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.
When I first used the internet, it wasn’t called the internet, it was ARPAnet, and it was all text based forums and email. Websites hadn’t been invented yet.
Where did you access it from? Was it a university? As far as I’ve learned, ARPAnet wasn’t available in residential settings.
If you knew the right people, you could get access outside of the universities and government.
Several services had onramps to segments of ARPAnet like GENiE and Compuserve, plus a lot of universities offered SLIP accounts you could dial in to them from home or your dorm and then use them as an arpanet gateway. A lot of universities kept those accounts open even after graduation
May 1995. Started with Gopher to access other university sites. My e-mail client was through vi editor. Eventually, I got onto the WWW with the Mosaic browser. Back then, I didn’t know how to even use a URL. The browser defaulted to Yahoo, and I just kept clicking through categories and then on links that sounded interesting. Even later, I discovered Geocities, created my own page (learned HTML by exploring the code the WYSIWYG editor generated), and collected lots of swag sent to me by up-and-coming online stores and search engines for placing their button on my page. I miss those simpler times…
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.
Summer of 1994 on a 486 Windows 3.1 PC. I had gotten back to the States after graduating high school at an American high school in Germany after living there for 10 years. I later reflected that I was the last generation who would experience living in a foreign country in the pre-internet age, being far more cut off from my home country than people would be after. I remember not liking web browsers much in the beginning because they were so slow and preferred Usenet groups. The internet was much more clunky and primitive, but also much more human. I really miss that aspect.
Around 1998, got big into Napster and warcraft 2, trillion (man yahoo ICQ) chats. Was happy to get 30kbps download speeds for music. Tied up a phone line.
1994 a service called e world.
It was a funny little thing, My 2800 baud modem brought me tons of adventures and gave me a place to share D&D ideas with others.
First time accessing the internet would probably be 1992 or 1993 from the local school library. Before then, I used local bulletin board systems via modem to play games, send messages, download warez, etc. as a young kid. The sense of freedom and liberation between those technologies was amazing. Around the same time, the school system transitioned to a digital card catalog system and some of the librarians were absolutely furious that the card catalog they knew and loved was going away.
April 1994. I was thirteen, at a sleepover with friends, playing Starfox on the SNES when my friend’s older brother told us he’d connected the home computer to the phone line.
No Prodigy or AOL, this was something different- more raw and BBS-ey. We started messing around and figured out how to join a local chat room- I have no idea now what they were called back then. There were maybe fifteen people in there, all with William-Gibson-ass usernames.
We were eating pizza and Sour Patch Kids, just fucking around, typing and watching the others. Then someone in the chat said, “Hey, turn on MTV. Kurt Cobain’s dead.” We flipped on the TV and sure enough, there was Kurt Loder breaking the news.
Very vivid 1994 moment.
I was just excited to play the South Park game on The comedy Central website.
In 1995, our class had to take a field trip to the library’s computer lab. The teacher had us open Netscape and go to http :// yahoo dot com. Then we printed off some kind of search query. That whole process took about 2 hours lol
