Back in 2009, I wrote a blog post called "So How Did the Baby Boomers Get Online in 1958?" Since then, my then teenaged son has grown up, but he maintains his interest in Internet history.
As for me...I was late to the computer world. I bought my first computer in December of 1996, and went online in January of 1997, as I explain below. My amazing computer, which cost nearly $2,000. with a service plan, had all but a 1.6 GB hard drive. I got online using a service called CompuServe.
For my browsing, I used a browser called Mosaic, and things looked just a little different. You can still use Mosaic, too, via something called a "Browser emulator". I tried it and...oh those memories.
And if you want to see how the Internet looked back in 1997, you can, too. This is the archived page of Yahoo from January 9, 1997.
But, about 1958....
So How Did The Baby Boomers Get online in 1958?
My son knows about what the computers of the 1950's looked like. People of my generation remember the UNIVAC. My son has studied it.
Do you remember the famous "hoax" picture of the 1954 RAND prototype of the first home computer? Maybe that was what son was thinking about when he asked his question.
One evening he asked me "how did you get online when you were growing up? Did you have one of those huge computers in your bedroom?" I thought he was kidding me.
He wasn't.
Although he intellectually knew there was no "internet" as he knows it back in the 1950's or 1960's, he had to believe that there was something out there that I used, something very clunky, using technology full of vacuum tubes.
He couldn't believe I grew up in an era without home computers.
Interestingly, son is also interested in "old technology". For example, he is looking for a good Betamax player (and has several Betamax tapes). He just couldn't make that intellectual leap of "no computer, no Internet".
Let's think about this a minute. I bought my first home computer (a bit later than other people, I admit) in late 1996 and went online in January of 1997. So my son was in kindergarten at the time. That computer connected through a 14,400 baud modem, and used Mosaic as its browser. (How dated can you be?)
From his viewpoint, there was a computer in his life "forever".
This leads to another question. When did the Internet start? The answer is complicated. This link has quite the discussion and the answer is..."it depends".
But no, we didn't have either the Internet or home computers in 1958. Just typewriters, carbon paper and long distance.
So....did you get online in the early days of the Internet? If you did, how was it?
I took “computer science” in high school. The computer was huge, took up an entire room. We weren’t allowed in the computer room, we had to talk to the computer from a terminal, typing commands in a language called BASIC. For real work, a data processing person fed punch cards into the computer. That was in the late 1970’s.
ReplyDeleteIn law school (early 1980’s) the library obtained a terminal to access a legal research database, Students could use Kexis only under the librarian’s supervision. Creating search terms was an art.
Now I carry a ell phone with instant access to any information I need.
I remember taking a couple of computer classes at night at Wichita State University in the 1970's. Yup, had to punch Hollorith cards (which you could not bend, spindle or mutilate) each with a line of code, and you handed it to an operator to run through the computer overnight. If you got them in the wrong order, or made a typo, there went your homework assignment. I took Fortran in college, and COBOL in that night college. I enjoyed my intro to coding but when I tried studying assembler language, I just couldn't grasp it, and that was it for my programming "career".
DeleteI bought my first computer in 1887 when I was in grad school. Just my luck, it had a bad motherboard. I joined AOL and set up my first email with them and still use it. In the early 99's I set up my own websites, one for my committee work and one for my office. My township did not set up their own website until several years later and mine got incorporated into it. I still remember learning how to format the sites. Much easier today.
ReplyDeleteThat's impressive, Denise! I've tried to learn a little HTML and, for some reason, I can't quite grasp it. Happy Blogger is easy and using it doesn't require any coding knowledge.
DeleteThat's like when a student asked about my high school cell phone use. She didn't *get it* when I explained there were no cell phones when I was in school.
ReplyDeleteI got my first email account 'round about the same time as you, roughly 1996. It was on WOW, which I think was related to CompuServe. My uncle (who is now 80) was the first in the family to be all computer savvy. I remember visiting him in 1984 and playing on his state of the art Apple.
Oh I got mine a 100 years later than Denise!! when I was in South Africa - the biggest boon of my life - perhaps exaggerated ... but I'd never be without one now. I don't think I emailed til I got back to England in the mid 1990s ...
ReplyDeleteFun to think about and how little kids of today realise how much has developed in their life-times, let alone ours ...
Cheers - and here's to Tim Berners Lee ... and a brilliant idea - enjoy the waning of Autumn into Winter ... happy times -Hilary