what was it like using the internet on Amiga in the early-mid 90s?

[Wavemaker]

I was on a BBS in 1995 when the sysop told me about this new Internet thing. Funny enough I had no idea Commodore was bankrupt, I just thought it had gone out of fashion. Anyhow there was AMosaic but the WWW was pretty boring and US centric, AWeb and Ibrowse came shortly afterwards and were a bit more user friendly. The killer app was AmIRC and how you could talk to people from far away, used to hang out at #amigascne where famous sceners hanged out, I was amazed at how they were sitting there just a click away but I was too scared to actually talk to them most of the time, not that my english was any good back then... I made a couple friends there cupid with whom I made a mod or two and this guy who had a funny name that I cant remember and would invite us to play Masterblaster a Bomberman clone online, that was fun as hell... of course having AmiFTP was a big upgrade as you didnt need to spend your weekly pocket money at the local "pirate" anymore, and besides the obvious Aminet I found a treasure trove of demos at the Funet FTP which I believe still exists. Still it took an hour to download a 1MB file if you were lucky.

We also had Yam which was a decent mail program and the Thor Usenet reader which seemed to be a program to rule them all although I had no idea what most of the options meant.

There were internet (telnet) enabled BBS run by cracker groups where you could get cracked software but those were elitist and I never managed to get in.

By the turn of the millenium IRC had turned snobbish and passive-aggressive, the PC got CSS and Amiga started to lag behind in terms of accessibility (you could however run Shapeshifter and browse it on Netscape!). I used to run together with a member of Ozone a website called scenebook which compiled every new demo scene release and was usable on the Amiga, until the early 2000s. Have in mind reviving it at some time as there's no easy way to download those to my Amiga.

https://web.archive.org/web/20010405...scenebook.org/

[Thorham]

Originally Posted by amiman99

As it turns out I should have added a capital "P" in front of my username for PPP connections, nobody told me that!

Better that than something unfixable

[XPD]

Originally Posted by CCCP alert

Did anybody use their A1200 or 4000 on the internet and/or with a web browser at this time and what was it like? easy to set up, how was iBrowse and other apps for email or J.A.NET/newsgroups/FTP

Think you mean "Did anyone use their AMIGA...."

I didn't have a 1200/4000, but a "lowly" A500Plus
OK, it was boosted to better than a 1200 (except GFX) via a GVPA530 etc...

Anyway, by time I got onto the internet, Miami had made an appearance, which made the network side of things a lot easier.

I purchased IBrowse for browsing, used YAM for email. Thought it was fantastic Was always fun trying to explain to the ISP that I didn't run Windows, DOS or Linux if I had any sort of connectivity issue....

Was just using a Dynalink 56k dialup modem. By time ADSL turned up, my A500 had sadly moved on, so it never got to enjoy "high speed" internet

[Photon]

I have never used Internet on any of my Amigas. But that's really because I was away for worklife and other things for 15 years during this period.

I did surf the "web" (as it was) on Sun workstations @ Uni in 1994/1995. The web then mostly consisted of a few hundred private homepages, many about focused special interests, and some .gov sites like NASA. I remember it was extremely dire and confusing to try to follow "mailing-lists". The rest was mostly teletext/BBS-like affairs tied to whatever provider you had, so not really the Internet or WWW.

In 1998/1999 the Web exploded with CMS packages (forums and company sites). I remember some preservation/information style sites emerging before that, like KLOV for arcade games in 1997. Until 1999 I used a 56K modem, and sometimes used Lynx/Lynks or something to browse in text mode to increase speed and save money. it was expensive to surf the web.

[Bren McGuire]

it was just as it is now mate absolutely dreadful compared to the norm this is why by 1997 i had already gotten a pentium computer with windows 95

Originally Posted by CCCP alert

Did anybody use their A1200 or 4000 on the internet and/or with a web browser at this time and what was it like?

[Angus]

I got my 1200 on the internet in 1994 with Demon Internet. There was a TV program at the time, called The Net that really caught my imagination and it kind of became my mission to get online.

Initially I just had a vanilla 1200 with a hard drive (270 mb?) and a US Robotics Sportster 14400. The software I was using was pretty horrible and called NOS. When I worked up the courage I changed to AmiTCP which was much better and there were some real characters on the Demon newsgroups Neil Bothwick, Simes @ AMDev etc etc who were really clued up and hugely helpful to clueless people like me. Simes on an impulse wrote a combined newsreader/email program which was really nice and felt very Amiga native unlike the Unix ported stuff.

Email was great to have but Usenet was brilliant, I still miss it. At the time the concept of talking to some guy with access to a computer in a lab he was supposed to be cleaning in the USA was quite a thrill. "Wow, man. How's it going?"

Then the browsers came.....
I was using Mosaic for a while, but also one that didn't do graphics (ideal for my memory situation of 2 megs chip, before I expanded.

People saying it was crap on the Amiga, I don't understand. They must have had a very different experience to me. Aminet was/is a fantastic creation, as was the Amiga community in general. Every Amigan and their pet goldfish seemed to be writing cool utilities, games and programs.

I remember people kept coming up with a new attempt at an Amiga Doom style game. Things like Poom! People like Andy Clitheroe would crop up on the newsgroup and you could chat to them about their new demo.


I remember a guy on the Babylon 5 newsgroup, with a signature like:

Accessing the Internet on a CD32 with SX-1 - Try doing that on your 3DO!!!!

Like many things in their early stages, there was an enthusiasm and innocence about it then, that is difficult to contemplate now. Best exemplified by the community itself, but we still see it here on EAB.

I sound like a Woodstock survivor.




P.S. I just found this usenet archive that I didn't know about.....



https://www.usenetarchives.com/threa...es&y=0&r=0&p=1

[Daedalus]

Originally Posted by Angus

there were some real characters on the Demon newsgroups Neil Bothwick,

I remember Neil being a very active member on various mailing lists and writing for the magazines back then. He even ran an Amiga-specific dial-up ISP in the UK back in the day.

People saying it was crap on the Amiga, I don't understand. They must have had a very different experience to me.

Well, they were just so far ahead of the curve that you would never understand. So far ahead in fact, that they also had no time for such trivialities as shift keys and full-stops