Although I progressed from my childhood into my teens in the 90s, l don’t retain much memory of the internet back then as l had no exposure to it.
Internet was mostly used for my people to find each other and do nerd shit. The rest were normies being trolls or casual people that just kind of stumbled through it. Corporations had websites but they were mostly just a one page description of the company and not really useful. Social media was basically chat rooms and message forums. Ads were mostly banners and maybe a few pop ups, sometimes a website would have so many pop ups that your computer would lock up. Search engines would bring up the wildest results. It was basically free and open and mostly unregulated, until Metallica attacked P2P (Napster) sharing and that’s about the time it started to fall apart and the glory days ended.
The Internet was 95% shit posting.
Man, it was amazing.
The internet was not a utility. It was not a necessity. It was not in 7 billion pockets. It was the refuge of nerds, techheads and the like… a fancy, affordable refuge for the curious and weird.
Exploring websites via webrings, guestbooks, and a literal yellowpage website that listed known websites. Everything felt like an adventure, like you were a brave explorer charting unknown lands. Never getting use to the whimsy and wonder that you discovered around every turn.
And the chatrooms were nothing like they were today. All you knew was their handle/screen name. Social media didnt exist, the ironclad rule of telling no one your name, age, location was in full effect and respected by everyone. So you’d spend all night talking with people from all corners of the globe, on common interests and unique experiences. . laughing with eachother well into the night before you had to log off, on the promise of doing it all over again the next night.
There were no ads, viruses were rare (at least until the later 90s when KaZaA/eMule/etc popped up), the corporate hellscape and consolidation were still too far off to be considered by any but the most paranoid conspiracy theorists… an absolute magical era of time.
Could we recreate something like this ??
You could probably recreate the technology.
but recreating the era? the sense of adventure? you’re never recreating that.
All the gifs and jpegs were in sepia.
Back then internet servers were getting a bit of flack from environmentalists for the destruction of cuttlefish populations.
But napster kept the masses placated so there was never a revolution.
Oh I remember! And data was transported by animal-drawn vehicles. The stench!
Ahh, yes, I remember hearing the clop clop of the FTP man coming down our road. It was often the highlight of the day! I would go running through house yelling “Mummy! Mummy! The downloads are here!”
We would meet him out front of the house and everyone would hope that he had brought a new photo or shareware demo just for them!
Look at the Japanese web, they’ve not really moved on from the early 90s.
Instead of like a handful of big corporate run websites, everyone had a personal one. Businesses didn’t just make a Facebook page; they had their own .com domain. You could very easily find stuff that you would only be able to find on the dark web now; though this is sometimes a good thing, like when it comes to accidentally coming across CP. Not very likely today as it was back in the Wild West of the 'net.
“This page is designed for 800x600 monitors, sign my guestbook.”
“Join the webring”
Under construction.gif
You are the 1,000,000th visitor! Claim your prize!
Asl
and a big animated gif of a skeletons hand for no reason but it was a cool gif.
Biggest change was there use to be more internet than web.
What does this mean ?
Probably a reference to there being more than just HTTP. There was protocols like Gopher and tech like Usenet which were kinda precursors to HTTP and the WWW for information sharing/reading/communicating.
The world wide web isn’t the same thing as the internet. The internet is a network of computer networks, allowing your home network to INTERcommunicate (pls be a word so I don’t look stupid) with your ISP’s NETwork and in turn a globally interconnected network of computers. The world wide web is specifically a type of thing communicated over the internet. Don’t 100% remember what counts as a webpage but I’m going to guess the wikipedia url and if I got it right then I’ll have saved you looking it up yourself. IIRC it’s just meant to be human-readable HyperTextMarkupLanguage (HTML) pages that you can view in your browser without having to download a file to your computer. Downloading a file is something you might do on an FileTransportProtocol website (ftp.example.com vs www.example.com).
The thing is, after everything I’ve said, it basically doesn’t matter because in case you haven’t noticed, lots of, if not most, websites omit the www. subdomain from their url. The reason for this is just because almost everyone who used the internet only cares about the web. Only very specific domains and users will communicate using an ftp, imap, git, etc subdomain. Not to say these types of sites and protocols aren’t widely used, just that for eg imap, you’re much more likely to go to a website like gmail.com, outlook.com, proton.me, etc (all of which are websites but ommit the www.) and then you will access the imap part of those sites via the website.
The only part of this comment that I’m reasonably confident I didn’t get wrong is how little the difference between internet and web matters today, because almost every single time I went to talk about a non www site, I started writing “website” (instead of domain, site, url etc) and had to delete it to write something else instead.
People used other protocols to communicate on the internet (FTP, Gopher, Usenet, telnet, etc…). The web (http) came later, and grew pretty slowly in the beginning, though some were smart enough to see where the web was headed and started domain squatting from get go.
FTP was in its heyday for obtaining files. Usenet was the place to be for grouped content.
Old Gopher information services were mostly dead by '99 but there were still a few holdouts.
E-mail in actual mail clients reigned supreme.
Also, depending of what you think of as “web” these days, most old web stuff was basically just nice-looking text with graphics thrown in and maybe a little JavaScript here and there, not full blown interactive experiences and applications like we have now.
I remember Gmail being revolutionary for being able to load new content without reloading the whole page. Also a lot of people thought it was fake because 1gb of storage was a ridiculous amount - hot mail offered lined 5mb total or something at the time. And that was a few years after 2000
The environment was more organically natural. Real people without corporate filters doing what they wanted, what interested them. More weird products, websites, small service doohickies that have long since been abandoned as tech became corporate and monolithic
This is a perfect example of the pre-Y2K internet.
That was the mid-to-late aughts (2005~). Most people didn’t have anything close to a good enough internet connection for that pre-2000 and YouTube didn’t even exist then. Your link is a perfect example of the late aughts.
First got AOL in maybe 1995/1996. That was back during the days of dial up and 1 phone line per house. Where you could be in online chats, then get knocked off because someone called your house. Finding your way into Warez/Server/Zeraw rooms run by AOL proggies like Fate-X and getting the first exposure to piracy. That’s how I first learned VB programmingz Photoshop with EyeCandy, and Bryce 3D in Jr High. It’s also my PC got crazy viruses. This had to be downloaded in from 10+ volumes via WinRAR. The game changer was when AOL finally added download resume so if you got knocked offline by a phone call when the download was at 90% you could simply resume it instead of having to restart. And you could queue email downloads, so you could have 20+ email queued and let it download overnight.
The shit storm hit one summer when AOL user base increased faster than they could expand and it was nothing but busy signals trying to connect. They eventually caught up but it was baaad.
Then came the era of “free” dialup internet services where it was a matter of having some ad bars run whole connected…but there were ways around that. Then About 2 year later cable internet started becoming common.
I almost never see anyone talking about AOL proggies.
Those things were so legit. Half of them probably were viruses, but being able to run games in chatrooms and such were so awesome.
Oh they were! I had a huge collection of those full suite proggies, a couple different punters, phishing tools, and servers. I even programmed my own punter at one point.
Yep. I remember AOHell and Firetoolz specifically, though I’m sure i had others, lol.
edit
AOL deserved all the hate it got, but it was also such a great place to be… Keywords, chatrooms galore, AIM, it was definitely a magical time.
Man, it was glorious.
Remember when it was generally accepted that an advert was a small banner at the top of your phpnuke forum, while you listened to Iron Maiden in musicmatch jukebox, while hanging on msn messenger and talked about your geocities website.
While technically possible it’s far more likely you were using ICQ or IRC back in the 90s. I had MSN when it launched in 99 and no one else was using it.
A/S/L?
Hey, I remember the internet before ads and SPAM…
I remember the outrage when a couple of lawyers posted an ad on usenet.
The internet before y2k was nuts. There were no safeguards for anything. Some of my favorites was just the weird game rumors and fake cheats at the time. Since there was no way to really verify stuff. Wild claims of going to professor bills backyard for pikablu or getting into the side grass area of pallet town to catch the starters.
Same as post Y2K, but with more stressed out IT and programming staff.
Y2K didn’t happen, because of massive coordinated efforts to avoid it. Nothing changed as a result of y2k.
The dot com bubble burst and a few years later web2.0 happened. Those events were much bigger.
You are visitor number 0000000000000027
The first 25 were the owner checking to see if anyone else had visited.
P.s. under construction… (animated gif of men at work sign)
Well, I guess there was 1 PC for the whole family. Analogue modems would scream as they talked over wires. A lot. If you picked up a phone in the house, you would hear the scream of not just the modem, but the person using the internet to put it down.
A lot of people had their own homepages hosted on Geocities or Angelfire - which were like free-form expressions of your facebook profile. Utterly abusing HTML and GIFs.
And to communicate with your friends, you used IRC, MSN Messenger, ICQ or AIM. All of them, as some friends wouldn’t be on one or the other.
You searched for information using Alta Vista, Web Crawler, Yahoo!, Lycos or Ask Jeeves.
Your email address usually ended in @hotmail.com or @yahoo.com (and regional variations, like .de or .co.uk, etc.), BUT, you also had an email address from your ISP (so aol.com, freeserve.co.uk, free.fr, etc.) were really common.
Listening to music was different. You would search for MP3s (people would ‘rip’ songs from CDs into MP3 format and upload them) using free services like Napster (the OG), then WinMX, Limewire, eDonkey. and you would listen to them using an audio player like WInAmp (on the family PC). MP3 players (like the iPod or Zune) were just starting out I think, so you tended to get MP3s and then burn them to a CD so you could listen to them in your car, or in your portable CD player, or even your HiFi.
Streaming video wasn’t really a thing, as modems are too slow, but, you could download movies (it just took FOREVER) and they would almost always be the worst cam quality you could imagine and compressed as much as possible.
Using Linux/Unix was really a huge pain as most of the modems were actually Winmodems so none of the manufacturers would provide binaries or modules for anything other than Windows, so they were almost always reverse engineered - and it was just a pain.
I could probably ramble on for longer, but this feels like a good place to stop and say “get off my lawn”.
I feel ya’ 🥲
They didn’t run cable to my area back then, so we tried to watch South Park via the Internet. If we left the computer running overnight, and nobody called on the telephone during those 10 hours, there weren’t any other connection issues, or too much traffic, and the file wasn’t mislabeled, there’d be one new episode waiting for us in the morning.
I’m glad that the boring old Internet survives and people are still actively making FOSS products without all of the awful innovations that have enshittified the Internet experience.
Not to be bitpicky, but all of the above except IRC (and all the UNIX commentary) existed about two or three years after the WWW came into existence.
You are talking about a very short period of time, two three years at most, before the year 2000.
That said, your description of that time is spot on. This is the beginning of the so-called golden age.
i still have an email from my isp. so retro!
I think most of the filesharing you mentioned was post year 2000. The only thing really around before then that was close to mainstream was Napster. Almost everyone was on dialup so downloading movies was basically not a thing. The dancing baby meme was a very low resolution, 30 seconds long, and would have a taken 10 to 20 minutes to download with a typical 1996 modem
Trading porn and music over irc was pretty common back then. There was even support to resume downloads via IRC DCC. A lot wasn’t what you wanted though and child porn was unfortunately prevelant all over dalnet, efnet porn chat rooms. As was troll images that you couldn’t unsee.
