In the UK ISPs used to advertise how my megabytes of web space you got, how much Usenet you got, how many ISP-only email addresses were allocated, etc.
Most people used modems to dial up paying the local call rate (the ISPs got a cut of this so the longer you stayed on the more they earned) and as a result your computer was directly connected so people could (and did) portscan your machine directly.
Every site was http by default and only switched to https when you were going to buy something.
Web rings were a big thing and so was Yahoo. Search engines let you use search terms that were case sensitive (so "Python" got you comedy results and "python" got you information on snakes).
Big corporate didn't dominate then like it does now and it was a lot more fun, lots to explore and find.
I worked for an ISP (Telinco/Northwest Net), that was a whitelabeller - two weeks before Freeserve launched in 1998 with no monthly fee and was paid for through 0845 chargeback, we launched Connect Free on the same premise, and then whitelabelled it - Totalise, Currant Bun (which was from the Sun newspaper - a newspaper had its own ISP!), and others. Eventually that firm became World Online and then Tiscali and today it's all TalkTalk.
The Summer before we did that, we had like, 2000 customers. Couple of small modem banks. A few racks of servers, which provided SMTP, POP3 (we weren't at IMAP yet), DNS, some webspace. We had a Usenet feed which was basically a cache from upstream, but those days were starting to look numbered. We also offered some gaming servers - Quake and the like.
I built the signup scripts which would also provision email addresses and webspace, and also get you hooked up on the RADIUS servers so you could dial in.
When the decision was made to go 0845, most of the team quit. There was basically like 3 of us left. And we needed to buy £500k of server parts and build them, get BSD installed and provisioned to do everything it needed, rebuild the RADIUS stack, provision a load of new bandwidth (we once diagnosed a rising packet error rate on a microwave link by noting the tree over the road had come into leaf, which we then fixed with a stepladder and a saw to deal with the specific problematic branch), all while just living Summer vibes.
We ended up buying a repossessed DMS100 switch to handle the phone lines, a ton of Nortel CVX1800s, figure out how to become a proper AS and get a BGP router sorted, and all while working from a portacabin in a car park next to the Cheshire farmhouse which acted as our data centre, which had such poor air con, at the start the ambient temperature regularly hit 45C.
Exhilarating. Genuinely, one of the best times of my professional life.
We worked so hard. We wouldn't get in until about 10am, but would then work to about 6-7pm, then head into the nearest major city where most of us lived (Manchester), go to the pub for a few hours and figure out what we were going to do the next day, and then go back and do it all again.
Being part of that movement where we went from ~2000 people paying £10/month to around 750,000 people dialling in whenever they felt like accessing the internet and providing exemplary service (our callout/support structure was based on us being benchmarked against Demon, Pipex, Freeserve, and so on, and we had to beat them on everything from modem negotiation time, DNS response, bandwidth, everything), and kind of seeing the start of the Internet becoming a popular thing in the UK was wonderful.
I met up with one of my ex-colleagues from that Summer this Spring, and we were talking about how much we would love to have that feeling once more.
Seeing the wired screenshots I was immediately missing hotbot [1]. The colours even hurt in the days, but I used it a lot. Actually I was surprised that it still exists
Graduated with a CS degree in 1996. Went to work right away for a media company helping run all their web sites. (A few dozen Ultra 2s on a FDDI network connected to NetApps. Served mostly by Apache. A couple beefier boxes serving dynamic content using Perl CGI scripts. The horrid Netscape Server to run early backend JavaScript. Management over a frame relay network. Had friends at Excite, Equinix, etc.)
(In college on the side, I ran a tiny local ISP with a couple dozen Hayes modems connected to a Livingston Portmaster. T1 uplink. A couple PCs running Linux. Before college I had been hanging out on AOL giving technical advice, and before that was using an Apple II dialing into BBS's.)
Which is all to say, I was there for all of this and this piece is pretty much spot on.
When the movie Frequency (which has a communicating across time aspect) was made in 2000, the company the screen writers went to for how to get rich by investing in the right stock? Yahoo.
Given the link rot and that this page still have thousand of visitors per day (according to Wikipedia) it's amazing that he never added a resell service. Maybe the original pixels owners are hard to track though.
Going back a few years (from 1998), it was all dial-up and I was working in London on a stand-by. Happened to be paired with someone I respct, so I showed him "the internet" - pretty much Pat Sharp and mtv.com back then.
Headline story on mtv.com was Kurt Cobain was dead - I was like "Wow!". Guy I was working with was "yeah, it was in the papers a few days ago.".
It's an abiding memory, maybe has coloured my view of the rise of the internet, just sharing a dusty anecdote.
1998 the game was already lost, although we could not imagine how evil Google would become and many others did not exist yet. Eternal September was 1993 after all https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September.
In 1989 when I started to use internet, someone being on the internet meant they could be trusted. Private internet did not exist, so all users were basically university employees. I visited people and invited people from other countries without knowing them. Sending a couple of emails, and everything was fine. I sent bills to a money collector overseas and the cheque was in the mail a couple of weeks later.
To me this was such a weird time, because I was too young to experience the Usenet groups before that. To me, all those "get usenet downloads access" premium upsales always looked very phishy and like a scam to begin with, and all the tools available for Windows were also commercially sold. You saw them everywhere, next to serials generators, illegal warez sites, even next to fetish porn ads. That's why I subconsciously associated it with "must be a scam like online casinos".
I only realized what usenet and IRC were when I first installed/booted a Knoppix CD that came with a computer magazine. Little did I know that it would brick the bootloader of Windows 98 at the time. But by then most usenet groups were already either flooded with spam, or dead. Most groups were lurking in IRC via bouncers all day long to not miss a message.
Of course this device didn't actually exist in the consumer market. Half of my aunts and uncles worked for IBM and none of them knew anything about it. From cruising the YouTube comments it looks like a simpler version of the system had a few industrial applications but nothing remotely like the commercial. With AR glasses I think we're pretty much there nowadays but most people would rather use Robinhood and AirPods on an iPhone to do the same without bothering pigeons or looking like a weirdo on public transit.
I feel like I missed a lot of the early internet while it was happening because I had dialup and it was already a DSL/cable era pretty fast by the end of the 90s. So many times you'd click an image link and go "ehh maybe I didn't care enough to see it after all" after it only loaded 10% of the pixels after way too long. I couldn't even play runescape for years; the site at the time ran a speed test and would just tell me my connection was too slow not even letting me into the world to test. Parents would set an egg timer for computer usage so every second counted which only added to the frustration and stress.
Installing software on the home computer was out of reach at that time. No one in the family or family friends were tech literate then beyond booting up the pc and opening email. I would doodle mustaches over family photos in ms paint and play pinball. Took years before I finally looked behind the curtain.
One thing I remember from those days, was how meteoric the google rise was. Prior to google I (and most I know) used Altavista. When we got around trying google, there was no way back. And then the years that followed with awesome products from google.
I used a couple others too but, yeah, pre-Google mostly Altavista. Funnily enough, the product guy on Altavista was the person most responsible for hiring me into my kast job.
For me Google came out in 1997, as beta and probably without the current domain name, but being back that time reader of Slashdot it was hard not to miss it.
And it was magic compared with everything else that were around back then.
Yeah, I remember that. The first search engine that wasn't absolute trash. Metafind/Dogpile only helped because they merged all the terrible results onto one page so you could be frustrated by them with one click. Access to information (and the quantity of available information, including about topics from the 90s) now is SO MUCH BETTER than it was in the 90s.
Or Qemu without virtualization (or DOSBOX-X) with W98SE (or the libre floss way
with Damn Small Linux, Dillo and setting up the proxy as you said to the ones of protoweb).
I wonder how many people actually used those portals, as in clicked the links and browsed the directories. I don't think I ever did, but I was just a teenager and not American, so maybe I wasn't in the target audience?
In the early days the portals were great and you could find most anything by browsing them; click on topic, go through the subtopics and get a list of websites on that topic, if those did not have the information you needed you went to the links pages/web rings on those sites and you would get what you needed soon enough. It was quicker than scrolling through pages and pages of modern day google results and trying to game the search terms. These were all personal pages you would be browsing and one of the things you would do in those days to get your page noticed is register it on Yahoo and the like. You were able to explore the internet in a way you can't anymore.
I did at times, but they are more fun now, browsed through the Wayback Machine.
Not only for the nostalgia, but for some topics, like som games or game genres, it can lead into amazing old internet clusters of sites full of fun/useful content (i.e. not just the ad/clickbate stuff everything turned into later, but real people just sharing because they wanted to share).
Many ISPs set a portal as your browsers homepage with their installers. Most people didn't know how to manually set up dial-up networking and would just run an installer their ISP provided. Since they didn't know how/why a portal was set they just assumed it was how things were.
1998 was the year I made my first website in pure HTML and, IIRC, CSS. There were two versions, one for 800x600 monitors or less, and one for 1024x768 and higher.
My grandmother's ISP offered games and such that could be played over dial up and would incur additional fees on the phone bill, per minute... Crazy times.
Yeah, bit hard for me to remember. I switched to Linux in 1995 around the time Windows 95 came out, because my 486/DX33 computer, with 4MB of RAM, wouldn't run it so I was going to be left behind anyway. 16MB of RAM (the only sensible upgrade due to stick sizes) would have been a colossal $400 ($840 today).
Plus, on Windows 3.1, SLiRP/PPP + Trumpet Winsock was only barely usable for timelines and reasons I can't quite remember, so much of my internet life was through a shell account anyway; it made more sense to run Linux locally and have a native experience, rather than living on the internet through some piece of dialup modem terminal emulation software.
Though, after installing Linux, with only 4MB of RAM, rebuilding the kernel took 8 hours. I didn't actually realize this was abnormal, or that the drive thrashing I heard at the time was swapping rather than just normal code compilation.
It could start X, but only very, very slowly
At some point later I got a Cyrix 5x86/133 (o/c'd to 160) with 16MB. Probably around 97-98. At that point, the graphical web became a reality for me as well.
Otherwise, it was interactive stuff via telnet/ftp/usenet, and plenty of lynx for web.
Once you got a svgalib image viewer, it didn't really matter a lot.
For newcomers, a similar experience would be using the framebuffer and running slrn against the NNTP servers from https://www.eternal-september.org, using IRC (still alive too) and using trickle to throttle down your connection to 56k or ISDN speeds if you were lucky.
Oh, an MUDs, of course.
Today you can get a similar feeling with http://wiby.me with tons of personal sites.
> drive thrashing I heard at the time was swapping rather than just normal code compilation.
Funny how that was such a signal back then. Did the program crash? Lets listen. No, I can still hear it, its just taking its time. I'm not sure how long it took for me to realize the noise was coming from the drives and that wasn't the sound a cpu under load makes. Maybe a cpu under load noise (or an increasing brightness light) would actually be useful in some contexts: no need to hop on and run htop just look from across the room.
Ironically people at the time were not discounting Y2K going awry. Parents told me years later that new years was spent a bit more tense with the cellar stocked with cans and booze. We make fun of it now but people had concerns about the supply chain and what might result from that if everything borked at once. I guess the guys in Office Space managed to save the world in time (initech in that movie was patching fintech software for y2k).
We had an unspoken 'end of the world' party with friends and family over. We all laughed when midnight came and nothing happened, then our power cut out at 12:10am.
In the UK ISPs used to advertise how my megabytes of web space you got, how much Usenet you got, how many ISP-only email addresses were allocated, etc.
Most people used modems to dial up paying the local call rate (the ISPs got a cut of this so the longer you stayed on the more they earned) and as a result your computer was directly connected so people could (and did) portscan your machine directly.
Every site was http by default and only switched to https when you were going to buy something.
Web rings were a big thing and so was Yahoo. Search engines let you use search terms that were case sensitive (so "Python" got you comedy results and "python" got you information on snakes).
Big corporate didn't dominate then like it does now and it was a lot more fun, lots to explore and find.
I worked for an ISP (Telinco/Northwest Net), that was a whitelabeller - two weeks before Freeserve launched in 1998 with no monthly fee and was paid for through 0845 chargeback, we launched Connect Free on the same premise, and then whitelabelled it - Totalise, Currant Bun (which was from the Sun newspaper - a newspaper had its own ISP!), and others. Eventually that firm became World Online and then Tiscali and today it's all TalkTalk.
The Summer before we did that, we had like, 2000 customers. Couple of small modem banks. A few racks of servers, which provided SMTP, POP3 (we weren't at IMAP yet), DNS, some webspace. We had a Usenet feed which was basically a cache from upstream, but those days were starting to look numbered. We also offered some gaming servers - Quake and the like.
I built the signup scripts which would also provision email addresses and webspace, and also get you hooked up on the RADIUS servers so you could dial in.
When the decision was made to go 0845, most of the team quit. There was basically like 3 of us left. And we needed to buy £500k of server parts and build them, get BSD installed and provisioned to do everything it needed, rebuild the RADIUS stack, provision a load of new bandwidth (we once diagnosed a rising packet error rate on a microwave link by noting the tree over the road had come into leaf, which we then fixed with a stepladder and a saw to deal with the specific problematic branch), all while just living Summer vibes.
We ended up buying a repossessed DMS100 switch to handle the phone lines, a ton of Nortel CVX1800s, figure out how to become a proper AS and get a BGP router sorted, and all while working from a portacabin in a car park next to the Cheshire farmhouse which acted as our data centre, which had such poor air con, at the start the ambient temperature regularly hit 45C.
Exhilarating. Genuinely, one of the best times of my professional life.
We worked so hard. We wouldn't get in until about 10am, but would then work to about 6-7pm, then head into the nearest major city where most of us lived (Manchester), go to the pub for a few hours and figure out what we were going to do the next day, and then go back and do it all again.
Being part of that movement where we went from ~2000 people paying £10/month to around 750,000 people dialling in whenever they felt like accessing the internet and providing exemplary service (our callout/support structure was based on us being benchmarked against Demon, Pipex, Freeserve, and so on, and we had to beat them on everything from modem negotiation time, DNS response, bandwidth, everything), and kind of seeing the start of the Internet becoming a popular thing in the UK was wonderful.
I met up with one of my ex-colleagues from that Summer this Spring, and we were talking about how much we would love to have that feeling once more.
It'll never happen, but wow, what a time.
Seeing the wired screenshots I was immediately missing hotbot [1]. The colours even hurt in the days, but I used it a lot. Actually I was surprised that it still exists
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/19980208062232/http://www.hotbot...
Edit: seems like it only became kind of a search engine again in 2023 under completely different ownership : https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/HotBot
Also no Metacrawler: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MetaCrawler
Graduated with a CS degree in 1996. Went to work right away for a media company helping run all their web sites. (A few dozen Ultra 2s on a FDDI network connected to NetApps. Served mostly by Apache. A couple beefier boxes serving dynamic content using Perl CGI scripts. The horrid Netscape Server to run early backend JavaScript. Management over a frame relay network. Had friends at Excite, Equinix, etc.)
(In college on the side, I ran a tiny local ISP with a couple dozen Hayes modems connected to a Livingston Portmaster. T1 uplink. A couple PCs running Linux. Before college I had been hanging out on AOL giving technical advice, and before that was using an Apple II dialing into BBS's.)
Which is all to say, I was there for all of this and this piece is pretty much spot on.
When the movie Frequency (which has a communicating across time aspect) was made in 2000, the company the screen writers went to for how to get rich by investing in the right stock? Yahoo.
https://youtu.be/9rzVftbbiBo
The Million Dollar Web Page is still up!
Back during the dotcom craze, you could buy a pixel for $1. It was a 1000x1000 image, so the value was a million dollars. Some teenager did it.
Amazingly, it's still up. Although all or nearly all the links are broker or point to somthing different than what was originally there...
http://www.milliondollarhomepage.com/
Given the link rot and that this page still have thousand of visitors per day (according to Wikipedia) it's amazing that he never added a resell service. Maybe the original pixels owners are hard to track though.
I still remember all the useless copycats (especially in other languages) cropping up after the success of the Million Dollar Home Page.
I wonder how the guy that created it managed to make it so viral that he sold out all of the pixels in a short time.
Going back a few years (from 1998), it was all dial-up and I was working in London on a stand-by. Happened to be paired with someone I respct, so I showed him "the internet" - pretty much Pat Sharp and mtv.com back then.
Headline story on mtv.com was Kurt Cobain was dead - I was like "Wow!". Guy I was working with was "yeah, it was in the papers a few days ago.".
It's an abiding memory, maybe has coloured my view of the rise of the internet, just sharing a dusty anecdote.
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1998 the game was already lost, although we could not imagine how evil Google would become and many others did not exist yet. Eternal September was 1993 after all https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September.
In 1989 when I started to use internet, someone being on the internet meant they could be trusted. Private internet did not exist, so all users were basically university employees. I visited people and invited people from other countries without knowing them. Sending a couple of emails, and everything was fine. I sent bills to a money collector overseas and the cheque was in the mail a couple of weeks later.
To me this was such a weird time, because I was too young to experience the Usenet groups before that. To me, all those "get usenet downloads access" premium upsales always looked very phishy and like a scam to begin with, and all the tools available for Windows were also commercially sold. You saw them everywhere, next to serials generators, illegal warez sites, even next to fetish porn ads. That's why I subconsciously associated it with "must be a scam like online casinos".
I only realized what usenet and IRC were when I first installed/booted a Knoppix CD that came with a computer magazine. Little did I know that it would brick the bootloader of Windows 98 at the time. But by then most usenet groups were already either flooded with spam, or dead. Most groups were lurking in IRC via bouncers all day long to not miss a message.
My favorite commercial from those days: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=BPIpWMCKEbk&pp=ygUeQWx0YSB2aXN...
Mine was this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H2YhXQaNiY4
Of course this device didn't actually exist in the consumer market. Half of my aunts and uncles worked for IBM and none of them knew anything about it. From cruising the YouTube comments it looks like a simpler version of the system had a few industrial applications but nothing remotely like the commercial. With AR glasses I think we're pretty much there nowadays but most people would rather use Robinhood and AirPods on an iPhone to do the same without bothering pigeons or looking like a weirdo on public transit.
The instant I saw the first frame I remembered having seen it... but I don't remember any of the content with the boy!
What does the search engine prompt say? I couldn't read it.
It says "How can I beat Karpov's (illegible) gambit". Something like that.
I feel like I missed a lot of the early internet while it was happening because I had dialup and it was already a DSL/cable era pretty fast by the end of the 90s. So many times you'd click an image link and go "ehh maybe I didn't care enough to see it after all" after it only loaded 10% of the pixels after way too long. I couldn't even play runescape for years; the site at the time ran a speed test and would just tell me my connection was too slow not even letting me into the world to test. Parents would set an egg timer for computer usage so every second counted which only added to the frustration and stress.
You could play MUDs at least.
Installing software on the home computer was out of reach at that time. No one in the family or family friends were tech literate then beyond booting up the pc and opening email. I would doodle mustaches over family photos in ms paint and play pinball. Took years before I finally looked behind the curtain.
One thing I remember from those days, was how meteoric the google rise was. Prior to google I (and most I know) used Altavista. When we got around trying google, there was no way back. And then the years that followed with awesome products from google.
I used a couple others too but, yeah, pre-Google mostly Altavista. Funnily enough, the product guy on Altavista was the person most responsible for hiring me into my kast job.
For me Google came out in 1997, as beta and probably without the current domain name, but being back that time reader of Slashdot it was hard not to miss it.
And it was magic compared with everything else that were around back then.
Yeah, I remember that. The first search engine that wasn't absolute trash. Metafind/Dogpile only helped because they merged all the terrible results onto one page so you could be frustrated by them with one click. Access to information (and the quantity of available information, including about topics from the 90s) now is SO MUCH BETTER than it was in the 90s.
You can still experience 1998 Internet by using and old computer or emulator and configure it to use protoweb.org
Or Qemu without virtualization (or DOSBOX-X) with W98SE (or the libre floss way with Damn Small Linux, Dillo and setting up the proxy as you said to the ones of protoweb).
I was waking up at 3 or 4 AM to download software as the internet was the fastest at that time of the day.
I wonder how many people actually used those portals, as in clicked the links and browsed the directories. I don't think I ever did, but I was just a teenager and not American, so maybe I wasn't in the target audience?
In the early days the portals were great and you could find most anything by browsing them; click on topic, go through the subtopics and get a list of websites on that topic, if those did not have the information you needed you went to the links pages/web rings on those sites and you would get what you needed soon enough. It was quicker than scrolling through pages and pages of modern day google results and trying to game the search terms. These were all personal pages you would be browsing and one of the things you would do in those days to get your page noticed is register it on Yahoo and the like. You were able to explore the internet in a way you can't anymore.
I did at times, but they are more fun now, browsed through the Wayback Machine.
Not only for the nostalgia, but for some topics, like som games or game genres, it can lead into amazing old internet clusters of sites full of fun/useful content (i.e. not just the ad/clickbate stuff everything turned into later, but real people just sharing because they wanted to share).
Many ISPs set a portal as your browsers homepage with their installers. Most people didn't know how to manually set up dial-up networking and would just run an installer their ISP provided. Since they didn't know how/why a portal was set they just assumed it was how things were.
I used the SBC global one as a homepage. It was cool, you could customize it quite a lot which was its own sort of fun. I was a kid then too.
Enough people used them to make them worth billions, in 1998 $.
If your interested in this era, also check out the Code Rush documentary.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Q7FTjhvZ7Y
1998 was the year I made my first website in pure HTML and, IIRC, CSS. There were two versions, one for 800x600 monitors or less, and one for 1024x768 and higher.
My grandmother's ISP offered games and such that could be played over dial up and would incur additional fees on the phone bill, per minute... Crazy times.
Seems like yesterday.
https://wiby.me/surprise/
In 98, I was still using ftp and USENET, WEB was still a few years off for me.
Yeah, bit hard for me to remember. I switched to Linux in 1995 around the time Windows 95 came out, because my 486/DX33 computer, with 4MB of RAM, wouldn't run it so I was going to be left behind anyway. 16MB of RAM (the only sensible upgrade due to stick sizes) would have been a colossal $400 ($840 today).
Plus, on Windows 3.1, SLiRP/PPP + Trumpet Winsock was only barely usable for timelines and reasons I can't quite remember, so much of my internet life was through a shell account anyway; it made more sense to run Linux locally and have a native experience, rather than living on the internet through some piece of dialup modem terminal emulation software.
Though, after installing Linux, with only 4MB of RAM, rebuilding the kernel took 8 hours. I didn't actually realize this was abnormal, or that the drive thrashing I heard at the time was swapping rather than just normal code compilation.
It could start X, but only very, very slowly
At some point later I got a Cyrix 5x86/133 (o/c'd to 160) with 16MB. Probably around 97-98. At that point, the graphical web became a reality for me as well.
Otherwise, it was interactive stuff via telnet/ftp/usenet, and plenty of lynx for web.
Once you got a svgalib image viewer, it didn't really matter a lot.
For newcomers, a similar experience would be using the framebuffer and running slrn against the NNTP servers from https://www.eternal-september.org, using IRC (still alive too) and using trickle to throttle down your connection to 56k or ISDN speeds if you were lucky.
Oh, an MUDs, of course.
Today you can get a similar feeling with http://wiby.me with tons of personal sites.
> drive thrashing I heard at the time was swapping rather than just normal code compilation.
Funny how that was such a signal back then. Did the program crash? Lets listen. No, I can still hear it, its just taking its time. I'm not sure how long it took for me to realize the noise was coming from the drives and that wasn't the sound a cpu under load makes. Maybe a cpu under load noise (or an increasing brightness light) would actually be useful in some contexts: no need to hop on and run htop just look from across the room.
Blue links, slow, new, exciting, portal to a new world, free, no social media facebook/etc walled gardens, pre-enshittification
Seriously, I miss the reliable blue underlined links like you wouldn't believe.
A lot of people were already partying like it was 1999 :)
Some of them had quite a head start too, considering Prince wrote the song back in 1982 ;)
Ironically people at the time were not discounting Y2K going awry. Parents told me years later that new years was spent a bit more tense with the cellar stocked with cans and booze. We make fun of it now but people had concerns about the supply chain and what might result from that if everything borked at once. I guess the guys in Office Space managed to save the world in time (initech in that movie was patching fintech software for y2k).
We had an unspoken 'end of the world' party with friends and family over. We all laughed when midnight came and nothing happened, then our power cut out at 12:10am.
Only for a few minutes, but I'll never forget it.
Some people definitely worried and many others spent many hours remediating systems in the year or two before.
Personally, I was in Quebec City on a group ski and party trip :-)
Never stopped.
Slow
If you want to see a website from that era see: http://zafka.com While a few changes have been made, the "style" remains unchanged.
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