 This is the SF Productions podcast network Cutler again from the pop culture bunker. I'm Mindy and I'm Mark You can check out our audio podcast how I got my way free comics on iTunes or in our website SF podcast network comm So for many in our audience or our potential audience those actually out there Online equals the internet or maybe just Facebook even right But for some of us older folks we remember an online world with no simple browser to access Yes My first online experience happened around 1978 and involved a friend whose dad worked for what became AT&T Mm-hmm. He had this suitcase like box with a keyboard a small printer and an acoustic coupler in it And tell me Mark What is an acoustic coupler? Back before phone deregulation you couldn't just plug a phone into the wall yourself. Yes You had to lease a phone and it used this weird four prong plug. Yes A coupler allowed you to plug the handset and they were all the same back then so there was no standardization issue Into cups that would send the audio signals back and forth. You just plug it in. Yes So we played tic-tac-toe by typing in a code We typed in a code and then a printout would occur of the whole screen There's no there's no display It's just the printer and then we would type another code in and so on and so forth And you were actually talking to somebody over the acoustic coupler right with them, right? Not a very green solution because it wasted huge amount of paper you would print a new piece of paper, right? So what was your first experience? Well, you know, I I just hardly even remember boy It was probably something along the lines of Getting on the source or something right dad, right? I I Because your dad was in my dad was really into computers you probably You know when I was a freshman in high school or even before that he had a home computer and And he well we may talk about this later, but he was one of those first guys to get on one of these You know what we're basically service providers right to get Online bulletin board kind of things right so you know it's very interesting, but you know it was the whole modem Hook in the phone kind of thing, so But I probably really don't remember the first time. I mean I Was trying to remember my first email address and I don't even remember that well Yeah, well in the early 80s I got an Atari 1200 XL computer and it was hard to justify a computer back then yes because you could play games Maybe you could write programming or you could enter your mom's recipes, which was always the use case they push forward It's like yeah, what you're gonna do is you're gonna type in all your mom's recipes And then when she needs one all she has to do is fire up the computer in her kitchen And it takes about 15 20 minutes rather than opening the recipe box Now my mom still has a whole bunch of recipes that were printed out on a dot matrix But then I bought a 300 bod modem what's bod well That's the term for the number of bits that could be sent in a second So at that point I joined comp you serve and which was one of these several online firms And comp you serve was actually sort of Stepchild of the source which I mentioned earlier right and and so even before comp you serve There were these bulletin boards online you could log directly into the bulletin board So some guy in their house yeah Would have their phone hooked up to a computer right and most of the time these guys had dedicated phone lines for it Because they wanted these bulletin boards up And so you would log in to their bulletin board and just post messages on their computer it was Interesting time right because with that you again the guy may have only had one phone line So only one person to be connecting at any one time. Yes, you had to you had to wait until that person Last person gets off it and it really was more of a bulletin board like you think of you know pinning up Right thing I know that because you can't really get a response right away. Yeah, like you would now right right so The online services that went out were mostly created from these business-centric companies They used unused capacity of their time-share system, right? It was all text-based. It was all proprietary Which mean a comp you serve user couldn't interact with a prodigy or a genie or a Delphi user, right? So you had to pay based on your usage a meter was running based on how long you're online Right, so you did what you wanted to do and you signed off quickly because the meter was running And it's sort of in a way like your cell phone data plan now. Yeah, except your data was much more limited Yes, and and there is obviously less to do then right yeah And so to sign on to one of these services all you had to do was Make sure no one else in the house was using the phone right unless you had a dedicated line, which hardly anybody did If we had four girls Yeah, I guess you had to If someone else picked up the phone while you were online you would generally be disconnected But then you if they did to you would hear that noise. Yeah, you can do the noise better than Yeah, so if you then look up a local call-in number if one was available in a physical book, yes You would then fire up your computer and your modem you would type in commands to call the number You would hear something like this And then you would sign in with your account Comp you serve was generally a five-digit number a comma and then a four-digit number And that's all there was to it So they had things like forums kind of like groups today you had online newspapers which cost more to access than just going and getting the paper newspaper Games you could check your stocks. There was email, but only other other users of your service, right? Shopping whether all the things you have websites and apps for today But most of it as you said was text-based. It was very very text-based And if you think about it really I'm at this point on your home computer, too You're barely getting into windows right and into a graphical user interface at all. Yeah, so you're used to that Absolutely. Yeah, now one point I switched over to genie for a while, which was general electric service But I think they were cheaper, but I came back to copy-serve In fact when I was doing the public access TV show in the 90s vast wasteland My email address had a copy-serve suffix initially. Yeah, well, I think part of that too was by that time I was was I working for copy-serve? I think that was before that. Okay As you mentioned the bulletin board systems or bbs's so This is also where the the earliest forms of copyright infringement happened. Yes, I downloaded a TNG next-generation Star Trek episode guide from one of them. This is a bound print out Yeah, because that's the only way you could get it I mean it was available on the internet you could look at it Yeah, but really it was something that you'd have to probably print out to look at so and as times went on The services move from text to more graphics base and that's as as your Operating systems developed as well, you know your your windows and your and your Mac so then America online arrived which became compusers main competitor and later their buyer. Yeah, and at this point in time You also have to keep in mind that that If you were on compu-serve You were on compu-serve you didn't go beyond compu-serve, right? You logged into compu-serve and all the services were provided by they were a provider a content provider Absolutely, they were not a network access point, right? And so AOL came and so the big the big thing there was you know Are we offering what compu-serve is offering is are we offering what AOL is offering? We all have to offer those same services. Yeah, it became an arms race. Yes, and that's why they moved from a Metered rate to X number of hours per month for a set cost Which kept going up as the interest increased and more people jumped on yes And this started the constant floppies and then CDs arriving in the mail. Yeah Yeah, so you know you would get your your compu-serve or your AOL floppy to sign up Which actually made it a lot easier to sign up to because as you're saying looking up the numbers before supposedly these Starter discs came you logged in with an 800 number and it would automatically then turn you over to your local number Exactly that also caused problems And then a lot of people ended up using especially the CDs for crafting Because there were so many coming in the mail. Yes So then the internet and the web which is not the same thing No, not at all brought this era to an end, right? So the internet happened basically when the services starting getting together and hooking them up, right? Yeah Yeah, so the internet is everything. Yeah Yeah, and the services tried to bring a form of the web in while keeping that walled garden going Yes, but it didn't last very long because people like no I want the internet and people just ended up just using their service as an entry point to get to leave the garden, right? And you know, it's kind of funny because a lot of people I worked at compu-serve right during that end phase basically from I Worked there when Before the web started developing up until about the time that it was absorbed into AOL Right and there would be people who would who would call up and and say they want to get on the internet But they would have no idea what the internet was. Yeah, I want to get there whatever it is I want it and then there were other people who would think that, you know, like they're their software is the internet, right? Yeah, well, I know I loaded the internet on my computer and then but I want to do this yes And it and there are just all kinds of weird and funny things that went on so I remember Like I said when the web came in and that's when people really wanted to start getting off of the compu-serve services Right online, right? And I remember people talking about the eBay Going to the eBay and And it was a big thing among you know in the bullpen where where we were working and everything You know, I remember the eBay coming up and was it Jenny McCarthy who had that web cam? Yeah, Jenny cam Jenny cam. I don't think it was her. I think it was somebody else. Some other Jenny I don't know but but yeah, so that was a big thing that everybody talked about But everybody who would call in on our lines because I was in tech support would be like Well, how do I get on the internet and you would try to tell these people things and and you know It's like what you you know all you have to do. Well, what do I do when I get there? Yeah? Yeah, well And it's hard to imagine now that there was a time when people didn't know but the internet would do right so Trying to think of some other things like those discs that you put in and load it up Sometimes those people would get on and it wouldn't change the number to the right number And they'd either end up with huge long-distance charges for calling the wrong number or huge out-of-network Basically charges where they were charging a number that that time them people would end up with hundreds and hundreds of dollars worth of bills And we would just write them off. Yeah the most part Yeah, and the other fun thing is like when people would call up and they would say, you know What's this charge on my credit card? And I think that you know, there were a number of people who had the source right which we talked about Yeah, and they had it on their credit card for like 20 years Yes, and they never they never used it right signed up for it one time and they were just now realizing what it was They're like, can I get a refund? It's the it's the health club of the tech industry You join up you forget you're on it and you pay a fortune and you're like, I'm gonna get back to that pretty soon Right, and you know, there's still some vestiges of that old internet out there Yeah, some of the things like with file transfer protocol FTP sites it used to be that you couldn't send large files through your email or you didn't have things like drop-bots or anything Yeah, so they would set up these file transfer protocols that you could use to send these large files places and There were actually special sites set up for that and special things and you always had to type it in with code and I was trying to remember what the name of the old bulletin board things. There was a You know we're and and I still occasionally see the remnants of them But I can't remember the name of it is but it was basically and basically it's sort of like What reddit is now? Yeah, these bulletin board. Yeah, these under literally under the radar. Yeah things went on Yeah, and people would exchange the files like this one and things Sometimes I miss those days. Yeah but Wild West yes, yes, so to speak so But now we just have our Gmail addresses with no. Yeah, no specialness to them But I guess a point of fact would be, you know, how old is your Gmail address and right that? Tells you how long you've been on the internet, right? Yeah, pretty much because I got I got an invitation only Gmail address Way back when you know Well, obviously we got a lot to talk about I could talk about this forever, but mark is telling me to shut up You should check out our audio podcast how I got my wife to read comics on iTunes or on our website as a podcast network From the pop culture bunker. I'm indy and I'm mark. Thanks for watching. Bye. Bye