qotd: internet history

[mindstalk]

questionoftheday asks: What is your internet history? What websites were you a part of that might not be around anymore, and do you have any fond memories of them?

My answer:

Got to college, was given a shell account with email and such. And talk/ytalk, I could communicate with friends across the country, for free! Like a long-distance phone call, but typing and free! Somehow found people purely online, too, chatting with some girl at an engineering college. Found Usenet, spending many years on the B5 newsgroups (I think I coined 'battlecrab' for Shadow ships) and rec.arts.sf.written. Mailing lists: extropians, cypherpunks, Julian May, Deryni (that might have been Usenet), Buffy.

Oh, and the early web, getting on with NCSA Mosaic, and Netscape Navigator, and I have web pages dating to 1995, if not earlier.

Early webcomics I forget the names of. Doctor Fun, User Friendly, Sluggy (still going!) Writing my own comic-scraper to generate a local page of updated comics, because RSS hadn't been invented yet.

A girlfriend found me via Orkut, I think. Was on that and Friendster before Facebook killed them. Technically am still on Livejournal, crossposting from here.

I sort of miss people *having* personal web pages. Or adding anything to mine.

Comments

[come_to_think]

I bought a computer (a Sun 3) in 1986 for business reasons. So I have been on the Internet since the beginning (1992). I participated in a number of mailing lists, notably the Bears Mailing List, beginning in that year; it no longer exists. My favorite newsgroup was alt.usage.english; it survives, tho infested by boors & spammers.