Instant Messaging's True Heyday

Lately I have been using a program on my computer (or website and/or phone for that matter) that basically allows me to instant message any friend on any type of instant messaging medium available. It's pretty incredible. And while you're checking you're e-mail or logging into your social network these things are built-in to the web experience as well. It wasn't always that easy.

America On-Line had that snazzy little sound. If I could find a freely available sound, I'd put a little flash button here that you could click and a link to an mp3. Baaaa-Riiing! And you had a message. It wasn't as weird as chat rooms and you could "IM" your friends.

Growing up, I didn't have America On-Line so I used Mirabilis ICQ (which was bought out by AOL at some point) and it's notification sound was much more annoying. It was this very high-pitched "Uh-Oh!" that is scraped into my mind as one of the sounds that should only be played for historical purposes. I will not post this sound a flash button, even though it is freely available. I really don't ever want to walk in someone reading my blog and having to listen to that sound. It was really that bad.

But that sound meant that your friend just sent you a message. And it was grand. ICQ also had this "real time" chat where you could directly connect with multiple friends and watch letter-by-letter as each other typed. It was phenomenal! This feature was also something I had only played with called "talk" which I had seen running Slackware Linux that allowed you to do the same thing in those classy large white terminal font letters on that night black screen.  I remember trying to get a bunch of friends to all connect to my computer with similar black boxes so we could chat like that years later, but ICQ had become a giant by then.

And then for some reason, America On-Line opened up their instant messaging service so any internet user could connect to their instant messaging networks and have that same "Baaaa-Riiing" with their friends.  I immediately installed their program and instant messaged a friend of mine and he was excited that I had become a "member" of his network.  And this is how we do some of our communication to this day, at least a decade a go.

All images retreived originally from wikipedia.

The Command Prompt

Ever since I had a computer, I was typing in commands. I travelled from the Commodore64 system to the Microsoft DOS platform and eventually became lost in the user interface of Microsoft Windows. Commands were soley to run games, start Windows, and change directories. When the MS-DOS command prompt came up one could type:

win

and Windows 3 would start up. When changing directories, there would be tons of files that may or may not make sense to children but I knew that if I messed with the right stuff and typed in the right commands, I could master the filesystem.

I recently recorded a song that started out as an ode to free software and filesystems. After the first thirty seconds or so it was more of an experiment with changing the automatic tuning of my vocals, harmonizing with myself and playing around with simple digital instrument sequencing. There is a lot of pop in the mix, but it wouldn't have ever happened without Linux.

mynight.mp3

 mp3 at http://clarksvegas.com/daniel/mynight.mp3 if flash is not available, which I understand.

Windows 95 had come out and many communities were starting to get on the internet. I had a good friend named Andrew that was into video games, amateur radio and building lasers. He got his first computer after we started hanging out and within a year he was running Slackware Linux and had convinced his parents (We were eleven years old) to buy him an additional laptop so he could network them together in his room and share the dial-up internet between the two systems. It was ridiculous! I remember him showing me a lot of commands and interactivity within the shell, but I didn't really grasp what was going on with those small white words on black screens until years later. What a useful thing the command prompt can be. I'm glad I was introduced to it so early on, but I don't know how kids these days feel about typing in commands (unless it is a part of hacking of modifying some cool new electronic device) to their computers, let alone their portable communication device.

Flash audio player from http://wpaudioplayer.com.
Slackware Linux mascot from Wikipedia.

Getting On-Line

So the Commodore64 had a great disk loading system, QWERTY-style keyboard arrangement, and it was pretty powerful.  If don't have eleven minutes to spare for a video, skip to the next paragraph.  If you have about eleven minutes to spare with the intention of watching some old Euro-dance inspired computer background music graphics from yesteryear with a bunch of computer nerds digitally spray-painting their grafitti all over your life, then this is place for it.

There were many, many demos made in the scene to basically showcase the power of the Commodore64 machine.  This "demoscene" was living then via telephone modems that users would dial into other computers and share relevant information such as you dissing everybody to show how cool your computer code can be.  It lives on today with the Commodore64 still being a platform these demos are developed on because of its versatile sound synthesizer and incredible palette of colors that instead of limiting some causes them to excel still lives on today all over the internet but popping up in the "warezscene" which was also around for the time of the Commodore64.

Most users primarily used modems then to pirate stuff like sweet computer games and secondarily to show how awesome they were at programming, even though they sure weren't programming titles that would be respectable enough that to even pirate.  Kids these days.  But anyways, great system.  Used it all the time.  I must have played my favorite computer title of all time, "Neuromancer" for well over a period of years before finally completing it, with the help of a freely available walkthrough document on America On-Line.

So you're a curious kid, living in the foothills on southeastern Missouri and you've heard about the internet and how you can digitally send messages to people for basically free (after purchase) and get pictures and communicate and get all kinds of stuff for free.  America On-line sent three and a quarter inch floppy disks across the nation to many people, but not so many in rural Missouri.  Luckily, my dad subscribed to PC World and we received one!  You just have to sign up, and to sign up you just have to have a credit card number and fill in the blanks.  Well, I'm not exactly proud of this today but I made it happen.  I typed in my parent's credit card onto a computer screen and bendorfd was logged in, hogging the phone line for likely a little less than ten hours that month and rightfully so as I had to write everything down so that card would never get charged.  


I went swimming with my friends and used a local payphone and had to pretend I was my dad and I was canceling the service before the first month was up because I couldn't afford it.  They believed me.  I had all of the credentials of my father and I think I even put on a fake deep voice like any kid would.  I was eleven years old pretending to be my father on the telephone not to mention I had charged ten hours of long distance to my parent's telephone bill.  Yeah, that's right.  America On-Line sure didn't have a local access number in the tiny town I lived in!  Ten hours times ten cents a minute.  It cost my family a good portion of money that month.

But hey, it helped me beat Neuromancer and it got me online.

* All images were from Wikipedia on each image's respective page.

From Commodore

My father taught me immediately to become inquisitive about things and had readily available modern computing systems that could be used primarily for gaming, but also for simple programming, but mostly fiddling. The best thing you could do second to playing games was copying games and this could be done with two five-and-a-quarter inch floppy drives. Have you ever seen a "real" floppy disk? They're not the ones that are covered with mostly inflexible hard plastic, but you can bend them like a frisbee and they're as big as and adult's hand! Yeah, those. Pop in a disk. It was household knowledge that to play games all you had to do was fire it up and type

LOAD "*",8,1

into this bad boy:

It'd say

READY

and you'd shout

RUN

The game was going while the joystick(s) were out and everyone was having a great time. I played games with my sister, neighbors, mom and dad. It was phenomenal! Most of the games at my household were single player adventure or turn-based strategy games. I never really got a lot of the great arcade classics, but I did have this beach volleyball game, a car racing game, and this space arcade shooter cartridge game that George Lucas had a part in. My dad had a pretty classic setup with a Commodore64 with a generic Zenith monitor/television, a couple of floppy drives. I loved using the computer. Whenever dad wasn't on that thing, I know I was. It was phenomenal. It wasn't just about games. Sometimes I'd enter the wrong command and I'd get a listing of all these files. I had no idea what a file was but I just wanted to play the game.

Dad ended up getting a new C128 for himself with a matching monitor and we shared the two floppy drives in the household, because only seldom did one need to copy that floppy. He told my sister and I that we could share the other one, but all of those games for that computer were likely made by men for men and although my sister posed some interest, I was on that thing all day. It was my first computer. The monitor could be switched to television with the click of a button and I could watch excellent VHS programming involving mutant turtles and then click that button and fire up some disk that takes forever to load and shows these awesome demos of seemingly excellent video games. It was the life.

*Image of animated Commodore64 command prompt originally located at the Greater Pittsburg Vintage Computer Museum website at http://www.myoldcomputers.com ran by Randolph Byrnes. Verbal permission to use image was granted by his daughter.