Alt Comp

Hi, this is me, Graham.

And this is my Wiki or Web Enabled Electronic Notepad as I like to think about it.

For a long time I was using LionWiki as it was so light and simple but alas the author stopped maintaining it and has taken down the website. This was sad news indeed but when I recently upgraded my PHP version to 8.1 LionWiki created way to many issues, reported in the rapidly growing log file, for me to want to jump ship asap!

I only had two options in my sights https://www.pmwiki.org and https://www.dokuwiki.org/dokuwiki

I tried out both but ended up leaning towards DokuWiki because of it's speed and easy to use syntax rules. I probably should of upgraded a long time ago but now I am I am pretty pleased I made the jump. My articles index is on the left as you can see.

This is where I will be creating content from now on!

Alt Comp is a reference to the early Usenet Newsgroups of the 1980's although I only got access myself in the early 1990's. My first modem was a 4800 bps (yes, Bits Per Second) analogue device connected to a BT phone line in the UK, operated from an early DOS based computer. I accessed bulletin boards late at night as the rate was cheaper. In around 1991 I upgraded to a 9600 bps modem and became a member of the Electric Dream Bulletin Board which acted as a BBS-to-Email gateway. This is when I got my first email address.

The only other person I knew at the time that had an email address was a guy at my college Liverpool Poly so I sent a 'Hello World' email and was amazed when he replied. I then went round telling people enthuisiasticly I had sent my first email. By far the majority reaction to this was “Oh…” and a rather blank look as though I was speaking a foreign language - but to me on a late night terminal session using my IBM PC XT and 9600 bps modem it was very exciting indeed. A year or so later I had an Amstrad PC1512 Windows 3.1 and Netscape v0.96 with Peter Tattum's Dial-Up Winsock on a SLIP account to Liverpool Uni thanks to Jim Crank at Merseyside Business Link. Other software I used at the time included Eudora Email client as well as an NNTP News Reader, Gopher Client, an IRC Client and Finger!

One night I got onto the NASA website and moved a radio telescope using submitted co-ordinates which then brought back a spectrum graph. The whole process took about 15 minutes - but it totally blew my mind! For the next 5 years or so I felt like I was one of the only people I knew who had any appreciation of what huge changes where going to happen in the world because of technology and inventions like the Internet.

To get a feel for what the Internet was like back in 1993 check out this Computer Chronicles video - click the image below.