Twenty Years Online

I'm not sure of the exact date when I first logged on to the Internet, but I do know that by February of 1994, I had an account with Netcom that gave me online access to a shell account on a Unix machine, probably somewhere in California, at least at first. Before that I'd tried my luck with both CompuServe and AOL, but neither of those was what I was looking for. They were too mediated. I wanted to know what it was like to be actually on the Internet, and that's what Netcom was all about.

I still have my welcoming letter from Netcom dated February 11, 1994. I paid a total of $42.75 to set up my account and promised $19.50 a month for unlimited access. My logon was mlhall@netcom.com. And for many years to come that was my online identity. Netcom wasn't very large yet, and there were a limited number of telephone access numbers, but fortunately there were some local numbers in the Washington, DC, area that I could connect with and not have to pay long distance charges. I had a 14.4 kbit/s internal modem, which gave a pretty fast connection, when it was able to connect at that speed, although sometimes the best I could get was 9.6k. Eventually modem speeds increased to 33.3 kbits/s, but by then I was already considering moving to cable modems.

It had not been too much earlier that I bought my first computer with an internal modem installed. I think it was probably late 1993. I must have still been using Windows 3.1, since Windows 95 was more than a year away. I do remember it was rather primitive. You had to use a communications program that started a session and then you would log on to Netcom. First you would use your modem to dial up an internet connection on some local access number Netcom provided, then when you got on and got a command line, you would enter your logon and password. I remember writing little scripts that would start the session and log me in once I got a connection on the modem.

When you were connected you would get the Netcom command line on your screen or in a terminal window:

{netcom:1}

This meant you were on the internet and connected to a genuine Unix computer and could do just about anything that computer was capable of doing. Of course, you had to know some Unix commands and Unix programs, and you had to choose a shell, which was the Unix environment you would be working in. I remember I started with the c shell, which was very popular and common among Netcom users who were willing and eager to share their expertise with newbies. In most cases I took the easiest path: my mail program was Pine, which was supposedly an acronym for Pine Is Not Elm, Elm being a popular, but slightly more difficult to navigate, Unix mail client. My favorite text editor, not surprisingly, was Pico, a very easy to use text editor also associated with Pine. I eventually learned to use other editors, including Vi, and Vim after I started using Linux, but Pico served me well for many years, and was the editor I used to create my first websites in HTML. There were also Unix news readers and various programs that let you connect to other computers on the Internet, like FTP (file transfer protocol) and telnet, and other programs with whimsical names like archie, a program that searched and indexed files on FTP sites. Archie was one of the first ways of searching what was out there on the Internet. When Gopher came along, other programs like Veronica and Jughead were written to interact with Gopher sites. The Gopher protocol was a forerunner and competitor of what would ultimately become the World Wide Web, except Gopher sites could be accessed and searched using text based connections on any Unix computer. In those days it was all text and command lines, but Gopher was an early step towards hypertext. Then when http came along I began using Lynx, a fairly versatile and powerful text browser: you could do just about everything but see the images.

I had great fun on Netcom, and I kept my account active long after I signed up for my first cable connection with Jones Communications in Alexandria, Virginia. I think I got my first cable modem in May of 1997. I remember I had to open up the computer and install an ethernet card. The increase in transfer speeds was sensational. Soon after we connected one computer, I figured out how to connect another, and then I had my own home network. At first I just installed a switch and found a bunch of unused IP addresses. Jones was rather lax about security.  In fact, you could see everyone else who was online, as though it were one big neighborhood LAN or local area network. It was also about then that I switched over from Windows 95 to Windows NT and Linux, so I could get some security for my own computers and network. But eventually Jones was taken over by Comcast, and things changed. That early era of Internet innocence was pretty much at an end. It didn't really last all that long. Hard to believe it's already been twenty years since I first went online.