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Before the internet

Does anyone remember what the world was like before the internet?

If you stop and think about it, there is a huge swathe of the earth's population that have never known a world without the uniquitous connectivity delivered by the Net's global web of copper, fibre and satellite links.

I suspect that to many of these people, the thought of life without Facebook, YouTube, Google or things like Google Maps would be a horrifying situation.

However, believe it or not, we managed to survive and some would say that in certain aspects of life, we were better off for this lack of 24/7 connectivity.

The catalyst for today's column was this story which reminds us that one of the first online services can trace its origins back an incredible 45 years.

Although Compuserve was a very US-centric system it, along with AOL (America OnLine) served as a gateway to online services that later saw users transition to the internet-real.

However, while Compuserve and AOL were commercially successful we ought not forget the small but very active communities that thrived online through the use of BBSes (Bulletin Board Services).

Ah, those happy days spent watching your modem redial, time after time, in an attempt to connect to a popular BBS so that you could check your email, swap messages with friends or download some cool software that someone had written.

XModem, YModem, ZModem and a raft of other protocols operated over dialup modems that had barely enough speed to keep up with someone's ability to read the characters as they were printed on a screen.

The most popular piece of BBS software was FidoNet, code that could be downloaded onto a computer that was hooked up to a modem. After a little configuring you could then advertise your dial-in phone number to the world and people could then create an account and start using it.

Since all the data was carried over low-speed dial-up connections, most of these BBS were pretty local in their operation -- that's because local calls are free. If you lived in Auckland and wanted to use a BBS in Wellington back in the 1980s you would end up with a pretty massive toll bill if you weren't careful.

However, pretty soon FidoNet was establishing itself as a network of BBSes. Each node would serve its local users and overnight, any emails addressed to a different node would be packaged up, compressed and then transferred by way of an automatic toll call to that destination node.

Despite the fact that this was all run by keen amateurs spending their own money and using whatever gear they had spare, the system worked pretty good and was providing those early users with a taste of what the internet would finally deliver.

Eventually, once the internet became more available, gateways between FidoNet and the internet were created so that emails could flow back and forth but once we started to see ISPs popping up around the country, the days of the dial-up BBSes were numbered.

Within another decade or so, *everyone* (not just geeks on Fidonet) would have an email address and Net-based services such as usenet, forums and webpages replaced the other things that BBSes offered their users.

Time certainly flies... those amazing days of the 1980s when a 9600bps dial-up modem was the holy grail and everything was run on an old 8088 "Turbo" PC-clone from Computer Imports seem just like yesterday.

Carpe Diem folks!

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