Internet nostalgia

[bpgreen]

This is prompted by a joking reply I made about Mosaic hops that led to a bunch of other comments about. viewtopic.php?f=17&t=5277

Maybe an admin can move the offending posts here.

This thread is for the old folks.

What browsers have you used?
Mosaic, Netscape Mosaic, Netscape Navigator, Netscape, Lynx, IE, Firefox, Chrome, Safari, Opera, "internet" on early androids, Whatever was on blackberry, something that Oracle created and abandoned really quickly.

Do you remember bang notation email? (Needing to call somebody to find a route to their server before you could send an email)

Do you remember ftp by email (find ftp server with file you need, send email with EXACT commands, wait a few days,, strip headers and use uudecode to create actual binary)

baud vs bps

Did you ever wrap a modem in a towel? Or suffer the consequences of not wrapping when a dog barked?

atdt

gopher, archie, veronica.


When you had to buy a dll to connect to the internet using a Windows machine?

When tucows was The Ultimate Collection Of Winsock Software?

Im sure there are others

[mashani]

Do you remember ftp by email (find ftp server with file you need, send email with EXACT commands, wait a few days,, strip headers and use uudecode to create actual binary)

BTW, in response to other topic, I actually do FTP at a prompt sometimes too, but usually only when working with a remote device through a terminal or RDP session. If I'm FTPing from my PC I use a visual client.

RE: the quote, I never had to do this through email, but used to do the same thing for exchanging binary files via USENET. Some people still do it for USENET but mostly what's on there now is mostly just viruses and porn. And stuff that says it's something else, but really is viruses and porn.

That said, I used to work on an old mini computer at college, and one of my independent projects was to figure out how the engineers managed to do stuff to it like installing and launching daemon processes that did various maintenance tasks remotely without anyone knowing how, as they were concerned it was a security risk to just leave that ability turned on, which was standard practice at the time. So it turned out that sending an email with a properly formatted encoded payload could be used to do this. I then used it to install a new command prompt on all the terminals as a demonstration. The prompt was "I want a cookie>". I set up the process so if someone typed the right thing it would reset back to the default. The correct type of cookie was "Oreo". But it took days for someone to figure it out, so for days everyone say "I want a cookie>" every time they looked at their terminal. I refused to take the prompt down myself, to remind them that this little annoyance could be a much worse annoyance if someone was really malicious.

Can you imagine the security implications of this "feature" these days? I literally was able to install and launch processes at a level beyond regular admin level - at the special tech level that only prime people were supposed to be able to. Just by sending an email. Geez... All you needed was the phone # and the right payload and the OS set to it's default state.

baud vs bps

I started with a 300 baud modem, then worked my way up. At one point I was running a BBS out of a computer store on a C64 with a 2400bps modem, an IEEE-488 interface card hooked to a 7 MEG (this was big back then) external hard drive for a Commodore PET that sounded like a jet plane taking off and weighed about 15 pounds I think. Ran punter BBS, modified by me to support color, private forums and file areas, etc. Had folks from all over the world who dialed into that thing.

Did you ever wrap a modem in a towel? Or suffer the consequences of not wrapping when a dog barked?

I used a shoe box with some foam.

gopher, archie, veronica.

Gopher and Archie yes, I don't think I used Veronica.

And I remember tucows, and having to obtain a winsock layer for Windows.

But how we did it back in my day wasn't a direct connection, but dialing into the local free connection run by the library - but that was limited and restricted. So some of us who went to a certain local college knew that they created all the user accounts with a specific formatted username/password based on the students name. And maybe only 1/4th of them actually used the accounts for anything. So it was not difficult to dial into our old college through their modem gateway, look at the student roster, and then just find one that worked following that paradigm. And then we had full on access to anything that wasn't locked down on the other end through gopher, telnet, etc. The college knew people did it and did nothing about it back then. It was kind of an unwritten "benefit" for the tech savvy x-students.

Of course there wasn't any google back then, so finding anything was the fun part.

[mashani]

I'll take this beyond the internet...

So... has anyone else gotten to work with old disk platters from mainframes? Had to take them out and swap them without destroying things? Those were fun.

Punch cards? Back in high school, my teacher was the football coach. I was in an IT assistance program (geeking well beyond AV club LOL), so we wrote our programs and ran our jobs through the IBM 360 used for the district on punch cards. He used to run football analysis stuff through the 360 and his jobs would always bubble to the top and push ours down the stack. I leaned enough JCL (job control language) that by comparing mine to his, I figured out the priority setting they were keeping secret from us. So soon afterwards one day he came in, ran his job, and mine still came out first. He was soooooo amused. (yes, I programmed in Cobol, and Fortran, and assembler back then too).

I also leaned how to insert a card into someone's stack that would cause a core dump. So folks who annoyed me got that. Those were fun and always freaked people out.

To understand that, you have to understand the band printer. So basically imagine a chain saw mounted in a box with a bunch of piano hammers behind the chain (this is not an accurate description but its the best I can come up with that's easy to visualize). And the chain contains the alphabet (more then once) in some sequence. So this letter chain spins at some stupid RPM and the hammers pound the letters into the paper as they fly past. Many letters at a time in a single row if they landed in the right spot at the same time, as it processed entire rows at once, and there was a hammer for every column of an entire row. It spun so fast that it could spit out paper at some stupid rate, as in it could be pages per second depending on what was being printed. It made so much noise that it was locked in its own noise suppressing room even though it was already in a noise suppressing box. And it was still loud.

So that's where the output of your jobs go by default.

So a core dump basically was a dump of the memory of your instructions and process data that crashed put to paper, instead of the results of your job. Think debugging assembler level code but without any op codes. The vast majority of folks would just look at them and cry. So when the band printer just started to eject paper like mad, folks wanted to cry for their mamas...

When I was in college I was the "geek on call" since the regular tech guy employed by the college was on vacation. Someone apparently turned off the AC in the computer room when turning off the lights one day, and since he wasn't there it didn't get turned back on. So my phone rings in the middle of the night and I get a computer generated voice telling me something along the lines of "The ambient temperature is 97 degrees. Hardware failure immanent." and then it cut to an audio of what it sounded like in the room, which was this hideous "kthunk, kthunk, kthunk" sound which when I got there I discovered was one the hard drives having a very bad time. It took me a while to figure out what exactly that phone call was, because I was half asleep and had no idea the Prime could do that. Ended up having to swap out the platter (this was not like swapping out a hard drive these days LOL) restore a bunch of stuff from this big old reel to reel tape backup, that was my first "IT" emergency support gig LOL. Half of that I had to figure out on the fly reading through these 8" thick maintenance manuals that were there. Somehow I didn't *$&* it up any worse then it was.

[mashani]

Now to go even further down the rabbit hole.

So I did not do this. Not I says me.

But I had a friend who did. See back in the day, phones used to use tones for dialing. You all remember that.

What you might not know is that there were other tones that did stuff that the phone could not make. But if you could make them, and knew which ones to make, then you could turn into the "operator" more or less, and do "operator like stuff".

So a C64 easily could make the right tones.

Using those tones slang terms is one of the things people did that they called "Phreaking".

So this dude and his hacker buddies would basically take over phone nodes and set up huge conference calls with people from all over the world. And it would get charged to some random other persons account if they did it right. The call would go on and on, until everyone hung up, regardless of who started it and they could patch other people into it at any time. So some of those calls went on for 48 or 72 hours or more.

He'd also record the tones needed on a sony tape recorder and use it to make free calls from pay phones.

He got away with this for years.

Then one day he did something wrong and his dad got a $2,450 phone bill. (or something like that). And called the phone company to ask about it.

Soon after that these dudes in black cars wearing suits and sunglasses started to stake out his neighborhood.

Soon after that he got busted. But he was a juvie, and he cooperated with their investigation - so he got off pretty lightly, except for having to pay a lot of money to the phone company, and making his dad go insane.

[The_Professor]

...This thread is for the old folks...

I think I am not quite as "internet old" as some here.

...What browsers have you used?...

Netscape Navigator as it worked on Linux and I used it on Windows 98 as well.
Links and w3m (Linux text browsers).
Firefox (Iceweasel), Chrome, Opera, Seamonkey, Modori, Epiphany, Konquerer (KDE)...
Yeah, IE.

...Did you ever wrap a modem in a towel? Or suffer the consequences of not wrapping when a dog barked?

Don't think I've heard of that.

...atdt...

We finally got rid of our last VT Terminal at work about a year ago.
I had some fun with them.
One time we hooked a VT to a modem (so atdt) and we pulled up an ascii pron site.
For a while I had 8 VT Terminals connected to a Linux box for some inventory and searching that wasn't available elsewhere.
For a while I had a Linux box in between a PC terminal emulator and the company terminal server so I could run ckermit scripts to make work easier.

[RayF]

Wtf!!! Sounds interesting! My head hurts! Give me a beer!!! You fellas like beer!

[RayF]

I want to learn how to program and use a raspberry pi! Dang it! But I know no one interested in the same things. Ah well. I'll figure it out!

[RayF]

My Head Hurts!!!! I just wanna make good beer!

[BlackDuck]

ImageUploadedByTapatalk1453988276.295444.jpg (38.54 KiB) Viewed 801 times

[John Sand]

I used the punch cards and paper tape in high school. The language was "BASIC".
In the Coast Guard we used fax machines with chemical coated rolls of paper. Remember the smell? In the Police Dept we used teletypes, until only a few years ago. The state system was so antiquated that they would continuously try to update it to another outdated platform. Every year I got calls and messages advising me that the big change was coming soon. Sure it was. I retired first.

[Rebel_B]

Qualifying myself as an old folk; took a class on Fortran in '79, a class on COBOL in '80, then a class on Basic in '81. Actually used COBOL on a job in '84-'85. I have used Navigator, I.E., Firefox, Chrome, & Safari browsers.
I don't remember ever using bang notation email, or ftp by email.
Never knew anyone to wrap a modem in a towel, or suffer any consequences.
I found my aptitude was more suited to selling stuff, not programming, so I never spent that much time immersed in technology.

[Kealia]

[MrBandGuy]

I used to teach some of this stuff to 8th graders in computer history.

First machine was a Commadore 64 my dad would program. He'd spend hours setting up a high low game that my brother would play for about 5 minutes, then turn off (which of course meant he had to start over). Also had a cassette tape to back up data.

Internet came with a sweet Mac paired with AOL.

[jimjohson]

wow y'all are serious geeks, I just started with an Atari 2600XL with a tape drive and started trying to figure it all out. I was so happy when I finally got a GUI...

[bpgreen]

For those of you who are puzzled by wrapping the modem in a towel, old modems were acoustic. You'd dial the number of the other modem, wait for the screech, then slam the phone into the modem quickly. You also wanted to get as good of a seal as possible, but even then, outside noise could cause your signal to drop. Depending on your software, sometimes you had to time that just right, too or either it or the computer on the other end would time out before completing the connection.

Wrapping it in a towel helped shield it from noise.