Oh now you have inspired me to tell this awesome story! All about nostalgia. Background, my Mac, I had it in college (ahh, my 2400 baud modem!).
Anyways, one day I’m sitting in the computer room (we had a VAX running VMS with VT terminals), and I don’t recall the details but I get a ping from the “phone” program I think it was. Basically a split-screen text chat. This is like 1990 I think. Totally weird, so I accept it and it was some guy, I don’t recall where he was, not too near upstate New York where I was (I want to say he was in Australia but I doubt that’s correct, I think this is “the fish that got away” syndrome where the size/distance grows over time), but the cool thing was, he explained, whenever he saw a new node on the network (we were on BITNET), he would ping someone logged in at the location and ask where it was!
This is so different from the net today I am just sitting here going “wow” at my own story (well I was just in the right place at the right time).
I forgot about that old chat program. I was at Yale in the late 80s, which, along with the City University of New York (CUNY), completed the first connection on the old BITNET. I also remember sitting in my dorm’s basement, pecking away at an old terminal, getting excited when a random person from the other side of the world would say hello and want to chat. It was a delightful part of an Internet that is long since gone. Some years later, I had the pleasure of getting acquainted with Grey Freeman, one of the BITNET founders. A true gentleman and one of the most modest individuals I’ve encountered.
That old chat program was a source of a lot of fun talk for me with people all over the world back in the late 80s when our college connected to BITNET.
Those were also the days when a polite and reasonable email to virtually anyone (even big name people) garnered responses.
Back when the internet was fun.
Kevin