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, controlled a radio telescope using submitted co-ordinates which then brought back a spectrum graph from space. 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.

The Internet shrank the world there is no doubt. On the back of friends I made on IRC Chat I ended up travelling to Berlin and Slovenia as well as keeping in touch with people I met at collage all over the world. You could say that the Internet change my life (and everyone else's) especially so because following studying electronics I went on to complete computer programming courses and consequently worked for several local computer companies, eventually breaking away to work freelance around 25 years ago.

Prior to the .co.uk derivative of this domain I owned the .com version which I dropped after a few years. www.cpcnw.co.uk was first registered on: 2004-02-26

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