Happy 30th Birthday, Web

And a visit to 1986, when Tommy wrote his first newsletter

Yesterday was the 30th birthday of the World Wide Web. Happy birthday!You don't look a day over 0b11110 …

On April 30th 1993, I was a student at Rutgers, learning UNIX and using the “talk” command to chat with strangers who were logged into computers from all over the world. The first web pages I visited with the NCSA Mosaic browser were astronomy related, the planets! And I was so delighted that I printed them out to read at home, which is embarrassing now.

an example of chat using the “talk” command

Then I learned to use Trumpet Winsock and dial in to the phone bank from my home PC, chat with people on MUDs and discuss stuff on Usenet (I was an early contributor to the Internet Movie DataBase, which was distributed via Usenet). Terms like spam, troll, spoiler alert… they had their origins there. (I’ve written here before about my experiences on “Multi-User Dungeons” which were games, not BDSM chatrooms, at least at first… but soon they became both!)

An example of a Multi-User Dungeon game login screen

I had been “trolled” years before on a Bulletin Board System for the Jersey Atari Computer Group, which met at Bell Labs. I sold clip art and BASIC programs on floppy disk there with a few friends, and a jealous troll dubbed me “Penguin Man” because I wore a tee-shirt and a flannel shirt that flapped behind me and made me look like a penguin, apparently! A little searching found their newsletter archives, and a video on YouTube! I might be the poodle-headed person in the lower left corner at 3:38 …

And here’s a screenshot of a gushing game review I wrote for the newsletter in 1986! I’ve been Substacking for 37 years, before it was popular… I was already a hyperbolic smart-ass with a penchant for parentheses. The game, Fooblitzky, by text game masters Infocom, was a flop. Take that as you will…

I can’t believe someone not only kept all these, but scanned them in. My handle was Pluck Rogers of the 25th Century, and a little bit later when I was a sullen teenager, I changed that to Dr. Dead, and took to wearing a top hat… but that’s best forgotten.

I learned to program on the Atari 800XL, which I then parlayed into a twenty-eight-year career. Thanks, Momootz, for buying me that Atari…