25. online anniversary

Around this date, in the year 2006, Claus Schmidt is celebrating that it’s been 25 years since his first “on line” experience. Yes, twenty-five.

Due to the massive amount of web2.0 hysteria the homepage clsc.net took on a “retro” look for an extended period of time. That also served to mark my 25. online anniversary.

In this respect, “online” does not just cover the-web-as-we-know-it but also some of the previous stages. Things that went before the web as it looks now. Different things, but still with that one important common denominator – they all belong to the “World of Online”.

Twenty-five years. You know what… that “Windows Explorer” program on your PC? That was how the Internet looked when I started using it. Files and folders, that was what the internet was only 15 years ago.

I was here before Google, before Yahoo!, before www, before hyperlinks, before images. And before that I used BBS’es. BBS’es were basically screens that would look like the “Dos prompt” in Windows (if you’ve ever seen that). Black background and text. Nothing else. Text could have different colours, though. And people even made artwork with text, ie. “ASCII art“.

That was an early preface to the internet – basically you would hook up your telephone to a server using a modem (a device you would physically put the handset into). You could only be connected to one server at a time, and the connection was.. well, slow by todays standards would not be an appropriate word. But it was useful. And fun.

Even as a kid back in 1981 I experienced being globally connected using teletype. You know what we did back then? We had printers (well, more like typewriters) that were connected to each other and we would print out the equivalent of web pages on paper(!)

Yes. Imagine that. We typed in the web pages on an electical typewriter, sent them to each other through the wires, and when we received them we could not see them unless printed! We would watch the line-printer print one line at a time, and read while it printed. True story.

So, 25 years ago I was “on line”. Not a lot of people can claim anything like that. But then, you’re not exactly here because I am like “a lot of people” are you? Thought so.