It’s weird to have grown up with things like bbc micro and MS-DOS and see how alien the terminal is to people who didn’t.
Back then CLIs were all over, even like library catalog terminals, were CLI. TBF some still had card indexes though.
At university everyone had to ssh in to the email server from whatever tty client even on windows (nt4/nt5/98/2k/mackintosh PCs).
You definitely didn’t feel like any hacker. The hacker level thing was to successfully connect via GUI mail client and actually have your emails update and sync properly - very few bothered.
I vaguely remember using putty on port 22 which i thought was ssh, but maybe it was telnet.
we were leaving the 90s by then, so I think ssh was around.
Might also have been different protocol on the uni LAN vs WAN connections.
The libraries I remember might have been direct terminals to local server.
Few catalogs were available even on the uni-wide LAN.
No big deal really since you’re going to have to go there to find the book anyway.
The catalog room was an acceptable place to have a chat or lament the size of the reading list.
Fair enough, I guess my overall point was more that we’ve all at some point taken that first step of doing something that now feels mundane, but at the time felt like we were doing something very advanced.
Let’s be reasonable: We were all at some point at the stage where doing anything at all in the terminal made us feel like a god.
It’s weird to have grown up with things like bbc micro and MS-DOS and see how alien the terminal is to people who didn’t.
Back then CLIs were all over, even like library catalog terminals, were CLI. TBF some still had card indexes though.
At university everyone had to ssh in to the email server from whatever tty client even on windows (nt4/nt5/98/2k/mackintosh PCs).
You definitely didn’t feel like any hacker. The hacker level thing was to successfully connect via GUI mail client and actually have your emails update and sync properly - very few bothered.
Do you mean telnet?
Very possibly.
I vaguely remember using putty on port 22 which i thought was ssh, but maybe it was telnet. we were leaving the 90s by then, so I think ssh was around. Might also have been different protocol on the uni LAN vs WAN connections.
The libraries I remember might have been direct terminals to local server. Few catalogs were available even on the uni-wide LAN. No big deal really since you’re going to have to go there to find the book anyway.
The catalog room was an acceptable place to have a chat or lament the size of the reading list.
Don’t forget using cmatrix as a sudo-screensaver
Some of us were at the point where GUIs weren’t a thing and the terminal was the only option.
Fair enough, I guess my overall point was more that we’ve all at some point taken that first step of doing something that now feels mundane, but at the time felt like we were doing something very advanced.