You youngins got things easy. In our day, we had to search uphill, twice. No simple Google search, We had to gopher to get our documents. When we finally did get HTML, it was simple. No flash, nothin' fancy like that. But we did have blink. Just plain old web pages like the Model-T, we could have whatever color we wanted, as long as it was black. Cascading style sheets? Ha! And the speed. Today you got it easy with cable and fiber and wifi. Them were slow days I tell ya, 14.4k modem. Felt like a thirsty man walking across a desert and have to drink water through a capillary tube...
Oh, my god. A gopher reference! I spent many, many days in school trying to find cool sites with gopher and via anonymous FTP, generally without success. That's what happens when you get your coding assignments done too quickly...
That said, we did have a frame relay, which was state-of-the-art for a high school at the time.
Gopher, are you kidding me? We would have loved to have something as nice as Gopher when I was a kid.
When I was your age, we didn't need any stinking search, because if you couldn't find the file you needed on a single sided 5 1/4" floppy disk you wrote it down wrong on the label, and you had to find the right file your floppy was on.
I also the delirious joy I experienced on getting my very first 1400 baud modem. It took me weeks to figure out the right protocol settings to get it to dial and connect to the local BBS. Within days of figuring that out, my father stormed into my bedroom because the phone line had been busy for 3 hours, and I was banned from using the modem for weeks.
He'd just seen the movie War Games and was worried that I might try to hack NORAD or something. Sigh.
I'm 23, but I still remember fighting with Altavista and Excite to try to get anything even remotely relevant on the web. Google certainly transformed the utility of the web overnight for me.
Rest assured, I have not forgotten any of those. :) But my personal tools were conservative - Lycos, Altavista, Excite. That's why I was wary of and didn't initially buy into this newfangled so-called "Google" bandwagon.
I remember when Netscape Navigator practically was the Web. "Yeah, there's this thing called the Web, you use a program called Netscape to access it". It's kind of like the relationship between PDF and Acrobat when they came out together, or the way PowerPoint is the only slideshow software most people know of.
I remember first seeing the Internet and thinking "How can you load two different things at once? Surely the phone line is dedicated to downloading one thing at a time?" .. a childhood of BBS use had spoiled me ;-)
