My early experiences with the Internet (Part 2) Here is a series of small entries on other experiences I had with the early Internet, plus a few assorted thoughts: Accessing the Internet from the public library (late 1990s -- lynx, etc) ------------------------------------------------------------------------ I didn't attend high school very often and spent a lot of my time "skipping school" at the local public library which was just a few minutes walk from my high school. This would be between like 1996 and 1998. I spent a fair amount of time there reading technical books, sometimes catching up on sleep because I have always tended to stay up very late and have never been a "morning person." I also spent a fair amount of time at the library messing around with the various dumb terminals that were scattered throughout this rather large public library building. I think that these were mostly like VT220 terminals, plus some Wyse thin client machines. Some were dedicated to "card catalog" functions i.e. looking up books and getting their Dewey Decimal numbers. Others provided basic Internet access like Web browsing with lynx. I seem to remember spending a lot of time browsing the Web from some of the terminals that were located a little more off the main parts of the library. I also remember figuring out that I could go into the lynx options menu and configure the e-mail editor to be the path to the VMS shell on the VAX machines that were hosting the dumb terminals. I don't remember how I figured out that these were running on VMS, but I did figure this out and eventually got myself into a shell and found a VMS book at the library that I used to teach myself a bunch of VMS stuff. That was a pretty cool experience. I've always liked the idea of Public Access computer terminals. Geocities (early "read-write" Web) ---------------------------------- My first memories of being able to easily create an "on-line presence" were via Geocities pages. You could create your own "site" and create a number of pages within your site using their built-in Web-based "WYSIWYG" editor. I don't remember doing anything particularly profound with this, but it has stuck with me as a minor turning point in the Web. MySpace (early "Social Media") ------------------------------ I'm sure that the introduction of MySpace marked yet another turning point in the history of the Web with respect to ushering in many more "normal" users. It seemed like everyone that I knew, both technical and non-technical, was now "present" on the Web. People would post all sorts of photos of themselves and maintain their "friend lists" but I'm not sure that I remember people writing very much. That probably would have been more of a LiveJournal sort of thing. I never used LiveJournal much, but I suppose that this also ushered in a good number of less technical, more "normal" users. I personally succumbed to MySpace like pretty much everyone else seemed to. I don't think MySpace ever got me laid the way that the local AOL chat rooms did. The local AOL chat rooms were very good for that, but I've already talked about this in Part 1. Hosting my own Internet "servers" for start-up stuff before "the Cloud" -- both my own physical servers placed in local data centers and "renting" "dedicated servers" -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- I've been trying out various "start-up" or entrepreneurial technology ideas (mostly software ideas) since I was about 19 years old. I'm still doing this some 25 years later. My first ever start-up attempt was with a non-technical friend in town that had a business and marketing background and somehow convinced me that we should host some sort of "bargains" / classified web site for the Tampa Bay, Florida area. Craigslist was founded in 1995 and this would have been in like either 1999 or 2000 so it's not like it was extremely original. I think the plan was to sell ads on the web site. Very novel. Anyhow, what stands out to me now was how we used to go about having our own servers on the Internet. I went to a local "mom-and-pop PC store" and bought a pretty powerful PC tower with an Ethernet card and probably some big hard drives. I remember when they tried to sell me a high-end video card and I told them that the computer was likely to not even have a monitor connected to it, that it would just sit in a closet as an Internet server. They were really sort of blown away by this idea. The start-up never really came to be anything but I thought that I'd share a story about "pre-Cloud" Internet servers. I started another entrepreneurial venture somewhere around 2003 that was based on extracting data ("scraping") from a system run by the United States federal government called PACER, or Public Access to Court Electronic Records. PACER access was not free and I would sometimes have monthly (quarterly?) bills that would run many thousands of dollars. I managed to find a customer for this data feed that I was creating pretty early on. I'll never forget the first time I went to my P.O. box and found a check for $207.69 in there just because I had some code running on a computer on the Internet. It was one of the most magical feelings. And those $207.69 checks kept coming every two weeks for many months, until they later started to increase in their Dollar amounts even more. ($207.69 * 26 bi-weekly periods in a year = $5,400 per year or $450 per month, with $450 per month being the initial deal I struck with this customer for access to the data feed I created.) This early code (PHP) and web site (also PHP) ran on some sort of "dedicated server" somewhere. It probably cost like $10 or $20 per month to host. (There was "back-end PHP code" that ran on a daily schedule via cron and automatically extracted data from PACER, later other web sites, and another set of PHP code that made up the web site and "Web API" used to access the data I was collecting.) Over the years, I added more and more to this data feed, ultimately adding many counties worth of Property Appraiser data and other services and eventually working up to about $8,000 per month coming in. At some point along this journey, I decided that it was not enough to host my software on such commodity servers any more and that I should move to more powerful, reliable servers. I ended up buying what was at the time a very expensive Dell 1U rack-mount server with redundant Ethernet cards, redundant power supplies, redundant storage via RAID mirroring, etc. It cost me like $3,000 if I remember correctly. Back in the early-to-mid 2000s, it seemed like there were a good number of local "data centers" where one could bring their own server and have it installed in a rack, sitting on the Internet. I toured a number of such data centers and ultimately went with a very sophisticated operation run by Level3. I drove out to the data center in Tampa with my server, met a representative for the company that was directly leasing space from Level3 and "subletting" space to small-time operaters such as myself, and proceeded to go inside and install my server in a rack in an extremely high-end and sophisticated data center, complete with biometric security, redundant fiber optic Internet connections, independent power generators, etc. I seem to remember the cost of this being somewhere around $100 to $150 per month. Needless to say my server never went down or lost connection to the Internet. I kept that previous "dedicated server" as a hot fail-over system, using some sort of DNS trickery to automatically route traffic there in the event that my primary server failed. I write about all of this just to give you an idea of what it was like having your code run on the Internet back before "the Cloud." RSS, Google Reader, and a similar feature that Yahoo! offered ------------------------------------------------------------- I really enjoyed RSS as a way of getting information from the Internet. I haven't checked in some time, but I suspect that it is largely dead now (although I believe it is one of the underlying technologies for podcast subscriptions, etc). It seemed like the peak of getting your news from RSS was in the early-to-mid 2000s. At first, I used a feature from Yahoo! as my RSS "reader" / "aggregator." I believe this may have been Yahoo! News. It was a very nice, clean, and minimalistic feature that made checking on the news a very efficient and uncluttered affair. Later I switched to using Google News (now defunct) as my RSS reader. One reason that I don't spend very much time reading news on the Web is due to its disjoint nature, various visual differences, and clutter with ads (although AdBlock helps a lot with this). I would likely read a lot more on the Web if everything was in some sort of common black and white format (you know, like plain text, like a newspaper!). Although actually the more that I think about it, the more I realize that I have trouble concentrating on much of anything on my computer and this is part of why I do almost all of my reading in paper book form. The modern, always-connected, notification-popping-up, multi-tasking computer just seems built for not being able to hold your attention to just one thing at a time. If I don't do much reading on the computer then I do even less reading on so-called "Smart Devices." Honestly I do not even like to be seen with one. "The problem with the Internet is that everyone is on it." ---------------------------------------------------------- Being on the Internet used to mean something special. Now it is simply like the air we breathe. This is arguably a good thing. It means that so many more people are now, at least in theory, in communication with one another. It also means that many more people have access to tons of additional written text, instructional videos, music, culture, etc. Today, telling somoene that you are "on the Internet" carries about as much meaning as "I have a television." At least in the "First World" anyway. As someone who is personally not much of a writer, I probably cannot put it any better than John Mercouris of the Nyxt project already did: "We should care about Gopher for the same reason that we care about IRC- it's difficult to use. This makes it an antidote for the Eternal September. In the year 2022, Gopher is hard to use. You must go out of your way to learn how to use Gopher, install a client, find documents, etc. By making something a little bit more inaccessible, we are inadvertently putting a filter on what is being posted." So if someone today tells you they use Gopher, you know you almost certainly have some very good things in common, similar to if someone told you in the 1990s that they had a web site. What does it tell you, exactly? I guess it tells you that this person is trying to get away from the noise and clutter of the modern Internet. Embedded in what they are saying is, the Internet is more than the Web. Perhaps that they are a "hacker." I don't mean someone that breaks into computers or even someone that is a good computer programmer. I mean hacker in the sense of Steven Levy's 1984 book, "Hackers." I know excellent wood hackers, metal hackers, music hackers, automobile hackers, clothing hackers, culture hackers, etc. Maybe it's like from an old Apple ad: "Here's to the crazy ones. The misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently." Why I sometimes don't like that "the Internet is flat" ------------------------------------------------------ Visiting a Web site half way across the world can be done, essentially, just as quickly as visiting a Web site in your home country. This is arguably a good thing. Even though the routing structure of the Internet is hierarchical or perhaps can be best represented with a graph structure, the underlying routing is all seamless and gives us no feel for when something is geographically near or geographically distant. Again, this is arguably a good thing. However, I keep having this idea that I just cannot shake of somehow introducing geographical distance or locality into our electronic communications. And I don't just mean like a "subreddit" for this town and a "subreddit" for that city. I mean like, for instance, I wish there were places that could benefit from the interconnectivity that the Internet offers but that were geographically closed off so that they could only be accessed from certain physical places. I will now draw some terrible ASCII art to try and demonstrate one such idea: _________________________________________________________________________________ | | | Some city or town or other geographic area | | | | | | ________________ | | | Wi-Fi | ________________ | | | Access Point | | Wi-Fi | | | | at local | | Access Point | | | | coffee shop | | at local | | | ---------------- | public | | | | | library | | | | VPN link ---------------- | | | | | | | .-~~~-. | VPN link | | .- ~ ~-( )_ _ | | | / ~ -. | | | | Internet ', | | | \ .' ________________ | | ~- ._ ,. ,.,.,., ,.. -~-------------------------| Wi-Fi | | | ASCII art "Cloud" | VPN link | Access Point | | | | VPN link | at local | | | | | coffee shop | | | | ---------------- | | ______________ | | | Web site | | | | (forums, | / If we are talking here, seeing | | | personal | <======== one another's forum posts, etc | | | web sites, | \ then we know that one another | | | etc.) | are both in the same geographical | | -------------- and could completely forego | | electronic communications and | | meet up In Real Life, etc. | | | --------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Figure 1. A "LocalNet" Now we would be communicating electronically but be more-or-less guaranteed to be in the same geographical area. Anyway, this is one such idea. Here is another: You run a VPN client on your computer. This VPN client does not allow any communication with computers that are not "on the VPN." The VPN itself is built on top of something like Amazon Web Services (AWS) or perhaps with servers that folks host themselves in various Internet Points of Presence (POPs), etc. Perhaps the VPN client offers a drop-down list of "destinations" like "WeirdNet", "GopherKings", "FetishesGalore", "PolandNet", etc. Each one of these would be like its own Internet of sorts. There may be many of these that you do not even know of. Invite only, etc. When you are on one of these VPNs, you see a completely different "Internet." Facebook won't exist. Google won't exist. Facebook and Google's ubiquitous Web surveillance technology won't exist. This is just a very partially baked idea. Who knows how technologically feasible it is, or even how desirable it would be. I can already hear someone saying, "You'd be making hiding places for Nazi's!" CREATED 2023-03-21