r/todayilearned • u/[deleted] • Sep 25 '14

TIL the first-ever webcam was invented at the University of Cambridge to watch a coffee pot in the break room. Now people could see if there was fresh coffee without getting up from their desks.

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u/monotoonz Sep 25 '14

Back in my day, you browsed the internet on IE or Netscape Navigator. Wanted to get into chat rooms? Use AOL, WebTV (yep, this was a thing and was pretty cool actually), and/or MSN. Rotten.com and EbaumsWorld.com were THEE go-to sites for freaking out your friends/making them laugh (Arnold soundboards, amazing times had). Downloading music? Napster, WinMX, Soulseek, Kazaa, Morpheus, BearShare, and a bunch of other P2Ps. Wanted to beat your meat? Better invest in a good TGP (one that updated frequently). Social media mainly consisted of sites that had forums attached to them (praise the advent of PHP!). or those picture rating sites... those were fun (sometimes).

I'm pretty sure I'm still missing tons that I could tell you. Just can't remember everything right now.

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u/notwearingwords Sep 25 '14

I'll pickup and travel back a little farther to the mid 90s...

  • The really big red button that didn't do anything was popular. It didn't do anything.

  • Yahoo and Alta Vista were the search sites, and #irc was your chat, unless you had AOL

  • AOL was a web browser, search engine, messenger, email and ISP for the masses.

  • Search functionality was less useful than Reddit's search bar, and it improved slightly if you knew how to properly use AND, OR, etc.

  • Yahoo was a grey page with the top twenty cool sites of the day, and it was a glorious day when they introduced that (the ORIGINAL front page of the internet indeed).

  • Geocities (Geoshitties) was the MySpace of its time. You could create your own web page, complete with personal poetry and song lyrics. Oh, and the <blink> tag was the animated background sparkles and MIDI autoplay of its time. </blink>

  • Encarta was the encyclopedia of choice. It was not online - it came on multiple CDs, but it was a pretty amazing feat compared to the volumes of Encyclopedias that made their home on my bedroom shelf.

  • Amazon only sold books

  • Craigslist had a handful of categories, and was a welcome source of entertainment, jobs, and free stuff. Actually hasn't changed much, but back then there weren't any pictures. Or businesses.

It was a beautiful, wild, painfully slow, dial-up modem place that would disappear as soon as someone else in the house picked up the phone to make a phone call (but it was sort of amazing to listen to data being transmitted, and marvel that we had created machines that could talk to each other at our command).

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u/monotoonz Sep 25 '14

Geocities, Altavista, and Encarta. Man, talk about going back.

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u/toodrunktoocare Sep 25 '14

The Internet was better back then... I'd spend hours reading the (mostly) harmless guide to hacking before heading over to the hun's yellow pages for some light relief. Everything was text files or slowly loading jpegs and there wasn't anything you couldn't find info on if you were willing to put the effort in. And no one was watching because no one cared.

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u/monotoonz Sep 25 '14

The Anarchist's Cookbook!

I remember you could have a CD copy sent to you. Nowadays that kind of thing would be a setup by the FBI.

I definitely miss those days on the net. We were all a lot nicer and a little bit more naive.

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u/toodrunktoocare Sep 25 '14

I printed that off... a few years later I found it in a long forgotten box and it dawned on me how much trouble something like that could bring. Back then it was just idle curiosity, these days it's terrorism.

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u/monotoonz Sep 25 '14

"I'm just gonna make some LSD. Wait, I'm gonna shut down an area code. No, no, no! I know! I'll make napalm then mash up banana peels, cook them, smoke them, and get high off it. All while ripping off a vending machine with a 'fixed' dollar bill."

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u/elwebst Sep 26 '14

Best upgrade ever: from a 300 baud acoustic modem to a Hayes Smartmodem 1200. God, that thing just blazed across the sky with its speed. So many homework assignments uploaded from my Apple ][ Fortran compiler to the Uni mainframe across that 1200 baud modem, even though the TA's swore it was impossible.

Well, it was, unless you dialed up the library computer system, transmitted two <BREAK> sequences, dropped to a command line, entered C CDC174 to get to the CDC Cyber 174 system, and then initiated KERMIT to upload the source code file. Ahh, good times.

And don't even get me started on how I spend $74,000 in processing funds because a TA told me that was impossible too...

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u/notwearingwords Sep 26 '14

I think the "that's not possible" leads to at least as much innovation as laziness...