Life online before Internet

ARPANET, the government packet network and forerunner of Internet, ceased to exist in 1990. Soon afterwards Internet became available to the public and spread rapidly worldwide.

It's hard to believe that almost 20 years have passed since Internet became available. There are folks out there who have never known anything except Internet. What was life like online before it existed?

I remember well in the '80s when we lived in the DC area when personal computers first became available that the best thing one could dial into was commercial online services like CompuServe, GEnie, Prodigy, Delphi and America Online (AOL). In '91 when I replaced my old Apple computer with an IBM compatible 20386 computer I bought a 2400 bps Intel modem and subscribed to Prodigy. It was text-based because in those days graphics took too long to download at such low bit speeds. Besides news, sports and financial information, what I loved most were the chat forums where one could get help on just about any topic. It was at a time when we were trying to sell our house without an agent so Prodigy turned out to be a great help.

But there were also free Bulletin Board Systems (BBSes) that anyone could dial into. In the DC area there were over 600 to choose from. They were run mostly by amateurs as a hobby in their home using one or two phone lines. One of my favorite past-times was trading shareware with BBSes because in those days few people purchased commercial software and many of us created our own.

When we moved to River Bend in the early '90s it was a big disappointment that Prodigy was not available here as a local phone call, nor was any other online service. The closest service was in Greenville which would have been a toll call and intrastate calls then were very expensive. That left only a dozen or so local bulletin boards, the most popular of which was Donnie Benners' BBS in New Bern. It was here that I began chatting with all the local computer types. Most of us used what was called Blue Wave Reader software that allowed us to download all the chat text so it could be read and responded to offline instead of hogging the phone line. It was great fun using Donnie's board and I met lots of friendly folks. Someone suggested we meet at the Berne Restaurant for breakfast one Saturday morning and thus began what is now the New Bern Computer Users Group (NBCUG) with over 300 members.

In December '94 at a NBCUG breakfast meeting at the Berne Restaurant, a company called CoastalNet presented a demo of their access service to the Internet. This was the first company to offer Internet service in the New Bern area. Immediately, everybody migrated from bulletin boards to the Internet and the rest is history. More Internet Service Providers (ISPs) showed up and the BBSes faded away. Nothing could compete with the World Wide Web and e-mail on Internet. What great fun!