Before Google...

the_Grinch

Might have been asked before, but I thought it could be a fun topic. Nowadays, one of the first questions I get when I escalate a ticket or ask a question is, what did Google say? I once had a user ask when I replied "I will research this error and get back to you" what that really meant? To which I replied, "I am going to search Google and see what I find." I often felt that perhaps I didn't know as much as I truly thought until one user I was working with said he found the same article I did, but didn't know if it would work. He asked how did I know it would? I thought about it and explained that experience, various technical courses, and research showing what worked/didn't work lead me to that conclusion.

So all of this got me thinking, before Google what did the techs do? Obviously, when the internet was born there probably was basic BBS' one could go to, but did it basically come down to the system admins just knowing their product that well? Was support vastly better then? Figured we have some very experienced people that could let us know how it was done! (I am sure the stories will be awesome!)

SteveO86

There was a time before Google???

I'm sorry I just had to.

RomBUS

I am not sure but I think Yahoo was pretty popular before Google came about

erpadmin

A BBS was useful only if it was a FIDOnet node, in addition to a wonderful shareware repository, and even then it might not have had all the available newsgroups. Sometimes, there was even a share between Fido and Usenet, but not too many sysops did that. (sigh...memories....)


Truth be told....before "Google" a lot of stuff was done by trial and error. I believe many techs still go by trial and error today. When the Internet became comcercialized, a lot of search engines that were popular were Excite, Altavista and Yahoo. Yahoo was definitely on top of the world for awhile until Google blew them out of the water. It was not immediate, but I think we can all testify who won that war.....

To my knowledge, none of those search engines was ever used as a verb.

qcomer

I was a huge fan of webcrawler, excite and altavista.

jibbajabba

I used lycos and altavista I think .. mainly the former ..

Edit: oh and excite ...

Forsaken_GA

I actually remember a time before search engines were worth a damn. Believe it or not, people still had to fix computers before the internet existed!

We read documentation. Lots and lots of documentation. Most techs had a fairly decent reference library of books in addition to documentation. I used to have binders full of printed documentation that lived on the shelves.

Now, I just carry it on my ipad.

jibbajabba

Forsaken_GA wrote: »

I actually remember a time before search engines were worth a damn. Believe it or not, people still had to fix computers before the internet existed!

We read documentation. Lots and lots of documentation. Most techs had a fairly decent reference library of books in addition to documentation. I used to have binders full of printed documentation that lived on the shelves.

Now, I just carry it on my ipad.

And magazine subs .. lots of them

Everyone

I learned a lot from games actually. You used to have to jump through quite a few hoops to get an early PC game to run. Even more so if you wanted to play multiplayer, which usually involved hooking a serial cable up between 2 computers. That and building every computer we ever owned.

Lots of trial and error as someone already said.

Forsaken_GA

erpadmin wrote: »

A BBS was useful only if it was a FIDOnet node, in addition to a wonderful shareware repository, and even then it might not have had all the available newsgroups. Sometimes, there was even a share between Fido and Usenet, but not too many sysops did that. (sigh...memories....)

That's because setting up a UUCP gateway was a royal pain in the ass, and tended to cost some money. Everyone who wrote gateway software was looking to make a quick buck off of it, and the shareware versions were so crippled to make running them not worthwhile, and the freeware versions were riddled with bugs to the point that you risked corrupting your message bases!

The amount of pain that proprietary software caused back in those days was..... time consuming. I'm very thankful that I can almost always find a good free version when I'm looking for software these days.

demonfurbie

back in my day we used BBS's and liked it

damn it now i feel all sentimental and on gonna setup a telnet bbs with a mud on it ... DAMN IT

whatthehell

Fond memories of Excite usage ....:)

TheShadow

whatthehell wrote: »

Fond memories of Excite usage ....:)

Most companies of any size offered support via Compuserv and GE services. You might find the likes of Compaq, Wordperfect, Novell, 3com, Aston-Tate, etc on those two dial in networks. It was common to run up a several hundred dollar per month bill on Compuserv if you were not careful or did not use one of the store and forward email programs. The internet destroyed their business model as support moved to there but they were big in the 80's and first part of the 90's. IBM had their own dial in network which also moved to the internet.

arwes

Dogpile for life yo.

it_consultant

arwes wrote: »

Dogpile for life yo.

I used dogpile too. I couldn't understand why anyone care for google, I thought Dogpile search results were very accurate.

rsutton

Before Google we RTFM.

erpadmin

Forsaken_GA wrote: »

That's because setting up a UUCP gateway was a royal pain in the ass, and tended to cost some money. Everyone who wrote gateway software was looking to make a quick buck off of it, and the shareware versions were so crippled to make running them not worthwhile, and the freeware versions were riddled with bugs to the point that you risked corrupting your message bases!

The amount of pain that proprietary software caused back in those days was..... time consuming. I'm very thankful that I can almost always find a good free version when I'm looking for software these days.

I did know that...I just wasn't going to get into that at 1 in the morning (especially when I was waiting for work to get done). I was a sysop myself and did want to set up a UUCP gateway, but those plans were killed when my parents saw a $1000 phone bill....(I was a biiiigg BBS junkie, and called all over the United States).

To be honest with you, I miss the sound my modem makes....yes my fax machine makes the same exact sound since it uses the same modem technology to make its connection, but it is just not the same. I miss those corny ANSI graphics....something kids in their early to mid twenties would know nothing about...all they know is the Interwebs.....and fake l337speek (intentional).

BBSes have gone the way of the Ham radio....but I'm proud that my BBS made the historical BBS list.

Webmaster

rsutton wrote: »

Before Google we RTFM.

Indeed. For years (for me) that meant searching the Microsoft Knowledgebase / TechNet / Help files / Resource Kit on CDs for symptoms, or for the error codes that popped up in the Event Viewer. Same with the Cisco Docs CDs and a box full of red books (Netware).

For a new/unknown problem that kept reappearing and/or just needed to be eliminated, generally, combining problem-solving skills (e.g. deductive reasoning) with a theoretic foundation and practical experience led to a solution (or sufficient info for a workaround).

themagicone

I remember my first time getting online. It was with Prodigy. Then we all can remember AOL. To the life of me I don't understand people who use @aol address's still. When we first got cable internet my dad through a fit cause I tried to tell him you don't need to connect to AOL before going on the net.

Forsaken_GA

Webmaster wrote: »

Indeed. For years (for me) that meant searching the Microsoft Knowledgebase / TechNet / Help files / Resource Kit on CDs for symptoms, or for the error codes that popped up in the Event Viewer. Same with the Cisco Docs CDs and a box full of red books (Netware).

For a new/unknown problem that kept reappearing and/or just needed to be eliminated, generally, combining problem-solving skills (e.g. deductive reasoning) with a theoretic foundation and practical experience led to a solution (or sufficient info for a workaround).

Yup, once upon a time, you actually knew what all the switches on your CLI programs did, because often they contained a magic bullet to fix whatever problem you were having. Stack tracers were also one of my favorite tools (and still are) because I could usually hunt down what was causing the error with one, and then figure out what was wrong from that point.

Bokeh

Yes and "back in the day" Computer Shopper was your bible. Was like the old Sears Christmas catalog. It was large, weighed a ton, and was CHEAP.

Online gaming was you logging in to a BBS, seeing what others had done to one of your characters (Pimp Wars anyone?) then doing what you could in your allotted time in the game for the day.

I can still hear those 75 baud acoustic coupler modems chugging along.

it_consultant

I don't know what the hell any of you are talking about. I recently threw away a bunch of manuals collecting dust all the meanwhile saying things like "we have google for this".

Truthfully though, I started my career in earnest AFTER google became a resource and AFTER Windows 2000 took hold. I looked at an NT4 server and was all "What do you mean it doesn't have device manager?".

Forsaken_GA

it_consultant wrote: »

I don't know what the hell any of you are talking about. I recently threw away a bunch of manuals collecting dust all the meanwhile saying things like "we have google for this".

A buddy of mine still has his old Exchange 5.5 and OS/2 Warp 3 books sitting on his shelves, in addition to other arcane (and outdated) tomes. I keep telling him he should clear them out to create some space, he'll never crack those books again, but apparently there's some sentimental value.

I got rid of my old crap a long, long time ago.

GOZCU

I was buying magazines monthly ( chip, pc world.. and so on..) there were some pages about technical stuff- how to do it-. Also in my opinion it was more effective to learn when u had to read main board's reference manuel than just checking exact solution from google. I remember that, i even memorized some of them.(whole manuel) atavista.com,, arabul.com,, (oldies goldies) they were popular search engines

blargoe

Forsaken_GA wrote: »

A buddy of mine still has his old Exchange 5.5 and OS/2 Warp 3 books sitting on his shelves, in addition to other arcane (and outdated) tomes. I keep telling him he should clear them out to create some space, he'll never crack those books again, but apparently there's some sentimental value.

I got rid of my old crap a long, long time ago.

I think displaying this old stuff is like a badge of honor for some people. I get that, and it's OK, but I have enough problems with clutter to not have 15 year old reference guides sitting around.

Xantcha

Starting out with XT/AT pcs it was all about RTFM and trial and error and it's still that way today (mostly). No-one had dreamed of Google back then and for information transfer it was also word of mouth passing from one enthusiast to another.

wastedtime

As far as search engines go I haven't seen HotBot on here yet.

Chris:/*

Before search engines System Administrators/Engineers and Network Administrators/Engineers were just that engineers. If you look back at the old IT world it was made up of a smaller number of people who were extremely well qualified. There were shelves filled with COTS manuals for ever item that was on the site all the way down to the NIC and PROM burner.

You also had a call list for all developer support of the items you ran if you could not fix it yourself. You had to justify the expense to the company for the outage you could not repair without outside phone consultation. This was back when companies used to have huge call support teams though and you paid a premium for them. Thanks to the IT explosion and the proliferation of search engine geniuses, the IT industry has become watered down with incapable personnel.

I have run into this problem with design repairs done by other people. Just because Google can tell you how to do it does not mean it is the right way to do it. Lastly despite what people seem to think Google does not know all.

I am not saying I don't use Google but when you don't have it people's knowledge really shows through especially during a natural disaster.

powerfool

Before Google? Deja! It was a web-based USENET website. Google bought it and turned it into Google Groups; at first it was horrible and I hated Google for doing it. Later, Google Groups was superior to Deja... and then Google Groups became irrelevant because Google search was working better for that sort of thing.

Before Deja... regular USENET.

krjay

Chris:/* wrote: »

Thanks to the IT explosion and the proliferation of search engine geniuses, the IT industry has become watered down with incapable personnel.

Agreed. I notice this especially with web developers in my place of work. Seems like every time I have to go see one about something they're right in the middle of putting our companies logo on the top of someone elses application and claiming they know what they're doing..