This page describes what it was like to use the Internet in 1991. This was before almost anyone in ordinary life had even heard of the Internet. Back then, it was almost a completely blank slate — there were a lot less things which could be done on the Internet in the early days of the Net.

I was just an ordinary person at that stage, in the sense of not being an "insider" in any sense of the word, as I didn't have Internet access (nor even much information about the Internet, which in 1991 you couldn't just Google) through a university, or work, or anything other than personal interest.

I had a second-hand PC, which was a "286", that is, it had an Intel 80286 processor, and a black-and-white (a.k.a. monochrome) screen. No Windows, just plain DOS. No graphical display at all (other than black-and-white EGA graphics, maybe even VGA, I can't remember actually).

The way I connected to the Internet on my home PC was the same as how I would connect to any other "bulletin board", which was the then-popular way to connect a home computer to some other computer outside your home. You would dial in with a dial-up modem (the one I had was 2400 bits per second as I remember it), using a terminal emulation program such as Telix.

This would give you a character-only based type of interface, very much like if you go into the Command Prompt of Windows (and imagine that what's in the command prompt window is your whole entire screen, and everything you can do on the computer happens there) or the Terminal window of Linux or MacOS.

To access the real actual Internet, rather than just any ordinary bulletin board, I had a paid account. I have the number $10 in my head, though I forget if it was $10 a week or $10 a month. Something like that. I would dial into their number with Telix and end up in the terminal window (a.k.a. shell) of a Unix server on the Internet. I can't remember which version of Unix it was, but it was was probably Unix System V, or BSD Unix.

What I Did on the Internet in 1991

I'll split this up into three points, plus a fourth one:

0 — Browse the World-Wide-Web (WWW)

I'll call this point 0, because I have no memory of using the Web in 1991. I had the account in early to mid-1991. Definitely it would have been before 6 August 1991, which is when many people claim the first web page went online. Wikipedia disagrees with this, and says that there were a (very) few web pages months earlier than that. So its possible that there were web pages when I had my internet account. However the date of 6 August 1991 does seem to legitimately refer to when Tim Berners-Lee publicly announced on NNTP newsgroups that there was such a thing as the WWW — in which case there would probably been no way before that I could have known anything about its existence.

This early version of the Web was entirely text-based. Even Lynx (a current text-only web browser) wasn't released until 1992. According to Wikipedia, Lynx is the oldest web browser still being maintained.

There was no graphical (i.e. with pictures and text) web browser until Mosaic was released in September 1993.

If I did any browsing of the Web in 1991 (which I think is highly unlikely), it must have seemed so basic and insignificant and uninteresting and unimportant that I don't even remember it.

1 — Use Email

I remember that there was email in 1991, and I had an email account, and an email address. I don't remember what it was. The domain most likely would have been the domain of whatever the Unix server I was connected to was, and the username would have probably been the username of the Unix account that I had on that system.

Since no normal ordinary people had email (nor had even heard of it) in 1991, there wasn't a whole lot that I found to do with email, other than communicate with the administrators of the Unix system I was using.

The only type of 'Email' most Australians had heard of in 1991 was the company that made electrical applicances.

Bug Hunting 🐜

As an optional exercise, there's a security issue which relates to the photograph above — and also a solution for it, which has been implemented in the image itself. See if you can pick what it is...

If you can guess (or otherwise determine) what the security issue might be, and then look at the corresponding part of the image really closely (probably meaning that you will need to zoom in on it), you can notice the solution.

I deliberately implemented the "security fix" in a somewhat slack and somewhat detectable way, so that it's possible to notice it if you look really close at the right place in the image.

2 — Read the NNTP Newsgroups

There were definitely NNTP Newsgroups in 1991, I can remember those well. There were a lot of them, on all different kinds of topics.

3 — Learn How to Use Unix

This is what I spent by far the most amount of my time doing "on the Internet" in 1991.

Technically most of it doesn't even count as "Internet", since I was connecting to the server with a DOS (and DOS had no TCP/IP) based terminal emulator, and doing most of my Unix education on the server itself (and not on other Internet servers).

I had the book Peter Norton's Guide to Unix. There's a version of it which came out on February 13, 1991 — so it's likely that is the edition that I had, since it would have been not long after then when I bought it new. As I remember I went through the whole book, or at least most of it, and learned the basic Unix commands and other basics of Unix.

I remember thinking of Unix as a much more "real" operating system than DOS was, and I was therefore very keen to learn a "real" operating system used in the "big real world", and not "only" on personal computers at home (or even in offices), like DOS was.

I don't remember for sure, but it's likely that the entire reason I had the Internet account was due to being interested in Unix, and wanting to learn it, and looking for a Unix server account which I could use from home.

This was a long time before Linux was well-developed. The first versions of Linux appeared in late 1991, but not being able to afford a "386" based PC I would have been ruled out from trying these. And they were very rudimentary, containing not much more than the kernel, a shell, and a C compiler.

The Unix server I connected to was a fully-fledged multi-user Unix system, and the machine it ran on was hugely more powerful than my 286 home PC.

I remember that Peter Norton's book stressed the importance of the vi editor, and that if you wanted to be skilled at Unix (which I very much did), you had to know vi. So I spent some time learning vi. Eventually, in 1997-98, I wrote my entire Astrophysics honours thesis in vi on a Sun SparcStation, formatted using LaTeX.

Coming Soon

I didn't have the Unix/Internet account in 1991 for that long, maybe 3 months. I was very short of money at the time. I probably finished Peter Norton's Guide to Unix, and then decided the expense of the account was too much.

After that, the next time I used the Internet would have been either late 1993 or early 1994.

Eventually I'll write more about the early internet, including using Mosaic, and Netscaspe, and what it was like to connect a mid-1990s PC to the internet...

Cover image by Shutterstock

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