I’m new to the internet. Only got access to it 3 years ago. Didn’t own a smartphone until last year. I’m curious how it was for people who discovered it earlier.
Back in my day we had to get our Internet at the village Internet well. I remember the dialup modem noises it made as you pulled the bucket up.
The heartbreak after spending hours downloading something and you hear “beepboopbeep beepboopboopbeep*…“ooops” clunk” through the modem.
30 some years ago?
Everything was just more fractured. Instead of a handful of options for social media, there were thousands of forums on their own websites. ICQ handled IMs and away messages was basically twitter. Before YouTube/spotify everyone used Winamp and internet radio streams for music, you didn’t have songs on demand, but compared to local “real” radio or MTV it was an overwhelming about of choice.
It’s honestly not that much different though.
There were many good-hearted feuds. SA versus Fark, newgrounds, photoshop wars… It was very tribal.
Also craigslist was a place people would just hangout.
Photoshop wars?
Photoshop wars?
Something is Awful up in this piece!
1995., I got an email account and discovered IRC and usenet via tin, ona a vt100 terminal
The Internet of the 90s was such a simpler place. Better in many ways, worse in some. For instance, the Internet wasn’t so commercialized back then. Instead of a bunch of services, it was a bunch of nerds sharing information and having conversations. If you liked a tv show, you would search for websites about that show. Anyone could make their own website, so you would find tons of fan sites dedicated to each thing. Search engines didn’t provide you with information or answer questions, they just helped you sort through all the different websites, then you could look on those sites to find whatever information you were looking for. There was almost no video, it was all text and (small) images.
1996, It was magnificent in its simplicity. Very few walled gardens, no cookie-pop-ups, and very few ads.
And the best search engine was HotBot. Fight me.
It took until early 1998 before I got my own modem and could start to really enjoy it. For those of us who enjoyed “testing stuff with telnet”, it was scary how much sensitive stuff was unencrypted and openly available. Anyone who knew how CGI worked could bypass a lot of stuff and craft custom headers to retrieve things they weren’t supposed to.
And the best search engine was HotBot. Fight me.
Dogpile 4 life…
…dogpile introduced me to google when it was a brand-new service: i noticed that all the best results increasingly came from the same search engine, so eventually i cut out the middleman and just started using google directly…
…how times have changed; i haven’t used google for years…
The cookie popups (you mean the cookie consent ones, right?) weren’t really common until like ~2016 or so, were they? (I found this post that claims May 2018) And I thought there were actual pop up ads before then, though yeah not as bad as modern internet browsing without an ad blocker, in some ways.
But there were other usability quirks… I remember always downloading Firefox on a new computer, because Internet Explorer 5 or whatever didn’t have tabs (and Firefox did). Then Chrome was faster and seemed to quickly take over. I remember that javascript alert popups were somewhat common, and would force their window or tab to the top, so a site could easily kind of hijack your whole desktop session, since I think you couldn’t resize the window or even close it until dismissing the popup. In fact at some point the major browsers added a checkbox “prevent this site from showing this dialog” (or something like that) as a mitigation. Before that you could do like
while (true) { alert('hello world'); }and I think the only workaround was to force-close the browser? Other random tidbit: you could also execute arbitrary javascript by putting it in the address bar,javascript:alert('hello world')would show the popup. And ha, I remember when the address bar didn’t default to search, it would only accept URLs.In 1996 I was quite young, but I remember my father connecting to bulletin boards to download free shareware games for me, and it would use up the home phone line. (For anyone who doesn’t know, bulletin boards were text based, like a terminal… and he’d have to call a number, we’d look up some in our area code to avoid long distance fees, I think. When visiting my grandmother’s house in another province, we used a different set of bulletin boards, I think. I remember seeing something like a phone book that would list a bunch of servers that could be called for different things. I remember seeing something like this on Reddit a long time ago:
Memory has a way of being fuzzy and inaccurate. Probably not my actual first experience of it, and I’m probably combining several different occasions…
But I remember a new desk with a computer set up in the living room. My parents or brother set me down in front of it and asked what I wanted to look for, I could search for anything. The first thing that came to mind was to look for Zelda, so I got them to type in Zelda Link’s Awakening for the search engine. I ended up on a cool little fansite, and learned about the bomb arrows trick.
First I used was dial up. My first recollection of using it was to browse my local kids tv network website.
Exactly like this
2000, just after dial-up was phased out in my area and broadband was the hot new thing. These were the Windows XP days, and I was a kid, so most of my early memories of the internet were websites where I could play Flash games, like Neopets, Newgrounds, AddictingGames, etc. Maybe it was just because I was a kid, or because it was new to me, or maybe I’m just blinded my nostalgia, but the internet felt much more novel then, and you could spend hours jumping from site to site. It was more interesting to explore. Now it really feels like I cycle around the same 5 sites. Oh also - Googling something worked and was useful back then. Way different than trying to Google something today.
- I saw picture of a penis in a bathtub someone had titled “Moby dick” on my first day.
Forums were everywhere, and most websites from private entities looked like someone vomited gifs and word art everywhere. Backgrounds were the most insane of colors and oh my god I just now realized one of the sites I used to visit in the early 2000s was popular with trans people, the trans flag was all over the place and literally was the background
Also MySpace.
1990, so 35 years ago, there was no WWW, we had IRC, Gopher, Usenet. It was mainly students/universities and a couple of companies.
Sometime around 1996 for my personal Internet experience, we got it and a laptop for my mom around 1994 so she could do something while getting her master’s and my parents thought it was super cool so we kept it. We finally got a family computer with a modem in 1996. I had an email penpal. I think I spent an entire day trying to download a demo for a video game that got stopped 75% through because my mom picked up the phone.
First BBS in like… 86? 87?
Simple. Everything was simple.
1987? Email address at university but didn’t know anyone off campus with an email address to use it with. There was a MUD one of the computer room assistants was coding.
Real Internet started for me around 1992 working for a company funded by Vint Cerf and Bob Khan. Found Mosaic on release date in 1993 on an ftp site and my mind was blown. Every morning I’d check the Cambridge coffee pot, and Library of Congress which was digitalizing documents and uploading new files all the time, and Adam Curry’s MTV which had a new article every few days or so.
Playing Warcraft 3 custom maps online and roleplaying in Yahoo! Chatrooms were some of my first uses.
remember the Yahoo! Games? I loved them. They were epic.
I played a fair bit of Yahoo! Pool for a while. Me and my brother in law even got involved in organized tournaments and shit, lmao.
