How you were using the Internet in the 1991-1995 and 1995-2005?
===============================================================
We are using the Internet more than several decades. We have seen many
things, which are forgotten now, and many which are changed a lot. The
most of them were so obvious then, that we aren't sure how they were
looked like. Very often our imagination of that things are distorted
with today's visions, things which are the same only with its name.
1995-2005
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I start to think about my first hours (literally, with dial-up modem
via home telephone line), when I was connected to the Internet, and
I realized that I don't remember too much. It was middle of ninety's
which is not so long ago.
So I was using internet search engines like Altavista, which had some
algorithm improvement in comparison to ordinary webpages indexes. But
the most of interesting addresses I had been finding in paper
(sic!) computers magazines, what sounds crazy today.
I was browsing web pages of my choice, but without any supporting
technologies like web feeds. I don't remember how I didn't get lost. I
don't remember much of that web pages.
It was also before time when blogs were popular and before, so called
Web 2.0. The most of the Internet content were static, and there weren't
popular thing to write comments or give „likes" by readers. The most
popular active part of webpages were „visit counter" and guestbooks.
First internet shopping, Facebook and other social-media came more than
ten years after my first Internet connection. During this period of
time the Internet became mainly the commercial platform, for buying
things. Is hard to find things which aren't aiming in selling some
product today (in direct or indirect way eg. influencers in blogosphere,
which started from totally amateur point).
1991-1995
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I was thinking about years 1995-2005 as I have written above from my
point of view, but the real reason of that questions there were my
explorations of Gophersphere.
I started my journey through the Internet in the point when Gopher
decline. I have never used Gopher in 90's. As I've read in [author's
of Gopher protocol article] I had some common point with Gopher. More
than licensing matters, which are commonly thought as cause of Gopher's
problem, there were „fast" 28.8kbps modems. They were so „fast"
that optimized for slow connections, text protocol were defeated by
graphical presentation of information.
The golden era of text information lasted until 1995. Gopher were
introduced in 1991. So we have about four years, which is hard to
recreate how it was used then. We can read many sources which are
describing the whole idea of Gophersphere (for example ["Using Gopher
The User-Friendly Reference" Keith Johnson, Philip Baczewski, Melody
Childs] book), but almost all content disappeared (there are only
[Gophersphere archive from 2007]) and I can't find any real evidence
of people who were active then.
Let's write about yourself!
---------------------------
So it was the first question - how you were using the Internet in
the 1991-1995? Then i asked myself - how I was using Internet in the
1995-2005? I am curious if anybody could write some memories about that
times, or know any existing sources which could give some point of view,
especially for the first period.
~ [author's of Gopher protocol article]:
gopher://sdf.org:70/0/users/szczezuja/novice/2021-09-12-Gopher-novice-part-vii.txt
~ ["Using Gopher The User-Friendly Reference" Keith Johnson, Philip Baczewski, Melody Childs]:
https://archive.org/details/usinggopher0000john/page/n1/mode/2up
~ [Gophersphere archive from 2007] :
gopher://mozz.us:70/1/wayback
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@ Sat 13 Nov 2021 03:39:18 PM CET
