The Demise Of The Internet
Well here we go on another thing to gripe about which often nobody can do anything about same as the weather. Everyone talks about the weather but us folk in the lower echelons can do nothing about it.
I remember my first time getting on the Internet. I had arrived back to the United States in January 1994 after a 1 year stint in Seoul, Korea. It was in Korea in 1993 at the Army PX I bought a brand new computer and monitor. I thought I was pretty high tech to just have a 2 MB computer in 1993. My digital watch holds like 2 MB of information now and God only knows the memory capacity of my digital/video cell phone. I'm sure it surpasses that wonderful technological innovation of the 2 MB of RAM that my computer had at the time. The newer computers were coming out with 4 and 8 MB and that was top of the line for 1993-94. I was briefly introduced to the Internet via the military when in Korea and was shown how to use Email. GADZOOKS!!!! What a complicated contraption and mind boggling method of sending a message I though. So many steps and things to remember on the antiquated computer technology. The military had had yet to be retrofitted with Windows. Windows was a new concept for the average home computer user anyway with it's debut sometime around 1990-1991 and it was just being introduced on military computers.
How I thought we were so advanced when the magic of Windows and a click of a mouse got you where you wanted to go on the computer.
Too intimidated to even experiment with Email using the military's system I never bothered. Even though I had purchased a computer with Windows when in Korea we had no way then of privately hooking up to the Internet then since we didn't have private phone lines in our rooms.
Now it was 1994 and I was stationed in Biloxi, MS and I had brought along my computer purchased a year before in Korea. I went to the Base PX and bought Prodigy Internet service as I heard that the Internet from a few folk was the big whoop tee do. I also had to buy an internal modem so I could get on the then NEW information superhighway. I knew nothing about computers but bought the Prodigy Internet Software and the purchase of my new Internal modem. How I was going to hook it all up was beyond me. I think that the Internal modem card came with the Prodigy software. I don't remember now.
By some miracle of fate and easy to follow instructions I managed to install the modem and the software without incident or crashing my computer. During those wee hours in my private room in the military barracks I followed the tutorial for account setup which was easy and was now for the first time connected on the Internet to the outside world in July 1994. What a Marvel it was to look at News, weather on the computer. It wasn't long before I was browsing other venues on that slow 2400 BPS rate..hey that was good for the time. I remember seeing a photo come along with a news picture. Stupid photo must have taken about 10 minutes to download but it was a technological marvel. Now I get ticked off if that photo takes 10 seconds to load on high speed DSL...how things have changed.
The next day a call to my best friend up north telling her about Prodigy. She too had just obtained it and we exchanged email addy's. What a marvel to write a letter, hit the send button to have it pop up on someone else's computer in an instant and it was so easy.
Soon I was off to a remote area in Texas in late 1994 and hooking up to the Internet was now a 150 mile long distance call to connect to the nearest modem server. They didn't have the various local ISP server connections that you could crosslink with other services...such as I use my phone company's ISP to access America Online today.
I used Internet for emails only. All replies and composing of email was done offline. I used the Flash mail feature to send/receive email that took less than one minute to accomplish. I had a calling plan of 10 cents a minute for long distance then so it wasn't too bad. Internet Surfing was out of the question having to pay long distance fees. Surfing the Net was a slow and tedious process in those days and one could quickly burn some serious time. I'm cheap!!!...I didn't want to pay the long distance. However in those days you were billed by the hour for your Internet use by Prodigy and America Online and I think they had various package deals. Like today's cell phones when you went over your allotted time the charges were steep.
Tired of Prodigy and it's garish screen colors and limited capabilities I switched to America Online sometime in 1995. WOW...big improvement and yet easier to use.
1996 I was out of the military and moved to South Florida and I once again had a local connection and I had X amount of online hours on my plan. Now I was seeing what the Internet was all about. I was in heaven!! at the wealth of info out there on my 2MB computer. Computers were advancing faster than I could keep up. I think I had a 386 and now they were coming out with 486's and 586's with the advent of the Pentium processor. Then America Online went with $14.95 a month for unlimited online time. We all know all the other Internet Service Providers soon followed suit. A practical meltdown with phone communications occurred with the unlimited use of Internet now available and millions of people buying computers and logging on to the World Wide Web. Folk had to get second phone lines for there computer since being on the Internet tied up the primary phone line. Additional lines were also needed in nd by ISP providers to meet the burgeoning demand and new area codes had to be created as old area codes ran out of phone numbers. An Area Code number explosion began...those were the days.
Phone lines were so jammed it was impossible to log onto the Internet during peak evening/weekend hours. You learned once you logged on you didn't dare shut the thing off, at least during peak hours and you prayed you didn't get bumped offline either. I was in the world of chat rooms, bulletin boards and Yahoo...WOW this was just icing on the cake.
The things Available on the Internet in the mid to late 90's was archaic in today's comparisons but unlimited in scopes of information one could obtain..
The World Wide Web was growing exponentially daily as we entered the dot.com era. Trying to upgrade my then 5 year old dinosaur computer was a valiant waste. It was time to purchase a new one. 1998 I purchased a 486..WOW.... I forget the MHZ speed it was and I think we had progressed up to now 56K speed modem...Wow this was much faster than waiting minutes for a web page to download on the old computer I had. That computer was soon replaced in 2000 and again in 2003 to keep up.
Whatever I wanted to look up it was there. If it was on the World Wide Web one could certainly obtain it easily via there favorite search engine. Remember there were no pop up ads then, no Ad-ware data miners and if you typed in the word "tonsillitis" you weren't automatically brought to a screen full of lusty, big bodacious blonde ladies promising to show you more. You got to where you wanted to go. One could access anything from looking up about a dog breed, to health concerns to the far out and beyond and even to the extreme with schematics on how to build a bomb. One could look up anything without fear or retribution from prying eyes of the outside world.
Then to my surprise one day I typed in something on a search engine that was rather benign and I was shocked to see naked pictures of topless women performing oral sex or other variants of adult consentual sex acts on the screen. I didn't ask for this crap!!! and when I tried to close out of the program it wouldn't let me. The screen kept popping up and no matter how many times you tried to use the back button or red X button on upper right corner of your screen. Only way out was to shut down and reboot. Fortunately it didn't happen that often..not yet anyway.
It only got worse from there. One could access an adult site and see ALL. There was no Adult Check back then and young children were seeing the same thing as us Adults and seeing things that they shouldn't be seeing. So Adult check came out that involved using a credit card for age verification purposes but the sites were still free. I was hip with that as I didn't agree with children being able to access adult sites. Soon the free of charge thing went by the wayside and every adult site had there own version of adult check and you paid your subscription for access to just about every Adult site. I heard of folk spending countless amount of $$$ a month just to view adult photos. Online video was still in it's infant stages. Wouldn't just a few $$$ movie rental at the adult video store do??...NOPE!!!!. We now had the privacy from the world via screen and made up user names so nobody had to know what one was up to in the privacy of there own home. I never liked accessing those sites anyway and I certainly wasn't going to PAY to see adult pictures on the Internet only to have it lock up my computer anyway. The Interent very quickly became a Giant Cesspool Pornographic Haven.
Then the sickos came along with child porn. The Govt had to step in and start monitoring both the sites and now using technology to track peoples Internet activity. That too only gets worse.
I was surfing the Internet daily and purchasing all kinds of things as we closed out the last century/millennium. It was so wonderful to purchase things on the computer only to have it arrive at my house a few days/a week later. We were in the height of the Dot.com boom. Corporations down to the little guy soon found out the Internet was a very fast, simple way to make money, lots of money..honestly and dishonestly. Then came SPAM (Unsolicited Email) that filled out email boxes to capacity with advertisements usually comprising of snake oil schemes to loose weight, get rich, loan schemes, where to buy prescription drugs and for men to increase the size of there genitailia...
There has been huge public outcry over this.
We are all assured that this is going to stop but it's only gotten worse and this is 2005 unless you have an arsenal of protection on your computer to stop all this.
Then these annoying popup ads starting showing up while surfing the Internet..They STILL DO!! despite my Pop Up Blockers, Firewalls. They were so bad at times one had to then again shut down computer and reboot to stop the bombardment.
I'm an info junkie so I was able to access most online newspaper sites with just one click of the button and most other sites as well.
Following 9/11/01 things drastically changed. The far out good stuff and the extreme on the Internet was being wiped off as quick as the websites popped up...thanks to Homeland Security. The pop ups only got worse and typing in a simple, benign word on your search engine brought a plethora of Adult Porn sites..that hasn't changed.
Then many and to this day are an increasing number sites are requiring you to register a user name and password. Holy Christ!!! I have pages of typed papers of the websites I visit with the user names and passwords. I got smart there and used the same user name but over the years my tastes for user names changed so now there is a plethora of user names. It was only for registration or should is say "Tracking" purposes but still free. That too in 2005 is changing.
I went to look up a newpaper article the other day in the LA Times...WHAT!!! not only do they want a user name/password but now they are charging access for the exclusive news info. Well I ushered out a few expletives outloud basically telling that website where to go and exited out of there web page real quick.
Another night I went over to one of my favorite conspiracy web sites. It now required registration and a subscription fee... SCREW THAT!!!! many other sites I can obtain the same info from. This was a top primo site for a plehtora of knowledge too. I refuse to PAY for it though.
The past couple of years I've noticed my private emails I sent to my friends, family or what I write on the Yahoo Forums key words are popping up in my SPAM email. Not to say that whatever you search on the search engines you will get SPAM. The past few days I was searching about Firefighters, looking at various photos of fire fighting apparatus, photos of fires and accident scenes. I wonder how long it will take for the Data Miners to put some junk email relating to my recent search topics.
I looked up snow pictures some weeks ago, I got ads for skiing vacations and warm weather retreats!!!. I live in a tropical climate and if I want to see snow I have family members that would be more than happy to have me come and visit.
Fortunately the arsenal of SPAM blockers, Pop Up blockers I've employed have eliminated about 95% of that crap. It's these damn firewalls in my computer that are messing up other online applications though like my online radio!!!.
How far is it going to go?. How low are they going to sink. Must we be bombarded by Junk Email, Spam, and Popups?? and Porno sites? If I want a service I know where to go and look for it. I don't need the crap bombarding me. When I type in looking for "INNOCENT" information must I see something relating to the human genitalia or copulation??!!!
The Internet is on the Demise in my opinion. It's gone from the information superhighway it once was. More and more sites that once were free you now have to pay for!!!. These folk figured out they were loosing money in the real world and now are regaining it thorough cyberspace. I REFUSE TO PAY!!!!...I'll go broke!!!. It's bad enough I pay for access to the Internet and then have to pay for the info???... I know a nice place where the sun don't shine they can stuff it!!!!!.
There are many free sites out there STILL but it's slowly being eroded. Just the other day I tried looking up some old military buddies. No matter what white pages source I typed in...I was automatically linked to Intellus.com... For $39.95 I could find out EVERYTHING about them. I only wanted to see if they still lived in there home towns was all and no intentions of calling them. Ironic...I typed in my own name and the address and phone number showed up without the Intellus.com referral.
Capitalism and Corporate socialism are quickly enroaching and have been enroaching on the very internet. The greed for money and the people who are so willingly part with it. I know there have been various Bills trying to be passed by the U.S. Post office to charge each email we send. They are loosing money and have been with snail mail. When the day comes I have to pay for sending email is the day I unplug this technological marvel called a computer.
Isn't it bad enough our own Government is watching our every move with Big Brother technology on the so called Information Superhighway? Big mainframe computers scan the millions and millions of computer users every second searching for Keywords. Once they get a ping off your computer of whatever plethora of Keywords they are searching for you become closely scrutinized!!!! and pegged!!.
God forbid you should talk about how you Bombed out with the big deal at the office or you had gas and farting so bad you referred it online as to dropping bombs left and right...OOOPS...I used a keyword there...."bombs"..oh well I'm pegged now. TRUST ME!!!! I know!!. Not to mention the technology is there that logs your every keystroke..even if you delete it from the screen and only you see it...guaranteed if your are "pegged" Big Brother has seen it.
I miss the old days of the Internet. Yes it was slow but we got where we needed to go. I just fear the day when that big bodacious woman comes out of my screen in a hologram in my living room inviting me to come and see her Hologram cam.
The Redneck Cowboy
I remember my first time getting on the Internet. I had arrived back to the United States in January 1994 after a 1 year stint in Seoul, Korea. It was in Korea in 1993 at the Army PX I bought a brand new computer and monitor. I thought I was pretty high tech to just have a 2 MB computer in 1993. My digital watch holds like 2 MB of information now and God only knows the memory capacity of my digital/video cell phone. I'm sure it surpasses that wonderful technological innovation of the 2 MB of RAM that my computer had at the time. The newer computers were coming out with 4 and 8 MB and that was top of the line for 1993-94. I was briefly introduced to the Internet via the military when in Korea and was shown how to use Email. GADZOOKS!!!! What a complicated contraption and mind boggling method of sending a message I though. So many steps and things to remember on the antiquated computer technology. The military had had yet to be retrofitted with Windows. Windows was a new concept for the average home computer user anyway with it's debut sometime around 1990-1991 and it was just being introduced on military computers.
How I thought we were so advanced when the magic of Windows and a click of a mouse got you where you wanted to go on the computer.
Too intimidated to even experiment with Email using the military's system I never bothered. Even though I had purchased a computer with Windows when in Korea we had no way then of privately hooking up to the Internet then since we didn't have private phone lines in our rooms.
Now it was 1994 and I was stationed in Biloxi, MS and I had brought along my computer purchased a year before in Korea. I went to the Base PX and bought Prodigy Internet service as I heard that the Internet from a few folk was the big whoop tee do. I also had to buy an internal modem so I could get on the then NEW information superhighway. I knew nothing about computers but bought the Prodigy Internet Software and the purchase of my new Internal modem. How I was going to hook it all up was beyond me. I think that the Internal modem card came with the Prodigy software. I don't remember now.
By some miracle of fate and easy to follow instructions I managed to install the modem and the software without incident or crashing my computer. During those wee hours in my private room in the military barracks I followed the tutorial for account setup which was easy and was now for the first time connected on the Internet to the outside world in July 1994. What a Marvel it was to look at News, weather on the computer. It wasn't long before I was browsing other venues on that slow 2400 BPS rate..hey that was good for the time. I remember seeing a photo come along with a news picture. Stupid photo must have taken about 10 minutes to download but it was a technological marvel. Now I get ticked off if that photo takes 10 seconds to load on high speed DSL...how things have changed.
The next day a call to my best friend up north telling her about Prodigy. She too had just obtained it and we exchanged email addy's. What a marvel to write a letter, hit the send button to have it pop up on someone else's computer in an instant and it was so easy.
Soon I was off to a remote area in Texas in late 1994 and hooking up to the Internet was now a 150 mile long distance call to connect to the nearest modem server. They didn't have the various local ISP server connections that you could crosslink with other services...such as I use my phone company's ISP to access America Online today.
I used Internet for emails only. All replies and composing of email was done offline. I used the Flash mail feature to send/receive email that took less than one minute to accomplish. I had a calling plan of 10 cents a minute for long distance then so it wasn't too bad. Internet Surfing was out of the question having to pay long distance fees. Surfing the Net was a slow and tedious process in those days and one could quickly burn some serious time. I'm cheap!!!...I didn't want to pay the long distance. However in those days you were billed by the hour for your Internet use by Prodigy and America Online and I think they had various package deals. Like today's cell phones when you went over your allotted time the charges were steep.
Tired of Prodigy and it's garish screen colors and limited capabilities I switched to America Online sometime in 1995. WOW...big improvement and yet easier to use.
1996 I was out of the military and moved to South Florida and I once again had a local connection and I had X amount of online hours on my plan. Now I was seeing what the Internet was all about. I was in heaven!! at the wealth of info out there on my 2MB computer. Computers were advancing faster than I could keep up. I think I had a 386 and now they were coming out with 486's and 586's with the advent of the Pentium processor. Then America Online went with $14.95 a month for unlimited online time. We all know all the other Internet Service Providers soon followed suit. A practical meltdown with phone communications occurred with the unlimited use of Internet now available and millions of people buying computers and logging on to the World Wide Web. Folk had to get second phone lines for there computer since being on the Internet tied up the primary phone line. Additional lines were also needed in nd by ISP providers to meet the burgeoning demand and new area codes had to be created as old area codes ran out of phone numbers. An Area Code number explosion began...those were the days.
Phone lines were so jammed it was impossible to log onto the Internet during peak evening/weekend hours. You learned once you logged on you didn't dare shut the thing off, at least during peak hours and you prayed you didn't get bumped offline either. I was in the world of chat rooms, bulletin boards and Yahoo...WOW this was just icing on the cake.
The things Available on the Internet in the mid to late 90's was archaic in today's comparisons but unlimited in scopes of information one could obtain..
The World Wide Web was growing exponentially daily as we entered the dot.com era. Trying to upgrade my then 5 year old dinosaur computer was a valiant waste. It was time to purchase a new one. 1998 I purchased a 486..WOW.... I forget the MHZ speed it was and I think we had progressed up to now 56K speed modem...Wow this was much faster than waiting minutes for a web page to download on the old computer I had. That computer was soon replaced in 2000 and again in 2003 to keep up.
Whatever I wanted to look up it was there. If it was on the World Wide Web one could certainly obtain it easily via there favorite search engine. Remember there were no pop up ads then, no Ad-ware data miners and if you typed in the word "tonsillitis" you weren't automatically brought to a screen full of lusty, big bodacious blonde ladies promising to show you more. You got to where you wanted to go. One could access anything from looking up about a dog breed, to health concerns to the far out and beyond and even to the extreme with schematics on how to build a bomb. One could look up anything without fear or retribution from prying eyes of the outside world.
Then to my surprise one day I typed in something on a search engine that was rather benign and I was shocked to see naked pictures of topless women performing oral sex or other variants of adult consentual sex acts on the screen. I didn't ask for this crap!!! and when I tried to close out of the program it wouldn't let me. The screen kept popping up and no matter how many times you tried to use the back button or red X button on upper right corner of your screen. Only way out was to shut down and reboot. Fortunately it didn't happen that often..not yet anyway.
It only got worse from there. One could access an adult site and see ALL. There was no Adult Check back then and young children were seeing the same thing as us Adults and seeing things that they shouldn't be seeing. So Adult check came out that involved using a credit card for age verification purposes but the sites were still free. I was hip with that as I didn't agree with children being able to access adult sites. Soon the free of charge thing went by the wayside and every adult site had there own version of adult check and you paid your subscription for access to just about every Adult site. I heard of folk spending countless amount of $$$ a month just to view adult photos. Online video was still in it's infant stages. Wouldn't just a few $$$ movie rental at the adult video store do??...NOPE!!!!. We now had the privacy from the world via screen and made up user names so nobody had to know what one was up to in the privacy of there own home. I never liked accessing those sites anyway and I certainly wasn't going to PAY to see adult pictures on the Internet only to have it lock up my computer anyway. The Interent very quickly became a Giant Cesspool Pornographic Haven.
Then the sickos came along with child porn. The Govt had to step in and start monitoring both the sites and now using technology to track peoples Internet activity. That too only gets worse.
I was surfing the Internet daily and purchasing all kinds of things as we closed out the last century/millennium. It was so wonderful to purchase things on the computer only to have it arrive at my house a few days/a week later. We were in the height of the Dot.com boom. Corporations down to the little guy soon found out the Internet was a very fast, simple way to make money, lots of money..honestly and dishonestly. Then came SPAM (Unsolicited Email) that filled out email boxes to capacity with advertisements usually comprising of snake oil schemes to loose weight, get rich, loan schemes, where to buy prescription drugs and for men to increase the size of there genitailia...
There has been huge public outcry over this.
We are all assured that this is going to stop but it's only gotten worse and this is 2005 unless you have an arsenal of protection on your computer to stop all this.
Then these annoying popup ads starting showing up while surfing the Internet..They STILL DO!! despite my Pop Up Blockers, Firewalls. They were so bad at times one had to then again shut down computer and reboot to stop the bombardment.
I'm an info junkie so I was able to access most online newspaper sites with just one click of the button and most other sites as well.
Following 9/11/01 things drastically changed. The far out good stuff and the extreme on the Internet was being wiped off as quick as the websites popped up...thanks to Homeland Security. The pop ups only got worse and typing in a simple, benign word on your search engine brought a plethora of Adult Porn sites..that hasn't changed.
Then many and to this day are an increasing number sites are requiring you to register a user name and password. Holy Christ!!! I have pages of typed papers of the websites I visit with the user names and passwords. I got smart there and used the same user name but over the years my tastes for user names changed so now there is a plethora of user names. It was only for registration or should is say "Tracking" purposes but still free. That too in 2005 is changing.
I went to look up a newpaper article the other day in the LA Times...WHAT!!! not only do they want a user name/password but now they are charging access for the exclusive news info. Well I ushered out a few expletives outloud basically telling that website where to go and exited out of there web page real quick.
Another night I went over to one of my favorite conspiracy web sites. It now required registration and a subscription fee... SCREW THAT!!!! many other sites I can obtain the same info from. This was a top primo site for a plehtora of knowledge too. I refuse to PAY for it though.
The past couple of years I've noticed my private emails I sent to my friends, family or what I write on the Yahoo Forums key words are popping up in my SPAM email. Not to say that whatever you search on the search engines you will get SPAM. The past few days I was searching about Firefighters, looking at various photos of fire fighting apparatus, photos of fires and accident scenes. I wonder how long it will take for the Data Miners to put some junk email relating to my recent search topics.
I looked up snow pictures some weeks ago, I got ads for skiing vacations and warm weather retreats!!!. I live in a tropical climate and if I want to see snow I have family members that would be more than happy to have me come and visit.
Fortunately the arsenal of SPAM blockers, Pop Up blockers I've employed have eliminated about 95% of that crap. It's these damn firewalls in my computer that are messing up other online applications though like my online radio!!!.
How far is it going to go?. How low are they going to sink. Must we be bombarded by Junk Email, Spam, and Popups?? and Porno sites? If I want a service I know where to go and look for it. I don't need the crap bombarding me. When I type in looking for "INNOCENT" information must I see something relating to the human genitalia or copulation??!!!
The Internet is on the Demise in my opinion. It's gone from the information superhighway it once was. More and more sites that once were free you now have to pay for!!!. These folk figured out they were loosing money in the real world and now are regaining it thorough cyberspace. I REFUSE TO PAY!!!!...I'll go broke!!!. It's bad enough I pay for access to the Internet and then have to pay for the info???... I know a nice place where the sun don't shine they can stuff it!!!!!.
There are many free sites out there STILL but it's slowly being eroded. Just the other day I tried looking up some old military buddies. No matter what white pages source I typed in...I was automatically linked to Intellus.com... For $39.95 I could find out EVERYTHING about them. I only wanted to see if they still lived in there home towns was all and no intentions of calling them. Ironic...I typed in my own name and the address and phone number showed up without the Intellus.com referral.
Capitalism and Corporate socialism are quickly enroaching and have been enroaching on the very internet. The greed for money and the people who are so willingly part with it. I know there have been various Bills trying to be passed by the U.S. Post office to charge each email we send. They are loosing money and have been with snail mail. When the day comes I have to pay for sending email is the day I unplug this technological marvel called a computer.
Isn't it bad enough our own Government is watching our every move with Big Brother technology on the so called Information Superhighway? Big mainframe computers scan the millions and millions of computer users every second searching for Keywords. Once they get a ping off your computer of whatever plethora of Keywords they are searching for you become closely scrutinized!!!! and pegged!!.
God forbid you should talk about how you Bombed out with the big deal at the office or you had gas and farting so bad you referred it online as to dropping bombs left and right...OOOPS...I used a keyword there...."bombs"..oh well I'm pegged now. TRUST ME!!!! I know!!. Not to mention the technology is there that logs your every keystroke..even if you delete it from the screen and only you see it...guaranteed if your are "pegged" Big Brother has seen it.
I miss the old days of the Internet. Yes it was slow but we got where we needed to go. I just fear the day when that big bodacious woman comes out of my screen in a hologram in my living room inviting me to come and see her Hologram cam.
The Redneck Cowboy
posted by Concrete Fireman at 10:20 PM
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