The Internet and I celebrated our 20th anniversary together last November. We didn’t do much—didn’t even exchange special packets. I’ve been thinking about it, though.
Back then, the Internet was a lot harder to get around. I don’t think we even called it the Internet back then. We called it the backbone. I thought of it as a technical connection between two computers — yours and the one you were connecting to. It’s still that way, but we think of the Internet, as a whole, differently. Instead of a string connecting two tin cans, we think of it now as an amusement park, museum, library, and adult video arcade all wrapped into one.
A lot of what we use the Internet for now was covered then by bulletin board systems (bbs). The bbs was like a much smaller, community version of the internet. Craigslist, in fact, is probably the closest thing today to bbs back in the late 80s, the Internet was all about text. The Worldwide Web and Web pages were still about five years away. Though there were a number of things you could do on the Internet, there wasn’t yet one program to let you many different things the way today’s Internet browser does.
First, you had to connect to the Internet a telnet program on your machine or terminal. This connected you to a host server, usually a unix or vax server.
Once on the host server, you could check your e-mail, using a program like Pine, which was all text (remember, it was all text back then).
You could connect, via the File Transfer Protocol (ftp) to download programs for your computer.
You could connect to Usenet, which was (is) a vast, International discussion board system.