Ah, sweet memories

I loved this:

A Net guru friend told me about Lynx. "All you have to do," he said, "is type the word 'lynx' at your Unix prompt, and presto! You're into the Web." That weekend I spent about eight hours a day exploring. I quickly found out that you could access all your favorite telnet, FTP, and Gopher sites from the Web, as well as tons of resources you would never find anywhere else on the Net. My cyberlife had changed forever.

"Favorite telnet, FTP, and especially Gopher sites" is incomprehensible to 97.8% of Web users now. I feel old. :(

Am I really that old?? I'm only 32 and haven't even thought of Telnet in years, even though my first 2-3 years on the net was spent using it exclusively.

I think Telnet is my generation's version of "You children have it so easy! Back in my day......... "

I also liked how prominently Usenet is mentioned.

Most netizens today have never even heard of Usenet.

-Rob

I'm struck that "the more things change, the more they stay the same". Yeah, Gopher seems gone, and FTP has largely been absorbed into the WWW. But Usenet is still around, so standardized that it lost its trademark and became generic "newsgroups". (And Google indexes it!) And if telnet is mostly irrelevant, so are line settings and shell accounts (to all but a few UNIX diehards).

Spam and security are still raging problems, and usage continues to expand to fill bandwidth, "Newbies" are still clueless, sometimes in public. Even so, E-mail is going strong, with less sophisticated users tossing around megabyte-sized passalongs. (Hi, Mom!) For someone who started before the grand merger of E-mail addressing schemes, the fact that my (late) grandnmother could send me E-mail was pretty impressive.