/tech/ - Technology

You can, in many ways, here's one: buy an '88 compaq slt286 laptop, use command-line text-only browsers for BBS, usenet, and IRC only, or if you're feeling fancy stick to web1 or web2 sites found via Marginalia and Wiby and Neocities, spend lots of time on textfiles.com and toastytech.com plus archives of bash.org and qdb.us .

Go all the way to full Snowden via i2p, tor, and zeronet running distros meant for 80's PCs like old versions of Slackware and Qubes/Whonix/Tails and hell you can find darknet IRC servers, fediverse instances, and so on if you dig deeper. (Hint, hint.)

>>17064 (OP) 
>i want to go back to when the internet wasnt commodified as well as our data and existance.
Just showed you how. Why are you still here? Still scared to let go and explore the unknown? If you truly wanted it, you wouldn't be reading this sentence.

>>17064 (OP) 
You're on Internet 2 (3 or 4 arguably) right now. Just showed you how to go back to Internet 1. You can only be invited to and shown an open door.

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The old Internet was more like: dial up  to your ISP just like you would any BBS. So it really didn't matter what gear you had at home. Having the ability to display 80 columns of text was a plus, but apparently people managed ok with Commodore 64's. Having a faster modem was also a big plus. Here's a video of an Amstrad CPC with 300 baud modem, and you can see it's very slooooow:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3WPMq80wYFY
I've used an 80286 with 2400 baud modem, and that was much nicer. Anything slower and you'd have to be really patient!
Of course today dialup systems are basically non-existent, especially in my country. Here they forced everyone onto fibre optic, and the copper lines are all disconnected. But you can still get a kinda similar experience by connecting to a shell account on SDF.org (if that's still up).

>>17077
>SDF.org
>link to their... mastodon
Does not bode well for sdf's political affiliation.

>>17064 (OP) 
You can always check out gopher. If you have no idea about anything then just install bombadillo, it works well enough,  and the default opening page is full of links and info. And if you are on gopher, you might as well visit bitreich.org for some extra autism.

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>>17078
I don't know anything or care much about mastodon or social media sites in general. I pretty much just ignore them all.
As far as SDF.org, their shell servers have been online since the 90's, and I don't know of anything similar. There used to be a lot of shell servers (in the 90's...) but they're mostly extinct now.
Of course anyone can setup a shell server, but then you'll just have an empty box with no users (very much like if someone sets up a new imageboard). One of the interesting things about the 90's Internet is the interaction on your ISP's local shell servers. You could see who else was logged in and their running process ("w" or "who" command), and like if someone was telnet'ing to a MUD you could join up with them. You could even "write" and "talk" to them from the shell prompt in realtime. And when you played some /usr/games, there would actually be other people in the high scores and some kind of incentives besides just playing by yourself.
Dialup BBS's had a similar feeling of local user interaction, because all the local message bases were just those users, and you'd play door games with or against them. But most amateur BBS's only had one dial line or two, and being logged in to a Unix server with dozens of other users at the same time was something else altogether. Yeah, I don't know of any other site than SDF.org where you could experience that today.

>>17079
Completely forgot about gopher. Talking about usenet and IRC, how could I forget what should have beaten http? Also that site is awesomesaucebrah, bookmarked.

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>>17064 (OP) 
I'd say smaller imageboards like this, and the few active forums for specific interests still online, are the closest there is to it.

>>17064 (OP) 
I wrote a guide on this:
https://websitereview.neocities.org/search