Re:I'm old... (Score 1)

I first got "net access" in 1989 when I got a university account as a undergrad CS student. I don't think I even really knew about the Internet until 1990 or so. Of course back then, not many people had PC's (at least not many students), so the only real access to computers was in the campus computer labs on terminals connected to a VAX. Email was used for class assignments, though, but I didn't know I could email somebody across the world. I "discovered" the Internet quite by accident, playing around with the rn program and started reading USENET. But the Internet back then was still pretty cool, I thought. I was possible to actually connect to computers all over the world. Archie was kind of like a search engine, and ftp was used to grab stuff pretty much. Newsgroups were actually relevant with a much higher S/N ratio. I think I first heard about "hypertext" in 1991 or so, and WWW around 1992. I took a computer networks class around then, and http was just another protocol mentioned, like ftp, wais, or gopher, nothing really special about it at the time. I have a copy of UNIX System Administration Handbook, second edition published in 1995, and the world wide web is barely a footnote towards the end of the chapter on the Internet. No mention of spam either on the chapter on electronic email. Yeah, just another geek approaching middle age now, I guess.