Internet Relay Chat and Gemini Protocol Help Us Relive the Net of the Dial-Up Era
Internet Relay Chat (IRC) turns 37 this month
Children and teens of the 1990s are old enough to remember dial-up, Integrated Services Digital Network (ISDN), and are likely to have used a fax machine at some point or another. Internet connections, even in residential contexts, were fast enough to deliver a lot of textual information and even low-resolution images (not low by those days' standards; monitors didn't have very fine pixels anyway). People could exchange messages, do "social media"-like group chats in USENET (without trackers and bloat-related overheads), and life was generally OK, even if you had to wait overnight to download a very large program (some of today's games take even longer to download because they can be almost 100 GB in size). Phone lines were working even when the power (at home) was down - as did most handsets - and there was enough bandwidth/throughput to comprehend voices. After disconnecting ("hanging up") you could better manage time and go play football outside with the lads, at least until off-peak hours when connecting again was cheaper. No doom-scrolling through mindless "walls" for 8 hours in a row, reciprocating "likes" with fake friends so that you both seem popular. The kids were alright. Many of us used IRC and are still using IRC (except hangups are nowadays rare; many people's connections are now persistent).
AOL is 'hanging up' on the dial-up era next month;. The company notorious for sending out media and making it very hard to cancel subscriptions will basically 'pull the plug'. This means that many pundits in today's media recall what it was like. Many people have memories; they vary based on all sorts of factors and experiences. Many people first got exposed to "the Internet" in someone else's home.
For me, the Net was something I needed to "add" to the O/S and it also required that I buy a modem and install it all on my own (I was very young, but it was typically as simple as turning off the PC, loosening some screws, inserting the modem, then screwing it in and powering back on).
Looking back, many of us can see what went wrong and how wrong it went. A lot of tasks we used to do on the Web were simple and faster (despite bandwidth being so much lower); the Web was generally safer and information on the Web in the mid-90s was more reliable. Many people chose to visit sites based on the credibility/pedigree of some domain, not a search engine gamed by SEO with spam and slop in considerable abundance.
We cannot go back to dial-up (it would be a technical challenge), but we can recreate the conditions that made the dial-up era more attractive. Some of us use Gemini Protocol, many of us still love IRC, and this site is still compatible with 1990s Web browsers. █