We're continuing investigation to the performance issues, you can follow and react here: https://lemmy.world/c/friendicaworld

mastodon - Link to source

I'm really loving how Mastodon has become a refuge for all the grizzled seafarers on the ocean of the internet. They pop up in my feed and their bios all say something like

"I've been online for longer than the internet. I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. 56k modems on fire in the light of Usenet. I watched IRC forks glitter in the dark near the Gateway 3000. All those moments will be lost in slop, like tears in rain. Time to deshittify."

in reply to Dave 🇺🇦 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿

mastodon - Link to source

Janeishly

@TheLancashireman Yeah, I've already had a mate saying "Pah! 2800 baud rate was all we had".

I'm not actually sure how fast(slow) my first connection was, because after I finished my MA in 1991 I was offline for about 8 years and missed all the very slow bits!

@Dave 🇺🇦 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿
in reply to Oggie

mastodon - Link to source

Janeishly

@Oggie @PizzaDemon Exactly! The printers! So good!

Meanwhile my laptop before this one was an HP because there were no suitable Asuses (Asusii??) when I came to buy one. When it got stolen from my car I was annoyed, because expense, and hammering a new Windows machine into shape always takes about a fortnight, BUT I was also sniggering at the fact that someone was now trying to use my piece of shit HP machine that had been crap since I bought it.

@Flaming Cheeto @Oggie
in reply to Oggie

mastodon - Link to source

Janeishly

@Oggie @PizzaDemon Yeah, it was a bit of a gut punch at the time, but fortunately I have a bunch of spare former laptops knocking around (probably like the rest of the seafarers) and a good backup, so I was up and working again after a couple of hours. New laptop arrived a few days later (Asus – I learned that particular lesson) and overall it was a positive experience. (Could have done without a sudden and unexpected massive car repair two weeks later, but hey ho.)
@Flaming Cheeto @Oggie
in reply to Alex@rtnVFRmedia Suffolk UK

mastodon - Link to source

SeaCaptain(Ret)

@vfrmedia Don’t know about boats but ships, yes. When I retired we were using InMarisat for Company only email. I understand that today there may be some internet activity allowed but these connections were very expensive and coms were restricted. Maybe StarLink has changed the playing field.
@Alex@rtnVFRmedia Suffolk UK
in reply to SeaCaptain(Ret)

mastodon - Link to source

Alex@rtnVFRmedia Suffolk UK

@jfharrison Interestingly about 12 years ago I was helping run a popular online radio station and we had one listener who was using Inmarsat from the ship he was on, and whoever was paying for the bandwidth tolerated this (a 128 kbits/s stream), and this didn't upset the Internet availability for everyone else on the ship so the tech must have improved at some point..

Near the coasts, most people nowadays can get an LTE (mobile) link from the nearest country..

@SeaCaptain(Ret)
in reply to SeaCaptain(Ret)

mastodon - Link to source

Alex@rtnVFRmedia Suffolk UK

@jfharrison our listener was on some ship doing marine research in the middle of the ocean - the radio station would have been a constant 128k stream on top of anything else they needed the Internet for (which included sending high resolution pictures and videos of whatever they had discovered back to a University). He said there was plenty of bandwidth for all of this, and it wasn't that much slower than using a fixed ADSL/VDSL circuit (this was in the early 2010s)
@SeaCaptain(Ret)
Unknown parent

mastodon - Link to source

Robin Adams

@Lightfighter Jan 1 1983 is usually the date named as the "birthday of the Internet", when ARPANET switched to using TCP/IP so it could share traffic with any other network using that protocol.

Usenet started before then in 1980, spreading from BBS to BBS via dial-up users uploading and downloading the posts.

The Web came later in 1989, using the Internet so you could click on a link in one document to jump to a document on a completely different machine.

Before then to use the Internet, you had to know where the machine that had thing you wanted was, connect to it by FTP or Telnet, log in (the log in prompt would give you instructions, usually username "anonymous" and password your email address), read the "message of the day", and navigate through that machine's file system (this was how I first learned Unix commands).

MUDs were big then. I spent a lot of time on MOOs (object-oriented MUDs where you could create your own items by coding their behaviour in an object-oriented language).

Now get off my lawn you darn kids.

@Lightfighter
in reply to Janeishly

glitchsoc - Link to source

Emily 🏳️‍⚧️ (Shenanigans Era)

"I fought in the great Usenet Wars, where the first trolls were forged, 2400 baud at a time. Where the groundwork for the first memes were laid -- primitive things of simple words, barely more than repeated jokes.

Back when one truly could not fathom how someone as dumb as that managed to get onto the internet."

reshared this

in reply to Irenes (many)

mastodon - Link to source

ShadSterling

@ireneista I think the first modem I used was a 2400. Dad had an older one with the acoustic couplers, which I might have seen him use, but never used myself. I remember being excited about a new 9600 at some point. And a bit later dad was working on a project to use two industrial printer-scanners (4’ wide paper printing 4’/minute) like an oversize fax machine, using two phone lines and two 14.4K modems
@Irenes (many)
in reply to Irenes (many)

mastodon - Link to source

Witold Kowalik

I had a 14.4 and a 56. Never made it to DSL ' cause we've built a net over a few blocks. There were like 30 or 40 people initially, hooked up to a synchronous 4 megabit line from a nearby internet coffee shop. Local irc went up, and so did FTP and local quake 3 arena servers followed. This was '98/99 or '99/00
Looking back I'm amazed how swiftly this was made. We barely had people with enough technical skills, honestly no money, and it all was grassroot. And that local net grew over a decade to like a 150+ people. That was cool...
in reply to Janeishly

mastodon - Link to source

The Sleight Doctor 🃏🍉

I saw someone say something like "Facebook is where all the boomers and Gen Xers who need help with their computers live. The fedi is where all the boomers and Gen Xers who *designed and built* the damn computers live".
in reply to LeighC2

mastodon - Link to source

The Sleight Doctor 🃏🍉

@leighc2 Late Gen Xer here (still in my 40s). I can't make such an impressive claim, but I was writing my own games in BASIC before I even hit my teens. I rewrote my version of Boulderdash in GFA for the Atari ST, then rewrote it again in QBasic on MS Dos.

The Atari version worked the best, because the language had specific commands (such as BMOVE) for directly manipulating screen memory. Even uncompiled, it was playable.

I also worked in IT for some years. Hated it, though...

@LeighC2
in reply to PC

mastodon - Link to source

Janeishly

@PChoate Yeah, I probably do but it's a bit too cumbersome in the mouth (and doesn't quite map as well onto "die", which is the original word).

It's amazing that we all used to wait so long for stuff to happen. I remember it being irritating, especially if you'd waited for half an hour for a tape game to load and it then gave you an error message right at the end... but it wasn't as irritating as waiting for a single YouTube advert to let me skip it, the odd time I forget never to tap a YT link on my phone.

@PC

PC reshared this.

in reply to Janeishly

mastodon - Link to source

ShadSterling

@PChoate I remember using “getright” to download things with minimal repetition across connection failures, and wishing there was a “putright” to do the same for uploading.

But I think the interruption that really pissed me off was when I’d set up some long running task to run overnight, and log on in the morning to find Windows Update ate my homework. Having to edit the registry to be able to use my computer on my schedule help me switch to Mac

@PC
in reply to ShadSterling

mastodon - Link to source

PC

@ShadSterling

One of my jobs was to work on mainframes through Telnet terminals. Later PCs.

I ported a bunch of things to our network when they created one, but the big stuff all had to stay on the mainframe so I was working with both.

So one of my tricks was running large overnight mainframe jobs, but it required a live connection to a session on my computer that would mysteriously toggle off occasionally.

I had a portmanteau of connections!

@ShadSterling
in reply to Janeishly

mastodon - Link to source

Mimi

This entry was edited (8 months ago)
in reply to Janeishly

glitchsoc - Link to source

hartreefox

I had a 300 baud cartridge modem for my C-64 that I dialed up the local university to get on Usenet. Upgraded to a 2400 and I was stylin'.

At least until nearby lightning strikes killed 2 of them within a few months. Those particular 2400s were seriously fragile.
I was working part time at a small company that made (among other stuff) telephone equipment. I hooked up a couple of inductors and a spark gap we used for protecting a DID (Direct Inward Dialing) system we made, and things went swimmingly after that.

This entry was edited (8 months ago)
in reply to Serge from Babka

mastodon - Link to source

Benjamin Pollack

@serge I initially had a harsher response to this, then I went through your feed, and I'll instead simply say this:

I get where you're coming from, but your post was extremely off-topic, and I think is more likely to cost than gain you allies. You can agree or not agree with how Mastodon has a disproportionate number of grizzled tech veterans, but I don't think that's the right context to bring Zionism into the chat. And if you were actually around in 2017? Honestly, I'd *take* 2017 Twitter or Facebook over 2025 *anything*. So I'm not even entirely sure what your point was

@Serge from Babka
in reply to Benjamin Pollack

glitchsoc - Link to source

Serge from Babka

@bmp

I'm pointing out that there's a high degree of antisemitism on the Fediverse.

I didn't bring up Zionism. I talked about antisemitism, and I can assure you that there's plenty of antisemitism thrown at Jews who have either never expressed an opinion on Zionism, or who have expressed anti-Zionist views.

I was on Twitter in ~2008/2009, so yeah I was on twitter in 2017.

My point was that antisemitism and harassment of Jews was widespread then,. and that's about the level that the Fediverse is now.

@Benjamin Pollack
This entry was edited (8 months ago)
in reply to Janeishly

mastodon - Link to source

tor_haxson

Pieces of the good internet often die when the content creator dies.

After seeing some really useful content disappear, I have taken to backing up locally content from people who have passed away, knowing that sooner or later, their domain registry will expire.

If your local fern fanatic, bird freak, fossil guy, trout guy/girl, erythronium expert, passes away, archive their website, now..

in reply to Janeishly

mastodon - Link to source

GRASSY KNOWLES

LOL! i sure do remember. but this brought to mind one day in 1986 getting ready to fly in Eliot Lake reading the WX feeds of the teletype and this TTY was going like never seen before.

it was spitting out radiation monitor alerts as this airport was near a uranium mine. i asked the FSS specialist if there was an exercise on and he said no but he wanted to look at the feeds. His face suddenly went ashen.

i asked if something was wrong. … 1/…

This entry was edited (8 months ago)
in reply to GRASSY KNOWLES

mastodon - Link to source

GRASSY KNOWLES

2/…

He paused and composed himself and handed me the pink form to put my flight note on . I was ok to fly here. He said "here is fine. but its the soviets. something happened there and it must be terrible."

That clattering teleletype and the curled up manilla paper pile took on a new meaning that day. I could only imagine the unknown horrors facing those who were sending the alerts.

Did the senders live long enough to know we read their messages ?

sad for Chernobyl

This entry was edited (8 months ago)
in reply to Janeishly

mastodon - Link to source

Kancept

everyone talking about acoustic couplers, which I've used, but back when I started at home, we saved things on tape! I still remember getting a clock chip so we didn't have to set the date and time later as well. Kids these days have it so good.

Now, outside of the home, I remember punch cards, flipping switches to program things and huge reel to reels and later the 8" floppy.

Unknown parent

mastodon - Link to source

Dave 🇺🇦 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿

@patterfloof
Funny you should say that.
My first stage of programming (at school, age about 15) involved writing the code (BASIC) on coding sheets and posting them to a computer centre. The code got typed onto punch cards and executed.
After about a week round trip the results and the card deck came back. We could make modifications to single cards by writing the changes on the back. Adding new code meant more coding forms. And then back into the post.
@patter
in reply to Martijn Faassen has moved

mastodon - Link to source

Martijn Faassen has moved

@supernov
I read your post about MUD after.

One week onto the Internet without knowing what it was, I was on a mud for the second time and I met a woman from Singapore. She even visited me irl once.

Almost a decade later I met another woman from Singapore in a mud I ran. She had met my friend irl for lunch. So we had a mutual friend who could attest we weren't catfish.

Flash forward about 25 years my wife is that second SG woman, sitting on the couch across from me.

@supernov
Unknown parent

mastodon - Link to source

Janeishly

@Amon_RA I've gone through the profiles of everyone who commented on that post, and I don't think there was a single person who wasn't ranting about politics and the impact on people and communities (and not just recent US politics, either). We remember the online world when it was a very different place, and never wanted it to be like this. And as far as I can see, we don't want the real world to be like this either.
in reply to Janeishly

mastodon - Link to source

FediThing

Those of us younger than e.g. BBS owners are benefiting from hearing this knowledge passed on, and hopefully we are passing stuff on too to the generation after us.

It's been really interesting hearing how so much on the Fedi now is similar to what happened in the early 80s with the first home computer dialups etc.

This is stuff that isn't really taught anywhere, it seems. It's weird technofolk knowledge.

in reply to Janeishly

mastodon - Link to source

Graham Downs

56K modems?!

Dude, that's not old. My first modem was a 9.6k. And then I upgraded to a 14.4k.

And I personally know people who started on 300bps. (And in between there was 2.4k).

56k was the pinnacle of connection speeds for a long time. When I started my first job in 1998, the company had a dedicated 64k line. Which was something regular people could only dream about having at home.😝

@uastronomer

@Allen but one of the good ones
in reply to Graham Downs

mastodon - Link to source

Levka

@GrahamDowns @uastronomer

Meanwhile, back in the past . . .

phys.org/news/2009-09-carrier-…

Carrier Pigeon Faster Than Broadband Internet

(PhysOrg.com) -- In South Africa, a carrier pigeon carrying a 4GB memory stick proved to be faster than the ADSL service from the country's biggest web firm, Telkom.
Lisa Zyga (Phys.org)
@Graham Downs @Allen but one of the good ones
in reply to Paul Turnbull 🇨🇦

mastodon - Link to source

Janeishly

@Chigaze Haha, it's amazing how many people have replied to this thread with that comment (and often with the same Python reference). It's my bad for having gone straight from a VAX system at university where I have no idea how it connected to a 56k modem (with the intervening decade being offline!) If I'd realised this would turn out to be such a popular comment (my most shared/liked ever, on any platform, by miles) I'd have researched it a bit more carefully 🤣
@Paul Turnbull 🇨🇦
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