I "grew up" on BBSs in the >=2400 baud era. It was about that time, as modems became faster, and as the average personal computer came default with some kind of GUI, that it was only natural that BBSs started to move into the graphical world also. One of the first BBSs I ever accessed was Prodigy [1] when a friend/neighbor bought a bundle at Sears (of all places) that included an external modem and the Prodigy software.

At some point we came across and downloaded BBS lists like Focke's and software like Telix, and realized we didn't need to pay $9.95/mo for access to interesting communities. The local BBS's were way more interesting and niche (and longtail) than anything found on the moderated Prodigy anyway. The pressure of not pissing off "mom" for spending extra time on Prodigy, which had a pay-by-the-minute, access plan at the time was extra appealing even if we could only spend 30-45 minutes on a local board at a time. It was all so reasonable.

But local boards were ANSI and later ASCII and the graphics on Prodigy [2][3] were sorely missed -- which were about the equal of even the best EGA graphics of the time. Games were descriptive instead of graphical. But the local communities (who you could meet up with), the forums, and the price (free) were an appealing draw to an early teen with no money. RIP Graphics BBSs eventually arrived a couple years later but they were few, fussy, and were more representative of the (by then) aging Prodigy graphics than the new VGA and high-res Windows 3.x GUIs we were growing used to.

We had a buddy, the next town over, who was a major Apple Macintosh enthusiast. As a result, he generally eschewed the gross and primitive ASCII scene, but was as cash strapped as we were. IIR RIP BBSs sort of bypassed Macs, but a bizarre sort of Galapagos technology appeared in the form of full GUI BBSs. I remember one client called "FirstClass" [4] that basically just extended the resource of the BBS onto the Mac desktop. It was absolutely mindblowing, and included a primitive ability to request simultaneous data streams allowing you to view a forum and download an image or a file at the same time. There wasn't a good MS-DOS/Windows client so we spent hours and hours and hours at that friend's house blowing up their long-distance bill dialing in to any first-class number we could come across.

As a parallel track, in the early 90s, (maybe '91 or '92) my Mac buddy ended up with access to a dial-up Unix shell through their parents, who had it for work. We memorized the password and ended up freaking out as we learned how to gopher, ftp, and telnet to sites all over the world. The semantic binding of protocols://servicestypes made an astonishing kind of sense.

I found out about the demoscene around this time on dial-up BBSs, but I found the actual demoscene on open access anonymous ftp sites in Florida and Finland and other places around the world. The amazing movie Sneakers came out about that time and it dropped into our developing digital milieu like warm socks out of a hot clothes dryer on a winter day. My friend's father eventually discovered our account usage (because we were blowing up his corporate account bill), and we were locked out. But I knew at that point, that BBSs were now the second tier in the information landscape. Cyberpunk novels entered my life and I knew the internet = cyberspace, not BBSs.

I ended up in a special program through my school district that happened to include access to my own gopher/shell dial-up through the district. I had a luxurious 20 minutes a day and 1 or 2MB of storage to play with. But as a high-schooler, getting access to what I had only known as the realm of top universities or global corporations was thrilling. I learned how to exit the default gopher menu and use the other unix tools to ftp, telnet, and do everything else I needed to connect to what I inferred as other digital pioneers around the world.

I graduated in '95, lost my access to the internet, which felt like the loss of a limb and spent a a year relegated to the local BBS scene, which was still going strong. RIP had stalled, and the Mac gui BBSs were only a distant ideal of what could be. Modems were 14.4 or 28.8 baud.

I found out that some other friends were starting an ISP through some miracle, and I secured a job with them, quit everything else, immediately transitioned to living off of a T-1 8+ hours a day. I carried a hard drive in to work with me, connected it to a spare IDE port in my day-to-day desktop, downloaded what I wanted, and brought it home...like it was a thumb drive. It was a drug. BBSs died for me at that point -- I just...stopped dialing in to them. Very quickly we adopted this software called Mosaic, tied to yet another semantically aligned protocol called HTTP. It just slotted in the mix of telnet, ftp, nntp, smtp, gopher, and others. It was cool, but it took forever to load a page vs a gopher site or a telnet site. Usenet was the vibrant global forum that was the "big-boy" version of the local BBSs I had been using. I remember when Amazon first put up their website and sold only books. I didn't trust sending my credit card over the internet, so I'd find out about new books then go to local bookstores to buy them. For a year, I lived in the future.

At some point we decided to distribute Mosaic, then quickly after than I remember an early Netscape to new signups (along with dial-up sofware, email software, and Usenet software) -- the entire kit fit on two 1.44MB floppies, a version for Windows and Macs (copied by my old Mac First-class BBS buddy). The rest of the semantic protocol internet, other than email died then -- even if we weren't quite aware of it. Gopher became a ghost, ftp lived a while longer, telnet sort of existed, Usenet was a constant "should we still mirror it" question. We would have killed the rest except the dial-up software, email client, and Mosaic needed slightly more than 2 floppies, so we filled the rest of the second disk with more software.

Modems at 28.8 became normal, and we started get requests for 56k and ISDN.

I started using my access in the ISP to create unlimited time dial-up accounts for my friends. Girls I like dated me because I got them internet access, and members of the U.S. Demoscene suddenly could talk to their peers in Europe because of it.

Mosaic drove up bandwidth demand to astronomical levels. It was the Macintosh first-class BBS software realized to the nth degree. We move the ISP to the same building as our tier n-1 provider, drilled a hole in the concrete between floors and got rid of the t-1 by

We dropped usenet, ftp, and telnet clients off the disks. Dial-up software + email + Mosaic became the norm. ISDN turned out to be kind of a bust, DSL was on the horizon and we saw that it was the end of the mom-n-pop ISP because of how the technology worked. We sold the ISP and moved on elsewhere -- but Mosaic + email + dial-up became "the internet" from that point forward.

To be honest, I'm kind of sad to see PROTOCOL-OVER-HTTP came to erase the other semantic protocols. The way in which the browser kind of erased the rest of the internet has caused later generation from forgetting what could be possible over the internet. There's no reason at all that somebody can't come up with an entirely new protocol for a specialized service -- but the entire industry is stuck trying to figure out how to shove a square protocol into a circular HTTP(s) hole. This has allowed browser makers to really centralize and control large portions of the internet. It's like being told you must stick to specific roads when you are standing in the middle of an easily traversable, open, recently mowed, field.

If there is one thing I could will back into existence from OG internet is that concept. The Web IS NOT the internet.

1 - https://youtu.be/FNxKg6ZXax8

2 - https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/07/where...

3 - https://archive.is/vVRQQ

4 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FirstClass