/var/log/vadept.log

This october 2nd I will have this for 10 years. Jeezus, 10 years.

The year is 1994-1995. I am a Junior at Linden High school. The internet craze is just started to get rolling. This is when a 486 DX4 100 was blazing fast, and you were hot shit if you had a 14.4 or even a 28.8 modem. BBS’s were still going strong, and the cream-of-the-crop was ‘Record Online’ with a whopping 7 nodes. ‘The Wrong Number’ was also pretty hot too with only nodes. Even typing those names out again gave me a whiff of nostalgia.

Whats sad is that most of the kids now days don’t remember (nor appreciate) the Internet. They take it for granted. They dont remember dialing in with Trumpet Winsock in Windows 3.1 to a 14.4 modem somewhere (if your ISP had a local number) and getting 100 hours a month for a whopping $29.99. This is before AOL had internet access and Compuserve, Prodigy, and Prominade were more huge BBS’s than ISP’s.

The search engine of choice was infoseek, and if that failed you could always use archie/veronica or gopher to look for stuff from the universities. There was no animated gifs or annoying flash movies. All of the sound files on the internet were .au format from the macs. The internet was fast, spam was almost non-existant, and the ability to talk to someone in real-time half way across the world via IRC really blew your mind.

People take that shit for granted. The internet has become an appliance like the television or the microwae.

MUDS were roaring strong, and Kali was out so you could play IPX network games over the internet (like Descent and Doom). Warez was a bunch of .arj files that were in 1.44 (or 2.8) .zips. Usenet is where it was at for pr0n, but you had to save locally because the overturn of news posts was really fast. 1.27 gig hard drives seemed like infinate and a gig of ram for a server would run you at the very minimum a few grand (if the motherboard supported it). ICQ was just ramping up (my number is 576027) and there was no such thing as “blogging”.

If you had software like wordpress or MT, you would be a god and a hochillionare. PHP (as far as i can remember) was either non-existant or nobody used it. MySQL wasn’t used much and everyone who wanted a good db used Oracle. Shit was static HTML. The browsers were Mosiac, then Netscape. IE was a wet dream of someone who should of been killed a long time ago.

Blogging was just a funny sounding word, and unless you wanted to write your own software you’d have to wait 5 years for LiveJournal (and then DeadJournal, go me) to crank up.

Makes me wonder if in 2018 when I look back on this, I’ll be able to wonder how I lived without neural uplinks or some wierd Web 10.x feature that people seem to flaunt.