i've been sitting on this gem for 25 years. i think it's time.
so back in 1997, i was a first-year undergrad and dial-up was finally rolling out to the general public in most of canada.
with every new welcome package, u of a students received a 25 page manual on setting up smtp/pop for eudora lite, and a copy of netscape navigator.
the Computing and Network Services department decided that the best way to onramp students to the world wide web was via an interactive multimedia tutorial for win95 and macOS that they built themselves with macromedia director
last year an old buddy was cleaning out his basement, and he found his NetSurf '97 CD. couldn't resist capturing some of the 👌 performance by virtual paul
@Chigaze getting a cable modem in 97 was hot stuff! i remember videotron was rolling them out very slowly, one neighbourhood at a time. i think i got mine in the north end in 98-99.
@vga256 yah, we were right downtown in one of the first, if not the first, neighbourhoods done. We laughed when the guy showed up to install a network card and saw my Power Mac 6100, which already had ethernet so we were already online. He shrugged and left.
@Chigaze 😆 i can remember the excitement for sure. do you remember what the line speed was in the early days? i want to say i moved from 56k to around 1mbit, but it might have been slower than that
@vga256 This is adorable and bittersweet to me. I've attended then taught at universities since before 1997 and watched as uni admins gave up on making their own tools (probably laying off IT staff) and bought wave after wave of corporate "solutions" for everything, dumping the workload to learn each new system on others and eating more of the budget each time the corporate solutions enshittified. Stuff like this post is from a happier time. :)
@guyjantic wow! interesting perspective - I hadn't realized this was the progression. i am not at all surprised - UA did pretty much the same when they retired all of their in-house systems and replaced them with gmail, blackboard and moodle.
@vga256 Oh man. "Multimedia experiences" like this seemed so neat back in those days. It seems so cheesy today I guess, but at the time it was really neat to see.
This is 10,000% fancier than the current #ualberta student portal consisting of a grid of several clickable MS Paint-quality 'icons', 3/4 of which contain a graduation cap and so are not particularly self-explanatory to the user as to what each icon is referring to that is any different than its neighbouring icon. 🙄
It's like they've expanded on Sesame Street's 'one of these things is not like the other' game, but in this case teaches us absolutely nothing. sigh
@vga256 I work for the department that used to be CNS (and started around that time). I don't remember Virtual Paul, but definitely remember Netsurf, Eudora, etc... quite the blast from the past!
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