Recently over on Bluesky, a friend posted a picture of a cake made using an ALF-shaped cake pan. In that post, he mentioned that it was reading about this cake pan that introduced him to the world of X-Entertainment, one of the earliest nostalgia blogs to really break out during the early years of the internet. I was also an avid reader of X-Entertainment in the year 2000 when it was part of my many-times-a-day rotation of website bookmarks that I’d read when I had downtime at work or at home. The owner of the site, Matt, now has a new website, but he’s still posting in that same nostalgic vein that he was nearly 25 years ago.
This conversation got me thinking about those early days of being online. There’s a lot of nostalgia in online culture for that time period, the era before social media, when the internet was still trying to figure out what it wanted to be. There were plenty of companies coming online to try to sell us stuff, but there were even more websites that were filled with nothing but some person’s strange obsession – or multiple obsessions – and, ironically, the web felt much more personal than it does in today’s social media algorithmic landscape/hellscape. It really is a case of “the good ol’ days” have passed us by.
Babysteps
My online journey kind of began back in the early-80s. My Dad briefly had a modem for our TRS-80 computer. This was the style of modem that required you place your phone handset into the cradle, known as an “Acoustic Coupler”. According to information I found online, it was only 300 baud, but back then, you only really had access to text online, so that probably worked just fine.
Dad didn’t use the modem for anything fun like message boards or online games like Zork. He had a program that would reach out to the farm markets and download the daily prices on corn, beans, and livestock. Then he could plug that data into a spreadsheet to determine when was the best time to sell beans or corn (we didn’t have livestock). I don’t know why, but he didn’t use it for very long, but I remember he and I were blown away that he was receiving information in some form other than a cassette tape or 5.25” floppy disc.
.edu
I wasn’t really exposed to the internet again until 1993 when I went to college orientation. The RA told me how I would be able to view the library’s catalog and even checkout books all from the comfort of my dorm room or any one of the school’s computer labs. I could also send messages to my parents! It was all possible thanks to “the internet”.
The computer labs had hardwired access, but the dorm rooms still required the use of the phone line. I had just gotten a computer as my high school graduation gift, but it wasn’t equipped with a modem. I remember my Mom and Dad traveling to my school some random afternoon (it was only a couple of hours away) to install a 14.4k modem in my computer and then we went out for pizza. Dad picked up an external modem for home much like the one pictured below. Honestly, as a gadget guy, I think he was just as excited about the prospects as I was.
While I had my school account to keep in touch, he signed up for an account from Prairienet, the local free-net community in the Champaign-Urbana area. Most people only knew about CompuServe, Prodigy, and AOL, which charged you a monthly fee to get email and join sketchy chat rooms. But there were plenty of philanthropic groups out there, usually with some university funding, that gave you similar access for free, all in an effort to get people online. The big difference between the two is that you didn’t get a nice, graphical, user-friendly interface like you would on AOL; Prairienet was all text-based and you had to know some UNIX commands to get around. My school’s internet was the same way – mainly telnet and gopher – but since I’d grown up using MS-DOS, translating those commands to UNIX was not a problem for me. Being online back then wasn’t for the faint of heart.
There was a bit of a learning curve, of course. But because I had plenty of free time as a student, I figured things out first and would show my Dad how things worked while I was home visiting for a weekend. Soon enough, we were off to the races. We’d email almost daily, even if it was just a line or two – “Dad, can you add more money to my checking account?” “Are you coming home for Thanksgiving break?” “Finished up the harvest today!” “I got an A on that Bio test!”. It was even better when I ran into old high school friends and we’d exchange our .edu email addresses. Soon, checking your email became one of the most exciting parts of your day because you never knew who had sent you a message. And then I discovered Usenet Newsgroups.
alt.whatever
When I was a kid, we had a Betamax player instead of a VHS. Unfortunately, our local video store/appliance store/tanning salon only carried VHS. It wasn’t until I was about 13 when our Betamax finally died and Dad gave in and bought a VHS player that I could finally start renting videos on a regular basis. But even then, our local rental place didn’t have a vast selection of tapes; I can almost bet they didn’t have a single movie with subtitles.
But in college, there was a really decent rental place within walking distance of my dorm, so I’d go down there on a Friday after class and rent four or five movies for the weekend – three days for only 99 cents for catalog titles and $2.99 for new titles. And the best way to expand my cinematic education was to hang out at places like rec.arts.movies, alt.cult-movies, and similar Newsgroups.
Newsgroups were essentially what Reddit is today – message boards centered around specific topics of interest. And, it’s funny, the same questions you’ll find on /r/horror were the same ones being asked on rec.arts.horror.movies almost 40 years ago – “What’s the scariest movie ever?”, “Can you tell me the name of this movie I saw when I was a kid?”, “What’s a horror movie everyone should see?”. But for a cinematic newbie like me, these conversations were like a class syllabus. The more I saw a movie being mentioned, the more likely I was to rent it that following weekend to further my education.
Of course I’d check out other newsgroups, too. Books, TV, music, The X-Files, comic books, and, not gonna lie, as a horny 18-year-old with readily available access to porn for the first time, I visited alt.binaries.pictures quite a bit. Those early days of college were very educational, even when I wasn’t in class.
If you’d like to get a feel for what Newsgroups were like, you can find a decent archive of posts over at UsenetArchives.com. Here are some interesting groups to get you started: rec.games.video (goes back to 1987!), alt.tv.x-files, and alt.cult-movies
Sneakers
My internet usage and navigational expertise only increased once I started working in my dorm’s computer lab. For hours at a time I would sit at a table just inside the door to the lab and take people’s student IDs. The ID would get placed on a rack on the wall beside me and the student could have it back as they were leaving. I also served as basic tech support, so I became an expert at setting margins in WordPerfect, and I was regularly crawling underneath tables to feed printer paper from a box up through the seams between the tables and then lining up the holes on the printer spools. But one of the main things I did during every shift was helping people access their email. This really came in handy, but I’ll get to that in a little bit.
When I wasn’t setting margins or helping someone print their term paper, I was scouring the newsgroups, reading as much as I possibly could. I was also busy downloading scanned-in comic book pages, screenplays in .txt format, and, yes, quite a few Playboy centerfolds. This was back in the days before graphic interfaces or even web browsers. So, the name of the file you were downloading might have been “Bat92.jpg” in the “comicbooks/Batman” directory on a server, which could indicate it was the cover of issue #92 of Batman, or it just as easily could have been a man wearing a Batman cowl and cape and nothing else. You wouldn’t know what it was until it was downloaded and opened in your picture viewing program (my personal favorite was ACDSee, which I just discovered still exists!).
There were five of us on the computer lab tech support team for our dorm – four men and one woman, I was the only freshman. The one woman wanted as little to do with any of us boys as possible and, quite frankly, I can’t blame her. She would barely speak to us when we came in to replace her for our shift and would instead write down any issues she’d run into (i.e., the monitor on computer #4 is on the fritz, the #2 printer keeps jamming) on the whiteboard behind the desk. Our entire conversations usually consisted of “Hey.” “Hey.” and she’d already have her things gathered and ready to walk out the door. Again, I can’t blame her.
But I became fairly good friends with two of the other guys on the team. One was a senior and the other was a junior. We’d gotten to know one another enough that we’d play D&D sometimes, I was invited over to their dorm rooms more than once to see some new program they had, one even helped me install IBM’s ill-fated OS/2 operating system on my computer (it ran horribly and nearly bricked my machine). The three of us would share cool newsgroups, as well as new internet sites, where you could download pictures, books, music, pirated software, and even entire movies.
I remember buying a small address book that I would carry around with me in my backpack and I’d write down new server addresses that I’d find. Sometimes it would be a recognizable address, like wustl.edu (Washington University in St. Louis – they had a ton of cool stuff), but a lot of times it was just an IP address to a no name server in who knows where. It was exciting going to new servers, poking around in their directories, and writing down the things I’d find. I felt like I was River Phoenix’s character, Carl, in the movie Sneakers, when they’re trying out the capabilities of the Setec Astronomy box. Unlike Carl’s little black book, though, my top secret IP addresses were mainly for downloading photos of swimsuit models and pirated copies of Wolfenstein, not national air traffic control and eastern seaboard power grids. Still, I felt like a hacker.
Shady Shit
Through my older mentors at work, I was learning about all kinds of cool things I could do online. They showed me how to use FTP (File Transfer Protocol) to download a bunch of files at once, but they also showed me how to use FSP (File Service Protocol), which was a slightly different beast from the more popular FTP.
FSP was mainly used on pirate software sites, AKA “warez” sites. The big difference between the two (at least in my limited understanding at the time) is that FTP required an active connection to the server to download, meaning you had to be logged in and sitting at your computer to download a file. If you lost the connection – by either logging off or your roommate picked up the phone – the download stopped. With FSP, you could start a download, but the download isn’t coming to your PC directly; it was going to a directory on the server that is associated with your account. So even if you logged off, your roommate picked up the phone, or you left that server to go to a different server, that file was still downloading to the server that housed your account. The file would sit out there until you logged in and downloaded it to your PC (usually with FTP). This is where it became very useful for me, as computer lab tech support…
If you wanted to use the internet at this school, you had to request a login at the student services center. It would only take a few minutes and you’d be handed a printout with your username and password, as well as instructions on how to access your email and the school’s library system. The usernames were our first initial and last name and then your password was your last name followed by the last four digits of your social security number (Can you even imagine this today!?). Of course this was just supposed to be a temporary password and there were instructions on how to change it once you were logged in. But changing the password wasn’t a mandatory process and most kids had enough trouble just logging in, so changing their password was beyond their capabilities. And when they inevitably needed help logging in, they’d call me over for technical support. I’d guide them through the entire process, which meant I now knew their username and password. I’d go back to my desk and write their login on the corner of a page of a notebook or scrap piece of paper for later.
I could have easily used their login to read their emails, but I had zero interest in doing so. Besides, that was amateur hour shit for a “hacker” like me. Instead, I’d use their school account to FSP cracked copies of programs like Photoshop 3.0, games like Doom, X-Wing, and Ultima VI, and to download entire albums of music, all running in the background on the server without them even knowing. I was smart enough to not use a single account for very long – usually just to get a program or two before moving on to another account. When I was done with them, I’d delete all the directories I’d created so that no one even knew I was there.
Was this ethical behavior? Absolutely not. Was it wise behavior? Absolutely not. Even though I was using someone else’s account, I’m sure the admins at the school could have easily traced the logins to my work or personal computer IP address. And since Heather Johnson (hjohnson/johnson6842) probably wasn’t hanging out in a freshman IT nerd’s dorm room at 2:00am, it would have been pretty easy to figure out she wasn’t actually the one downloading a cracked copy of Warcraft.
The way I justified it, no one was getting hurt by me using their account for FSP (naïve, I know). I wasn’t reading anyone’s emails or using their accounts to hack into a bank – I was just downloading my favorite Public Enemy albums from an anonymous server in Delaware. I’m sure the admins at school would have disagreed if I’d ever gotten caught. Or maybe they would have offered me a job. In hindsight, this was definitely a violation of those people’s privacy and could have gotten them – and me – in some serious trouble. But, I was young, dumb, and couldn’t see beyond my insatiable appetite for all the stuff the wild west internet could offer.
There Goes the Neighborhood
Because I knew my way around the internet using nothing but UNIX commands, I really did feel like a hacker. I wasn’t, obviously, but that’s how I saw myself. I felt like I was privy to this secret world that no mere mortals even knew existed.
And then, during Christmas break 1994, about 18 months after my online journey began, my Dad introduced me to Netscape Navigator.
And it ruined everything.
Netscape was developed by Marc Andreessen, a former student at the University of Illinois in nearby Champaign-Urbana. Andreessen was part of a team who developed the original web browser, MOSAIC, for the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the U of I. Because he was a former student, his new browser was all the rage on Prairienet. Dad showed me how he could just type in one of the many server addresses I’d given him and he’d get a page full of filenames that he could click on to download. This was so much easier than the flurry of UNIX commands I’d type in to search through directories. Obviously, I hated it. My knowledge wasn’t special anymore. Now any old dummy could browse the web! It really was very much a “There goes the neighborhood!” moment for me.
Eventually I grew to love that pesky Netscape browser, but I still long for those days when I thought I was a cyberpunk Neuromancer. There was a sense of excitement after downloading a bunch of files while I was at work, then going back to my dorm room and seeing what I’d found; it was like opening a treasure chest every day. The internet back then was wild and free. It was only accessible to those who were willing to learn the jargon and the technology to get around. For a kid who had only ever really used a computer to play video games, it was a whole new world of information at my fingertips. There’s no question that I am the person I am today because of those formative years online. It was, quite frankly, a high that I’ve never experienced since and certainly not the same feeling I get doomscrolling on social media today. It’s truly one of those things that you just had to be there to understand.
Next Time
Thinking about my early days online has spurred a lot of memories that had been shoved into various corners of my brain. So, I’m working on another post about some of the websites I loved – including Matt’s X-Entertainment – that will hopefully be available soon. So, check back and we’ll both surf the cyber information superhighway of yesterday together.
