I didn't really encounter the Internet until college when my classmates introduced me to local bulletin boards on the school's network. The web wasn't a thing at the time, it had just been proposed a few months earlier and work wouldn't begin on building it until the following year. So I learned about BBS, telnet, ftp and all manner of online frivolity.
I didn't really touch the web until five years later and my first exposure was through the Unix-based system of Lynx. It was all text-based with no mouse control and I was not terribly impressed. But two years later I began my career in IT as a Help Desk technician on a graveyard shift supporting Compuserve and I was forced to learn to use the earliest browsers like Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator. In my boredom of the wee hours of the morning I started looking up tutorials on building web pages and learned to program HTML from scratch. My very first webpage is still out there hosting my poetry and short stories, but since I try to keep my online persona separate from my real identity I'm not going to tell you where. ;)
My adoption of the web was a slow, gradual affair but it's become part of my daily life now. Any time there's something I want to know the first place I go is Google.
I didn't really touch the web until five years later and my first exposure was through the Unix-based system of Lynx. It was all text-based with no mouse control and I was not terribly impressed.
I wouldn't be either, didn't sound like a great system to use at all.
Well, it's certainly not as pretty to use as a modern GUI-based web browser, but when there were fewer pictures on the web, it was certainly a usable system. Even in the age of graphical browsers, there are times when features of Lynx (and Links) can be advantageous to troubleshooting web pages or scripting downloads.
I didn't really encounter the Internet until college when my classmates introduced me to local bulletin boards on the school's network. The web wasn't a thing at the time, it had just been proposed a few months earlier and work wouldn't begin on building it until the following year. So I learned about BBS, telnet, ftp and all manner of online frivolity.
I didn't really touch the web until five years later and my first exposure was through the Unix-based system of Lynx. It was all text-based with no mouse control and I was not terribly impressed. But two years later I began my career in IT as a Help Desk technician on a graveyard shift supporting Compuserve and I was forced to learn to use the earliest browsers like Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator. In my boredom of the wee hours of the morning I started looking up tutorials on building web pages and learned to program HTML from scratch. My very first webpage is still out there hosting my poetry and short stories, but since I try to keep my online persona separate from my real identity I'm not going to tell you where. ;)
My adoption of the web was a slow, gradual affair but it's become part of my daily life now. Any time there's something I want to know the first place I go is Google.
I wouldn't be either, didn't sound like a great system to use at all.
Well, it's certainly not as pretty to use as a modern GUI-based web browser, but when there were fewer pictures on the web, it was certainly a usable system. Even in the age of graphical browsers, there are times when features of Lynx (and Links) can be advantageous to troubleshooting web pages or scripting downloads.