Here is a deliberately anachronistic approach to the World Wide Web, in celebration of its 25th anniversary. The WWW dates to 1990 and the work of Tim Berners-Lee at CERN. However, in this video, a rather deadpan presenter uses much older equipment, including a 1960s vintage teletype terminal, a rotary dial phone and an acoustic-coupling modem.
I will date myself by saying that even this older equipment is not entirely unfamiliar to me, for which I credit the fact that my uncle, enrolled in computer science classes in the early 1970s at the local university, took me along with him to learn about computers. Thus I have actually operated terminals quite similar to the ones shown, including doing some BASIC programming when I was 8 or 9 years old. I think it was on the DEC "mini computer" at the university ("mini" being a relative concept – it occupied a largish, excessively air-conditioned room in the computer science department, and had blinking lights on the front, just like in the movies. Its computing capacity was probably about the same as a modern "dumb" cell phone – not a smartphone, which exceeds the computing capacity of even supercomputers of that era.
I remember making a text-based "slot machine game" where it said "PRESS ANY KEY" and it would give an apparently random assortment of slot-machinish results, e.g. "BAR CHERRY LEMON" or "BAR BAR BAR". But I made it so that I could manipulate the results to increase my chances of winning depending on which "ANY KEY" I chose to PRESS, in an utterly undocumented way. It was a kind of rudimentary "easter egg" (a term of art among programmers and hackers) wrapped in a pointless game. I would press the various keys for hours, watching the statistical variations in the output. I suppose it gave me a good intuitive grounding in statistics, although it wasn't until university that I realized that's what I had been doing.
I also enjoyed playing a text-based "Star Trek" game that was wildly popular in the 1970s on mainframes (many javascript "ports" of the game are available, for example here), in the pre-home-computer era. Later, when my uncle acquired an Apple ][, I believe it had some version of that Star Trek game, too, but I moved on to Hamurabi, and later Space Invaders when he shelled out for a graphics card for the Apple.
[daily log: walking, km]