Today’s writing prompt asks what the most important invention in your lifetime is. While it’s an easy question to answer – the internet – it only really makes sense if we go back and look at the story of how computers were used before the internet became widespread.
Thankfully, several years ago I took part in NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month), and wrote a huge chunk of an autobiography – with several chapters covering the arrival of computers and the internet in my life.
Here’s a taster:
486
One day, late in the autumn of 1989, my Dad floated the idea with me of selling the Atari ST, and buying a PC to replace it. We hadn’t been using the Atari for it’s original purpose – music production – for years, and it was obvious from the various magazines we occasionally bought where the future was headed. The Atari ST, and it’s long-time rival, the Commodore Amiga, were fast becoming obsolete.
The weeks that followed saw us purchase magazine after magazine – learning an entirely new lexicon of words. EGA, VGA, Ethernet, PCMCIA, and so on. We learned the difference between the 386 and 486 processors, and what a 486DX had that a 486SX did not. We didn’t know what difference it would make to us personally, but we could probably bore somebody really well if they asked us.
I even returned to my old lecturer at college, finding him in his office. I had never visited his office before, and caught him half-way through eating a cheese sandwich. He scooted his chair to one side, and invited me to sit down. I layed a copy of Personal Computer World on his desk, open at a vast list of specifications for computers available from one of the major manufacturers. Over the course of the next half an hour he explained what a maths co-processor actually does, what difference cache memory makes, and why having 4 megabytes of RAM was a pretty good idea – all the while shaking his head that computers were now being sold with that much memory on-board.
Before saying goodbye, he rose out of his chair, smiled, and said “follow me – I want to show you something”.
We wandered back to the computer science classroom where I had spent so many hours over the last two years, but instead of heading to the classroom area, opened a door, and walked into the small server room next door. Among a mass of cables on one of the desks sat a new beige PC case, with a monitor, keyboard, and mouse attached. He wiggled the mouse, and the screen burst into life – showing a patterned background, and a prettier version of the interface we had known on the Atari ST.
It was Windows 3.0.
Sure, I had read about Microsoft Windows, and everybody knew it was coming – but actually seeing it running on a computer was a bit of a moment. After a few clicks of the mouse, “Word for Windows” opened, and he began typing letters in a smooth, serif font. I was blown away.
“That’s not the best bit – watch this.”
He leaned across the desk and retrieved a strange t-shaped device with light pouring from it’s under-side, and a cable hanging from it’s rear. After a quick look around the desk, he grabbed a coke can, and dragged the device around it’s edge. The outside of the coke can slowly appeared on the screen – it was a hand-held scanner. Again, I had read about them, but never seen one – and again, I was blown away.
“Good luck with buying your PC”, he said, as we parted ways. I must have had a smile like a coat-hanger.
The next weekend I went with my Dad to Evesham – to visit the very same computer store we had visited years before to buy the Atari ST. By now Evesham Micros had evolved into a well known maker of PCs with huge full colour adverts in all the well known computer magazines. They had also moved premises – to an industrial unit outside the town. I remember walking into their showroom, and seeing a number of huge computers, quietly humming at desks for people to look at.
When I say “huge”, I really do mean “huge”. The “tower” computer cases you tend to see tucked under desks in offices are only really “half-tower” cases – back in 1989 the first 486DX 50s were typically sold in full-tower cases – they would only just fit underneath a standard height desk. I imagine the room inside was designed to accommodate multiple hard drives, multiple floppy drives, and multiple optical drives – CDROMs had arrived too.
We waited in reception while the computer we ordered – that had been built for us – was brought through from the store room. It was one notch down from the fastest computer available at the time – a 486DX 33. The 33 reflected it’s internal clock speed in megahertz – the rate at which it could get stuff done. To give some perspective, within five years the first Pentium chips had hit 1 Gigahertz – thirty times faster.
The computer we bought cost an eye watering £3000. The same price as a low-end family car at the time. It was a non-descript beige box, with a couple of slots on the front, and came with a monitor, keyboard, and mouse. While looking around the showroom in the shop, I spent the little money I had on a copy of the video game “The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy”, and a copy of “Flight Simulator 4” – the direct successor to the same game I had spent so many hours playing on the Atari ST.
When we got home, I had a considerable mountain to climb in terms of knowledge. Unlike todays PCs that come pre-installed and pre-configured, in the early days they did not. To run Windows 3.1, you needed to already be have DOS installed, and if you wanted to play games, a world of hurt lay ahead of you.
You might say I was the right kind of person, in the right place, at the right time. The software that came with the computer – MS-DOS 5, and Windows 3.1 – came with sizable books. The DOS book ran to hundreds of pages, and looked quite impressive on the shelf. I read both of them, and over the course of perhaps a week or two, learned all about hard drives, partitioning, memory management, drivers, interrupts, address space, and lots of other things. In order to play games, I learned about expanded memory, extended memory, high memory, and the various tricks required to use them efficiently. When you switch on a Windows PC or Mac these days, you have no idea how much has been done for you by the operating system – it wasn’t always that way.
For several years I became a version of my old school friend. I was the guy that could turn up at somebody’s house and solve their computer woes. I could get games to work. People would sit in awe as I wrote configuration files for their computers by hand. When they asked where on earth I had learned how to do it all, I always replied with the same answer – I read the books that came with the computer. They were actually REALLY good books.
Once upon a time, Microsoft Press were famous for the quality of their books. I remember seeing the set of printed books for the Windows Software Development Kit for sale at the Computer Shopper show that year – our second visit. The stack of books was two feet long, and could be bought in shrink-wrapped bulk. It was a bit like buying a set of encyclopedias.
Our computer came with a free copy of “Microsoft Bookshelf” – a compact disk that ran within Windows 3.1. It contained an encyclopedia, a dictionary, a thesaurus, and a book of quotes. It seemed magic – being able to search for pretty much any subject, and find articles to read, pictures to peruse, and sound clips to listen to at a moment’s notice. Some entries – such as the Apollo project – let you listen to speeches, and watch video clips of the event. This was quite a time before the internet became widely used, remember. The World Wide Web was still an idea Tim Berners Lee was toying with, and connecting computers to the internet at all was still perhaps two or three years away.
Each component inside the computer had an impressive sounding name – a “Diamond Stealth” graphics card, a “Soundblaster” sound card, and “American Megatrends” BIOS. It’s perhaps worth remembering that PCs started out very much as kits of components – not sealed units bought and sold as consumable items. A PC would be bought with the intention of upgrading it over time – replacing elements of it’s innards to tailor it for specific tasks – or just to make it go faster.
Although I could never warrant the cost of office software for the PC in those early days, I didn’t have to. One or other of the magazines available in the high street newsagents had CDs on the cover, which invariably had free copies of Microsoft Office competitors on the cover. For years I used “Lotus Smartsuite”, purely because it was free. I also reasoned with myself that it was somehow better than Microsoft Office – and back then it probably was. As has always been the way, Microsoft slowly but surely improved their own software and swept all before them. When was the last time you saw a copy of Lotus Smartsuite, or Wordperfect Office in the wild?
The funny thing? Lotus Smartsuite really was better than Microsoft Office back in the early 1990s. And Borland Delphi was so much better than Microsoft Visual Basic that it wasn’t funny. Neither Borland, or Lotus exist any more.
The 486 served the family (ok, me) for about five years. It was upgraded over time – doubling it’s memory, and DOS 5 became DOS 6 – but really, it was kind of stunning that it did so well. Looking back, I suppose there was a subtle shift in the early 1990s – away from what your computer could do, towards what other computers could do.
The internet had arrived.
The Internet
When I say that the internet had “arrived”, that’s obviously not entirely true. The Internet had been in development since the 1960s – first through Arpanet (the Advanced Research Projects Network) used by the US military, and then through the work of Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn at BBN to improve it.
You see – the first version of what we now call “The Internet” was designed rather badly. Each computer had to be wired directly to each other computer on the network. Also, each computer ran different software, and interfaced with other computers in different ways – so to get two computers to talk to each other, you had to develop bespoke software to translate in either direction. Add to that the idiocy of adding more computers to the network, along with wires to all the other computers, and methods of communication between them all, and you can see the problem.
Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn invented “TCP/IP”, and “Packet Switching”. They are still used today, and describe a standard way through which any number of computers wired to the same network can communicate with each other – picking and choosing which information being sent across the network is for them, and sending that information as lots of tiny bits (packets), which can be re-compiled at the destination.
The beauty of packet switching came in the idea that computers in the middle of the spiders-web of interconnected machines could be knocked out, and the network would still work – finding new routes for packets around the problem areas. You can see straight away why this might have been developed – the threat of nuclear war – and you can also see that once you build the network, you can’t really switch it off – because it will survive your attempts.
Except you could. And it happened. By accident.
In the early days of the internet, before the World Wide Web had really taken off, it became obvious that it should be easier to identify computers on the network than by their “address” on the network – a group of integers split by periods (you’ve probably seen these numbers – IP addresses – the internet still works the same way). The idea of “domain names” was thought up – names that represented the numbers – such as “harvard.edu”, or “yahoo.com”. The list of names correlating to addresses obviously needed to be copied to each server – so when a request was made of a given computer system by it’s name, the system would know that a given name meant a given IP address. Rather than have a single computer giving out the addresses, it was thought best that each of the big computer systems on the network should have their own copy, and replicate changes from the master database. The fault in this system? The master database.
The computer at the centre of the domain name system died one day, and over the next few hours the internet stopped working for the millions of people using it around the world. Needless to say it was eventually fixed – but yeah – proves even the geniuses that built the internet were fallible.
Sorry for the history lesson.
So – the internet had been around for a while, in educational institutions, and government facilities, but had not really happened outside of that.
What had happened was a madcap priesthood of crazy people running their own systems via the telephone network. They were called Bulletin Boards – and you needed a modem to access them.
Guess who bought a modem.
I was at PC World with my Dad buying printer ink and paper. PC World had opened a few months earlier, and was something of a novelty – a one-stop-shop where you could buy anything from a box of paper, to a mouse, or even a desktop computer.
In the months previously I had been reading computer magazines, and had seen numerous adverts for an online service called “Compuserve” that promised to connect you with the world. The advert showed a distant house in the middle of nowhere, with one light on, and some blurb about never being alone, no matter how remote you might be. I was sold.
We bought a V32bis modem – the meaning of the code is now lost in the sands of time – I think it means the modem would communicate on the V-Modem protocol with other computers, at a rate of 32,000 bits a second. The various protocols bestowed different error correction, and compression powers on the modem – the likelihood that data would be transmitted correctly.
The modem sat between the computer, and the telephone line in your house, using a splitter cable. While you were connected to the internet, you were essentially making a call to the “Internet Service Provider”, who would then connect you to the internet. These days the modem in your house essentially acts as both the modem, AND the gateway – back then, the ISP was the gateway. Well – except if you connected to a Bulletin Board system.
Bulletin Board systems were perhaps the earliest form of internet community for the masses – you could connect to a server, and browse conversations on any number of subjects, and pitch into them yourselves. While some bulletin boards were self contained, others acted as a bridge between you, and a far bigger community message board system called Usenet. We now know usenet as “newsgroups” – I’m not really sure why.
I fell in love with usenet immediately. I had read no end of conspiracy theory books during my teenage years, and knew that all the best information (or misinformation, it turns out) was being published to usenet – to groups such as alt.ufo. After watching endless episodes of The X-Files, and forming an unexplainable attraction to Gillian Anderson, I discovered hoards of people were using Usenet to share anything they thought they knew, and even found ways of transferring photos through plain text. It was called UUEncoding, and proved that porn will ALWAYS find a way.
The one problem with bulletin board systems is that you had to be connected to them in order to read, write, and reply to messages. Sure, there were fancy software applications called “Off Line Readers” that made that process more efficient, but it was still a largely disconnected, overtly technical, and user unfriendly world.
The general public would never have taken to the online world in the numbers they did without the help of two companies – Compuserve, and America Online. They each created their own bulletin board system, but polished it to within an inch of it’s life, and dumbed everything down. The systems aped bulletin boards, and introduced private messaging (email with the wider internet was still not a thing – if you were connected to Compuserve, you could only message fellow users of Compuserve, for example).
I had accounts at both Compuserve, and America Online over the next year or so. As has often happened through history, the massively inferior product won out – America Online, or AOL as it came to be known flooded the world with CDs containing the software installer for their system. Every magazine had an AOL CD on the cover, and they were even sent through the post. Millions upon millions of them.
If you look around in gardens you still see AOL CDs from time to time – made into bird scarers, hanging from pieces of string.
I miss Compuserve. I still remember my ID number (you had an ID number – not a username) – mine was 100333,3457. I’ve often wondered if there was a structure to the user ID numbers – if the various parts of the number meant anything at all. Of all of the various interest groups and clubs available at Compuserve, the Writers Forum still stands out in my memory. I made my first real online friendships with strangers there, and took part in numerous writing exercises.
The Compuserve advert was actually true – no matter who you were, or where you were, you could connect and find your tribe.
I can remember the day a new icon appeared in both the Compuserve, and AOL interfaces. It looked like a picture of a globe, and launched a second piece of software called “NCSA Mosaic”. Mosaic opened to a blank screen, with a text box above, that you could enter an “addresses” into.
It was 1993, and it was the World Wide Web.
A guy called Tim Berners Lee at the CERN project in Switzerland had become frustrated that even though the various computer systems were connected to each other through the “internet”, there was still no easy way of publishing notes and research for others to see – so he set about inventing it.
It’s easy to say now that the world wide web changed everything – but when it first appeared it was slow, buggy, and the software tended to crash a lot. Magazines wrote at length about it’s importance, and it’s growing popularity – emphasising its open, decentralised nature. Where Compuserve forums could only be visited by Compuserve members, and AOL forums could only be visited by AOL members, the World Wide Web could be used by everybody.
It came as no surprise, decades later, when Tim Berners Lee appeared at the opening of the London Olympic Games, that he sat in the middle of the Olympic stadium and keyed into a NeXT workstation “This is for everybody”.