c7five on Nostr: In Spring of 1995, I was a Linux user. I had been since late 1993 running Slackware. ...
In Spring of 1995, I was a Linux user. I had been since late 1993 running Slackware. This was being done on a 386SX processor with 2MB of RAM and 20MB hard disk.
There started to be some chatter on USENET about Windows 95 coming out and how it was going to be amazing.
I wanted to see if I could get my hands on a leaked copy somehow. In 1995, the best place to find this was #warez on IRC. So I jumped into that channel and found a DCC bot offering up a beta version of Windows 95.
After going back to my dorm and installing it, since this was a beta version there wasn’t any network card drivers nor a TCP/IP stack. I had to get the DOS driver (3c509) and then the Windows 3.1 TCP/IP stack which was Trumpet Winsock to be able to DHCP an address from my dorm’s network and connect to the Internet with terminal tools like FTP and NCSA Telnet.
A graphical web browser didn’t come as part Windows 95. Internet Explorer didn’t come until the Windows 95 Plus pack was released later.
There were basically two main choices of web browsers at the time: NCSA Mosaic and Netscape Navigator, so I installed both.
I had been using NCSA Mosaic since fall of 1993 and was a fan - having developed a lot of websites for my university and also businesses in Chicago starting around 1994.
Netscape was innovating more than Mosaic and it eventually became my browser of choice for many years.
I remember being especially excited when Netscape added SSL support - prior to this most of what you did online was sent in clear text. SSL would enable web forms to take private information like credit cards with less risk to compromise at the network layer.
I didn’t have a credit card in 1995, so I went down to the quad at Illinois State University and found a table with some kids giving free beer koosies if you signed up for a credit card.
It took a few weeks to arrive but received credit card with a $500 limit - with something like a 27% interest rate.
My first online purchase over SSL was on the Netscape website store for a t-shirt. It was a white t-shirt with a small Netscape logo in the upper left front chest and had the dragon named Mozilla on the back. It got lost in some move or closet purge - I wish I still had it. To me that transaction a monumental one in my life / career. It showed me a glimpse of what the future would be like. I spent the 2000s writing standards and building technology that further secure credit card use for the entire planet.
Connecting and building the Internet in mid-90s took a lot of motivation and time. Most parts of the experience just work today and we (including me) never thinks about it when doing everyday tasks. Those same parts would sometimes take several minutes or hours to setup just before you could begin to use them.
If you were a hacker with both patience and endless curiosity the 90s was a technical wonderland where you could discover and use technology that almost no one else on the planet was using, but someday would.
There started to be some chatter on USENET about Windows 95 coming out and how it was going to be amazing.
I wanted to see if I could get my hands on a leaked copy somehow. In 1995, the best place to find this was #warez on IRC. So I jumped into that channel and found a DCC bot offering up a beta version of Windows 95.
After going back to my dorm and installing it, since this was a beta version there wasn’t any network card drivers nor a TCP/IP stack. I had to get the DOS driver (3c509) and then the Windows 3.1 TCP/IP stack which was Trumpet Winsock to be able to DHCP an address from my dorm’s network and connect to the Internet with terminal tools like FTP and NCSA Telnet.
A graphical web browser didn’t come as part Windows 95. Internet Explorer didn’t come until the Windows 95 Plus pack was released later.
There were basically two main choices of web browsers at the time: NCSA Mosaic and Netscape Navigator, so I installed both.
I had been using NCSA Mosaic since fall of 1993 and was a fan - having developed a lot of websites for my university and also businesses in Chicago starting around 1994.
Netscape was innovating more than Mosaic and it eventually became my browser of choice for many years.
I remember being especially excited when Netscape added SSL support - prior to this most of what you did online was sent in clear text. SSL would enable web forms to take private information like credit cards with less risk to compromise at the network layer.
I didn’t have a credit card in 1995, so I went down to the quad at Illinois State University and found a table with some kids giving free beer koosies if you signed up for a credit card.
It took a few weeks to arrive but received credit card with a $500 limit - with something like a 27% interest rate.
My first online purchase over SSL was on the Netscape website store for a t-shirt. It was a white t-shirt with a small Netscape logo in the upper left front chest and had the dragon named Mozilla on the back. It got lost in some move or closet purge - I wish I still had it. To me that transaction a monumental one in my life / career. It showed me a glimpse of what the future would be like. I spent the 2000s writing standards and building technology that further secure credit card use for the entire planet.
Connecting and building the Internet in mid-90s took a lot of motivation and time. Most parts of the experience just work today and we (including me) never thinks about it when doing everyday tasks. Those same parts would sometimes take several minutes or hours to setup just before you could begin to use them.
If you were a hacker with both patience and endless curiosity the 90s was a technical wonderland where you could discover and use technology that almost no one else on the planet was using, but someday would.