My name is Celso Ferrarini. I have a degree in Communication and I love books and philosophy.

But I have always been involved in computing.

I started building PCs at the age of 13, back in the era of the 386, and I never stopped. Every day I would take a box of formatted floppy disks to school, because you never knew what you might bring home: a new game, an application… This is how new software circulated in the late 80s and early 90s. Many friendships formed around sharing programs, which involved visiting a friend’s house. It was common for groups of kids to show up, sometimes people you didn’t even know, just referred by another friend. Later came the BBS (Bulletin Board Systems) to share files, images, and texts, which peaked until around 1995, when the Internet started becoming popular, and gradually disappeared. Some even became ISPs for a while.

This topic deserves a separate article, which I plan to publish.

Managing files was challenging because HDDs were very small — 40 MB, at most 80 or 120 MB. Floppy disks, besides being very small (1.2 or 1.44 MB), were not very reliable and quickly became cumbersome. It was common to delete a large program to install something new. When disks became heavily used, bad sectors would appear, corrupting data, which could be repaired with Norton Disk Doctor—a very slow process. Because of this, much data was lost or scattered, and only now is it possible to locate some of it thanks to the Internet Archive, which keeps the memory of computing and the Internet alive.

It was necessary to use ARJ or PKZIP to compress programs into 1.44 MB volumes and save them across multiple disks, which was a complicated and time-consuming process.

Around 1995, the largest HDD available was about 1 GB, usually SCSI. There was no IDE drive that large; they cost around $1,000, plus $1,000 for a SCSI controller. By the late 90s, storage scarcity was no longer a problem: CD and DVD burners became accessible, and IDE drives were large enough to avoid constantly deleting files. At that time, drives were around 20 GB and much faster.

However, the convenience of the Internet and the ease of recording data on media like CDs and USB drives gradually distanced the “friend clubs.” Although there were technical challenges, there was close personal contact and friendships. There were no forums to ask questions, but Web 1.0 was fantastic, full of personal and interest-based pages. Many of these pages were lost, hosted on services like Geocities and other free hosts. It was common to register a domain to write about your favorite author or musician, create a CGI forum, or a simple static HTML site about a movie you liked. Before social networks like Facebook or Reddit appeared, these pages were usually made by students and enthusiasts who had been “orphaned” by the BBS. The search engine AltaVista was very efficient because simple HTML content was completely transparent and easy to index. Today, almost everything is in databases, which search engines don’t index as well, making much of this early content difficult to find.