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Admin
You forget the part where she had created an admin account on joomla just 1 month ago.
Admin
I was so completely expecting goatse or some other rickroll that the true result was anticlimatitic
Admin
Especially the end bit. I can't see computer Techs (especially pre-internet techs who were, on the whole, bigger nerds than we today) running around panicking about what the internet is. Even if none of them had heard of it (and let's face it, that in itself is unlikely for nerds such as these), the last bit about running around in a panic wondering about 'ordering sendmail' and 'phoning the internet' sounds more like managers than Techo's....
I would expect Techo's (especially of that era), to desperately start searching for information (through their vast supplies of Computer Mags) rather than admit that some technology may be available they didn't know about. Sure, they might not have understood what the internet was about, I would have thought they'd look into 'sendmail' so as to be able to appear knowledgeable in front of their peers. After all, nerds are all about showing off that they know everything, not panicking when they come across something new....
(For those who were in IT in that era, I hope you don't take the 'Nerd' label as [too much of] an insult)
Admin
CIX actually grew when the Internet's popularity came about, they were one of the first providers of email and Usenet access.
Of course, they also sank fast when ISPs such as Demon came about.
Admin
I must be missing out on all the pr0n..... I have only ever twice used more than 10GB in a month. Many months I've used under 5GB.
But then, I guess I don't really do anything interesting on the 'net....
Admin
Oh yes.. I'm probably a bit younger and lucky enough to have plenty of BBSs on my local area. I restricted myself to only connecting in the local network and still managed to get up to 150$ monthly bills sometimes.
Reminds me of a visit in '94 to my hometown's (in Finland) sister city in Estonia. It was a visit organised by schools of the cities and I was one of the six students participating the trip. We had some presents for our hosts, and I got the task of taking our IT department's gift for the school. It was an external 1200baud modem, no error correction or other "fancy stuff". The moment I saw it I knew this was not going to end well, it was clear that our IT department thought that the Estonians are very poor and this was a pricy gift for them. On our visit then I had the chance to see their computer class, and although it had only 3 computers, they had the latest 9600baud modems with support for every protocol you could imagine. I then had to hand out our "gift". Luckily there were only two students and one teacher present. They stared at it in silence for a while while I was blushing like a tomato. I don't remember how we got out of the akwardness, but somehow we managed and agreed that this was just going from our "old stuff" -shelf to theirs. I then learned that it was even more unusable than I thought, because their phone lines were so bad (noisy) that a modem without error correction would not be able to connect to anything.
But oh boy, did they have some BBSs! They had free local area calls, so they were practically online all the time (in 1994!) and they showed me the file section of one BBS. It had page after page of leaked, pre-release software, I had never seen that level of piracy in Finland at that time. This was sometime around midnight, those two student boys and their (quite hot) female computer science teacher lived in the school's dorm and spend most nights in the computer class. It was a night to remember, international nerdship at it's best.
Admin
wow only 12GB.
I finally got broadband (3G) a few weeks ago. 5GB per month. $50 per GB after that. Uploads and downloads are counted.
ADSL isn't available in my area. Some of you don't know how good you have it.
Some people I know can't even get a wireless plan like this and are stuck on dialup.
Admin
wow only 5GB? i've got dialup and i probably manage 3 times your max per month
Admin
Admin
There are some inaccuracies, but this has to be GeoNet. The filler details match one-to-one with the Wikipedia article.
The conversation is not a surprise at all: back then, the shared medium was the telephony system, not IP. The Internet was just another service ("network") alongside the likes of UUCP, CompuServe, and FidoNet. It happened to be the fastest growing, but didn't truly take off until it was commercialised around 1993-4. All these services were owned, and had telephone numbers.
In the time of the first Pentium, if a user needed a file, they'd call to get it shipped on floppies. They'd be very lucky to get FTP or even BBS information.
Admin
Ouch. No matter where in the world you are, $50 a GB (even for excess) is a real whallop to the wallet. That's half my monthly phone/internet bill, and that's already too high! I'm scared to ask what yours is.
Admin
Ah, the days of dialup. Tomorrow. Today I'm in rural Thailand trying to download AVG via satellite link at 4 KB/s. Seriously looking at switching back to dialup.
Admin
You meant to the "therealdailywtf.com" and instead accidentally ended up on "thedailywtf.com". I know this, because with the number of brilliant people regularly explaining how lame this site is, we can be certain that at least one of them will have created a site where there's no "fluff" and you can find out exactly what "actually" happened complete with documented evidence.
But thanks for helping remind us just how much you hate this site.
Admin
Wow. I pay $5 for unlimited data on my android phone. My fiber connection at home is also unlimited, and quite fast, and costs me $10 a month. Id hate to be shelling out anywhere near what you do if $50 is half your phone/internet bill. And oh, I dont have a landline phone. ;) No need for it.
Admin
Actually it's still quite funny for me. I'm quite sure that my 2 years old cheap mobilephone processor is faster then all of these processors combined..... But hell, there is lot more that I have to do with my phone then they had to. I need to call and send sms-s and take pictures..... They only had to share internet and provide services for clients.
Admin
Surely someone of you have heard about Legend of the Green Dragon: http://www.tradelair.com/LoGD/
Admin
Admin
"I take offense to the implication that Tandem didn't have Unix." Maybe this was written before 2000.. they definitely didn't always have unix.
Admin
Never underestimate how stupid management can be once they've set their mind on something. Last year I was tasked with creating a demo build of a phone app, with several new pieces of functionality (touch screen & acellerometer) despite that fact that the app itself was being reworked by an offshore company, and there was never any intention of releasing the full version of what I was making (so the trial didn't correspond to the release version at all).
Admin
But it was really the internet :p
Brilliant episode. The story is probably true. I'm sure a lot of companies have fallen when the internet started to rise up.
Admin
This story is not BS... I was there. The story starts in 1982 and the Tandem was used from 1986 to 1994 if I remember correctly. The company was very innovative, really at the cutting edge at the time (they had some connections with Apple for a while). Howard Rheingold of the Well even visited once. There was a lot more to it than what I saw (African Telex, and things like that), as I was only a moderator on the public forums. There was a real community and we all felt we really lived through a sort of proto-internet at the time. It's true that for some reason management didn't see the reality of the internet and missed the coach. Pity. The real name of this French company was CalvaCom (initially CalvaDos). Just Google it. The SCO story is true. For some reason the second processor of the PC couldn't be used :-) The company still exists but has evolved into something else I know nothing about.
The only real BS part of the story is the end. The technical people were not clueless at all. They knew perfectly well what the internet was (and so did I). They even wrote one of the first web forums. Slow in comparison to the old interface, but useable.
Fond memories. Old friends. Nice to recognize it on first sight. Nothing really WTF...
Admin
Well that's what most of us thought - that the story IS true, apart from the end about clueless techies. We're supposed to believe that the same guys who ported old FORTRAN app to new OS, were as clueless as the average Joe who barely knows how to turn the computer on, and go to Google? Total bullshit, the only WTF is the fact this crap was posted to TDWTF.
It did remind us of the good ole' days, though, but that could have been done with more style and less ass-hattery.
Admin
So true, it's the same pricing here... $50 for 10GB, $30 for 5GB. Not all people have ADSL or cable available, so they're doomed to 3G or, in the worst case, dialup.
And telcos are keeping those extortionate rates for 3G... And you can't even combine those data plans with regular talk/text plans, because they're "intended" only for use with computers (you get bluetooth or PCMCIA 3G modem included), so it's quite expensive and impractical to use your phone for internet... which sucks if you have an expensive smartphone.
Admin
Admin
www != internet.
Admin
PS: Grammar nazis, please bring me up on my pluralisation of the word "maths" even though I'm English and that's just how we say it. Thanks!
Admin
The word mathematics being Greek, only exists in the plural in this context.
If you say "do the math" you are saying "do the mathematician" :-)
Admin
Best software was Emulex/2 written by Sam Brown.
Admin
Is that a type of dance move?
Admin
Admin
It is a sad story...
Admin
However, I don't think the article is about CIX (if it's about anything real), as they are a UK conferencing system, not European, and I don't remember anything as bad as the article talked about - Internet email/usenet seemed to work reasonably well (at least from a user's PoV).
Also CIX ran custom CoSy code, which was designed to run on UNIX servers... AFAIK, their system STILL uses a customised version of CoSy. So there was no mad panic to change everything.
As other people have said - the 'European' version of Compuserve, was, erm, Compuserve. CIX was a UK thing that was similar-ish. I'm not sure what other 'European version of Compuserve' there was...
Admin
Yep, they even were reluctant to cancel the accounts of dead people who um obviously could no longer use their accounts anymore.
Admin
http://www.calltheinternet.org/
Admin
If Nelle42's information is correct, they founded Calvanet, which provided Internet access for 5 years. They also provided a platform for "FORTRAN, BASIC, APL, PASCAL, COBOL, SNOBOL, LISP, RPG II" [1], so the development work may have been to ensure continued support.
[1] See http://www.aup.edu/pdf/AUP_Magazine/2009_Spring_AUPMagazine.pdf, bottom of p10. There's also mention of a Tandem TXP on p11.
Admin
A view from the other side: http://www.rheingold.com/electricminds/html/vcc_vc_8.html. Apparently, based on forums, their communities attracted high-quality technical content.
Their mistake seems to be that they were actually trying to be like the big Internet players, while the French government was forcing Minitel on everyone. And the Internet only overtook that in 2002.
Admin
So I'm complaining not because I hate the site, but complaining in hopes that the my complaints will be heard and the stories will be trimmed down a little more to align with reality, and thus invoke a "WTF!?" from me regarding the actual events, and not the poorly exaggerated writing.
Admin
Ah BBS, bugging the SysOp for access to the private, pirate games area. Ringing several sites a night to find that one elusive file to patch XYZ game. Having to cut neighbours grass for 2 months after your old man got the phone bill in and wanted to know why it was bloody much!
Admin
I feel insulted. I'm no mere nerd, I'm dual classed (nerd lvl 20/geek lvl 24).
Admin
Yep, I still remember François's messages on the forums... Rather unusual to see the CEO of a large company spend several hours chatting with the users on a daily basis. The techs were definitely aware of Internet and quite knowledgeable about it, but much like AOL or Compuserve, didn't know whether it was a fad or not. They realised it wasn't a tad too late, and went the way of the dodo.
So the end of the story posted here is the real WTF...
Admin
Competition? What competition? The ISPs that don't have explicit caps offer "fake unlimited" (IOW, "there's no limit, but if you use too much we'll cut you off") or traffic shaping.
There are a few exceptions, but they're generally priced in the £HOLYFUCKEXPENSIVE range.
Admin
As entertaining as that might be, you do understand that we Americans don't say "math" instead of "maths" for any linguistic reason, right?
We say it that way because it's a hell of a lot easier to pronounce than "maths". We are a lazy people.
Admin
Be FTW!
Admin
I have been working on my sort of system from unix, to irix, and similar long before linux existed, and I have never found any of those system without a version of fortran 77 (f77 compiler) there were some system where they even had high performance parallel fortran or something similar. And that was end of the 80's.
So maybe we had admin which were intelligent enough to ALWAYS install fortran, but I kinda smell bullshit here.
Admin
I guess it can't be Minitel (of France), because I understand that still exists and has no idea the Internet exists.
Admin
It might have been easier to just do #4
Admin
That was my first thought too...
Oh, 1996 on Cix at 6p a minute peak. How I miss you!
Admin
An 'OldCoder' who cannot remember a time when 60Mhz was fast and when SCO maintained really reliable unix? That jibe seemed more of a Big, Blue bit of propaganda, to me.
Admin
SCO only had really reliable UNIX if you stayed within some very narrow boundaries of supported hardware, peripherals and applications.
After repeatedly watching, documenting, and reproducing Lachman TCP/IP drivers walk pointers through and corrupting the shared memory, and having SCO do nothing about it, we had to write code and balance the drivers and the application to just deal with the corruptions. I also sent the fixes to deal with the fixed size limit on Link Kit directories, repeatedly, only to have SCO ignore them again and again.
Oh yes, I hated SCO before hating SCO was cool.
Admin
I think all the stories here are made up.
I mean I saw one the other day about a lady trying to get help with her coffee cup holders but kept closing it by typing on her keyboard with her chest and then when she tried to find the {Any} key she found out she had to download the latest version of the Internet to her computer first but she hang up on the tech support guy when she tried to dial her modem.
My guess is this site is just retellings of classic, usually fake, IT stories. I could be wrong but that's my opinion.