Tell Me How The Spark Caught Flame
I want you to tell me the story of how you got started with the Net.
Tell me how your passion was sparked and why it keeps coming to full flame.
Tell me why the Net matters to you, even after all of the long days, short nights and wrecked weekends.
I’ve been writing my story because I need to understand why I care deeply for what the Net is and what it means.
I want to read your story for the same reason.
Don’t hold out on me now. I can see your data trails in my server logs: a few hundred of you trudging in from RSS subscriptions, the PHP, Mozilla and MySQL planets, Boris’ twitter post, and other places sundry and diverse.
Most of you are Net veterans – people who’ve been helping build and nurture parts of this massive meta-machine for a decade or more – and many of you care very, very deeply for what the Net allows and what it represents.
I ‘d love to know. Leave comments, send trackbacks, email me, let me buy you a pint, sent postcards – even implement RFC1149.
p.s. Feel free to substitute Electronic Frontier or Free Software or Open Source or Free Culture for the Net. As near as I can tell, its all part of the same ball of wax.
Posted on Tuesday, December 30th, 2008 at 16:52
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December 30th, 2008 at 17:36
I got started with the Net before there was a Web.
I was a FidoNET dial-up nerd, and eventually I decided I wanted access to Internet e-mail and Usenet newsgroups. So sometime late in high school I paid for a subscription to a skeezy local BBS that offered both services. And that was how it got rolling.
Later, in university, I remember seeing Mosaic for the first time, but I’m not sure what year, exactly. I think I had my own web page before 1996, though, as that was the year I did a summer internship with Motorcycle Online (still around, having changed hands at least once).
Ed. After an emailed nudge, Ryan expanded his answer: http://wiredcola.com/content/net-and-me
December 30th, 2008 at 18:26
First, I became addicted to using FidoNET on a 300 baud modem which I managed to put together for myself. The money I saved from making my own modem was quickly spent on telephone bills. Playing those doors games, such as Global Thermonuclear War (which was a variant of the board game “Risk” except that there was communication delays between players, measured in days). Soon I started my own BBS and joined FidoNET – and even managed to be a hub … this significantly reduced my phone bills to support my GTW addiction: As a hub, other nodes dialed in. Purchased a full license for Fossil comms drivers and FastEcho/386 mail processors.
By around 1992-1993, I was introduced to the internet, via IBM’s Global Network. It started though an initial free trial which came with OS/2. Finding stuff with Archie. Browsing stuff though Gopher. Transferring files via FTP. Accessing online systems with Telnet.
During 1994, I was online with ISDN-2 (128kbps), had a small CIDR allocation of 14 IP addresses (/28), where I turned the old BBS phone lines into a mini-ISP to offset the cost/luxuary of being online 24/7. During this time, I enjoyed playing with Apache, SSLeay, porting them to the OS/2 platform. Using IBM’s WebExplorer and the early Netscape/Mosaic. In the HTTP/1.0 days, I had to use a seperate IP address for different web sites, so with the small amount of IP addresses I had, half were used for dial-in users, the other half were for websites. I also ran Squid and encouraged users to use it. Using a small selection of 3rd party paid-for shareware apps which few today would remember along with Open-Source software. I encountered MiniSQL at around that time, I had some prior experience with Oracle so that gave me a limited but somewhat useful database to play with but I mostly used CISAM/xBase databases with C or Pascal APIs which required manually programming the queries.
I ran a small website on my personal computer at university too. That brings me up to around 1997, which is where I shall end this flashback.
I don’t have as much time to play with my personal websites these days… Something I should fix but I have been saying that every year recently.
Ed. I wrote Antony, asking if he could also say what the Net means to him. He wrote:
For me, the ‘net is about making the world a smaller place.
Perhaps the biggest revolution in the distribution of information since the invention of radio.
What it means for me? We’re all a node in the network of civilization.
December 30th, 2008 at 18:33
I started programming computers at the age of 9, but lost interest in my mid-teens, my passion shifting to visual art. After graduating high school I attempted to enroll in a graphic design course, but my portfolio was rejected so I decided to instead study programming.
After graduating, I spent a frustrating year working in the security industry until getting my first IT job. It was there that I started playing with the Net, first creating static HTML web pages, then FileMaker/Lasso concoctions, then primitive PHP/MySQL applications.
When the company got bought out in the late 90s I chose to leave IT management to pursue web application development full time at a small development shop. It has been interesting seeing the evolution of web development over the years and seeing the emergence of the Net into mainstream culture and the open source movement into the business world.
My parents, who used to worry about the amount of time I spent computing, now spend much of their time surfing around and occasionally trolling. One of my grandparents is now on Facebook, keeping tabs on the behaviour of my nephews and nieces. It’ll be very interesting to see how it all impacts us in the future.
December 30th, 2008 at 20:05
I’ve been using multi-user UNIX computers since 1979. As more and more content was becoming available on FTP sites and propagating around via Usenet, I became interested in downloading files and programs. The Gutenberg Project and nascent open-source software was great. But typing in long pathnames and filenames was tedious. Recombining 100KB chunks of uuencoded binaries was also tiresome. I kept thinking there ought to be a way to make FTP sites generate a picklist of content, instead of forcing me to type in the filenames blindly, or sift through long “ls” listings.
Then suddenly the world-wide-web appeared to solve this problem. I thought “www”!? That’s the least pronounceable name they could have given it. What’s wrong with “gopher?” Or “wais”?
Anyway, in spite of the name, it revolutionized information searching and retrieval. We never looked back. The only thing that has become an overnight necessity more quickly was the FAX machine.
December 31st, 2008 at 06:13
I started out in high school, a pretty late bloomer compared to some of the posts above. I grew up in Prince Rupert and we didn’t even have decent dial up Internet access until sometime in the mid 90’s.
Since we didn’t have Net access, we ran a BBS out of our highschool. Eventually, I built a webpage for the Infinity BBS. It didn’t have a domain name, hosted somewhere at UBC with a little tilde in the URL to boot…
Back then it was all hand hacked HTML (eww) table layouts. I eventually moved to Vancouver in about 98, and got a job at an Internet start up. That eventually went defunct but it set me on course to learning PHP/MySQL/etc (PHP3 at the time…sessions, what are those?).
When the .com went bust, my sister and I started our own, menubc.com. I spent many late nights hacking out a databases, forms, etc. While the project eventually died I learned a lot about web programming as well as sysadmin Apache on BSD.
These days I prefer to be more on the business side but I still dive down into the code now and then. Mostly to write custom log parsers and throw away data aggregation scripts.
December 31st, 2008 at 10:36
I’ll happily let you buy me a pint next time I’m in YVR.
You know, collecting these stories together could make for a very interesting anthology.
December 31st, 2008 at 20:56
Well, Zak clarified that he wants to know what the Net means to us, rather than just an anecdote of how we noticed its genesis.
For me, it’s about people. If it were about technology, I could sit on a disconnected Linux box and write code and just watch the propellers whir. What differentiates the Net is how it allows people to reach out and communicate, who may never have known of each other’s existence if we were in the 1970’s.
Isn’t that essentially like most world-changing technology advancements throughout history? A system of writing, the printing press, the telegraph, wireless radio, telephone, and television. Advancements in transportation are similar in that they enable people to come together in new ways.
Before the Net, I used multi-user UNIX systems at the University of California. UC Berkeley and UC Santa Cruz may have had the earliest online cultures of their kind. Usenet, forums, and finger files were the predecessors of Blogging, Facebook, and Twitter.
I wrote an article in 1991, with a brief history of those early days: http://www.geek.org/ucsc-archive/ROOT/timeline/forum-history
What attracts me to the Net now is what attracted me to the multi-user systems then, which is the opportunity to listen to other people and to share my ideas with them too.
December 31st, 2008 at 23:27
i had a computer since 1990, but i started with the net in the mid 90’s when the first 33.6 modems came out. used to dial in to some bbs and subscribed to some usenet groups. later i got isdn and could play quake 1 with the “team fortress” mod via the internet. 3 months later my provider kicked me out for using up to much bandwidth (avg 300MB per month)
January 1st, 2009 at 19:23
computers first entered my life in 1971, when you had to pass an intelligence test to be allowed to take an introductory computer course with IBM! my first glimpse of the internet was in 1985, when i worked at a software company that used UNIX. i never sent any messages myself but i was very, very intrigued by the fact that some of my co-workers were sending things around via UNIX. they didn’t call it the internet, though.
i first connected myself in 1988, hanging out on bulletin boards, and using a pre-WWW product called SUZY, similar to AOL, i guess. it was incredibly exciting. connecting with people who i would otherwise never meet or get to know better was heady stuff. my favourite bulletin board was run by an evangelical christian 75-year-old guy! i loved the early interactive games. in 1991 i went to my first “meetup” (of course we didn’t call it that) of vancouver bulletin board users. what a bunch of crazy, freaky, wonderful people. totally up my alley. by that time i was working on the net, gathering information from newswires for greenpeace’s first news database. cool pioneering stuff.
one of the most memorable experiences was some time in 1992, when i struck up an internet friendship with someone, talking about all kinds of interesting things. he was somewhere in the states. after a while it turned out that he was 11! i will never forget awe and almost science-fiction like feeling that i was connecting with someone across space AND age, somewhere in the dark, mysterious universe called cyberspace.
i didn’t really warm up to WWW until early in 1996 but then i immediately went full force. i was among the first people to do academic psychological research on the net, in 1996.
January 1st, 2009 at 20:26
huh, it was very interesting to read other people’s responses here. First time I got on the Net in 1996. At first we were using some kind of special Email program to send emails to each other at work and to all over the world. Then my boss showed me what Web is, and I remember I was thrilled to discover that I can find and print out any lyrics Jim Morrison have ever written. I had a teenage crush on Jim, even though he died before I was born
Slowly I’ve discovered IRC, ICQ and was connecting to people across the globe. Needless to say I was fascinated by Web.
What Net means to me? Everything. I’ve found my future husband there. I moved to a new country and started my life from scratch. Without the Net I wouldn’ve had my daughter. I earn my living with the Net and I socialize much more online than offline. I have friends all over the world, in countries that I’ve never visited and some will probably never be able to visit.
January 2nd, 2009 at 05:09
For my generation in the UK, I guess; for alot of us, as post-graduate students in the 80s it was JANET (the UK Joint Academic Network) which was a net for the big Universities; some great stuff was done in that space, in those days, particularly in my own field of Monetary Econometrics.
January 2nd, 2009 at 13:41
I found out about the net by chance in 1990 …
My first awareness of the Internet I came across by chance, early on. I had a similar brush with programming early on as well. But before I ever understood what I was really capable of, and what I could do, I lost a lot of time to sorting out misconceptions told to me by so many people.
I always had a taste for media and technology, but finding my way into it took a long time. I first got into computers in high school. CompSci 12 was about assembly language programming on Apple II computers. Here we were doing what amounts to the lowest level programming possible, but our mean sprited teacher said we would never know enough to be ‘real programmers’. What the hell. There was enough skills in that course for us to totally invent the future, had we known what to do next. Look at what people do today by comparison. Most ‘real programmers’ I have met have never touched anything on that level.
That was in the 80’s. Fast forward through a few years of dreaming but not doing what I wanted to do. When I wasnt partying. One roommate was a programmer, another got into hypercard – interactive multimedia – and while I didnt understand how to make it work, an early macintosh showed up in our place and I fooled with it from time to time. Through another year or two and we went to MacWorld ‘90 in San Francisco, now remembered as the halcyon days of conferences. We all got passes through my former roommates., so there was nothing to do but wander Moscone Center and collect schwag, go to parties, and then return at night via BART to Oakland, where we crashed on the floor of a room. One of the guys I went down with was a PC programmer. It was his friend we stayed with in Oakland. The guy was a Phd in Math at Berkley. He showed us around campus, and even to the rooftop of the math building. So back at Mosone, the pc guy tells me to go check out this talk. It was a talk for unix system administrators about the future of network connectivity. Ok, whatever, Unix was only for extremely brilliant people, I was led to assume. I wasnt sure what I would get from it but Ill go and sit in on it. The talk was about Korn Shells, Bourne Shells, and machine interconnectivity. The crowd seemed to have this light about them. A light giggling at the speakers’ remarks, and a spirit of optimism to a degree I had never really been exposed to much in my life. But I realized they were talking about how just around the corner, large scale services were going to be online and how things were about to grow rapidly. I found my buddies after the talk. My head was spinning with new ideas. I realized something really big was going to hit the world. People were going to make millions, no, billions…. and probably lose as much again. The thing the talk was about, I thought, would have a name, and it would have a name suited perfectly to what it was. It was going to be called the inter…net… or something like that. I dont know if the speakers knew of the work of Tim Berners-Lee, but in any event as these technologies improve and more and more people become aware of them, it is only a matter of time before the next step is made. What did I know, I was only 23 at the time. It was 1990. Nobody knew about this stuff. On the 16 hour drive back home on the I-5, I spent most of that time thinking of how database systems might work.
Fast forward through about 3 more years of what I will call ‘not the right path’. Some of it was fun. I moved on from my past acqaintances. Time was spent dreaming or in jobs that were either ridiculous, back breaking, life threatening, or some combination thereof. After a couple months in the hospital, and a deep dissatisfaction, It was back to school. Still the domain of computing was a mysterious thing kept away from the general masses, incubating in labs full of 386 machines. Nobody I ever came across had any more to say about what I had learned about years before. I had no abilities in math or sciences when I started in university; I went back in order to learn how to think, write, walk upright, and feel like a human being again.
The farthest flung adventure I could find myself on was to take on studies in French. So by the grace of bursaries, loans, and a little money, I got into French Immersion in Quebec City. One of my class mates was showing other students how to get access to email at the library. I was jealous. I thought I should be the one to know about such things. But still it was going to be a while. My next year in Montreal, still studying in french. I got out to Ontario during the holidays to see my oldest brother , an old hand in IT. We passed through a giant bookstore somewhere, and in the bin was a book called ‘Learn Unix In A Week’. He told me to buy it, so I did. I was able to get an email account through a special request by a T.A. in one my courses. Emails werent even given to undergrads unless you happened to be a sudent from another province or abroad. I found my way finally to the terminal labs, and spent my time after homework was done there in a shell using Pine for email and doing every exercise in the book. Towards the end of the winter semester, the computer labs had completed their long incubation. They buzzed with activity and users tended to them like bees to flowers.
I returned home to Vancouver to finish off that degree in a communication program. The topic most often covered is what would be called social analysis of technology. From that time its either the brilliant people or the idots who stick out in my mind. Technology, I heard lectured once, was sexist, because of the use of terms like ‘abort’. But it is the student that makes the program and I learned plenty. It is mostly in the background of my mind now. In perspective, nobody in that department was really equiped to prepare their students for real careers in communication and media. With a book I taught myself Java. It inspired me, but I didnt know really what I had to do to become a programmer. Couldnt find another soul who cared, either. And graduating just in time for the dot com crash, there was no getting of anything. The degree turned out to be nothing more than a bill of goods.
By July I found myself again in what would be called a risky, tenuous, and dangerous situation, but it put a roof over my head. It would last for two years and take even longer to get back on my feet again afterwards. I got a computer finally with a personal loan. With a ripped copy of windows and some other software, I spent my time getting proficient in html and css. The job search was endless, fruitless. So I just kept learning. Made a couple static websites. Kept learning. Kept seeing this php extension on pages in browsers. Finally got a php book. Tore hair out installing and making apache, mysql, and php work. Did the whole book. Felt like I had real power for once in my life. In truth there was a lot more to learn. For that matter, there still is. And knowing a programming language is almost all I was able to take away from that time.
It has taken a really long time to stitch it all together. I had learned so much over time, without really understanding what I was actually building towards. I never really ever did get a job. Not for years anyways. But somehow I cobbled together a porfolio of websites for people I knew. I had projects come my way and I took them on and did them. The jobs that I have had turned out to be less stable than the contract projects I now take care of, oddly enough.
So now I am self taught in a field that is very technical. Its not in my benefit to be that way, but there it is. I made it happen with my own curiosity and the willingness to sweat through stuff. I may not know as much as many of my peers, but for having gone through what I did to get this far, Ill have something they will never have. And I still struggle. Beyond that, it was a hint from someone now and then, or a little bit of support, an explanation, that made the difference between closed doors and seeing a universe of possibilites open up before me. I am deeply grateful to a few people who I have managed to connect with, even though it seems like I did most of it on my own.
Looking back, I could have jumped into all this about 20 years ago, if things were just a little different. I had lots of obstacles and not enough information. Now I can only shrug. But I think the real obstacles were the misconceptions about technology I took on from teachers and other people. And its a shame. Those were the real limitations. If I knew what was possible, I would have found a way. That is why I got involved with user groups, to overcome this basic obstacle, and to stay in touch with people and to talk and listen. The process of giving, giving back, sharing, is vital; without it there is darkness. FOSS has opened up the idea to a great number, but its still a shame that people dont share more.
January 2nd, 2009 at 21:53
My generation grew up (sort of) with the personal computer. I remember playing with a 286 when I was about seven or eight years old. It was an old computer my father had brought home from work at the time. It was always like that, an old work computer, became a family computer, and then eventually became my computer. Long story short I became handy fixing older abused computers!
The net entered the picture probably around 1998 with our families 56k dial-up modem (how I talk about it reminds me of my mothers generation talking about the first color T.V). It’s funny how that slow modem influenced my browsing bevahior today. Since it took a while to load pages, I would click a page; and as it was loading already open up more windows and start multi-tasking and loading something else so that as I was reading something was always loading. When people watch me work or “surf” nowadays they think I’m an absolute spazz.
Since then I’ve been involved with a number of small startups ever since I was a kid. We will see where that leads me (currently in college).
January 9th, 2009 at 13:45
My father brought us a Commodore 64 when I was still very young. I don’t remember the day he brought it or how I used to sit on his lap while he was working. All of these are stories that I’ve been told.
What I do remember, however, is my first experiences at creating websites. I began playing around with CSS and HTML around 1997-8, I suppose. I remember that a little later I was so bewildered by the poor quality of my neighbour’s personal website (he did it very poorly with a WYSWIG editor) that I totally rebuilt it with notepad. My knowledge of these tools didn’t really grew into any serious form at the time, though. No projects came my way and I didn’t seek them.
A few years back I discovered that css had matured and the browser war (in the traditional sense) was over giving us the possibility to truly use web standards: it really motivated me to update my skills and keep them.
As for free software, I kept using Win98 until 2004. Then, I began dreaming of a smooth transition to GNU/Linux so I prepared it very carefully reading documentation for weeks and being unable to make the move for fear I wouldn’t be able to learn quick enough (It was the year I entered college I needed to be operational quickly). One day, I had blue screens of death on both my father’s and my computer. I decided I had enough, backed up and moved on to GNU/Linux, discovered Firefox in the transition and never looked back.
All in all, I don’t think I did nearly enough for the Open Web/Open Source Movement but I do cherish them.
January 19th, 2009 at 16:44
[...] arc, writing the "Hitchhiking the Information Superhighway" post and adding the "Tell Me How the Spark Caught Flame" post after realizing that I should test some of my earlier [...]