The distant echo of faraway voices

[venta]

When writing last week's BAYD post, I did what I always do: put up an mp3 (of Try This At Home) for download. Later on, when I wanted to refer in passing to Reasons Not To Be An Idiot, I just linked to YouTube.

And then I thought: why do I do that? Why don't I just link to YouTube for my BAYD posts? Unless it's something really quite obscure, it'll be there. Do people care that much about downloading an mp3?

And then I thought: er... good question. The answer surprised me. I first started BAYD as a regular thing at the beginning 2005. At that point, YouTube didn't exist.

The domain name wasn't registered until February 2005 (the first video was uploaded by one of the founders in April, it went into public beta in May and was officially launched in November).

I went to university in 1994; I remember in one of the interminable induction sessions someone asked if the college computer services included "e-mail". At the time, I didn't know what it was. But I had an email account by the end of the term.

My college's computers were text-only dumb terminals; my first experiences of the web were through Lynx. Recently, clearing out bags of old university paperwork I found a tiny scrap of paper. On it, in my friend Andrew's overly-neat, school-book writing, it said:

http://lycos.cs.cmu.edu

... he'd written it down for me, and explained the concept of a search engine, and suddenly I could find stuff. Admittedly, the stuff I could find was not always related to what I searched for, and was frequently porn, but stuff none the less.

The web of the mid-90s was an odd place, and achieving anything at all often felt like a miracle. But finding things was so exciting... finding other people with the same interests (there was, like, a whole mailing list of other people, all over the world, who liked New Model Army!) Finding odd, fascinating pages written by who-knew-who, finding MUDs and - even then - lost archives of long-dead conversations.

But by 2005? The world was a different place then. The internet was no longer a mysterious kingdom, but a well-mapped, mainstream area. We had Google[*], and FireFox, and Wikipedia... pretty much like it is now, right? Only without the annoying Flash and AJAX?

It really surprised me to find out that YouTube just wasn't an option. I link to it so frequently, without thinking, that it now seems faintly unimaginable that it arrived so late in the day.

By contrast, I'm surprised to find that Facebook was already around in 2005 (though I'm quite sure it hadn't impinged on my consciousness). I still think of Facebook and Twitter as the johnny-come-latelies of the web. Mind you, I also think of them as almost entirely dispensable :)

The BBC news site had a fascinating graph the other day, showing use of its services over time (with the x-axis marked with 'notable' events). They reckon UK internet use hit 30m in 2002 - so by 2005, well over half the country was online.

If I'd gone to university four years earlier, I might have graduated and moved on without really encountering the internet until it became un-ignorable. Four years later, and I'd have missed the party and perhaps never really known a Google-free online world.

[*] The day I first encountered Google (courtesy of bateleur) was a revelation. It just, like, found stuff. That was relevant. Quickly.

Comments

[venta.livejournal.com]

and used to get random other undergrads trying to talk to me in the middle of the night just because I was online and female

Yup... I changed my name on my Sable profile, but of course having a username at the only all-female college was a dead giveaway :)

Our college computer room just had 4 or 5 of the kermitty terminals. And that was it. I obviously had insufficiently geeky friends because (unlike uitlander's experiences above), it was usually more efficient to go and physically find someone than it was to email them.

[lanfykins.livejournal.com]

I remember those heady days of being wadh0189. And my friends were fairly geeky, seeing as what they were people like zandev (AKA corp0008) and bateleur :)

Ah, those heady days spent on talkers and BBses, and learning to do cunning things with simple scripts...

...and, given what college I was at, emerging blinking from the computer room into the light of day to find myself inside the security cordon around Nelson Mandela's dinner engagement...

If I wanted to do anything productive with computers, though, I hit the psychology department. They had a network of high-spec macs :)

[uitlander]

but of course having a username at the only all-female college was a dead giveaway :)

I found being logged in from an all female college was moe than enough enough. Most CompScis had scripts running 'fingering' any logins from one of our terminals. One of my current colleagues has confided that my predecessor had to take him to one side and explain patiently that messaging people with things like 'I see you're sitting in the basement computer room all alone at 3am, would you like some company' was an inadvisable way to approach girls.

My undergrad geeky chum and I used to compare notes and harry those that approached us in that way. It never seemed to dawn on many of the boys that two people sitting next to each other in the same room, logged onto the same system, might actually compare notes on who was saying what to them online.

[lnr]

I have fond memories of late night 4-way ytalk sessions with Ian and I sharing the one Hertford terminal, while Chris was in Trinity and over in Cambridge there was David at (t'other) Trinity and Mobbsy at Trinity Hall. Or going to sit in OUCS in person at an actual VT100 terminal so we could have one each :)

I think having online non-local friends made email more useful - though pigeonholes or leaving notes on the boards outside people's doors were often still better for locals. I still miss my hert0145 username :)

I never did get a net connection in my room.