Hearth.com Home Page 11-05-1996 from the Internet Wayback Machine

In all its glory.

http://web.archive.org/web/19961222111122/http://www.hearth.com/

The old forum.

http://web.archive.org/web/20010809215113/http://hearth.com/ceilidh/ceilidh.html

Looks like that was back in the Efel Kamina days.

Damn, I probably have about the longest running web site...with the same management...on the whole damn interweb! Started end of 1995.

That would be awesome if this was the oldest commercial site still running under same management. Here's the oldest internet site I could find:

http://www.w3.org/History/19921103-hypertext/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html

Yahoo was running off of servers at Stanford way back then.....

In many ways, AOL was one of the first biggies since they had a portal (an "internet" button) inside their software. That is how I first got to see the internet in 1994.

Of course, the real geeks had been online for many years - at colleges, research, etc.

The real WWW boom was because of the netscape browser. Before that time, there were a few experimental browsers (Mosaic) and otherwise it was all text based.

The main thing I remember for the first couple of years is that it was nearly impossible to get hooked up reliably. I spent many a night getting hooked up - then dropped - then hooked up - then dropped again!

This guy, a Ham radio nut, was my first ISP. He had bulletin boards many years before:
http://web.archive.org/web/19961108075820/http://k2nesoft.com/

I put Stoveworks first site on his server...

BBS is where I got started with the Amiga (ARCNet?). Remember CompuServe, Delphi and PSINet? I think CompuServe predated Yahoo by a decade or so.

I remember PSI was really big.......Prodigy was also pretty big at one time (owned by Sears)

I was on Compuserve in 1986 - with my Mac and a hack put together by a guy named Dennis Brothers. He's also been saved for history.....
http://code.google.com/p/theunarchiver/wiki/MacBinarySpecs
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,926733,00.html

I'm currently reading "What the Doormouse said" about the beginnings of all this stuff - and also drugs in Silicon Valley. The interesting part so far is that ALL that we are currently doing was envisioned and demoed in 1968 by Doug Engelbart and Steward Brand - the so-called "Mother of all Demos":
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mother_of_All_Demos

1968! Yet, according to the book and history, all the PC inventors from that time onward forgot about the fact that networking was a BIG part of the deal.

Think about that. In 1968 they demoed to an auditorium full of folks.....had video windows communicating real time with others located elsewhere!

In 1982 the Fort Worth Star-Telegram became pretty much the first dial up online accessible newspaper site. It was the first site I ever hacked into. I sent them the details so they could tighten it up. Got a free subscription.

ETA: Startext

Wow, check out clip #12
http://sloan.stanford.edu/MouseSite/1968Demo.html

Considering how many blue screens of death MS had years later (in demos), this 1968 demo went off quite well.

Ahhh...memories. You guys have me lusting for my 1200 baud modem and 20 meg hard drive. " What in the world would you ever USE that much memory on." Remember using cassette tapes and a recorder set to "record" for memory.

IBM 8088 - man I was cool when I had that thing. Punch cards predate me, but not by much.

Hearthnet.net - I remember that. Just a lurker then.

Sorry, Jags, just mentioning a hard drive gives you away as a newbie!

Here is a pic with my first Mac - no hard drives were available, but I sprung for the external second floppy - 3.5", of course! This is a 128K Mac, the first model introduced in 1984. In fact, the only reason I have it is that I purchased it from the teacher at Drexel. They got them before the general public. You can see the D for Drexel logo on the computer next to the drive slot.

By this time I had already had a couple PC's......first an IBM PC ($5200 with printer, but only 160K floppies) and then a Compaq "portable". Of course, all this time BB was running mainframes!

1200 baud was nirvana. I hacked Startext with a 300 baud modem and a 1977 TRS-80, the second one Tandy sold in Fort Worth. Dual 90k floppies and two 300 baud tape decks. It is packed in a box in the basement to this day. Along with the receipts. $6,284. The "display" was a 300 baud DecWriter LA36 dot matrix terminal.

Mainframes came a lot later in life. I was a micro and mini-computer kind of guy. The first shop I ran was running a Dec-10 36 bit machine using Tymenet for the network at 300 baud and later 1200 baud for a tri-state industrial distribution company's branches. Everything was written in FORTRAN because none of us could take the time to learn COBOL. The monthly reports for corporate took two days to print on LA120 1200 baud DecWriters printing around the clock.

To this day I have never written a line of COBOL code. Don't tell that to all of the COBOL programmers that worked for me over the years.

OK, I'll play. The first computer I owned was an HP-85 (it didn't hurt that my wife at the time worked for HP). 8-bit microprocessor, keyboard, 4" B&W CRT, tape drive, thermal printer, 32K ROM, 16K RAM. All in one neat little package. Of course, I added the 16K RAM extension module so I had a whopping 32K of RAM! Christmas 1982, wife gave me a really cool HP X-Y plotter I could drive with this computer that I had a lot of fun with. In 1982-1983, I did my graduate thesis work on this little guy, writing a program to perform Engineering Design Optimization. I became quite fluent in HP BASIC.

Looks like the first all-in-one iMac.

Oh Craig, that was far from the first 'puter I had my hands on. I just knew at that time that I had hit PC nirvana.

The Mac pretty much sucked until 1986 when they came up with the Mac Plus (1 meg ram) with a 10 meg hard drive. That made it truly useful.