Well, I am writing after a long-long time! So, at present I dawn on the Internet as the medium which is helping me communicate so effectively and ponder how the Internet truly was during the 1990’s.

The Internet was created and setup as a result of technological evolution during the 1970’s and 1980’s. But, the transition to the graphical utilization happened in the 1990’s. If you were one of the users in the late 90’s you I am sure you would read and vet very nostalgic and would feel it as the Good old days of the Internet.

For the starter, I still remember the acoustic sound the modem used to make to connect and my speed was 8Kbps. It was a typical dial-up connection to the Internet. If you would like to hear the same and enjoy the sound here it is modem sound.

I also remember using BBS (Bulletin Board Services). It was real fun using them. They were very small host with limited hardware and software availability. But every bit of it was being put to use for the best. I also remember the days when downloading a 1 MB file was like downloading a 10GB. I used to request a friend to do it and then we will later share the same using floppy disks. 🙂

Then one fine day we found out that 2 modems can talk to each other.So instead of connecting to an ISP we started hosting BBS in our own PC’s and downloaded files at a extra ordinary speed for 14.4 Kbps. One small step for man became a giant leap for file sharing between our friends. 😛

As the file size grew and our Internet speed did not, we could not download more than 2MB – 3MB files as either the net got disconnected or the the server requesting the same got too bored with as and left us alone. So we found out a work around. We were allotted public temp directories by our ISP’s [Internet service provider] were we can download/upload files and keep it for a day or 2. So we downloaded them to the IPShared drive then downloaded them to our local PC?s. Later use a software called split files write them to multiple Floppy disks of capacity 1.44MB and distribute them.

I even remember receiving Windows 95 on a pack of 12 floppy disks. When I installed it, the last disk did not work, I got tensed, nevertheless windows worked because the last disk was a printer driver disk. I did not mind because printers were too expensive to be bought.

Hotmail I still remember creating my first mail account on Hotmail. I used it for sometime after bought by Microsoft and it did not work with my Internet account because mine was a Shell version and not a graphics version. It had created some other mail account for the same.

Also, there was this first time I used to connect to a chat server, it was called as IRC (Internet Relay Chat). Funny thing, we talk so much of privacy now a days; when I used to log-on to the chat server, my email address used to be displayed to everyone when I logon, logoff to a chat room. Also using a simple command I can get all the e-mail addresses of of everyone on the chat room. But back then the word SPAM and HACKING did not get invented. So no problem.

Then one fine day I upgraded my Internet Connection to a Graphics oriented one (non graphical broswers are like browsers that looks like your command prompt C:>). I was running windows 95 and Netscape, meaning I can use Netscape and actually see HTML pages with images. After waiting for 10 min, the first page I typed to see timed out and the icon that used to display image not loaded properly with the ‘ X’ mark did show up. I was all excited because I saw my first image on a browser. Because that ‘X’ mark is also an image. [:big grin:]

Later I used to chat in with a piece of software called MIRC. I saw multiple chat windows in multiple chat rooms. It was like traveling on a rocket to outer space from the usual riding of bicycle on the road.

When I did learn HTML for the first time, I wanted to host a page, back then there was no free servers. And the servers that allowed hosting was 20 times more expensive than what it is today,let alone buying a .com.

Today, rest is history. Here I am blogging now with such a rich interface. Just can’t imagine so much has changed in the last decade!