I ran a single line BBS system in the Seattle area in my early teens which was early '90s. At the peak we were averaging about 20 calls a day and I kept the whole thing running for a few years. I had a four drive CD-ROM tower system loaded up with shareware CD archives and a connection to fidonet, so you could exchange email with anyone else who had a fidonet address around the world. It was freaking cool and the skills I learned building that prepared me to jump into IT during the .com boom which was a pretty lucky career break for a teen in Seattle.
That era was the tail end of the golden days of BBS systems because Prodigy and CompuServe followed quickly and what they had was professional content creators and some of the first integrations for buying airline tickets, stocks, reading the news, and functional email that reached a wider audience. At that time, you have to remember there was no other way to access those services in real time. Your only other source for this would have been TV or newspapers, or picking up the phone and calling a travel agent.
A lot of these services' business model was selling hours of access. So you might pay 30 bucks a month for 50 hours, and if you stayed online longer you'd pay more. Those numbers were fine because after you finished whatever you wanted to do, there was nothing left to look at so it was easy to log back off. Very few people were leaving anything resembling an instant messenger logged in all the time.
Those services were constantly updating so every time you logged in you'd see new games, photo libraries, user-generated content in their forums. But in the end they were essentially overgrown BBS's with funding.
All of them, including AOL, tried to stay relevant by adding the internet as soon as it became a little more mainstream to talk about. But within a fairly short period of time, maybe about a year, the content available on the wider internet from major sources outpaced whatever Prodigy, CompuServe and AOL could produce on their own, so most people logged in just to bypass and get to the internet.
The next generation of getting online after that was subscribing directly to a local ISP for a dial-up account.
As I think back to this, we knew the future was coming fast, but nobody seemed to really understand what that would entail. Absolutely nobody was envisioning services to come like cloud storage, social media, non-stop connectivity from your pocket etc. That was basically sci-fi movie stuff. Connectivity was simply too slow, and we didn't even have high-res pics or videos stored on our computers at the time. Photos were still taken on film, and video was stored on magnetic tape. It was still very analog and very few people could afford the hardware to digitize it. Early scanners were crappy, only black and white, and expensive.
The most incredible services to launch at the beginning were the chat systems and forums, and online shopping. Clicking on a picture of a cool thing, Entering a credit card number, and it showing up at your door a few days later was pretty cool, and I can distinctively remember the first Christmas where I did all of my shopping online and then bragged about not having to go to the mall. A pretty glorious experience for somebody who never really liked the mall.
Mail order systems existed but you had to call to place your order on the phone (during business hours), or physically mail your order slip with a handwritten credit card number or a check.
I think one of the most fascinating components of this that struck people was how fast you could communicate with people on the other side of the earth. A lot of people would exclaim "I just talked to a guy in Australia!" as the most eye-opening first experience. That's a real tell on how isolated we used to be.
In the early '90s, there was a very real sense that most people around you had not ever been online before. So if you started talking about your experiences most people would look at you like you're an alien, or at least some kind of super nerd. There was a period of time where it was decidedly uncool.
My best friend to this day is a guy I met in middle school and we quickly discovered that we both knew about BBS systems. By the time I graduated there were maybe only four or five guys in our BBS group of friends at our high school of 600 people.
Anyways, sorry for the essay. Having been born into the analog era and grown up as it became digital was a wild experience that those before and those after might not totally relate to.
Impressive, I don't think I'd heard of Ceefax. It seems like it was broadcast and then recorded, and then this set top box knew how to interpret and parse the data into this format.
Basically in CRT screens, the arm that zapped the glass of the screen needed to stop zapping the screen and return to the top again. So there was a gap in the broadcast to let this happen. Some engineers saw this gap and decided to put data in there. Originally for subtitles, but they realised they can make an entire news service with it.
I’m old enough to have experienced some of the analog days, but we were too rural and poor for me to participate online.
I read an article in some magazine back in the day where the author talked about using email, and it did sound so amazing. And then when I eventually had internet access, yeah, when I traded emails with someone in Italy, mind-blowing. I thought the internet would make everyone outgrow small-mindedness!
I suspect cloud storage would have sounded old-fashioned and "mainframe" at the time.
I used Usenet and anonymous FTP, archie and gopher, in the days just before the creation of the web. I actually thought the web was weird when my ISP started trying to push it, and couldn't really understand why they were making such a big deal about it and taking so much trouble to explain to me all the things I'd have to do to get hooked up with it (which were significant). It seemed like just a bunch of weird-looking pages and not all that useful. Weird bomb-making recipes in text files from anonymous FTP seemed a lot better.
CompuServe had a very different feel as opposed to the community-run places like FidoNet and Usenet. It always sort of felt like a Dollar General version of the internet, where all the shelves are a little disordered and no one's really paying that much attention to what's going on. Usenet and FTP were very cool. There was wild stuff on there.
Getting access to email was very cool. Before that it was sending letters, or talking on the phone with family members or random strangers walking around hearing you. Getting a physical letter from someone you were distantly-connected to was very cool in a way that's not replicated on any electronic network, and email seemed initially like it was better, although I think now that in letters we lost something important.
Probably the most massive difference between now and those days is something I don't see people talk about very much: Before the internet, there really was only 1 viewpoint and 1 viewpoint only on the news. US soldiers were the good guys. Neoliberals in government are looking out for you. Criminals are bad. It's just... it's hard to explain, because now there's such a wealth of different opinions and ways of looking at things that it seems normal, but back then it was very rare to get your hands on even one little piece of "subversive" viewpoint. When the Rodney King beating made the news, it was really electrifyingly shocking; at least to the white world, the idea that the cops would ever do something wrong or could even be charged with a crime was aberrant and confusing. They found the cops not guilty in the first trial. It was just too much to take on, to change the jury's world view around to that they might have done something illegal, even with the whole thing on video.
I got an issue of Adbusters and it was like this wild precious thing, an artifact from some other world. I was visiting somewhere when I found it; it wasn't available in my hometown. On the early internet, I was reading a message board where some people were talking about tactics fighting against NATO troops, and it was fucking mind blowing. Like... they're the enemy. How can they be allowed on the internet? Like people? And then I started downloading episodes of "Off the Hook" and issues of 2600, and it sort of was this gateway into this whole other way of looking at the world. I read some Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn, and around that time this whole other type of media came along, and in about 5-10 years it became, silently but inexorably, an acceptable thing. But when I was growing up, it wasn't.
It's not gonna be possible, I think, for someone from today to really understand how blinkered the view was of the world for 99% of people, before the internet came along. I don't know how well it will translate to today, but I remember Spin as another big watershed at the time, in showing me how much fakeness was in a lot of what I thought was real.
Before the internet, there really was only 1 viewpoint and 1 viewpoint only on the news.
Absolutely, though it went beyond the news. Culture in general was much more monolithic. You could start a conversation with any random person about the previous evening's episode of Gunsmoke or MASH or Cheers and there was a very good chance they had watched it. It's hard to overstate how much more diverse culture has become in the Internet era, for better and for worse.
That’s interesting - I didn’t experience the advent of the internet like that, probably because I’m from a fairly multicultural background and travelled at lot at that time. I lived near DC for a few months in 1976 and went on a three-week road trip around California in 1990 and did notice how isolated from the rest of the world Americans in general seemed, especially outside the big cities. I was a real novelty, exotic even, and I’m a white cis het woman. Just with a funny accent, from a country they’d never heard of.
I grew up in the rural US, and my family was acquainted with a family who lived in a neighboring state and had a summer home nearby.
They were so exotic, yes. Just looking at a car with a plate from a different state was a novelty. I wish I’d been bold enough to talk with them myself, but then again my mother probably would have discouraged it.
When I was first working, my officemate was from that state, and I was kind of impressed that he’d made the globe-trotting jet-setting move of coming to a whole other state. (No, I’d never been to another state myself at the time.)
Even though I was too poor and rural for internet services, I am old enough to remember the analog days, and this is very interesting what you're saying about the narrow perspective and then broadening it.
Like I remember the nightly national news on television and accepting it in the way of a kid who's bright but hasn't seen anything of the world very far from his house. Maybe the wider world seemed like something that happened only on television. Whatever Tom Brokaw said seemed like probably what was happening out there.
But I think I would have expected at least a Southern cop to fuck anyone over whom he didn't know, and we knew that cops liked to sit at the bottom of a hill with an unexpected speed limit and ticket the public all day.
I can remember being a little bit aware of adbusters in the late 90s (IIRC, they were trying to sell something called black spot sneakers, and I kind of suspected they were just being like any company except with different rhetoric), can remember seeing that there was some company called Loompanics (I think) that sold every kind of crazy book. I knew that alt.2600 existed, but I didn't really understand it.
But, beyond that, I don't think I recall the broadening as clearly as you do. There was probably a good bit of waking up that I didn't do until the 2000 election happened, saw how the people around me regarded it, etc.
I do remember the pre-internet days, but we were too poor and rural for me to buy a modem and dial into anything.
I always kind of wished I had a pen pal back then. I was so lonely. I was looking for clips from Big Blue Marble a while back (a children’s television show I just barely remembered seeing once or twice), and there was something about pen pals being part of the show, and it made me feel all over again like oh if I'd had a pen pal back then! Although my life was so dull I might have struggled with what to write about.
I read an article in some magazine where the author talked about using email, and it did sound just mind-blowing to have a larger world than your mother and your father and the television.