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.
When it finally got off 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 of school and was one of the founders of 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 ended up in the closing down of the system.
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
