The everyday consumer did not have access to the Internet until the 90's when it was commercialized. True, it "existed" before that, it was primarily education / academia and defense-related orgs that had access.
BBSes were primarily text based... early Internet providers opened up access to Usenet newsgroups, email, IRC, etc. which made traditional BBSes look like a toy in comparison. The web put the nail in the coffin, but they were already on their way out before then.
> The everyday consumer did not have access to the Internet until the 90's
I remember a day in the very early 90s when another node in our UUCP email system told the rest of us that he'd heard that there were now a million computers on the Net. We were gobsmacked. A whole million!
Now an extra million or two computers is mere noise-levels.
My biggest surprise was how quickly everything happened.
One day you were considered a massive nerd for having your own computer, spending a lot of time on it, playing games on it, and socializing with others on it.
Seemingly the next day everyone was online and had their own email addresses. I remember being amazed the first time I saw website advertised on the side of a bus. It seemed like the world had massively changed overnight.
Now so many people have lived their entire lives with the net all around them and only hearsay about what it was like before.
>Now so many people have lived their entire lives with the net all around them and only hearsay about what it was like before.
It's become so ubiquitous that the nerds have started complaining about how the tourists have ruined it.
Which is understandable on the one hand, and regrettable on the other, because unlike physical real estate, the internet can be a potentially boundless space and there's room in it for everyone.
"unlike physical real estate, the internet can be a potentially boundless space and there's room in it for everyone"
There is room for everyone, but what kind of place is it? The observation is that it's no longer what it was, and that something special was lost.
I wouldn't place the blame on the "tourists". First, there are no toursits. Everyone is here to stay. Second, the nerds played a huge role, using their skills and knowledge to make the internet what it is today. Corporations and governments also rushed in to claim their stake, try to take ownership and control -- often quite successfully.
The Gold Rush transformed California, and so did the Internet Rush, if it could be called that, transform the Internet itself. I'm not sure how it could have remained as it was, like in a museum. The use of new technologies alone would have changed it.
The first year I was able to access the Internet was 1989. Before that it was BBS only. But one BBS I accessed was connected to a university network and provided access to Usenet newsgroups that way.
Not really, but it probably comes down to how you define terms. If you are considering ARPANET to be "the internet" then you are correct. However, one can argue that ARPANET was just a single isolated network and not really "the internet" until multiple networks were joined via a common protocol. This started happening in 1973[0], the same year the first protobbs, Community Memory[1] came online.
Many would consider the deployment of TCP/IP as the birth of the internet. These protocols were not standardized until 1982[0]. This was well after the first true BBS in 1978[2].
Not on DOS machines, which were by far the most popular machine in that era. There was no tcp/ip because there was no kernel. I imagine the protocols that modems used were much easier to implement in each application than tcp/ip.
Even windows 3.1 had no socket support. Anyone remember WinSock?
By 1992 there were packet drivers for most ethernet cards as well as a PPP driver. With the Waterloo TCP stack you got telnet, ftp, smtp, whois, ping, and finger. Looking at my old DOS collection I see NNTP, POP2, Gopher, Archie, and IRC as well.
BBSes were primarily text based... early Internet providers opened up access to Usenet newsgroups, email, IRC, etc. which made traditional BBSes look like a toy in comparison. The web put the nail in the coffin, but they were already on their way out before then.