WEB-years, like dog-years, are multiples of real time. Things move on at such a pace that in one calendar year the Internet and the world of computing do the equivalent of eight, 10 or even 15 years of development. There is plenty of evidence of this time-inflation when you glance back over the early issues of Computimes.
The first issue, five years ago today, carried a listing of the major Irish bulletin board systems: Systemhouse Information Xchange, Styx, TOPPSI. For people who got their first modems in the late 1980s and early 1990s those names have some of the same magic as the places etched on the dials of old valve radios: Hilversum, Tromso and the rest.
The BBSs represented hours and hours spent online, exploring a magic world which opened up to your computer once it had reached out across the phone system to other computers. User-touser messaging systems and open discussion message boards buzzed with activity in a mini-Internet with a strong local flavour.
Stinging long-distance phone rates ensured that Dubliners called Dublin boards and that Cork, Limerick, Galway, Belfast all had their own boards. Even so, these islands of cyberspace were not completely isolated. An international BBS network called FidoNet enabled boards to exchange mail and files during scheduled late-night dial-ups. There were even some mail gateways out of FidoNet and into the coming wave which would sweep away the BBS scene - namely, the Internet.
Based on numerous precarious dial-up hops from one BBS to another, this system worked (after a fashion). A message to a friend working two miles away in Microsoft took two months - and what looked from the headers to be several thousand miles - to make the trip. In fact, the heyday of the BBS was over by early 1994. More and more of the discussions on the boards related to the glimpses that users had gained - usually in college - of the coming thing, the Internet. To anyone who had been banging around the BBS scene for a year or two, the potential of a worldwide bulletin board was obvious, and the decline of the local boards equally plain.
The BBS world may be gone, but its influence is still stamped all over the Internet in Ireland. The country's largest Internet service provider, Ireland Online (IOL), has its roots in a Galway BBS. Similarly, the Connect Ireland ISP grew out of the most active Dublin BBS, TOPPSI. Many of those who managed boards now manage Internet-related businesses.
Meanwhile back at your computer's desktop, this was still the infuriating universe of Windows 3.x. Its point-and-click interface had firmly established itself as a standard on IBM-compatible PCs, putting a gloss of usability over the underlying MS-DOS that still did the actual work. And "gloss" was certainly the word when it came to networking. Windows for Workgroups (the version that was supposed to network easily) had shaken off its "windows for warehouses" tag and begun to sell, but those cranky and irascible winsock.dll files ensured that networking PCs remained a fourstep black art: (a) tweak the config.sys, autoexec.bat and netstart files, (b) reboot, (c) wait to see what fails this time, (d) repeat endlessly.
The networking issue, and Windows 3's imperfect (to put it mildly) desktop metaphor meant that Apple Mac users remained smug and convinced of their infinite superiority. In reality, the company had already started the downward spiral which culminated in this month's job cuts in Cork.
Apple's decline and near-demise was not the only casualty of the Windows/Intel juggernaut over the past five years. Commodore's Amiga, a computer which inspired even more dogged devotion among users than the Mac, staggered, fell and finally bit the dust. A similar pattern saw the more recent death of the Acorn. And in 1994 Alan Sugar's ugly Amstrad PCW - a green-screen, floppy-disk only brute that ran the CP/M operating system - was already past its sell-by date.
Those who wanted to replace a PCW with, for example, a Gateway 2000 PC could have paid £1,899 for a 60MHz Pentium. Moving up to a 66MHz model with CD-Rom drive, sound card and speakers would push the price up to £2,199. Top of the range was the newly launched Pentium 90, with 16MB of RAM and 540MB hard drive, for a hefty £2,999. None of these models came with a modem, so it would have cost £199 to add a Gateway own-brand modem, or even more for a US Robotics model - all at 14,400 bps, of course.
Nowadays a far more powerful PC costs less in absolute terms and a great deal less in relative terms. A CD drive, modem and at least 32MB of RAM would be standard features. Much more important, however, than the progress of hardware is what can be done with it online. The world has got wired so comprehensively that far more ambitious networking than the tenuous dial-ups of five years ago are taken completely for granted. From 1994 on Computimes noted lots of online firsts: first Irish bank online, local authority, residents association, national school and so on. It was newsworthy at the time, but seems somewhat quaint now. Nowadays it would almost be news to find a business, a student or an organisation that did not use the Internet.
We have lived through, and recorded, a communications revolution. Momentous as some of the changes have been so far, there is much more to come.
Next week: Five of the best
fomarcaigh@irish-times.ie
Michael Cunningham (mick@volta.net) has recently set up the Internet development agency Volta Digital Media