Did you use the internet during the DOS era? Can you describe your experience? How were images displayed on the black screen when everything was just text-based commands?
07.06.2025 00:18
Netscape color cube
As far as I know, no-one at my workplace was downloading porn at that time, because a) work, b) it was too bloody slow, and b) there wasn’t that much around yet. (No doubt someone will say “ah, but the ftp server at 141.0.173.173 had a fine collection of monochrome smut”).
Thing is, at that time DOS was not the predominant operating system, and the internet was not yet the predominant international computer network. The internet was for academic researchers. DOS was for PCs used by early adopter consumers and small businesses. They didn’t have internet access. Researchers had better computers.
According to Wikipedia, the DOS era ran from 1981 till 1995. Windows 1.0 appeared as a graphical shell on top of DOS in 1985, continued until Windows 3.1 in 1992. Windows did not have native Internet drivers (a TCP/IP stack) until Windows 95, though you could install 3rd-party ones.
One problem with graphics in that era was that memory was expensive. Both RAM and video, and for that matter storage. You could fit only one 1MB GIF on a floppy disk. So images were small. They also didn’t have many bits per pixel. In the early 1980’s I was using a Gerber PCB layout workstation, a step up from coloured tape on acetate. That had 3 bits per pixel. So you could have black, white, red, blue, green and combinations like cyan, with no luminance levels. Later displays had 8 bits per pixel, using a palette. So you could have 256 levels of greyscale, or some variety of colours. You could not have both. Compuserve developed the GIF format which matched that capability, so if you viewed one image, the program would load the hardware palette from the GIF header and everything would look fine. If you tried to view two different GIFs from two different sources at the same time, chances were that they’d have different palettes. The one you had mouse focus on would look normal, the other one would look weird.That happened with Mosaic with early web pages around 1995.
In the early days of the Web, Netscape developed the “Netscape Color Cube”, a set of 216 colours that web designers were supposed to use. I have an idea that Netscape Navigator transformed non-compliant images before showing them.
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We got an internet connection sometime around 1989. At the time I thought “Big deal, another network with a different structure and commands to learn”. (ftp instead of copy, telnet instead of login). We had a Sun Sparcstation running Unix around 1992 that I was using for electronic circuit design. That had a built-in internet stack, and I think a working connection via ethernet, but that was before DNS and the Web. If you wanted to download something you’d need to know the numeric ip address of an ftp server. I never did at that time, but the station did have pretty decent colour graphics. A colleague had installed the image viewer “xv” (which I’m still using on Linux). JPEG was brand-new, and he had some NASA images like “Earthrise”
X-terminal. Probably 8 bits per pixel, greyscale.
The original PCs didn’t have very good graphics, and a number of companies produced third-party ISA cards. As I recall, one department at my workplace had started using PCs with Windows 3.1, and installed Hercules cards. Later, 24 and 32-bit graphics became normal, and web designers switched from GIF to PNG and JPEG.
The internet protocol suite was standardized in 1982. In 1986, the growing internet was connected to supercomputer sites on NSFnet, and expanded into academic and research organizations in Europe, Australia, New Zealand and Japan in 1988–89. In 1989, Compuserve joined the internet, allowing more public access. In late 1993, AOL joined the internet, connecting a huge number of uneducated noobs and creating “Eternal September” (university freshmen starting in September typically got their first exposure to Internet culture then, resulting in “inappropriate behaviour”” on Usenet forums till they settled down).
Hercules card with 720 × 348 8-bit graphics. Standard PCs had 320 × 200 colour.
Before the Web was invented in 1992 (and Mosaic which let you see inline images), we had Usenet (news) on the internet. That was a hierarchical collection of text-based forums, some of which were dedicated to images (and porn). Since Usenet was purely text, and MIME had not been developed, images were encoded with “uuencode” into lines of ASCII text. Since there was a size limit, larger images might be split up. So you’d read the newsfeed titles, find some likely-looking image posts, save them as text, join them together (they were typically numbered image-1, image-2 etc.), then run “uudecode” to get a JPEG or GIF, then finally display it in an external image viewer. Tedious.
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In the 1970’s and early ‘80s, if you wanted pictures, you’d have to settle for Racquel Welch as ASCII-art on a lineprinter. The good ones used overstrike to get better ink density, which you can’t reproduce online. To get a black square, you’d print M, backspace and print W over the top, then again and print * (or rather, print one line, then carriage-return without linefeed, then print over it).
Around 1994, I replaced my VT-100 with a 486-based PC running Linux, with X-11. So I could run the same “xv” program as on the Sparcstation. I never had a DOS or Windows-based PC at work. I did get a DOS-based portable PC at home to replace my beloved (stolen) Osborne. I never liked it. I don’t think it had graphics at all, it had a small green monochrome screen. No ethernet, it would have had an RS232 connector and used an external modem, so I could have logged into work on their modem pool and then downloaded files with Kermit. It just wasn’t worth the bother. If I really wanted something it would have been easier to print it at work, except there were no colour printers. We had pen-plotters for PCB layout and engineering drawings, with swappable pens, so while we might have been able to produce a 3ft by 2ft drawing in red and blue, it wasn’t exactly Racquel Welch. No doubt someone with too much time on their hands could have converted images into rasters in HPGL, and maybe they did.
Another thing about images on the early internet - the bandwidth was poor, so most images were small and took ages to load. We had a T1 connection with a whopping 1Mbps as a time when the average home user might have had 1200 baud (the “average person” didn’t have a computer at all). So if you downloaded a GIF, it might take 60 seconds. The palette was in the header, so as soon as you got a few kB you could start to view the image. Probably you’d see sky or walls, so you’d have to wait for 1/4 of the picture to decide whether you wanted to download the whole thing. Some people started using an interleave feature in GIF, where it would store every 4th line first, then every 2nd line, then the rest. So you’d see the whole image at 1/4 resolution in 15 seconds.
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So in the 1980’s we were typically using VT-100 terminals, either directly linked to a Vax with RS232 cables at 9600 baud, or at home with a modem at 300 baud then 1200 baud as the teechnology improved. Those didn’t support graphics or colour either, but they had an extended character set with box-drawing features and cursor control. So you could move the cursor around on a 24x80 text window and create box graphics (a perfect rectangle, but it had to be an integral number of characters wide). I had a maze-drawing program that I hacked to solve itself. That was as good image quality as a PC, pixel-for-pixel, but you could not draw generic images.
With the wrong palette.
I was working at a research lab with a lot of international collaboration, so we got into international networking early. We had a lot of PDP-11s in the 1980’s, and started connecting them with Ethernet (thickwire, then thinwire co-ax) and DECnet. Then we got some DEC VAX computers, and connected those to some international networks, so we had HEPNET to Europe for email, file transfers and remote login, and also things like Bitnet and EARN for email. Those didn’t support graphics.
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Sparcstation.
So in principle I could login from home to a computer at CERN. Some of my colleagues did.
Jupiter, from NASA on the internet circa 1994
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We also had a lot of X-terminals, using mostly DECnet to connect to Vax/VMS. As I recall, those had fairly good monochrome graphics, OK for preparing a graph of neutron flux density for print publication, not so good for sunsets.
VT-100 terminal.