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.
One of my first exposures to the internet was in school, a teacher plugged a computer into a telephone, it made weird noises, then we waited five minutes to load a website with facts about frogs, I’m pretty sure he had to type in an ip address that was written down on paper. Later I printed out videogame walkthroughs at the library. It wasn’t until after Y2K that I really started using its more interactive features.
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
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.
What are you saying ?? I grew up using those CDs as decoration items:D
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!
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.
“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 ?
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.
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.
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
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.
So I was in college till 95 and the internet up to that point was basically command line. I mean a guy was doing html at the university which was like the first to get these things a year or so before but it was not mainstream really. I was not really using it much in the next year or two with what I was doing and then in 97 or 98 I encountered it at the library. The big thing to me at that point was my customized excite page which folder and then my yahoo page. Honestly it kinda stayed that way even after y2k. google and youtube and google offerning email with a gig of storage really changed things a lot. Then you had facebook and such. Basically early aughts were way different than late aughts. Also disk, ram, cpu sizes per unit of money increased massively during that time.
AOL was already giving out free internet discs in '95 and everyone had them in '96. I was already one of Amazon’s earliest customers ordering books just a couple of years later.
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.
It was a lot of noise about y2k happening. Then the particular new year came and y2k didn’t happen. Then life went on.
Y2k “happened”, we just fixed 99.999% of the problems.
Except that one guy who got a 100 year late fee when he returned his video rental after new years.
Well, we fixed it in enough important places before the deadline! And even in many unimportant places.
Remember to turn off your PC for 12/31/1999! [Geek Squad logo]
I worked overnight to prevent it from happening only for people to say shit like this.
You are visitor number 0000000000000027
P.s. under construction… (animated gif of men at work sign)
The first 25 were the owner checking to see if anyone else had visited.
Y2K “happened”? Please explain.
There was no decisive change between 1999 and 2000. However, last century was before even forums became widspread. The social aspect of it was - different
Y2K made major headlines in 1999. That the entire computer network would crash or something.
And? Did it?
Nothing. Life continued as it is. I was preparing for my 10th boards then.
Because programmers busted their ass making it work
Computers were going to crash. The ones most at risk potentially didn’t talk to the Internet (but ran core systems, including core banking, airline, defense, etc systems). Fortunately - except very very few cases - they were all fixed before y2k. Since it was an incredibly well-publicized, fixable problem that everyone mobilized on.
The much bigger impact to the nascient Internet was the dot com bubble burst not too long after. Then what REALLY changed things was smartphones.
It wasn’t that computers would crash. Its that they might treat midnight Jan 1 as a hundred years before almist-midnight Dec 31, instead of one minute later.
Really critical things like airplanes would probably be OK, but your savings account would suddenly be drained thanks to 100 years of negative interest, while your credit card would sudddy go from owing $1000 to having $60,000 in available credit.
Y2K, if no one had done anything, might have ended capitalism. Assong that there were no nuclear launch systems with a date-based “don’t shoot” dead-king switch.
Some might crash. We absolutely fixed bugs like that.
There were lots and lots of failure modes.
It’s shorthand for the year 2000. Which did in fact happen
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”.
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 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.
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.
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 feel ya’ 🥲
i still have an email from my isp. so retro!
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.
Look at the Japanese web, they’ve not really moved on from the early 90s.
