My early experiences with the Internet (Part 1)

[This series of articles is partially written as a nod to the great archaeological work done
by -- and the authentic wonder and enthusiasm shown by -- another sdf.org user: szczezuja.
I have also been inspired to start writing much more on Gopher again after having one of my
articles featured in the "Why should I care about Gopher?" World Wide Web article by
John Mercouris of the "Nyxt" project.]

I was born in the United States in the very final weeks of 1979.  I attended high school from
something like 1995 to 1998.

Computers, electronics, and radio have been a lifelong interest (obsession) for me.  So, naturally,
when the Internet started to become "a thing", I was sure to be there to check it out.

Much of my childhood was spent with a Commodore 64 computer that I received as a hand-me-down
from my uncle.  I didn't get my first modem (or PC) until early in high school, if I remember
correctly.  Probably somewhere around 1995.  Having a computer without a modem and having
a computer with a modem are two very, very different things.

I got really into what was called "BBS culture" (I have written about this separately on Gopher)
as soon as I received my first modem.  I probably spent about a year or two being completely
enamored with BBS culture before starting to really check out the Internet.

If my memory serves me correctly, my first access to the Internet was using stolen account
credentials to dial-up Internet-connected computers hosted by a very large and local university
in the Tampa Bay, Florida area.  I'm pretty sure that these account credentials and associated
dial-up phone numbers came to me by way of the "elite BBS scene" (I have also written about this
separately on Gopher).  I have no idea how the person / people that provided me with these credentials
themselves came into possession of them.  No seriously, I'm not just saying this to protect others
(Statute of Limitations and all that).  They probably leaked their way into the elite BBS scene
because some students at this university were also involved in said scene.

Mostly what I remember using this university dial-up Internet access for was to use lynx to
browse the World Wide Web.  I don't think that I would have used FTP very much if at all
because I likely would have had no real way to download the files from the dial-up computer
to my home computer.  (Or maybe I did use FTP and some sort of "xmodem" or "zmodem" program
to download files to my local PC?)  I can't remember whether or not I used Gopher, although
I remember being aware of Gopher, archie, veronica, WAIS, and other things from fairly early on.

Another major use of this access to the university dial-up computers was simply trying to get
access to more accounts and to more computers within the university's computer network.
I remember running some sort of password cracking software (compiled on the machine from C
source code likely acquired via lynx) to extract more usernames and passwords (this was before
"shadow password files" were common on Unix machines I guess).

I can't say that I really did a lot with the Internet access I had via these university computers.

A very large bump in my Internet access and Internet usage came when a fellow elite BBS user told me
about how I could get my own "dial-up Unix shell account" from a local Internet Service Provider (ISP).
This was likely around 1996 or 1997.  During those years, "mom and pop" and other small-time ISPs were
very popular.  Similar to how local "PC stores" and "PC repair shops" were very popular.

I still remember riding my bicycle into the next city over to apply for my very own dial-up Unix shell
account.  It was $19.95 per month and offered unlimited usage via a fairly massive bank of 56k modems
that you could dial into.  In essence, this small company had something like a few "T-1" access lines
to the Internet and a number of computers on a local LAN with access to the Internet via these T-1 lines
and they provided dial-up access to said computers which were "on the Internet."

The people that ran the ISP (it was like a 10 person operation at most) were amazed that some 16 or 17
year old kid knew what Unix was and understood how to use a dial-up shell account.  I will never forget
their reaction when I asked for this sort of account.  I ended up becoming good friends with the owner,
who would frequently give me tours of their super cool "data center" when I would come in to pay my bill.
I also ended up buying an old Sun Microsystems SPARC workstation from them at some point.

[I could (and maybe should?) write an entire article just on my experiences with this local ISP.]

Anyway, I ended up using this Unix shell account *A LOT*.  It became a major part of my high school years.
I used it extensively for IRC (got very big into IRC culture), FTP, and would often run "slirp" to establish
a "SLIP" or "PPP" connection from their Internet-connected computer to my PC so that I could run Netscape
Navigator on my Linux PC.  I also used this SLIP/PPP connection as a better way of doing things like FTP'ing
updated Linux software directly down to my PC.  I also seem to remember using a graphical web browser a lot to
access nude and semi-nude photos on the Web.  Hey, I was a teenage boy, what were you expecting?

What else did I use the Web for at this point?  I remember reading MIT's Telecom Digest a lot because I was
still very deep into my telephone system hacking phase at this point.  I also remember using WebCrawler a lot
as a search engine but I don't remember searching for anything particularly interesting as I write this.
Probably Unix / Linux stuff, technical information, hobbyist stuff, etc.

I also remember using "web directories" like Yahoo! and probably some others (dmoz.org?) that I'm not
remembering right now.

I remember some of the kids at my high school starting to use AOL around this time to access the Internet
but I always thought it was "really lame" and never signed up for AOL until the early 2000s when I used it
for the local chat rooms.  Man, I got laid a lot from my time spent in those local chat rooms.  Those were
some good times.  But, I never really considered that proper Internet access.  In fact, the AOL chat rooms
were something completely separate from the Internet (Walled Garden sort of thing).

I hosted a web site on my local ISP's servers (the URL would be something like http://myisp.net/users/d1337).
I ended up putting tons of effort into this site, making it a "blog" of sorts (and photo gallery as I was
really into photography back then) although I don't remember if blogs were a properly named thing yet.  I also
hosted a big collection of hand-curated links to other web sites.  I ended up teaching myself PHP so that
it wasn't just a "static" web site but one where the articles / photos / links were based on the contents
of a MySQL database and with a sort of "back-end" / admin area where I could go and author new articles, etc.

An example "article" I hosted on my web site circa 2001: How I took the local police department to court
over a traffic ticket and won, complete with diagrams that I drew in Windows Paint or Gimp and photos
that I took with my (then very expensive) Sony DSC-S30 digital camera.  (True story: I showed up in
court with print-outs of digital photos and diagrams I created and the judge asked me "how I did this."
He was pretty amazed.  He eventually turned to the cop and asked him if he agreed with my assessment of
the traffic situation in question and the cop agreed and my ticket was dismissed.)

I was also working for the local telephone company at this point (early 2000s) as a sort of Unix specialist
(mostly Solaris and HP-UX machines).  Writing lots of shell scripts, etc to automate processes, scan log
files, etc.  This was in direct support of the national telephone switching system (this was a very large
phone company that I worked for called GTE, later Verizon) and was very impressed with myself for having
such a position.  Anyway, I was way younger than pretty much everyone else that I worked with
(10+ years younger, easily) and I think because of this, I was much more in touch with the Internet, HTTP,
PHP, etc.  I ended up creating a number of "Intranet" pages at the phone company that helped with automation,
viewing logs, reports, etc.  They seemed to think this was really far out stuff, not that I blame them.

I also remember writing Unix shell scripts that would read through logs of my home Linux server and send me
an e-mail if suspicious activity showed up in my firewall log.  This seemed very novel to me at the time.

I ended up running an ultra low-scale sort of "ISP" from my apartment using like 3 PCs and a dual-channel
ISDN link to the ISP mentioned above.  I had my own super-cool sub-domain and everything i.e. like
d1337.myisp.net.  A number of my friends, both from real-life and from IRC, had shell accounts on these
computers that they were very fond of.  One of the things that they thought was cool was being able to
IRC as "username@d1337.myisp.org".  (It wasn't actually "d1337" but another "name" / identity / "brand"
that I had created and cultivated through local elite BBS culture and elite IRC culture that was
considered by a small handful of people to be something cool to identify with.)  The main server
eventually got hacked ("rooted") and its contents were "rm -rf'd" and I stopped running my "ISP" at
that point.  That was a very frustrating experience, seeing someone destroy what I considered to be a
charitable and creative act.

Word to the wise: Be very careful who you offer Unix shell accounts to.  Also, keep your patches up to date.

I believe that other than very special places like sdf.org, the days of Unix shell accounts are very much
a thing of the past.  Something from another era.

There is so much more that I could write but I need to stop at the moment and get some sleep.
Here is what I plan to add soon:

* Accessing the Internet from the public library (late 1990s -- lynx, etc)
* Geocities (early "read-write" Web)
* Myspace (early "Social Media")
* 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"
* RSS
* Google Reader and a similar feature that Yahoo! offered
* When I think the Internet started to go really wrong -- I was "there" when it happened, so to speak
  [Wrong in the sense that it was no longer a special place for weird people to use, but rather started
  to just be another place for "normal people" to lurk -- like it became Television in a way or
  something -- "mainstream".]
* Why I often tell myself, "The problem with the Internet is that everyone is on it."
* Probably a lot of other things I should write about as well
* Why I sometimes don't like that "the Internet is flat" and what I sometimes think would be an
  interesting (although likely very unrealistic) alternative

I am now involved in creating "local", "non-Internet" wireless communications networks to try and
restore a sense of localness to our digital communications.  Also to decentralize.  Sort of a pipe
dream of mine, no pun intended.

I also had a hobby project a few years back (since abandoned due to some
technical annoyances / limitations / time restrictions I guess) for creating "Internet islands" in
my home city that could only be accessed from physically local Access Points.  (If we're talking
then I know we are within "grabbing coffee distance", "IRL", etc.)  This is very much an interest of mine.

[szczezuja: Has this helped at all so far?]

CREATED 2023-03-20