How were images uploaded in online service providers?

Question

Before the first image was uploaded on the World Wide Web in 1992, it was possible for people to upload images on the internet before the World Wide Web, users uploaded images on online service providers such as CompuServe, GEnie and among others, How were images uploaded in online service providers before the World Wide Web?

Answer 1

You may have heard the very true proverb that

There is no cloud, but someone elses computer!

right? The very same misunderstanding seems to be at work here:

There is no 'World Wide Web', only networks and communication protocols.

The Internet and its IP based protocol suite being one. HTTP for example handles request and delivery of web-pages, while FTP, handling file transfer, just to name two of them. Those protocols are used connect service providers, like mailboxes, forums and whatsoever by means of using a user client software, vulgo a browser.

Other networks, like the mentioned, have their own protocols, service providers and client programs to do the same. Some based it on more generic clients like terminal protocols (often VT100/ANSI) and standard file transfer protocols (X-Modem, Kermit, etc.), while others created and distributed their own client software - best go and ask some older person about 'AOL-CDs'.

Bottom line, as soon as there is a communication line to exchange data, data can and will be exchanged. No difference between text, sound or pictures, as they are just files of data - files to be transferred using some file transfer protocol (*1). Protocols dating back to the 1970s or even before.

That nowadays the camera app of one's phone offers a button to post a picture taken straight to some social network holds no principal difference to a 1985 Compuserve / Q-Link / AOL / mailbox / etc. user pressing some key combination to select a picture file to upload.

The only improvement is more a seamless UI integration.

... well, that and that one may now upload a 20 Megabyte picture the same ease as a 2 KiB one back then :))

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*1 - Not to mention, that files can of course be transferred using sneakernet, aka good old physical media, like floppy disks or tapes. In the very early days (*2) of mailboxes it was quite common to 'upload' large amounts of data, like web comics, picture collections or (textual) data bases that way. After all, transferring a 100 KiB data blob at 300 Bd will take anywhere between one and two hours. While blocking the computer (not much background transfer back then) and the family telephone line for two hours might have still be acceptable to the uploader, the mailbox owner and other users might not be as appreciative as those systems often had only one line - or a few at best.

*2 - Not telling that Sneakernet is dead, it's still as useful for large data sets as 40 years ago - except 'large' no longer means in Kilo- or Mega-Bytes but Tera- and Peta-Bytes :))

Answer 2

Before the WWW, you couldn't guarantee that:

1. your communications link could send 8-bit bytes as a single character;
2. the remote computer (and possibly even your local computer) represented data in bytes anyway.

So whatever protocol you used, there as a lot of conversion and escaping of characters to ensure the data made it through the wires. Compuserve, for example, used its own B Protocol to packetize data and make it safe for transmission through 7-bit data networks such as Tymnet.

In addition, simple graphics formats were developed that only used printable characters. One of these was Compuserve RLE, a disarmingly simple file format that could nonetheless encode a 256×192 monochrome bitmap in a text file that could be decoded using a short BASIC program. Because it used only simple run-length encoding, CIS RLE files didn't store stippled images efficiently.