Saturday, June 13, 2009

These Anachronistic Times

A couple years ago I posted an image I scanned from an old magazine concerning Gopher. Yesterday I had a conversation with a man who is in his 30's. He was telling me about how he read that the Internet "took off" in 1984, earlier than he thought it did. He was wondering how people got online back them and what was there for them. Remembering that feeling of discovery I felt way back when, I mentioned using FTP and Gopher to access information. That got a blank look. I remembered some guy had a list if FTP sites and every week I'd print that off and use it to find things like guitar tablature for songs. For a while geeks ruled and the Internet was a wonder to most of the population. I mentioned Robert Morris's email worm that crashed the Internet and how exciting it was when Mosaic came out.

Fortunately he did not ask me about steam shovels.

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