Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[tickmike]

He should be remembered like the other great www inventors .

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-23945326

[burakkucat]

An interesting story about someone of whom I am unfamiliar.

[kitz]

Very interesting,  I must admit I hadnt heard of Jumpstation.   

My first dabbles into the internet occurred at around the year Excite & Webcrawler was the big new thing.  I used to use Excite as there wasnt really much alternative..  I think Yahoo also appeared at around the same time..  yet within a couple of years there was a bit of an explosion. Still long before the days of google though

[sheddyian]

Marvellous, and a shame he isn't more widely known.

I don't think I'd heard of Jumpstation.  My search engine of choice, before Google took over, was AltaVista, but I'm struggling to think what I used to use before that launched. 

Wasn't Yahoo (in it's early days) also manually updated?  Or am I thinking of a different one?

Interesting fact - when Altavista launched, www.altavista.com was already taken by a different company.  The correct url was altavista.digital.com .  After a while the long-suffering owner of altavista.com put a search box on their site that linked to the altavista search engine, it wasn't until some time later that Digital got the altavista.com address.

A quick Google (how ironic) shows some news I missed - only a few months back, Yahoo finally put Altavista to sleep 
They'd bought it some time back when DEC were losing money and selling off various assets.

Ian

[Edit] Having just read a bit more about it, the above is a mildly erroneous oversimplification (from memory) of what happened to AltaVista - the Wikipedia entry for Altavista tells you the full story http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AltaVista

[kitz]

Wasn't Yahoo (in it's early days) also manually updated?  Or am I thinking of a different one?

I think a lot of them were.. back in the late 90's if you had a website, there were still many search engines you had to submit your site to. 

Altavista

oh yes..  another one that appeared at about the same year, I forgot about them (and AOL!).
 
haha can you remember the days when if you wanted a 'home-page' for you browser (unless you were with the likes of AOL) then you built one yourself in html.

Sigh - now I feel old 

[sheddyian]

haha can you remember the days when if you wanted a 'home-page' for you browser (unless you were with the likes of AOL) then you built one yourself in html.

Sigh - now I feel old 

Didn't Mosaic (and possibly early Netscape) browsers save the "bookmarks" as an html file?  I have a feeling I used to use that as my home page! 

Ian

[kitz]

I didnt ever use Mosaic so cant comment
I cant recall an awful lot about IE early days either because I didnt use it until later.   Back then you needed a browser to get online before you could download another and I stuck with what was provided by my dial-up ISP on the introductory floppy. 

Unsure about Netscape prior to v3.   I certainly recall Netscape Gold being released and thinking it was the best thing since sliced bread, that certainly introduced a lot of new features that for me at least I found very useful.

Youre correct about Netscape 2, which shows a home button, perhaps I was making it hard by doing my own.

[sheddyian]

I didnt ever use Mosaic so cant comment

I cant recall an awful lot about IE early days either because I didnt use it until later.   Back then you needed a browser to get online before you could download another and I stuck with what was provided by my dial-up ISP on the introductory floppy. 

Unsure about Netscape prior to v3.   I certainly recall Netscape Gold being released and thinking it was the best thing since sliced bread, that certainly introduced a lot of new features that for me at least I found very useful.

Youre correct about Netscape 2, which shows a home button, perhaps I was making it hard by doing my own.

Mosaic : Think I used this on a Dec workstation sometime around 1994, so it was very early days.  Was using the Internet in 1992, but not via a web browser - usenet news, email.. anyone remember Gopher? 

Had beta versions of Netscape on my Windows 3.11 PC at home - think it was version 0.7 - it was all quite exciting, but as I was paying by the minute for the connection, I didn't like looking at web pages - you were "wasting" connection time!

The thing to do was to dial up, log on, download your email, download all the usenet news headers for the groups you were subscribed to, then disconnect.

You could then reply to emails offline, mark usenet messages you were interested in, and log on again.  It'd send your email replies, and download the message bodies of the newsgroups.  Disconnect once more, read the messages offline, write your replies, dial up once more and send your replies.

That way you were never online with the meter running without any data flowing!  Pausing to read a web page before clicking a link was very wasteful if you were paying by the minute! 

I think I switched to IE around version 3, when it definitely started overtaking Netscape in features and usability.  I had tried earlier versions of IE and found them to be awful.

Ian 

[roseway]

You could then reply to emails offline, mark usenet messages you were interested in, and log on again.  It'd send your email replies, and download the message bodies of the newsgroups.  Disconnect once more, read the messages offline, write your replies, dial up once more and send your replies.

That sounds like a description of CIX, which I used for many years. Amazingly it's still going, albeit in a much modified form.

[kitz]

Had beta versions of Netscape on my Windows 3.11 PC at home - think it was version 0.7 - it was all quite exciting, but as I was paying by the minute for the connection, I didn't like looking at web pages - you were "wasting" connection time!

Heh. you beat me then, I didnt find the internet until about 1995.  iirc I was running win 3.1 or even 3.0 cant remember
I may be wrong but I dont think IE really started gathering momentum until it was packaged in with Windows 95, but I didnt get a 'Windows 95 desktop' until about mid '96. 

In between I was given a work Digital Laptop that also ran 3.1 on it complete with a USRobotics (sprint?) modem about the size of a credit card that plugged into the side and I'd have to every day dial head office to upload the days work transactions.  It gave me the flexibility to work from home..  (and late ) because if I'd been doing a home visit evening appointment.. I'd have to rush home write up a report and make sure it was all uploaded the same day :/

For personal use my 1st ISP (U-net) was £12 per month plus 1p/4p per min, so for a while I used to be on and off pretty quick.
Some time around '97 that all went out of the window when I started an 'Internet Technologies' degree module at night school which proudly boasted something like a 10Mb microwave link to Lancaster Uni and Janet.  Then I was hooked with the huge amount of information out there and could spend ages on sites such as NASA and my home phone bill rocketed!  By this time the search engine was my friend as I found you could look up information on just about anything 

I was so glad when BT brought out the £10pm with cheap internet access for call cost which bolted on to your phone bill (You also still paid your £12 ISP monthly bill, but designated their dial up number iirc).  They later brought out another BT package for about £10 which gave you free after 6 and at weekends all-in....  and then we got adsl

sigh..  trip down memory lane.

[tickmike]

I have a Massive Win 3.1 laptop in the roof, I will have to see I can still fire it up and see what's on it  .

[sheddyian]

Heh. you beat me then, I didnt find the internet until about 1995.  iirc I was running win 3.1 or even 3.0 cant remember
I may be wrong but I dont think IE really started gathering momentum until it was packaged in with Windows 95, but I didnt get a 'Windows 95 desktop' until about mid '96.

Getting Windows 3.1 online wasn't straightforward (had to install a 3rd party winsock), but even Win95 didn't have much more support - Gates himself later admitted they were a bit late.  Original version of W95 didn't have IE (but had MSN - the Microsoft Network).  If you bought the Plus Pack addon you got IE version 1 (I think) which was VERY basic, and way behind Netscape at the time.

I think later releases of Windows 95 (OSR1 and OSR2) might have come with IE as an option.

Due to the "browser wars" between Microsoft and Netscape in the mid/late 90's, MS even released a Windows 3.11 version of IE in 1997 as there was still quite a large 3.11 user base at the time.   It was quite a substantial install, as it had to include dial up networking (with support for lots of modems), a winsock, mail and news reader as well as IE itself.  It was surprisingly good, considering.
 

sigh..  trip down memory lane.

Indeed!

And in reply to |Tickmike, I was recently given a load of old(ish)/broken IT kit that I'm working my way through, though sadly I turned down a laptop that had a "designed for Windows 95" sticker on it.

I have regretted that decision every day since - it would have been amusing to repair / reinstall W95 (or even 3.11) on it and persuade it to get online.

Ian

[kitz]

Getting Windows 3.1 online wasn't straightforward (had to install a 3rd party winsock),

Aaahhhh...  that could be why it took my brother and his 2 mates (one who worked at an ISP)  about 3 hours to install my first modem then.   I just left them to it.   
I dont seem to recall any problems with Win 95, Win 98 I remember always having to double install the modem drivers after a format.  Yea gawds I think up until WinXP & decent sized HDDs I used to format every few months 

it would have been amusing to repair / reinstall W95 (or even 3.11) on it and persuade it to get online.

heh, you're mad     

[sheddyian]

Getting Windows 3.1 online wasn't straightforward (had to install a 3rd party winsock),

Aaahhhh...  that could be why it took my brother and his 2 mates (one who worked at an ISP)  about 3 hours to install my first modem then.   I just left them to it.   

One of the features of Windows 3.x and the third party winsock approach is that you'd be trundling along (slowly - Win 3.x significantly impacted your online speed compared to DOS!) you'd be trundling along and then suddenly dropped back to a DOS prompt with the modem still online.  Part way through a download/replying to an email/browsing.  Tough.  Reboot and start again.  And dial up again.

I dont seem to recall any problems with Win 95, Win 98 I remember always having to double install the modem drivers after a format.  Yea gawds I think up until WinXP & decent sized HDDs I used to format every few months 

98 was better set up for the Internet than 95, though both worked quite well (especially compared to Windows 3.x!).  There were some problems with Plug and Play in 98 that caused it to keep redetecting the same hardware on every boot (usually down to buggy 3rd party drivers!)

it would have been amusing to repair / reinstall W95 (or even 3.11) on it and persuade it to get online.

heh, you're mad     

I shall be making phone calls in the morning, although I fear the said kit has made it's way to the tip by now

Ian