[Benj’s note — I originally wrote this in 2020 and had it sitting around until now. I still think it might be useful to someone in the future, so I decided to publish it.]

Many Americans alive today witnessed one of the most dramatic cultural transitions since the invention of the printing press: The rise of the consumer Internet, beginning around 1994. For everyone else, life before the Internet may seem like a distant, foggy past. To help future generations understand what happened, here’s what life was like back then, mostly based on my personal recollections as someone born in 1981.

The Internet first made its way to the world as the ARPAnet (1969), a computer network that linked universities and government institutions. The network grew quickly in size and capability, and soon, it opened up to private companies and individuals. Not long after becoming publicly known as the Internet, this global network first made a big splash in the mainstream American press. Around 1995, commercial ISPs began springing up overnight, and soon America was rushing to get connected.

As a result of easy and inexpensive Internet access in homes and businesses (and now in our pockets), many aspects of our society have changed, and I’m going to go over some of them below.

This is a broad generalization

Everything you’re about to read is a generalization. Individual experiences before the Internet differed greatly depending on your location, age, and socioeconomic status.

In fact, experiences varied year-by-year as culture and technology shifted. And obviously, life before the Internet spans back into prehistory. So to simplify things, I’ll be talking about life from the point of view of a middle-class American family in the years before the Internet hit it big—roughly the 1970s to the early 1990s.

I was born in 1981 in Raleigh, North Carolina, USA, and raised there in what might be described as an upper-middle-class white suburban family with a technologically literate father (who was an electronics engineer) and access to varied computer platforms and telecommunications from an early age.

I still think this summary of differences might be useful to people in the future since it is coming from the perspective of a veteran tech historian who has spent nearly two decades writing about these topics.

So first, a very big disclaimer: Your Memories Will Vary.

[ Continue reading My memories of what life was like before the Internet » ]

As I mentioned back in April, I joined up with How-To Geek in February, and I’ve been regularly writing tech history-related features in addition to my usual how-to pieces.

Since that first post, I’ve written many more pieces that may be of interest to VC&G readers. Here’s a list:

• Why I Still Use a 34-Year-Old IBM Model M Keyboard
• How to Read a Floppy Disk on a Modern PC or Mac
• Why Did Dial-Up Modems Make So Much Noise?
• 40 Years Later, ‘Pac-Man’ Is Still Capturing Our Hearts
• Windows 3.0 Is 30 Years Old: Here’s What Made It Special
• Why Notepad Is Still Awesome for Taking Notes
• How the Gravis PC GamePad Transformed PC Gaming in the ’90s
• Remembering Windows 2000, Microsoft’s Forgotten Masterpiece
• Deja Vu: A Brief History of Every Mac CPU Architecture
• Why Did the Turbo Button Slow Down Your PC in the ’90s?
• The Web Before the Web: A Look Back at Gopher
• Virtually Forgotten: Nintendo’s Virtual Boy, 25 Years Later
• The CDs You Burned Are Going Bad: Here’s What You Need to Do

Some of my favorites include the Turbo Button piece, in which I discovered the first PC to ever use a turbo button, the Noisy Modem piece, in which I identified the man who invented the onboard modem speaker, and my look at Gopher, wherein I talked to the lead creator of the Gopher protocol. My ode to Windows 2000 is fun too. But heck, they’re all fun reads.

Hope you enjoy reading them! Keep an eye on my How-To Geek author page for more in the future.

The only time I have ever read the term “MUSH” in print.

You are looking at a scan of the actual newspaper ad that got me on the Internet with a commercial ISP for the first time. (Prior to that, I got online through a free dial-up university dataswitch.) It’s an ad for NandO.net, a 1990s-era Raleigh, NC-based ISP originally owned and operated by our flagship newspaper, The News and Observer.

As you can see by the handwritten notes on the ad, my dad used this actual piece of paper to sign us up for an account on the service (I modified the credit card number digitally, in case anyone is wondering). I found this rare artifact in my old computer papers recently while researching my early web history for a FastCompany piece I wrote last year. In that article, I explored what it was like to build a website in 1995. Here’s what I wrote about NandO:

As the Internet became more than just a way to access MUDs or look up the occasional novelty on text-based Gophers or web browsers, both of us sought a more robust way of accessing it. One of the first ISPs in our city was called NandO.net. Our local newspaper, the News and Observer, ran it as an extension of its efforts to pioneer online newsmaking processes.

On some day in late 1994, my father signed my family up for NandO.net. What we got in exchange for about $20 a month was an account on an Internet-enabled BBS, which had its own local message board and games, but would allow us to use text-only Internet email, web browsing, FTP, and Gopher. My dad paid extra for a “shell account” so I could log in and get a Unix command prompt. From there I could upload and download files from a terminal program, telnet to other servers, and push stuff from my shell account to remote machines via FTP.

What heady days those were. Incredible to think that I was just dipping my toes into what would eventually become a life-changing deluge — not just for me, but for all of humanity itself.

Discussion Topic of the Week: What was the name of your first ISP? What year did you first use it?

Ten years ago today, I opened an experimental music website called Request-A-Song.com. On the site, my brother Jeremy and I solicited song titles (just titles, not lyrics), which site visitors would submit via a web form. We’d pick the ones we found most inspiring and write songs based on them, then publish them on the site in MP3 format. The project lasted until December 2005.

As you might expect, a lot of very interesting and unusual songs came out of the process. You can tell just by reading the titles of our most popular songs — names like “Butter Ghost,” “Violent House Panda,” “Poke ‘Em In The Neck,” and “I Flipped My Biscuit” — that we preferred ideas on the bizarre end of the spectrum.

In honor of our 10th anniversary, I’ve uploaded all 134 of our songs to The Internet Archive with the hope that it will preserve our effort for posterity.

You can still download those songs from the original Request-A-Song.com website (which also provides information on who requested what and when, lyrics, and dates of release), but it’s actually easier to explore our catalog with the IA’s handy online streaming MP3 app.

(If you want to know which songs to listen to first, here is a list of our 25 most popular songs.)

Over the next month, I plan on uploading more RAS information to the Internet Archive, including news archives, press clippings, song metadata, images, and more.

[ Continue reading Experimental Music Site Request-A-Song.com Turns 10 » ]

I don’t know if anybody out there knows this, but some years ago, I created a music site called Request-A-Song.com (RAS). My brother Jeremy and I wrote original songs based on visitor suggestions, recorded them, and put them up on the site in MP3 format. We usually treated serious requests humorously, and humorous requests seriously, which thoroughly confused everybody (Hence RAS’s amazing success, and why you’ve no doubt heard of it many times). Sadly, our heyday was before the Digg, YouTube, MySpace, and ubiquitous blog explosion, which would have undoubtedly helped us promote our music and unique concept.

I’m only mentioning this now because it deals with something at least slightly on-topic for VC&G — computer history. Mike (aka Dr. Macenstein), over at the Macenstein blog, recently put together a video for my tongue-in-cheek song, “Ellen Feiss Makes Me Hot,” which I released back in 2003 (yes, almost five years ago). It’s about the famous Mac switcher who appeared in an Apple advertisement around the time. Essentially, people thought the commercial was funny because Ms. Feiss looked like she was stoned while filming.

(By the way, I should probably note that I had no idea Ellen Feiss was 15 when I recorded the song. It’s also written from the point of view of a fictional admirer. I was looking to hitch the song onto a popular meme about Feiss on the Internet at the time.)

[ Continue reading Ellen Feiss Music Video – An Ode to the Mac Switcher » ]