First, I got “online” before “online” was a common term. When I bought my first computer in 1984 (a Macintosh 128K) I also bought a modem. A 300 BAUD modem. Back then 120 BAUD modems were pretty common, that’s what we used to run our ATM machines at the bank I worked at. We had a bank (no pun intended) of about a dozen 120 BAUD modems and they managed all of our ATM usage.

Anyway… I bought my Macintosh in the summer of 1984. And with the modem came a flyer advertising something called “Compuserve” and another called “GEnie”. I also knew a few computer enthusiasts who ran what were then called “BBS systems.” Back then you would call a BBS system on the modem and if your settings were compatible (and there was no guarantee of that, there were few standards at that time and most BBS systems published their modem settings so you could connect) you would see a simple menu system and could then post messages on the bulletin board.

In fact, the reason I am even posting this is because I have only just recently realized that those BBS systems were early versions of blogging. Most BBS systems were technology related, but not all were. But Compuserve and GEnie were different. They were behemoths, BBS systems that were so large that they operated like my bank did with the ATM system. They had banks of modems connected to large mainframe computers and charged for the service.

Through the local BBS systems I learned about what was then called a “User Group” on Compuserve that was supposed to be the world’s top gathering place for Apple programmers. Since I wanted to be a Macintosh Programmer, I figured that was the place to be, so I scraped up the cash to get a subscription to Compuserve in the Fall of 1984. Compuserve operated very much like a BBS, you had to set your modem settings just like your local BBS connection and you had a modem-to-modem link that you made over the phone. At 300 baud, if I haven’t said that already.

It was at Compuserve that I discovered email. Before then I had some message capability on local BBS systems, but Compuserve had a mailbox, you could send messages to multiple subscribers, and they had a bridge to other systems, like GEnie, so you could even send mail to non-Compuserve members. That was freaking awesome.

But still it was all a menu driven text based system where you logged in, get a text menu to choose what to do, and then watched text scroll by your screen (or in my case, “window” which was a new concept then).

The user group I joined was called “Micronetworked Apple Users Group” or, as it was more commonly known “MAUG.” There were two system operators I remember, one named Neil Shapiro and the other named Dennis Brothers (I think, not sure about Dennis’s last name). They OWNED the online Apple world back then.

There wasn’t even a separate Macintosh group at first, that took some time to form. But there were a lot of programmers there, mostly working in the Macintosh version of Basic and some in 68000 assembler (which is what I was learning at the time).

But again, all you could do was to read text as it went by.

Until one day I read one thread and it contained a word I had never heard before. A magical word that made my head swim with unlimited possiblities. The word was “download.”

As in “What you do, is you download the file and then load it into MacWrite…” or words to that effect.

I had to figure this out. So I asked “What does ‘download’ mean?”

Then I learned ANOTHER new word, one not quite so pleasant. That word was “newbie,” or “noob” or “n00b” depending on who wrote it.

So I learned that day that there were programs called “Terminal Emulators” that allowed you to do amazing things. There was one written in Basic for the Macintosh called “MacTEP” for “Macintosh Terminal Emulation Program” (we geeks were so creative in those days). But there was a problem. You had to download the program. But without MacTEP there was no way to download anything, you just got scrolling text.

But, there was a solution. The solution was a Basic program called “GetMacTEP”. It was about 30 lines of Basic code, and all it did was to connect to Compuserve and download MacTEP. “But,” you say, “How did that help? You still had to download GetMacTEP”.

Ah, no you didn’t. What you did was the following.

Find the thread with the GetMacTEP basic code, and do successive screen prints as you scrolled the text down until you had screen shots with all the GetMacTEP Basic code. Then you logged off, typed it into your BASIC interpreter, entered your own login name and password (incidentally, my Compuserve login was “74266,2044″ yep, I was a number). Then you ran the GetMacTEP program, and if you typed it all in correctly, you sat and waited for it to log off and BINGO, you had “MacTEP” all downloaded on your computer.

I stayed up all night that night downloading everything I could find about programming the Macintosh. Coupled with another program called “Binhex” I could even download binary files. Binhex would take a binary file and convert it into hexadecimal (text) files which would be uploaded to Compuserve. Then MacTEP would download the hexadecimal files to your local Mac, where you would run BinHex and convert it back to an executable binary file.

That was in 1984.

I’ve been online, uploading and downloading files to and from remote systems now for 22 years.

Wow.

And now you buy a computer and it has Earthlink, AOL or some other system pre-installed, all you have to do is launch the program, and it does all the rest for you.

In some ways I miss those old days. There was something exclusive about having an email address and knowing how to convert hexadecimal files into binary files. At one point in my career as a Software publisher, I had online accounts at CompuServe, GEnie, America Online, and Prodigy.

Then, in about 1995 or so, something called “Mosaic” was created and the whole world changed. Compuserve is now just another Internet Service Provider. I don’t even know if MAUG still exists. I sort of hope it does.