Long answer from an old guy looking through rose tinted glasses.

I’m what would probably be classed as the 2nd era of networking. I wasn’t a pioneer working on protocols in the 1970s, but I was small part of the group of network architects and engineers that rolled it out on a national scale (in the UK).

My first network experience that I can remember was using a service called Prestel which was run by the Post Office. I remember playing a multi user text based game called Shades - first MMO? I was rocking a 300bps (yes 0.3k) modem connected to a computer running an OS called CPM. This must have been around 1983.

Roll the clock forward 8 years, and I’m working at the University of Manchester. There was a national piece of work called Project Shoestring, the remit of which was to roll out the IP protocol across all the universities, encapsulating the data in the X25 serial network which connected them all together at that time.

I do remember the day when we got a TCP/IP stack up and running on a Novell server and I transferred my first piece of email via SMTP. I’m going to guess this was summer 1991.

The first bit of news I remember hearing across the network was Freddy Mercury’s death. Even in 1991, it was fastest means of news propagation, with the news only hitting traditional broadcast media several hours later and print newspapers the next day.

Around that time, a program called “Trumpet Winsock” was released. This was a flakey bit of code that allowed Windows 3.1 to connect to the internet natively (i.e. not across a modem). I cannot convey the excitement of this. Within a few weeks I had “friends” all across the globe. Network techies reaching out to one another via bulletin boards, ftp, mail scheduled file transfers, and Gopher (the precursor to the web developed in Minnesota). All using IP.

1993 and another seismic shift. The WWW arrived with a browser called Mosaic and some very, very unreliable server software that I ran on Windows 3.1. I wrote my first web site and by 1994 was running a site called “The FoxPro I/O Address” that connected programmers working with the FoxPro RDBMS language. “Visitor Books” were common on early websites, and it was so cool seeing comments from the US, Argentina, Eastern Europe etc. One amusing event from that time was the day someone sent me a tech support CD from Microsoft with a post it note telling me to look in a certain directory. Microsoft had only gone and scrapped the whole of the Foxpro I/O Address website (it wasn’t small) and published it on CD! It truly was the wild west.

Another memory is a book which I still have somewhere. “The 1994 Internet White Pages”. A large book (maybe around 1000 pages) which had every active email address in the world at that time. I believe they were mostly scrapped from USENET posts, but it’s bonkers to think that you could publish all the world’s email addresses in a book!

In the late 90s I had the pleasure of having dinner with Vint Cerf (look him up), on the Orient Express, no less. I remember asking him what was his single regret in developing the IP protocol. He’d obviously been asked that before, because he quickly said, “Security, we never put any security (encryption) in the packet headers. It never crossed our minds that anyone would use the internet for nefarious activities”. Man, I miss that time. There were no scammers, no phishing, no viruses (well the Morris Worm, but that was just exciting!).

I was fortunate enough to work in the place where the first programmable computer was built, virtual memory was developed, and early pioneers worked with Linus on Linux. My first distro was the Manchester Computing Centre version running on kernel v0.96. I have a floppy disk with it on somewhere! I learned a lot from some genuine unknown and uncelebrated giants in that building.

The internet is awesome, but I do miss those days. Those early net residents valued what they had and treasured it. We take it for granted today and rarely stop to appreciate how incredible it is, let alone how dangerous it is.

If you got this far… thanks for reading.