On Sun, Jul 27, 2008 at 7:04 PM, Leo Mauler [email protected] wrote:
At the time Windows95 came out, I was working for an ISP and Windows95 was like a gift from heaven.
Those of you who remember back to the days when the web (according to Scott Adams of "Dilbert" fame) was composed entirely of some text files and 12 pictures of dinosaurs, may also recall that Windows 3.1 did not come with TCP/IP (NetBeui Rulz!...not). If we wanted to sell an
Internet account with our ISP, we had to arrange for the customer to get a copy of "Trumpet Winsock" so they could get on the Internet, and it was hell to configure (especially over the phone). Windows95 came with TCP/IP standard and it was a lot easier to configure, and easier to tell some computer illiterate customer over the phone how to configure it.
Dino pics, hah! One of the first things I did back after the day I got my first modem was get a shell account (Grapevine or their precursor, IIRC). Then I heard about this new "surfing the web" thing and decided I needed to try it "for real". On a mostly stock Amiga 500. Enter some sort of software that took a UNIX shell dial up on one end and ran a server that tunnelled TCP/IP over the dial up serial line to a custom client on the Amiga which then had to have it's own TCP/IP capable browser to grab web pages. This wasn't a regular SLIP/CSLIP/PPP setup, for sure. I had been running Lynx on the Sun shell account for a bit before this. The first actual image I ever saw over the web was a green and orange T-Rex. I was completely blown away. Of course that was back in the days when I though Gopher was going to be the end-all-be-all of internet tech...