Historical Data on the Internet

Currently it is hard to understand the internet did not exist before, or at least was not as accessible as it is right now. I actually encountered with the Internet in 1992. The internet was only TCP/IP – Black & White telnet sessions and the real browsing or discovery happened only with the usage of the Surfnet Gids with X25 addresses of peer systems.

Internet was only available to a select group of students or pioneers. It didn’t take long before the wonders of internet entered our home by means of a 150Baud modem and  the ATDT commands we all knew.

NCSA Web browser

When it finally got started and the NCSA browser became available on the Silicon Graphics machines we had in the UNIX lab at school, the world opened up. I started pioneering with our first NCSA webserver, installed the first website at HR&O and was one of the founders of BRINTA BBS.

Brinta BBS

In hindsight BrintaBBS was a predecessor to  Facebook, and when we finally got more than 100.000 users we were amazed. The BrintaBBS was a bulletin board systems created for chatting and sharing ‘rooms’. These rooms were discussion forums. The users could have friendships and relationships. Almost like the current profile pages in Facebook.

When we graduated we left BrintaBBS to the other students who were using it. It appeared that managing a system like this was not an easy job and moderating so many users resulted in the closing down of the system.

Bromo server

With the webserver available to the students the amount of personal pages did increase quickly and I started my first attemt at what later would become my Personal Blog. I called it my online personal column, for whoever wanted to read my explorations

When my blog was founded at breedveld.org in the end I created my own content management system. This opened up a lot of tools and quick hacks to do things the normal content management systems couldn’t do. I played with moblogging (blogging from my T-Mobile smartphone directly) an ultimately I created a system to create video blogs… short videos made on my smartphone and sent directly to my blog.

Dutch Bloggy

In 2006 this was not a common thing and my weblog even got nominated for a Dutch Bloggy award in the category “Best use of video on a weblog”.

When social media finally became mainstream (I remember having a twitter account when no one even knew what twitter was all about) the content moved more and more to Facebook and Twitter. Right now all content is centered on Facebook and my weblog is tightly integrated with facebook .