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.
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.
Here ya go.
P.S. it’s still alive go visit it! https://www.webtender.com/
P.P.S. I know you didn’t mean what did a website look like but I love sharing it and it’s not entirely wrong to connect it to your question since it is still a functional site that really hasn’t changed much. Enjoy responsibly. And feel free to share your favourite drink recipe.
P.P.P.S the rest of the internet had just as much clutter as today’s obnoxious ads, they were just a lot more annoying in some ways. Also more colourful. Ahh Geocities
Thanks for sharing. Drinks are not my cup of tea :)))
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.
It came on a CD-ROM, and they were everywhere.
Children throwing the internet like shuriken across fields, hanging them from trees as decorations, occasionally actually putting them in a PC for 2 free hours!
I like your answer best, because there’s no way OP believes your 100% accurate answer.
The good internet still exists, and is pretty damn good even now. The problem is social media and a handful of bad-but-popular sites.
I tell people this every so often, but in terms of percentage of the world population, there are far more people on the good internet than there were back then. The problem is, with the advent of smartphones, social media use exploded, and Facebook and Twitter became gigantic, far exceeding the size of the good web. Your aunts and uncles with little net savvy and a bucket of bad opinions swamped Facebook, and never really changed. The popular tech media, which tends to follow the biggest crowds to the exclusion of all else, began treating Facebook as if it were THE internet. It’s the tyranny of crowds.
Once it became evident that you could be successful by doing it, everyone started chasing the favor of those largely clueless users. Google began to prioritize a handful of websites like Reddit, Stack Exchange, Wikipedia and their own Youtube, and largely gave up the fight against SEO abusers like Fandom. Sites that had been considered internet utilities decided to cash in.
There are still fun web games being made, if you know where to look for them (some places to look: Vole.wtf, Neal.fun, Ferry Halim’s long-running Orisinal and hey Newgrounds is still around). There are great free web hosts still, like Neocities and Nekoweb. (Although note, I just learned that Angelfire shut down in April.) A version of the old good Google still exists through the Web search option, a.k.a. udm14, but now there’s multiple other search engines that aren’t so bad. There is the Fediverse, of course. And if you look around you might find out about these awesome things called tildes, free Linux machines you can apply for a shell account on just to mess around, often with internal chat, bulletin boards, web space, community games and even weirder things like Gopher and Gemini (not Google Gemini) sites.
All these things exist. You just gotta know where to find them, amidst all the suck out there. They CAN be hard to find, but that’s one reason why I linked to some of them above. Seek out sources of links! Metafilter, the venerable community weblog, is one of them. A few other places to look: Andy Baio’s Waxy, Rusty Foster’s Today In Tabs and even Mozilla’s own Ten Tabs. You can also find a good RSS reader to keep up with many websites at once.
It takes work to find things now, it is true, it takes the realization that you can’t be passive about finding the good things out there. But, truly, it’s always been like that. The good days of Google were an aberration. The natural order of the internet is, the great stuff has never been, and will never be mainstream.
“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.
34, genderfluid, metro Atlanta.
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”.
Still have my ICQ number memorized. It was awesome in the dialup age when people were gasp offline to be able to send them a message where AIM and MSN only worked if both parties were online. Mostly used AIM myself, but ICQ definitely had its place.
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.
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.
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 feel ya’ 🥲
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.
i still have an email from my isp. so retro!
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.
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
Y2K was not the problem. Eternal September is. Before that, the Internet was a better place. Much better.
I feel like this comment could at least benefit from a rough explanation of what Eternal September was. Someone unfamiliar with Y2K isn’t likely to be familiar with the term.
Back in the day, it used to be that every September, there would be an influx of new users on the internet, BBS, what have you, every September, because of the school/uni holidays. Because they were unfamiliar with internet etiquette, they’d be confused by the existing terminology, or be a little annoying to the existing users, by not being familiar with the culture there.
Eternal September was a point where every day on the internet was September. There would always be people new to the internet on it, enough for there to be a major impact.
Hey, asl
On Discord I always get more DMs around certain times of year, I think it’s from college kids getting on there for the first time and not knowing the general etiquette. Or thinking you need to send a friend request to someone before talking to them. Interesting how some patterns return.
The term came from Usenet, after AOL opened up internet access to its users.
I don’t feel like it’s new users not knowing etiquette that’s the problem. I think it’s corporate greed and enshittification.
The internet has been dumbed down to a handful of high-traffic sites, and those are trying to make a buck of us. You ran a server/website for your own benefit, not to make a dollar. It’s corpo greed, I tell ya…
The Internet was a place.
Compared to now, you had to go somewhere physical to be on the Internet. That changed the relationship that people had with the Internet, you went there to do something rather than have it entertain you when bored. It also meant you weren’t always available to being messaged.
There were also a lot less videos online due to bandwidth. Animation was a far bigger deal since the bandwidth needed to show an animation was significantly less than the bandwidth needed to show even SD video.
Relevant video essay from one of my fav (new) youtube creators. The Internet Used to Be a Place
That really changed more in 2008+ with the invention of smartphones.
I really need to understand this term, bandwidth. Also latency.
If I send you a 24TB hard drive in the mail and it takes three days to arrive, thats high bandwidth, high latency.
If I send you a 24 character morse code message over the radio it’s low latency and low bandwidth.
Conclusion:
bandwith = maximum volume per second, like width of a water pipe
latency = delay in arrival, how many milliseconds the data takes to make the journey, like how slow or long a pipe is.
I’m going to use some descriptive metaphors to explain this as best I can. Apologies to my fellow Lemmy nerds for the small inaccuracies this might create, but I think I can get the basic point across in plain language.
Bandwidth is how much data can flow over a rate of time. It is similar to a water pipe—a bigger pipe can flow more water into your home, and a smaller one will flow less. If we’re comparing internet data to water, downloading a file is like filling up a bucket until the bucket is full and it is a complete bucket of water. Bigger files are like bigger buckets—you need more water (data) to fill them.
In the case of streaming a video, the bucket has a hole in the bottom because the playing of the video is the equivalent of the water being used and discarded. The flow of data needs to be faster than the play rate of the video (the drain rate of the hole in this case), otherwise the video will pause because it has not received the next section of data to play that video content (the bucket runs out of water). In the 90’s, we all had really small internet “pipes”, so sending data could not happen very quickly, and thus sending video that could be streamed was very difficult (or in many cases, impossible).
Now let’s talk about latency. Internet is unlike a water pipe in that not any old data will do—it has to be that specific data from that specific server.
In plain language, latency is the amount of time it takes to send a signal from a server to your computer and back.
Your computer has to contact that server and tell it “I need YOU to send me water.” The server has to react to that and start sending you the data, but the server has its own pipes to contend with, and it has other requests from other water users it needs to deliver too. If their pipes are slow, or they have too many requests, then the data will not flow to you quickly. If the data does not flow to you quickly, it will not outrun the play rate of the video, and the video will pause.
I hope that helped you gain a basic understanding of these concepts—I did my best. I welcome any other nerds out there to chime in if I misrepresented anything too much.
That means, if l wish to catch up with the live action of FIFA World Cup on the internet, it needs a high bandwidth and high latency. We watch all our TV channels and movies on Jio airfiber, which is an internet connection. It involves very high bandwidth and latency.
Close. High bandwidth, low latency.
High amount of data able to stream, low time to communicate with the server.
That said, servers are a lot faster than they used to be, and video compression has come a long way too, so you can stream more things on a worse connection than you could in the 90’s.
Video compression would be an interesting area to study.
It’s pretty much the entire plot of Silicon Valley (TV show). It is complicated and fascinating.
Can we watch it on YouTube ?
Bandwidth is akin to number of lanes on an interstate, latency is how long it takes each car to go from point A to B (or X, or wherever you’re measuring to).
Technically, bandwidth is the difference between the upper and lower frequencies in a continuous band of frequencies. It is typically measured in unit of hertz (so how “wide” is the signal) - in ye olden days the signal width corresponded to transmission capacity.
While latency is a measure of how long a specified bit of data took to transit a system, especially when compared against the “ideal” performance of the system.
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.
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 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.
Oh yes. Sanford Wallace. May he rot in a very special place in hell.
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.
