Did anyone here actually use the Internet in the 80s? The Web of course didn't exist yet, but the Internet itself in terms of the TCP/IP protocol did and email was already in existence though not common place. Usenet was also around.

What was using the Net like in those days?

The internet did exist in the '80s, but I think it was used mostly in offices and some other public places.

The internet did exist in the '80s, but I think it was used mostly in offices and some other public places.


But there was no websites to log onto at that time.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O8vCEg5k_d4

In 1963 during the early days of computers and six years before ARPANET, students at MIT developed the first computer game called Space War. It would be twenty years before the TCP/IP protocol stimulated the growth of various networks and nearly thirty years (1991) before the United States government opened the Internet to private enterprise ( PBS Timeline ), but this game foreshadowed the commercialization of the Internet. In the 1970's and 80's people who were online put out information about furniture and cars they wanted to sell. Debates raged about whether this was an appropriate use of the new research tool, the Internet, but when the Commercial Internet Exchange (CIX) was formed in 1991 the genie would not go back in the bottle.
Commercial contractors have been involved in the development of ARPANET from its inception. As Tang and Teflon began as curiosities of the space program and later became common consumer products, so too have email, web research, and home shopping on the Web. It has only been ten years since the first relay between a commercial entity (MCI Mail) and the Internet was made. Since that time technologies have emerged that have fueled the growth of private enterprise on the Web. In 1992 Paul Linder and Mark McCahill at the University of Minnesota released Gopher, a tool that allowed researchers to retrieve specific data from myriad locations. The next year Mosaic, a web browser, was developed at the University of Illinois by Netscape founder Marc Andreesen, the World Wide Web became a public domain, and the Pentium processor was introduced by Intel to speed up the whole process.

http://education.illinois.edu/wp/commercialism/history-of-the-internet.htm

I wonder what life would be like if Facebook and Twitter existed in the 80's?

http://www.inthe00s.com/index.php?topic=47296.0

http://www.inthe00s.com/index.php?topic=47296.0


Interesting, thanks!  :)

How widely used were LANs and stuff by businesses would you say? Hardly used at all or semi-common?

I wonder what life would be like if Facebook and Twitter existed in the 80's?


We would be ca. 20 years ahead of the time, so we will see this in the early/mid 2030s ;)

How widely used were LANs and stuff by businesses would you say? Hardly used at all or semi-common?


I remember offices without computers at all in the early-mid 90s  :o

I remember offices without computers at all in the early-mid 90s  :o


Oh yeah for sure. I bet in most countries this was case even into the 2000s when you consider that Western countries are obviously the first benefactors of any new technology.

How widely used were LANs and stuff by businesses would you say? Hardly used at all or semi-common?


I think some people used them and some people used modems which were slow at times.

We would be ca. 20 years ahead of the time, so we will see this in the early/mid 2030s ;)


That's 20 years from now.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FCvidD5JKBg

That's 20 years from now.


Obviously.

How widely used were LANs and stuff by businesses would you say? Hardly used at all or semi-common?


In the 80's and early 90's, the model for business computing tended to be one or more central computers with numerous "dumb terminals" - often with multiple central computers networked together.  This model worked well for a couple decades.  For large companies, if they could afford it, each employee who needed one would have their own dumb terminal, maybe on their desk.  Users would send all their computing requests to the central computer, and that was normal.  At the same time there were personal computers around - a fairly new but growing concept.  In the 80's, they were pretty awful in terms of capability - little to no hard drive storage, use of 5" floppy discs, primitive DOS operating systems - but they were good for word processing, making them popular with secretaries.  (The exception being Apple MacIntosh - even the early ones were pretty remarkable.)  In the early 90's, Windows 3.1 revolutionized (can you imagine) personal computers, making them more plausible to use for "serious" computing.  Once this happened, sometimes PCs got networked into the central computer networks.

My parents purchased me a modem for my Apple IIc for Christmas one year. The salesman talked them into it by telling them how I could talk to other people all around the world. What he didn't tell them was that everyone else would also have to have the modem, the service consumed the use of the phone line, you had to pay an incredibly high usage fee for the service plus long distance phone fees. I only ever used it to get the exact time and local weather from our local airport.

But there was no websites to log onto at that time.

No buddy...We had our own sites (BBS) and people called our numbers :)

I created a thread about an episode of Silver Spoons in 1985, where Rick was using instant messaging with a modem.

http://www.inthe00s.com/index.php?topic=31081.0

Here's a spoof vid of the episode...

_OBAfe5ueAA

I created a thread about an episode of Silver Spoons in 1985, where Rick was using instant messaging with a modem.

http://www.inthe00s.com/index.php?topic=31081.0

Here's a spoof vid of the episode...

_OBAfe5ueAA


Wow, very interesting.

It was all dial-up BBS sites using acoustic coupled modems.  Apple ][ and Commodore pirated games were huge back then, the "crackers" often calling out the phone number of their BBS to call into.  I remember chatting on a BBS back in 1988 or so.  Computers back then were so simple... <sigh>