Technology | Learning | The 1990s
Learning To Be Thankful Is Easy: Tech Ed. Vol 2
Desktop computing in the era of early video game pioneering, dial-up modems, and the advent of the public internet
INTRODUCTION
In this volume, you will learn what home computing was like in the 1990s, including dial-up connections, early video games that changed that landscape and using the public internet in its infancy.
This series is of interest to anyone who…
1) Didn’t experience these things first hand and is curious about the history of computing
or
2) Was there during that time period but never “got into computers” (perhaps you knew someone who did)
or
3) Was already using computers then and would like to reminisce about those days
The information is kept vendor-agnostic wherever possible, with a handful of exceptions that refer to recognizable brand names of the time for context. There also are no dry timelines of events!
BONUS: You don’t need any preexisting technical knowledge to follow along.
EARLY VIDEO GAME PIONEERING
No recap of home computing history between the late 80s and mid-90s would be complete without discussing the pioneering efforts of the Sierra On-Line (Sierra) and id Software video game developers and designers.
Sierra On-Line: The birth of graphic adventure games (Quests)
A company that was easily one of the most popular ones for home computer video games at the time. Plus, not only were their games highly sought-after, but they were also an effective English as a Second Language vocab learning tool for players whose native language wasn’t English. This is because the hero in each game was controlled by typing commands and seeing the resulting actions being carried out by the character on the screen. Also interesting to note is that the developers often made an effort to inject humor throughout these gaming products.
The following franchises from Sierra are particularly noteworthy and guaranteed to bring back a lot of memories for those who played them for countless hours:
- Police Quest (the hero is a police officer/detective)
- Space Quest (the hero is a janitor)
- King’s Quest (classical hero trying to rescue a princess and such)
- Leisure Suit Larry (adult-themed, the hero is trying to get lucky… surprisingly playable and entertaining even for teenagers!)
id Software: The birth of First Person Shooter (FPS) games
I feel it’s important to also mention the birth of the FPS game genre which continues to be extremely popular to this day. This first game of its kind was Wolfenstein 3D, and it was conceived by VG programming pioneers John Carmack and John Romero of id Software, who then followed it with the excellent Doom (on which the 2005 movie was based). But their biggest breakthrough came next, in the form of the Quake FPS franchise, which is notable for being arguably the first very successful FPS game to allow playing over a Local Area Network (LAN).
MODEMS AND DIAL-UP CONNECTIONS
In Vol. 1, we mentioned using a modem to connect to a public Bulletin Board System (BBS). A regular analog phone line — the one with a rotary telephone attached to it — could handle a variety of modem speeds. This speed was measured in “bauds” and was determined by the type of modem.
Two famous brands that dominated the market at the time were Hayes and USRobotics. The first “practical” modem speed was probably 300 bauds. At this speed, you could expect to sit in front of your computer screen for several minutes for a single page of text to finish downloading on your screen. Nothing to write home about! Other popular low baud rates were 1200 and 2400. At 2400, it would take around 1–2 minutes per page of text.
After that, you started to hear about some 9600 baud modems, but the commercial “break-through” for home users was definitely the USRobotics 14,400 baud modem. This was part of their High-Speed Transfer (HST) line. Home users who had a USR 14,400 modem and especially those running their own public BBS got noticed. This was a fancy and expensive option at the time. It could easily cost you upwards of US$500 for a basic model, and several hundred dollars more for a fax-capable modem that could also double as your fax machine.
THE IMPACT OF FILE COMPRESSION UTILITIES (ZIP, ETC)
The importance of having the ability to shrink files to package them together for transfer purposes cannot be overstated. At a time when it took so long to transfer a simple page of data, software programs and text documents were, by comparison, much larger to handle. The time it took to copy files between computers using floppy disks* or to download/upload those files on a BBS was directly proportionate to the transfer speed of your computer data bus(for floppy disks) or your modem speed (for dial-up transfers).
*See Vol. 1.
The first time one had a chance to use a compression utility was a thing of beauty. Imagine being used to seeing long lists of files and suddenly having the ability to compress and package them all together in a significantly smaller, single file that could be easily transferred. It was, literally, mind-blowing. Technically, this is called “archiving” files. The most commonly seen and used archival formats at the time were probably LHarc (LZH), RAR, ZIP, and ACE. I’m sure that most of you are familiar with ZIP and RAR, two formats that have continued to be widely used since. The main difference between then and now is that everything used to be done using a command-line prompt.
THE BLACK & WHITE INTERNET OF THE EARLY DAYS
From around 1990 to 1992, before the first Microsoft Windows graphical user interface operating systems started to become available and seen in homes across North America, there was already a public Internet connecting computer networks made up of Universities, businesses, and even some early Internet Service Provider (ISP) services.
In North America there were a few Freenet services, usually provided through universities. In Canada, the main one was the National Capital Freenet. Following some not-so-user-friendly software installations and configurations, and registering for an account using a government ID, you could get something like 30 minutes of free access per day. This consisted of access to a number of discussion groups, called “Special Interest Groups” (SIGs) covering a variety of topics, and an email address to send and receive messages with.
The NCSA Mosaic Web browser is one of the first widely popular internet web browsers that was used back then. It is the precursor to Netscape Navigator, which itself eventually became the Mozilla Firefox browser that is well-known and still in use today.
INTERNET SERVICE PROVIDERS (ISPs) AND COMMON ONLINE USE CASES
As technology progressed throughout the 1990s, images and sounds started to become common on the internet. And by the time Windows 95 came out that year the most popular internet service provider (ISP) in the United States was America Online (AOL). This dial-up subscription-based service was so popular that the software client required to connect to it came packaged with the Windows 95 installation software. In the late 1990s, the proprietary AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) was the leading instant messaging (IM)* client in the US and a few other countries as well.
What’s most impressive about AOL, however, is that its internet access subscription service had grown to be so prevalent in the public internet space by the end of the decade that the company ended up purchasing the Time Warner company in 2001.
The Internet Relay Chat protocol was the earliest technology to be adopted to make real-time text communications possible on the internet, and it was implemented in the form of discussion groups with “channels”, where each channel represented a specific topic of discussion.
Another important player of the time was the Yahoo Web Directory which, once it added a search function to its web page, became the first web search engine to gain wide acceptance. In addition to this searching capability, Yahoo! also had a very successful instant messaging client called Yahoo! Messenger. Note that all of this happened years before Google was founded.
And, finally, Mapquest was the website for getting and printing directions online at the time. The service would later be purchased by AOL in 2000.
It would take a few more years before voice calling using the internet became a reality, and a further full decade longer before free video calling arrived, both courtesy of Skype.
CONCLUSION
I hope that this has provided you with an interesting insight into who and what were some of the key players and technologies available in the world of 1990s desktop computing.
Keep an eye open for the next article in this Learning To Be Thankful Is Easy series.
Q. Did you, or anyone you knew, use any of the technologies I’ve discussed here?
PREVIOUS VOLUMES IN THE LEARNING TO BE THANKFUL IS EASY SERIES
Vol. 1 — Desktop computing before Windows and Macintosh
All the best,
Pascal
PS: You can read more about me here.
