Five at 8 - 9/23/09: Your first Internet moments

Posted at 6:55 AM on October 23, 2009 by Bob Collins (8 Comments)

1) Happy birthday to the Internet, whose "original stirrings" were 40 years ago today. The Guardian has a terrific interactive "people's history of the Internet" to celebrate its entry into middle age. What was your first foray onto the 'net. Mine was sending an e-mail from CompuServe and listening to a colleague rave about the speed of his 1200 baud modem. What's your earliest experience?

2) The New York Times' continuing series "1 in 8 million" today profiles Richard Valvo, who's spent his life putting other people's words in his mouth. He's a "spokesman." Everybody's life is interesting and is a story worth telling. Don't believe me? Contact me.

3) Why? Because it's Nikki Tundel, that's why.



4) These two stories aren't related in any way but I can't help but put them together for some reason. In Massachusetts, brotherly love can't compete with the love of money. It's a cautionary tale about mixing family with business. It doesn't work. "With family business, there is no opportunity for a clear exit. In a corporation, the sharp knives come out and you can literally end a relationship in a business like way. It's hard to fire your brother or sever the relationship,'' an expert says.

Meanwhile, out in Spring Hill, they don't much care for fancy suits and the love of money. They only know that when someone needs help, you start running.

5) Neat images of Target field at night as crews test the lights. Ignore the fact that unless some serious money is spent over the winter, the lights will illuminate Nick Punto at the plate in a critical situation.

Follow-up: The La-Z-Boy chair that a Proctor man drove while apparently drunk is now for sale. (h/t: Nate Minor)

Bonus: A tale of two extremes. The Hudson River flight crew vs. the flight crew that couldn't see fit to land in Minneapolis. Jeff Skiles, the co-pilot of the Hudson River, discusses the local incident on WNYC's The Takeaway.

TODAY'S QUESTION

The Obama administration's pay czar has ordered a 90 percent pay cut for executives at seven companies that took public bailouts. Should CEOs who accepted federal bailout money have to take deep pay cuts?

WHAT WE'RE DOING

Midmorning (9-11 a.m.) - First hour: Savvy Traveler Rudy Maxa and Frugal Traveler Matt Gross join forces to give listeners advice on travel destinations that offer great experiences for less money.

Second hour: Rudy Maxa.

Midday (11 a.m. - 1 p.m.) - Both hours: Award-winning children's author Kate DeCamillo and MPR's Cathy Wurzer, from an event at the Fitzgerald Theater.

Talk of the Nation (1 - 3 p.m.) - It's Science Friday! First hour: Talk on hand-washing, from hospitals to highway rest stops.

Second hour: Empathy with primatologist Frans de Waal, natural selection at work in humans,and a possible new explanation for mass extinctions.

All Things Considered (3-6:30 p.m.) - MPR's Tim Post reports on efforts by the Minnesota State Colleges and Universities System and the University of Minnesota to keep students from leaving college.

Euan Kerr, the hardest working man in showbiz, profiles a man who runs a Web site where people send their secrets. He talks about his new collection on "Life Death and God." Have you noticed? It's been a big week for talk about God on MPR this week.

NPR's Ted Robbins has a look at the economic woes in Phoenix, rapidly becoming the Detroit of the southwest.

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Comments (8)

Our family got Prodigy dialup on January 6, 1995. I remember this because the first news headline we saw when we logged on was that Lenny Wilkens had set the NBA record for wins by a coach. Prodigy -- like AOL -- was self-contained, which means that although we were logged on, we weren't on the actual Internet per se.

The fall of 1995, I was in 6th grade, and one day we got an introduction how to use the Internet. I remember logging into Netscape for the first time and being actually thrilled..."Wow, I'm on the Internet."

The 1995 Mac would be astonished how far we've come since then.

Posted by Mac Wilson | October 23, 2009 7:16 AM

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Ah, memories. You remember the big knock on Prodigy was that it had banner ads?

BTW, last week I was cleaning out a booksheld and threw away a huge instruction manual for TAPCI$, which was an automated script for getting on CompuServe, getting your messages and logging off so you could read everything offline. We needed to do that because it was 20 cents a minute to be on CI$.

Posted by Bob Collins | October 23, 2009 7:22 AM

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300 Baud dialing into a bbs server from the middle school library to do research for a school paper on bbs technology.

Because of that paper, I also wrote some of my first code as I experimented with extending bbs code and writing a demon dialer.

Even at 12, I was geek.

Posted by cacharbe | October 23, 2009 8:43 AM

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My dad taught "computer" at an extremely small northwestern Minnesota school back in the early 90's. He got really pumped when the school bought the Internet. For some reason, only one computer had it, and it was on a computer in a dark corner of the library. Or maybe a closet? I sat on his lap as he played online 3-D chess and talked to people from "around the world!" Good times indeed.

Posted by Nathan Matson | October 23, 2009 8:47 AM

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Maybe a precursor to the internet: my computer geek friends with miles of paper tape that they could feed into the noisy teletype machine to connect to the Univac mainframe in Minneapolis. That was more programming than internet, but they could play chess using keystrokes to communicate the moves.

My geekness happened many years later. My first internet was Compuserve using the Commodore 64. That computer was my first upgrade from the Vic 20.

Posted by Fred | October 23, 2009 10:17 AM

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Don't know the date, but one night I got on the internet somehow, this was pre-www and pre-compuserv, I think it was maybe via gopher. Unfortunately, once there, I had no idea what to do, but I remember being excited about it nonetheless.

Posted by Bonnie | October 23, 2009 11:15 AM

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1984 - CompuServe on a C64.

Over the years I had memberships in more "on-line services" then I care to remember. (For the curious some include: CIS, American PeopleLink, Viewtron, Prodigy and I was an AOL Beta tester.)

Compuserve had great forums. In the mid 90's I was doing Lotus Notes development and the Notes Forum was a great resource. Viewtron and the early Prodigy service were of interest to me because a long time ago I did some work with NAPLPS which both of those used. (I still have my official ANSI reference for NAPLPS.)

Posted by JackU | October 23, 2009 1:04 PM

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Trying to hack into, I think it was, gopher net with 300 baud, 1984-5 in 6th grade.

Finding some research papers from some students in another state and printing them out on the DMP we had and thinking I would save them till I was in college.
:)
fun times

Posted by BJ | October 23, 2009 4:39 PM

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