A weird little memorium today.

Back in the early 90s, there was no such thing as cheap public internet access. If you were a student, or worked at one of a very few large corporations, you could get access, otherwise you were generally out of luck.

The flip side of this is that, if you did have access, you had something quite unusual and rather special. Even back then, before the growth of the web, internet access meant that you had access to ftp sites and USENET newsgroups and gopher and a great many things that you couldn’t get through local BBSes or pay services like Compuserve.

I was just a high school student at the time, so I shouldn’t have been able to tap in to any of this and probably shouldn’t even have known it was out there.

On the other hand, I had unofficial access to an account at the local university, and that’s where I got my first exposure to the net. It was pretty intoxicating, and I spent far too many hours sucked into the comp.sys.* newsgroups. It’s no exaggeration to say that my career so far is owed to having early internet access and being able to tap into so much information that wasn’t otherwise available.

That ended when the Vax I had access to an account on got shut down in 1991. It was a pretty harsh separation – not as crippling, to be sure, as being netless would be today, but… I’d had, for a few months, a window into a much larger world, one which was still out there, and now it was closed, blinds pulled, and boards nailed across.

Then, a few months later, I ran into someone with the virtual equivalent of a claw hammer.

That gentleman’s name was David Casti, a student at the local college, and he wasin charge of a machine there called VECTOR. He also didn’t mind creating accountsfor people who, well, weren’t necessarily students. Life was good again, and although it didn’t last, it wasn’t too much longer before Delphi started offering reasonably inexpensive internet access, and not too much longer after that before the growth of freenets, and really not too much longer at all before the thought of not having access to the internet was actually unthinkable.

I probably wouldn’t remember any of this, except that while I was doing a searchfor something completely unrelated on my machine today, I ran across the following message from June 2, 1992:

SERVICE INTERRUPTION * SERVICE INTERRUPTION * SERVICE INTERRUPTION * SERVICE

OK, so the end is really here. I cannot guarantee that VECTOR will be
on the network after 5:00 p.m. June 5. I expect that it will remain
until the afternoon of June 10, but I make no guarantees and I don’t
want any misunderstandings about this. If you have any questions,
contact me.

Many of you have asked about access through other UO machines. Much to
my surprise (and your dismay) I have FAILED to find anyone who will
allow me to transfer my users to their system. I was surprised to find
such close-mindedness on the part of the university, especially because
the reasons they give are so lame: not enough time or money &c.

So, feel free to leech the network away these last few days. Please be
mindful of disk space. Currently there are 20 free megabytes. If they
fill up, no one will be able to log on except me, and I will be forced
to delete (what may appear to you to be random) files. A good guideline
would be to keep your off-line storage down to 5M. While you’re logged
on, feel free to use the disk, but before you log off prune your user
space.

Please keep in mind that I’m not falling off the edge of the Earth, and
although I won’t be able to help with network access right away, I may
be able to at some future point. Also, I will be happy to help anyone
who may find other ways to get network access. My account on OREGON will
probably remain active for a term or two, so I can receive mail at
dise@oregon.uoregon.edu.

Thank you all for treating me so well. I was happy to have provided
access — I’m just sorry it couldn’t have been for longer than a few months.

This service was provided (albeit unwittingly) by NeXT Computer and
the Institute of Theoretical Sciences at the University of Oregon.
Without their support, none of this would have been possible.

INTERRUPTION * SERVICE INTERRUPTION * SERVICE INTERRUPTION * SERVICE INTERR

16 years later, I’m going to bet that VECTOR is long since scrap, and that David has long since graduated and is hopefully doing well in whatever endeavours he’s decided to pursue. This whole thing, in fact, seems a bit quaint – these days, net access is universal, nearly free, and as impersonal as paying your water bill.

That’s what memoriums are for, though, for remembering things that – while they may not seem all that significant today – made a difference at the time.