{"id":946,"date":"2014-02-07T10:44:51","date_gmt":"2014-02-07T14:44:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/niftyc\/?p=946"},"modified":"2014-02-08T13:21:18","modified_gmt":"2014-02-08T17:21:18","slug":"what-came-before-social-media","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/niftyc\/archives\/946","title":{"rendered":"What Came Before Social Media?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>(or, <strong><em>Social Media circa 1994<\/em><\/strong>)<\/p>\n<p>(or, <strong><em>Happy 20th Birthday, My Home Page!<\/em><\/strong>)<\/p>\n<p>Thanks to the rigorous use of backups, I&#8217;ve just noticed that it is the twentieth anniversary of <a href=\"http:\/\/www.niftyc.org\">my personal home page<\/a>. In the spirit of commemoration, I&#8217;ve uploaded <a href=\"http:\/\/www-personal.umich.edu\/~csandvig\/booger.html\">the original version (c. 1994)<\/a>. For reasons I don&#8217;t remember now, I named it &#8220;<a href=\"http:\/\/www-personal.umich.edu\/~csandvig\/booger.html\"><strong>booger.html<\/strong><\/a>.&#8221; A screenshot:<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/socialmediacollective.files.wordpress.com\/2014\/02\/booger-html-screenshot.png\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-1953 aligncenter\" alt=\"booger.html screenshot\" src=\"http:\/\/socialmediacollective.files.wordpress.com\/2014\/02\/booger-html-screenshot.png?w=300\" width=\"300\" height=\"161\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>I stumbled upon this file while looking through my backups for something else. I also found all kinds of other interesting stuff. For example, I found my personal list of &#8220;<strong>hotlinks<\/strong>&#8221; (as we called them then).<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s very hard to <strong>reconstruct<\/strong> what the Web was like then. The Internet Archive had not begun operation yet. All of my old links to things are now dead, but it&#8217;s still interesting to try to remember how we were social with computers. Yes, there were &#8220;social media.&#8221; I&#8217;ll explain:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Apparently I was in a <strong><a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Webring\">Webring<\/a><\/strong>.<\/li>\n<li>I found my <strong><a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Pretty_Good_Privacy\">PGP Public Key<\/a><\/strong>. (No idea where the private key is.) I made my PGP public key available so people could send me a PGP encrypted message at any time. However, in ten years no one ever sent me a PGP encrypted message. But I was ready. (Take that NSA.) As long as I could find my PGP private key and remember the password from ten years ago, that is.<\/li>\n<li>My preferred search engine was <strong>Web Crawler<\/strong>.<\/li>\n<li>Later in the year I was very excited about\u00a0<strong><a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/HotWired\">Hot Wired<\/a><\/strong>, the first commercial magazine on the Web (an online version of Wired Magazine). It had its own URL then, which still works:\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.hotwired.com\">http:\/\/www.hotwired.com<\/a>\u00a0 Everything was prefaced with &#8220;hot&#8221; back then. That is a <em><strong>hotlink<\/strong><\/em> to <strong><em>HotWired.<\/em><\/strong><\/li>\n<li>I spent a lot of time doing <strong><a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Talk_(software)\">ytalk<\/a>\u00a0<\/strong>with my friends. Screenshot (found on the Internet &#8212; not mine):<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/socialmediacollective.files.wordpress.com\/2014\/02\/ytalk.png\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-1949 aligncenter\" alt=\"ytalk\" src=\"http:\/\/socialmediacollective.files.wordpress.com\/2014\/02\/ytalk.png?w=300\" width=\"300\" height=\"173\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>I exhorted people to look me up on <strong>whois<\/strong> and to &#8220;<strong>finger me<\/strong>.&#8221; I regularly updated my .<strong>plan<\/strong> and .<strong>project<\/strong> files, which were status updates. Yes, Mark Zuckerberg basically ripped off <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Finger_protocol\">the finger protocol<\/a>\u00a0from 1971, then added a facility to help Harvard men look at Harvard women (the &#8220;Facebook&#8221;) and &#8220;<a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Facebook_features#Poke\">poke<\/a>&#8221; them. Great job. Here&#8217;s an example finger query (not mine, found on the Web):<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/socialmediacollective.files.wordpress.com\/2014\/02\/finger-protocol.gif\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-1951 aligncenter\" alt=\"finger protocol\" src=\"http:\/\/socialmediacollective.files.wordpress.com\/2014\/02\/finger-protocol.gif?w=300\" width=\"300\" height=\"225\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>A lot of being on the Web in 1994 seems to be about <strong>just<\/strong>\u00a0<strong>being on the Web at all<\/strong>. For instance:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>I used the <strong>HotDog Web Editor<\/strong> for my HTML. Apparently because the logo was so cool. (I don&#8217;t think I used it for my first Web page &#8212;\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www-personal.umich.edu\/~csandvig\/booger.html\">booger.html<\/a> though because the HTML is terrible.)<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/socialmediacollective.files.wordpress.com\/2014\/02\/hotdog3.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-1948 aligncenter\" alt=\"hotdog3\" src=\"http:\/\/socialmediacollective.files.wordpress.com\/2014\/02\/hotdog3.jpg?w=300\" width=\"300\" height=\"187\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>I appear to have been on an obsessive search for new &#8220;<strong>icons.<\/strong>&#8221; I bookmarked a bunch of icon sharing sites, all now defunct.<\/li>\n<li>I was very interested in how to <strong><a href=\"http:\/\/whatis.techtarget.com\/definition\/interlaced-GIF\">interlace GIFs<\/a><\/strong>.<\/li>\n<li>Does anyone else remember <strong>Carlos&#8217;s Forms Tutorial<\/strong> at NCSA? I spent a huge amount of time there and looking at <a href=\"http:\/\/web.archive.org\/web\/19970303193722\/http:\/\/hoohoo.ncsa.uiuc.edu\/cgi\/overview.html\">the CGI documentation on a server named hoohoo<\/a>\u00a0(the link is a capture from 1996). I spent so much time on it that I memorized the URL, and we didn&#8217;t believe in short URLs then. UIUC loomed large in my imagination purely because of its Web stuff. Little did I know I would go on to work there and genuflect at <a href=\"http:\/\/farm1.staticflickr.com\/196\/447183492_6124e508d7_o.jpg\">the monument to the Web Browser<\/a> every single day.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>The ephemera above remind me that the Web was <strong><em>so<\/em> <em>exciting<\/em><\/strong> that a friend went to the DMV and got the California personalized license plate &#8220;<strong>IDOWWW<\/strong>&#8220;. I thought this might be the coolest thing anyone had ever done. In fact, I still think it is.<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s hard to believe <strong>twenty years<\/strong> have passed since <a href=\"http:\/\/www-personal.umich.edu\/~csandvig\/booger.html\">booger.html<\/a>. I want to keep the nostalgia going. Does anyone else remember anything about <strong>social media in 1994<\/strong>?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>(or, Social Media circa 1994) (or, Happy 20th Birthday, My Home Page!) Thanks to the rigorous use of backups, I&#8217;ve just noticed that it is the twentieth anniversary of my personal home page. In the spirit of commemoration, I&#8217;ve uploaded the original version (c. 1994). For reasons I don&#8217;t remember now, I named it &#8220;booger.html.&#8221; [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2132,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[6386],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-946","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-living"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4M7Bm-fg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/niftyc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/946","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/niftyc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/niftyc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/niftyc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2132"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/niftyc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=946"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/niftyc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/946\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":949,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/niftyc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/946\/revisions\/949"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/niftyc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=946"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/niftyc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=946"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/niftyc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=946"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}