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Jurassic Web
theodp writes "It wasn't so long ago, but Slate's Farhad Manjoo notes that The Internet of 1996 is almost unrecognizable compared with what we have today. No YouTube, Digg, Huffington Post, Gawker, Google, Twitter, Facebook, or Wikipedia. In 1996, Americans with Internet access spent fewer than 30 minutes a month surfing the Web and were paying for the Internet by the hour. Today, Nielsen says we spend about 27 hours a month online (present company excepted, of course!)." I thought in 1996 all we did was idle in IRC channels while we wrote code in other terminals.
It wasn't so long ago ...
It was 13 years ago. Maybe I'm just young but that is an eternity in the world of computer technology.
I would argue that you should really be looking at the hardware & communication infrastructure because internet usage (in my opinion) is really a product of how cheap the hardware makes the connection and usage.
My work here is dung.
The first (non obvious) big site that pops to mind is IMDB. Other than that I just remember IRC and BBSes.
This post climbed Mt. Washington.
With terrible blinking text and eyesore backgrounds.
They were all on geocities then. Now they're all on facebook/myspace.
It was a nicer, gentler internet. Less advertising, less malware. Less crap and less people too... e-Commerce was a rarity. Naive users and online shops would transact via card-detail containing emails.
There was still all the porn you could imagine though.
I remember seeing Mosaic in 1992 or 1993 and saying, "this will never replace Gopher."
http://twitter.com/OLDTELEGRAM
"I thought in 1996 all we did was idle in IRC channels while we wrote code in other terminals."
Yet another person who does not know he can find porn on the net.
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.
Maybe y'all were, but not me. I had an unlimited dialup account from a provider called FlashNet, prepaid by the year. It translated to like $8.95/month.
The Web sucked in 1996 compared to today.
Now get off of my lawn.
My blog
And what the hell is Huffington Post and Gawker to put it inside this list?
I don't think about what was there, then, I think about what we have lost since then.
So many sites that were popular in that timeframe are no longer around. Internet Archives doesn't capture all those funny, cool sites that used to be there and are, sadly, no longer around.
Sig Follows: "Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself." -- Mark Twain
I thought in 1996 all we did was idle in IRC channels while we wrote code in other terminals.
No, that was 1991.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Did it with Netscape Composer.
Surprisingly, it still exists today... http://scudhavoc2.chez.com/
(It's in french, but look at the layout and press ctrl-w )
But kids who were not even in school then are driving now. People who were first graders then may well have voted in the last election.
How many of us even had cell phones then?
Even from a 43 year old's perspective, thirteen years can be a long time.
Best Slashdot Co
Infinite porno movies!
I still idle IRC channels :)
That was my baby, and we had been around for two years by 1996.
Our archive of back issues is available to all. Go cruise our 1996: http://www.netsurf.com/nsd/sub/v02/index.html
One sample issue, NSD 2.20, leads with the launch of Quake and the new MSNBC, whose DNS entry was suspended for lack of payment.
The main archive is here: http://www.netsurf.com/nsd/backiss.html
"Even for Slashdot, that was a very obscure reference!" - Anonymous Coward
I can't believe I read this and immediately thought "...but AOL didn't allow screen names over 10 characters until 1999..."
I'm a loser.
Of course it was different ... at 28.8kbps and at 56kbps. But it was recognizable, and you could tell a lot about what it would look like when it grew up.
In 1996 I was addicted to telnet talker channels that ran on EW-Too, EW-Three, Sensi-Summink, and other MUD derivatives. I miss those days.
"I thought in 1996 all we did was idle in IRC channels while we wrote code in other terminals."
Those of us on DARPANET did other things, like play Colossal Cave on the old DEC machines, running RT-11 and using up a ton of thermal paper to remember our moves, or played similar games using TTY's. Punched cards and paper tape. We thought the world was perfect when MYLAR tape became available.
1978. LOL and BBS's were a few years in the future. Woohooooo.
Brings back good old memmories :)
I remind using hotbot/metacrawler/ftpsearch a lot.
King of the hill with my 33k6 modem !!
It is interesting to look at that time. Cookies were not widely supported at that time. I can only find the paper here: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.54.7317 Times really have changed. Patrick
Think Deeply.
No Google, true -- but choice of search engines. While Google was great between about '97 and '03 or so, it's become so gamed to be as bad as Altavista was in 1996 -- but now there's no real choice.
No Facebook, no MySpace, no Wikipedia, less spam and far less Flash-based sites -- yes, those were better days. Not to mention a lot less Buzzwordery and fuckwittery.
There was more porn, and it was more extreme and less restricted -- not so much video based, of course. And if you were a producer you could throw a site up and make money easily, now it's so hard as to be really not worthwhile.
While there's definitely improvements, I can't help looking back fondly to a lot of things that are no longer with us. And the massive intrusion that some things on the web have become.
In 96, I was still a teenager. All I did was play doorgames on BBSs. LoD, LORD, etc.. I suppose you could say I surfed the web, but it was really only for pron :D
For best results, avoid doing stupid things.
Oh how I wish someone would swing the banhammer on Facebook or Myspace sometimes. Good thing I don't read either :P
Nerds were nerds long before the web. What is this "outside" of which you speak?
Blank until
persiankitty.com's links to free porn has been up since then... still probably the best maintained list on the web.
With a little work we can get rid of Huffington Post, Digg,Twitter and Myspace. The rest can stay, but only if they behave themselves.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
I thought in 1996 all we did was idle in IRC channels while we wrote code in other terminals.
Isn't that what we do now?
"City hall" in German is "Rathaus" Kinda explains a few things......
our local Verizon hub went down yesterday and we were without internet for 12 hours. It's amazing how critical the internet is to business now. We had to get back up access running with another provider to limp through the day.... then you always get the old-timers who reminisce about the âgood old daysâ(TM) when they didnâ(TM)t have to worry about computers going down because everything was done with a pen and paper⦠For some reason, when thinking back, they always think they did just as much without computers.
http://www.AmherstburgVisionCentre.com
Steve Polge was the king
http://www.object404.com
I was surfing the Eudora e-mail forums on my company's dial-out internet (in an office of 80 people we all shared a 26K Baud modem), trying to figure out how to share address books. This was before Eudora went POP/IMAP and was still just LAN mail. Mail was queued up in the gateway, and once enough was stored, the modem would dial out and release.
In late 1997 we'd gone from dial-up, to ISDN, to 1/4 T-1...but that's a whole other era.
Pre-1996 I was using UNIX talk (and ytalk) to chat with my friends via IP addresses.
IRC? Pfftt. You kids and your newfangled technologies, although it is an entertaining observation that both the ancient talk program and IRC were both pretty vulnerable to various exploits over their history.
Anyway, get off my lawn.
It was a sad time. There was no:
TubGirl
MeatSpin
Two Girls on Cup
I get the impression that the article author was not on the web then. I used ATT Worldnet back then and paid a monthly fee for unlimited dialup. I recall using Infoseek and Excite to search for information, as well as use IRC. My tinkering on the net back then launched my IT career. Can't say I ever used AOL...
What is this "outside" of which you speak?
It is a fairy tale. I hope you're too grown up to believe in such nonsense.
I'm quite disappointed by that. That's only 1/30th of the month, or about 1/20th if you don't take into account sleep time. I probably spend 95% of my waking hours next to firefox. Of course I'm not always using it, I just keep it open so I feel less alone when I'm destroying my soul in java and matlab... But still, I do click on "Check mail now" in GMail once every 20 minutes or so.
weinersmith
No Slashdot, no Facebook... all we did was work! ;-)
I know some people complain about Google having been taken over by spammers, but it still works for me and what I search for. Anyone else remember doing every search twice--once at Yahoo! and getting too few matches, and then AltaVista and getting too many?
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
Existed back then and there were lots to choose from. The MUDs were text. Ah, no need to download a GB client. Good ol' telnet was enough.
What is this "outside" of which you speak?
It's where you had to go when you were traveling to the dungeon masters house ;)
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
News flash: amateur astronomers are nerds, as are geologists and peleontologists. You can hardly do any of thet that without going outside.
Free Martian Whores!
Back then we still had a functional usenet, people generally used IRC a lot more, altavista was one one of the most popular search engines, anon.penet.fi was still up, and the personal webpage was a lot more important than today.
We may overall be better off today, but where we were had its own charms, some of which are now lost.
For every problem, there is at least one solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
So he says that back then people were self-important pricks who seldom went past AOl for their online experience. I didn't know everyone in the past was named Farhad Manjoo.
SpyGlass sued MS and according to Wikipedia they settled for $8 Million.
Internet Explorer 3.0 was released free of charge in August 1996 by bundling it with Windows 95, another OEM release. Microsoft thus made no direct revenues on IE and was liable to pay Spyglass only the minimum quarterly fee. In 1997, Spyglass threatened Microsoft with a contractual audit, in response to which Microsoft settled for US $8 million.[4]
Wikipedia Article
I seem to remember rumors that the settlement was for $50 Million, but perhaps that was what they were suing for, and settled for less.
Think Deeply.
News flash: amateur astronomers are nerds, as are geologists and peleontologists. You can hardly do any of thet that without going outside.
Uh, yes you can:
astronomers: Bedroom window
geologists and paleontologists: Hole in the basement floor
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
I still have a big bag full of buttons and other freebies from the 1996 Comdex.
Ah yes the year 3 B.G. (thats Before Goatse )
In 1996 every ISP provided Usenet access, and most of the groups hadn't been swamped with trolls and spam yet. I subscribed to a number of groups on different topics - hobbies, work-related, star trek, alt.ensign.wesley.die.die.die (sorry, Wil). I learned a lot about some areas that I was interested in, and had a lot of fun.
It was a lot easier to find discussions of areas of interest on Usenet - just browse the hierarchy. Now various interest groups are segregated in their own forums all over the web, and even with Google it's hard to find the good ones. The Usenet groups I used to read have all gone to hell, and are only accessible through Google Groups because my ISP doesn't support a feed. Google Groups sucks compared to a good news reader.
No sig? Sigh...
Now that is progress. No more struggling to piece together usenet posts. Just click and download.
Flashnet, 33.6, Quake 1 with a 250 ping, shugashack, betanews, they heyday of efnet IRC, coveting extra time at work to abuse the T1, wanting to punch ISDN friends in the face...
was the year I realized that the internet really is for porn.
In '96, I was 7, and living overseas on a military base. These BBSes that y'all speak of intrigue me, but passed me by. USENET was something I learned about long after it had faded in popularity. I wouldn't really get a computer until I was 11, but then I discovered the Web and started writing crappy HTML.
But I do remember things from later on in the decade. Pages sucked. There were many annoying things like blinking text, horrible backgrounds that were unreadable, annoying under construction signs. The bright side is that the pages were very small.
... but in 1996 I was in 11th or 12th Grade ... Sure we used BBS's still, but I had graphical internet access well before 96. I think I was first on IRC around 93-94, hacked my first free internet account around 95. I distinctly remember surfing to playboy.com from my school's library in 95... We were playing C&C across the internet in groups of about 5 or 6 by 1996...
I don't know what the OP was doing in 1996, but it sure sounds boring compared to what I was doing at the time.
"I thought in 1996 all we did was idle in IRC channels while we wrote code in other terminals."
I idled in ICQ and wrote code in Visual C++ you insensitive clod.
You should see the mess that kid made in the basement with his research on geothermal energy!
On the plus site, his parents unplugged the hot water heater and the water still stays at a toasty 2,000F.
Random Thoughts From A Diseased Mind (Not For Dummies)
Back in 1997 I bought a book about the Internet. Most of it was a list of webpages, i.e. one website per page, with Madonna's bedtime stories website opposite a space art gallery website, and whatever else that seemed relevant back then. That was back then when you paid the price of a local call to connect to the Internet, so to save time and money you'd have to know which site to visit before the modem would make a whole bunch of funny noises.
Do they still even make such books with long lists of websites and USENET channels? Somehow I doubt it, but I wonder when this genre of literature would have died out.
You just got troll'd!
Remember insidetheweb.com? All those shitty message boards with shitty, SHITTY coding that you could spam tags such as and completely own a thread because it wouldn't be stripped by the server and thus would be interpreted as browsers as proper html?
Man, those were the days. Then ezboards sprung up, an then eventually as people wisened up they started to get real boards based on phpBB and such on hosting.
In 1996 I was spending a lot of my time out of lectures surfing The Hun's Yellow Pages. I was awarded first class honours, thus proving that porn makes you clever.
In 1978 I was blowing people up in multiplayer COMBAT and engaging people in real-time conversation all over the state of Minnesota via MMT on MECC's MTS (MECC Timesharing System).
Mainframe/UNIX Bit Twiddler and long time Windows/Linux Hobbyist.
The Theorem Theorem: If If, Then Then.
In the beginning the keyword search didnt find much interesting.
Yahoo's original idea of a human-built category tree was more productive.
I used to like to go to lists of "most creative web sites" for web-building ideas and entertainment. I rarely do that now, save for checking out the annual "Webby" award winners.
I was a kid back then and for me it was just right. I still remember it well. Internet was still too expensive for home users, but there was the public terminal in school. Good search engines didn't exist yet, but nonetheless I managed to find an awful lot of exiting stuff. For example, I was (and still am) a rather passionate LotR aficionado. And I found a site on it. It had pictures, and poems in Quenya! I was overjoyed. And it had a little webring thingy. Now today a webring on a topic gathers hundreds of links and there's no way sift through them, but back then there were only relatively few pages and there was less cruft then. I clicked around and found sites about Quenya and Sindarin, about tengwar, about Tolkien's life, fanart (some good stuff actually), a plethora of maps and diagrams, and so on. At the time I was also kinda getting my feet wet in coding and the same thing. Webrings were useful back then, though the search engines and Wikipedia of today do a better job by far. Was the Internet useful? Well, it was in a way. For aspiring programmers. For kids. For hobbyists. And that's how the Internet started out, a lot of hobbyists suddenly discovering that they could share what they knew about X with other people who loved X. In response to this article I dug up a list of favourites from an old diskette and although some sites were gone, some could be found in the Internet Archive, and some surprisingly still exist, in all their slightly amateurish glory. Some were even updated. It was like wandering through the shining metropole where you live your everyday life, and one day you decide to go left instead of right and you find this little village with a park and small but bustling grocery store. Maybe the Internet did grow up a little, and I think that's a good thing, but I'll always remember the old days with fondness.
That's the place where the T-Rex ambushed you in the middle of an open plain whenever you were going in the opposite direction from what the DM wanted you to go.
Let's see if I can remember this correctly. In 1996 I was a Junior and then Senior in high-school. These were some of my activities...
1) Heavy IRC usage.
2) Designing webpages for my high-school.
3) Writing versions of Minesweeper and Life as Java applets.
4) Commenting on Robert Jordan novels in AOL message boards and usenet.
5) Doing not-quite-legal activities that would have involved AOL not being happy with me if they found out. (think statute of limitations have passed)
6) Playing Federation on AOL.
7) Playing Bolo on school network, and wishing my home connection was fast enough to play at home.
8) Downloading music and games from FirstClass or HotLine BBS systems (before I gained a piracy-conscience).
9) I think I played a lot of World of Warcraft 2 online in the summer of 1996 while using Harvard's fast connection.
10) Trying to figure out what the point of Gopher was, and eventually giving up.
The main thing I remember is that while the Web and email were important, they were both a much smaller portion of my online usage than they are today. I think the turning point was 1997, where the web took over in terms of content.
One amusing anecdote from 1996. I remember overhearing two people who couldn't figure out how to email each other. They decided it was because one of them used Netscape and the other used Internet Explorer, and decided just to use the phone from then on instead.
BBSing is still very much alive, but instead of the thousands of boards that once existed, it's down to a hundred or so globally.
At any rate, the Internet of 1996 was quite different from today, but I can't say I like it any better. I personally liked it when the Internet was a smaller group of folks and you were still considered 'nerdy' for using a computer and no one knew what 'online' meant. It might sound like an elitist group, but that's pretty much what it was. You had a certain level of power that you could go 'online' and 'talk' with folks all over the world when no one else around you could. That was cool back then, but now'days it's just as common as talking to someone across a restaurant.
There was, however, The King.
The african fellow with an insanely long dick, spinning around in glorious video streams with two blonde girls at his side.
Back in the last century, Usenet was alive and well and not yet overwhelmed by f-tards. You could actually make friends on alt.sysadmin.recovery or your local [a-z]*.singles group, or ask a technical question on comp.sys.something or other and get an intelligent response instead of a death threat from a fanboy.
That my friend is the biggest change in the net for me.
Google News is trying to keep the flame alive but it's a lost cause.
Give a man a fish and you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish, and he'll say "WHERE'S MY FISH, YOU IDIOT?"
It strikes me that people mark "1996" as significant to the net, because I see the beginning of the contemporary era as around 93-94. That was when "the internet" had its big transition from the motivated few (or those who were *required* to use it), to a mass-market consumer product. Everything else follows from that, and the only reason 1996 seems significant to me is, that was the year I went from being paid hourly as a system administrator to a salary as a network engineer, and *that* is correlated to explosive sales.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
When you remember those halcyon days in which the the state of the art of search was WAIS. I'll take today's internet, warts and all, thanks.
Those people who think they know everything are a great annoyance to those of us who do. (Isaac Asimov)
finding open source software was a piece of cake with xarchie. Unix games were never binary, but sources ;-)
There were tenths of ftp sites which were miroring each others.
Finding the email adress of someone with only its name was easy: there was a site in australia (telnet on a port) just for that.
finger was working.
I have used xdvi remotly (display in Paris and xdvi running in Brest) to finish a project report without any latency.
xhtalk was very effective as IM.
usenet was a lot more polite and with very few spams.
IRC (I learned it only in 93) was also a good way to chat with girls ;-)
I think you mean that the web has changed. Correct - after 13 years, there are more websites.
tags: moveonnothingtoseehere fromthedepartmentoftheblindinglyobvious noshitsherlock
Almost like search.yahoo.com?
That's the main tech boom since 1996! Think about it. Viruses existed back then, and they were destructive. They'd crash your machine on purpose, but not before alerting you to their presence. Botnets? Definitely a 21st-century tech. There was lots of spam, but it didn't contain viruses, and the web was pretty safe. Even using IE :) The big-name viruses: Melissa, ILoveYou, Blaster...all newer.
Heck Smashing the Stack for Fun and Profit wasn't published until 1998.
The net hasn't improved much since '96. It's the bad guys that have. Where will THEY be in 13 years?
Practice Kind Randomness and Beautiful Acts of Nonsense.
Back in the mid 90's (1993, 1994) there was more to the Internet than just WWW/browser based html content. WAIS, Gopher, FTP clients were all tools you had to use back then.
but before the WWW
I saw the above and immediately thought "World War W?!" It was funny for me.
Mon chien, il n'a pas du nez. Comment scent-il? TrÃs mauvais!
astronomers: Bedroom window
That telescope is not for looking at stars. Which neighbors don't close the shades?
I am officially gone from
We started our business in March 96 ... went online 3/6/96 ... back then, a 128k line was enough to supply a total of three POPs with internet ... private users were limited to use during off-hours (5PM through 8AM), though IIRC we didn't have hourly charges (apart from the dial-in cost for the people for their modem or ISDN connection)
Ah, what fond memories - Web browsing without any M$ IE in sight ;)
Before Yahoo! me and like five other guys WERE the internet. Before search engines people like me collected cool links and created content so others wouldn't have to go hunt for it. Those were the days when you had to write 5 different versions of your web site for all of the crappy incompatable browsers, AOL, Netscape, IE, ugh!
Remember modem noise? *nostalgic sigh*
What if Tetris was invented by Nazis?
In 1996, the only connection options to me locally were BBSes and AOL: there was 1 local BBS, and AOL was still a long-distance number for us, I seem to recall. Our family computer was still ancient - the IBM Portable Computer, an 8088 with 640K and a 10Mb drive, a hand-me-down from a family friend. I would go over to a friend's house where we would
I remember the first time I saw the "Internet" - really, just the AOL interface. But just the same, it was amazing: I was 13 or so, and simply blown away by the fact that you could send images over the phone line. I was familiar with Morse code and the telegram, and the like (being a geek and in Boy Scouts), but that you could send color images over the line using the same basic mechanisms, at such speeds (14.4kbps)?! Astounding! Our "Internet" use was culminated in downloading freeware and shareware, which we would then play locally. Those were the days...
Then there was 1997. I remember that summer well. We didn't have air conditioning, and the computer was in the warmest room in the house. Our local provider had just gone from a "per minute" to "unlimited" account. The "unlimited" account would disconnect after 5 hours; it was almost every night that I hit that 5-hour mark.
I think that may have been the summer - or the one after - when I stayed home for a week while my parents left town for vacation. Whatever their destination was, I didn't want to go; instead, I stayed home and used the computer/the Internet for 5-15 hours each day, downloading software and grainy porn at less than 2kbps.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
...the screeching sound of your modem connecting?
[high-pitched] *whhhheeeeeeeeeeeeee* - *oohhnnnggnnggngnng* - *errnkk errnnkk errnnggk*
Ahh, the memories!
------
Isn't it remarkable that our entire civilization is now precariously dependent upon a contraption that wasn't even invented 100 years ago?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
uucp://duke!decvax!gwkl10a!kevin
We spent a lot of time in college, in 1996, on the web. We got hardwired connections in the dorms in January 1996. As I recall, we spent a lot of time playing GameZone Spades (I think that's what it was called) back when it was independent instead of a MS property. There was PLENTY to do on the web "back then". Yes, the web is richer in content, but there was far more than you could make use of even then, with new goodies popping up constantly.
woah.....that shouldn't exist. my simple googlemind doesn't permit it!
I find it amusing that the thoroughly left-wing Huffington Post is considered some vital part of everyday Internet usage. Then again, this is an article from Slate.
> It's where you had to go when you were traveling to the dungeon masters house ;)
Aaaah, you mean the caves under the basement...
I think that "outside" is that thing with sun and stuff. I saw it on a photo, it's incredible.
http://www.intotemptation.net/2009/02/25/idiotic-article-in-slate/
He asked the wrong people and Slate looks d-u-m-b.
Thanks for reminding me that I still have the same Under Construction message on my website that I did in 1997. Twelve years past and I still have nothing of value to share with the world. Well, I guess it could be worse. I could be a blogger ;)
I could still live without Digg and the Huffing Post.
Coder's Stone: The programming language quick ref for iPad
1996 was when I got my first modem, a blisteringly fast 14.4K Hayes Accura external model, with lots of flashing lights. CompuServe was the ISP I used back then, $10 a month for 10 hours access and then $1.80 per hour after that (at 9.6kbps, to get 14.4 I'd have had to dial a London number at great expense). Of course, being in the UK there were local phone charges to contend with as well, with any time from 8AM to 6PM on weekdays being strictly off-limits (£2.40 an hour, $3.50 in US terms, 4 times the "offpeak" rates). Once the paltry 10 hours were up it was eyewateringly expensive to be online.
That said, a couple of years before I went online it was ten bucks an hour to connect at 9.6kbps - I guess I was lucky!
Back then the Web was much, much simpler - it didn't take me long at all to find a site called Lord Soth (which was part of HappyPuppy.com), which had all sorts of Shareware games and game demos to download. Score! No more paying 1.50 a disk for Shareware, I could just download it myself. Yeah, it took half an hour to download a meg but it was better than waiting a week for the same thing by post.
The main thing with the Web back then was its straightforwardness. Yes, Javascript existed but it hadn't been used to annoy, merely to enhance. No banner adverts, no annoying popups, just forests of links - which usually worked, rather than being dead. Altavista (.digital.com) and HotBot were the two search engines we all used. Music downloading consisted of grabbing MIDI files, and if you were really lucky a wavetable emulator program so you could listen to them on something other than the OPL3 chips on your soundcard!
Although there was piracy even then on the Web (albeit on a much, much smaller scale) the majority of stuff was found on Usenet. CompuServe was famous for its Usenet feeds, with Forte Agent being the program I used back then.
In the end CompuServe's 10 hours was just too painful and I signed up with Demon in 1998, who had a "tenner a month" offer (they still do, in fact). I'm still using that email address 11 years later - and no, it doesn't receive much spam!
Once Netscape 4 came out it all seemed to go downhill, until we've ended up with today's bandwidth-hogging, browser-scripting mass of content. Although modern things like YouTube etc are great, I admit I sometimes yearn for the day when the Web was so much more compact...
It was 13 years ago. Maybe I'm just young but that is an eternity in the world of computer technology.
Is it really an eternity? What's so different anyway?
Let's take blogging as an example. The concept of posting your thoughts online is a constant of the Internet (it isn't a new concept like some green Internet users/media think). It's just been refined (or redefined if you don't like the implication that it is better now, just more "user-friendly") versus the available methods of the past.
Truth is, things haven't changed much on the net in 13 years. We're just implementing the same concepts with a different interfaces and tools. And some more bandwidth that allows larger, more robust concepts to be more feasible (streaming video for example). YouTube isn't anything new, it's just more realistic now than it was back then.
So if it really is an eternity, we haven't done much other than flood the "pipes" with more "unwashed masses" and make streaming video work a bit better. File sharing, BBS (social sites are just profile-centric forums), IRC/chat rooms, knowledge sharing, and user interaction/arguing are all things that have existed for years and years. The only thing that makes it all "unrecognizable" from 1996 is that we've got fresh paint, newer paintbrushes, and a larger fence to cover.
For all the faults that myspace has (and there are many), it is still the best place to listen to music from a band you just heard about.
Most band websites are either flash-based monstrosities that take take pride in being as obscure and unnavigable as possible, or are geocities throwbacks don't have media content because the band doesn't know how to post it. Last.fm keeps making their interface worse and worse, and due to licensing issues, was never very good for listening to a specific band (as opposed to treating it as autogenerated radio). Other sites are very hit-and-miss as to whether they will have a specific artist.
But every band who has any interest in having fans has a myspace music page. More importantly, I know exactly what I'm getting when I go to a myspace music page. I know that every single one will have at least a handfull of full sample tracks that I can listen to and see if I like the band. I know I won't have to search around the site, it is right there on the front page every time.
That's a very different Yahoo from the Yahoo of old.
more interesting than see the usage of internet in USA is to take a look around the world at that time. in 1996 the distance between USA and the rest of the world in internet services, conexios and/or spread was huge, today that diference simply doesn't exist. I was 10 but i remember that internet here in Brazil was not atractive, my cousin, that brought internet to my house was trying to sell the idea: - See! now we are connected with the rest of the world! look we can visit (i don't remember the site exactly, but it was american)..! - But it is in english, we can't read it... - well, there ain't many sites in portuguese, but we can speak with some buddy! the problem is, you already had some fellows to chat with, but in Brazil, most of the people don't even had PCs at that time. i think that this is why places like Brazil are more disposed to adopt new things in the web than USA. For example, google in USA today is stronger than yahoo but in Brazil and other countries this difference is even bigger, i saw the statistics once but cant remember the numbers. that's because when internet popularized in Brazil google already was one of the first, we didn't participate of the yahoo era, it already arrived here as a pepsi.
So times were terrible back then! Imagine. I sometimes had to go to "friends' houses" and to the "theaters" and even step outside once or twice. I am very glad we have come this far.
I didn't have to go out in 1988. There was more than enough reading on USENET to keep me occupied 24/7. And the shit was so much more interesting than on the sites mentioned. Ever read sci.nanotech?
Only his tendency toward a dazed stupor prevented him from screaming aloud.
Nice link. I was thinking the same thing when I read the article... and no mention of usenet, or any other cool portions of the net (such as IRC, MUDs, etc).
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http://raptr.com/getfirefox.php
Sorry, I just love it when someone dumps IE6 support. Gives me hope that the Interwebz is finally making progress after a decade of crap...
I rarely rant ... but he just missed the mark so very badly. There was plenty to do online ... remember how much effort went into trying to save people from using AOL?
Throughout the timeline, until I got a cable modem in 1997 or so, Net access (once the Net appeared) was about $10/mo, unlimited, over a modem line, that went from 2400 baud to 56Kb. Did you know that you can run X over a 2400 baud line? :)
1980- 1983. No Internet. BBS'es and uucp mail. Anyone remember ! style addresses? E-mail takes a week to get there, if 'there' is far away (in number of hops). But at 300 baud, this seems great.
1983-1985. E-mail and news become almost real-time (a day or less, usually). Bitnet.
1986-90. FTP, news, Gopher and Archie rule. MUDs. I downloaded and built an Emacs distribution over 2400 baud (took a day) :)
1991. TkWWW (still a couple of years before Mosaic). Total of 11 (count them) sites on the WWW. Took me about 5 minutes to surf to the End of the Internet, say 'junk' and go back to Gopher/Archie/News.
1993-94. Mosaic. NCSA keeps a list of all the sites on the WWW, updated daily. About 300 of them. Some even have images on them!
A few months later. Yahoo appears. I can no longer surf to the End of the Internet. The Internet Coke Machine.
1996-2000. The Web is flooded with commercial ventures and garbage. I do not _want_ to surf to the End of the Internet.
Through the whole process the hackers stay the same - they are up late at night doing cool, creative, wonderful and cruel things on/to the net. The more recent ones listen to different music...
Believe it or not, youngsters, back then the people you talked to online tended to actually be who they said they were. Without going into excessive detail, before AOL began routinely violating their own terms of service by monitoring private chat rooms and interfering with that communications channel (either by banning people who did naughty things or by closing rooms), it was possible to open a room, have a conversation, exchange phone numbers, and get to...ahem..."know" people rather quickly. And I mean online, on the phone, and in a hotel room. That all went to hell when the infamous Community Action Team was given great powers and no oversight, thus allowing them to close anything that offended them personally. When CATWatch01 came into your room, that room was endangered and so was your account.
It's been many years since I was there, but the last time I was in the room named "phonesex", the lonely housewives were guys with problems trolling for suckers and the teen girls were LEOs trolling for still more suckers. Sad, really. A tragedy of the commons, I think.
To some extent, the same was true on IRC. It was often possible to talk to people who would tell you who they were. And they wouldn't be lying! Amazing, huh?
You misspelled basement.
News flash: amateur astronomers are nerds, as are geologists and peleontologists. You can hardly do any of thet that without going outside.
Better yet, Google Earth and Google Sky...
Starcraft was released March 31, 1998.
Posted not to be a pedantic douche, but to point out that our memories are often imperfect. Starcraft, a revolution in online gaming in many respects, did not come out until 2 years after this article describes.
Everyone posting in this thread about how they had all this unlimited, highspeed, MMO-full gaming with massive multimedia collections in 1996 - I'm sorry, but you're not remembering things very well. And it's easy enough to find examples that show why.
1996 might not have been the $10/hr CIS days (that was 1994 for me), but it sure as hell wasn't anything like today. In 1996 we saw the very first TCP/IP games that weren't IPX tunneled through something like Heat.net. Web browsers existed, yes - and 95% of the pages out there were about someone's cat. Napster (ie: mp3 sharing of any large scale) was 3 years in the future. Software mp3 players had just appeared in the fall of 1995. Winamp, the first truly popular player, was a year away. Hardware players were at least 2 years away. Flash didn't really exist until the end of 1996.
Anyway, that's just pulled from the first few posts I could find. Y'all are remembering 1999 at earliest. 1996 was a very different online beast. Splitting hairs? No, showing just how much changed in such a short period of time.
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
Oblig.
Quite frankly, the way you describe the old Internet reminds me of Black & White television and movies. There's still a huge nostalgic following of that format as well.
I wonder if in 30 years we'll see "artistic" websites designed to look like 1996, for emotional effect.
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
as title
When your mom yells down to take the trash out, what did you think she meant? On second thought, don't answer that question ...
but goatse.cx has always been /WUNce and forEVA da champiUN
I was watching all my favourite BBS' slowly die away. I don' know how to make this DSL dial the local sysop anymore I was giving up hope of a next generation Amiga. (there is still a glimpse of hope in me).
. .
It's been 13 years but somehow we're still in September.
> Aaaah, you mean the caves under the basement...
basement?
its a command centre, dammit
What you are remembering is the subculture that went with the web of the day. If you had Internet access... man, you had something special. This crazy ability to make friends from around the world, to meet people who like the same shows or games as you...
That's exactly it. Back then "the social web" was befriending strangers from around the world based on similar interests. Now "the social web" is all people you know in real life, but on Facebook.
Does it make you happy you're so strange?
I already had my first webserver up and running via a 115200kbps ROLM phone network connection.
I was using ICQ (I was one of the first users of ICQ. 565xxx number) and it *wasn't* owned by AOHell.
IRC is where you got warez from as well as pr0n. Undernet and Alternet were usual hangouts.
I bought my first Seagate 1GB harddrive. ($250 at the time)
19" CRT monitors were the big boys at the time. (With the exception of a few high end graphics stations in the media labs.)
While I accept that most folks in 1996 did spend 30 minutes a day or less and had dial-up and used AOL, most is not all. I published my first web page in March, 1995, but the oldest copy of my 'homepage' I can find on archive.org is from October, 1996, archived December, 1996.
penguincentral.com in late 1996
As for "blogging", I was writing about my day-to-day experiences starting from the day I put up those webpages 14 years ago. It's all still online, along with newer stuff.
She's just happy that I have a girlfriend at all...
Blank until
Back then having your own website meant something. You'd spend time crafting it (or copying it from elsewhere), and you'd update it from time to time. Friends, and the occasional stranger, would check it out. Maybe they would e-mail you, or leave a message in your guestbook if you had one.
Now no one cares if you have your own website. According to them, why would you want one? Everyone's on Facebook.
Does it make you happy you're so strange?
-I was 18 and in my first year of University. :-)
-I was a chanop in #ircbar on Undernet and had a misguided idea that this made me important. I used ircII-EPIC to connect and everyone was bitching about some guy named RevWhite (remember him?)
-ICQ didn't exist, real time chat was achieved via YTalk
-Social networking existed, it was called Usenet. I spent hours on alt.fan.pratchett.
-I submitted my personal web site, hosted on my University's web server to Yahoo! I don't think they ever added it. (http://www.wibble.co.uk/zerbswibble for the terminally curious)
-CD-R drives were ridiculously expensive, but that didn't matter, the media was almost impossible to find and cost a fortune anyway.
-My PC was an X5-133 with 32Mb of RAM and I thought it was cool.
-My home internet connection was a 14.4K modem. I had to run a telephone cable from my room, down the stairs and into the only telephone socket in the dining room. It cost me 1p a minute to connect and my parents would FREAK OUT.
-Luckily, I had a broadband connection to my room when at University. It's a big part of the reason I flunked out
I had been working in technology for 4 years.
I had been programming off and on for 20 years.
I'm old.
I think you're forgetting:
>)o(<
Three words: "robot field geologist" (AKA Mars Rovers)
TFA states that "[p]eople still refer to the new medium by its full name--the World Wide Web." Sure, maybe in articles of the era, however, I don't think I knew anyone who didn't just call it "the internet". As geeks we knew Internet > Web, but it didn't matter. It was "the internet" as far as common parlance was concerned.
-l
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Interesting article, but it assumes that the internet begins with http:// and ends with .com
A lot of the things people rely on webpages for today could be still be done then, just in a different form, such as Usenet, IRC, ICQ, FTP, or MUDs.
I can't remember a time back then that I had so little to do that I logged off in disgust or boredom. Quite the opposite, actually: I had to find an unlimited plan for my dialup because I spent far too much time exploring the internet, in all its varied protocols.
Meanwhile, in 2009, "internet" has been reduced to an alias for webpages, and if it can't be done in a browser, nobody seems to want it. Sure, "the web" expanded (arguably not for the better), but it did so at the expense of the rest of the internet.
Ah, but before Goatse even existed, those pictures were on aol.com/~sting3r or something like that. And when you got some friend of yours to look at it, you "stung" them.
Good times.
I believe that PowWow was the first "Internet" IM program, pre-dating ICQ by a couple of years. I certainly remember downloading ICQ for the first time and thinking "Hmm, looks like PowWow but cleaner".
That's not to say, of course, that PowWow wasn't predated by the Quantum Link IM program, or talk or similar. But they were usually limited to 1:1 conversations, usually on the same mainframe or cluster. But PowWow was the first classic IM-style client. Basically every desktop PC IM client today looks like PowWow.
Da Blog
It may seem shocking, but I believe that the internet is far more left-wing than it was in 1996. And it was pretty far left in 1996, considering that it was far less commercialized and driven mostly by 20-something Gen Xers.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
No Digg, Huffington Post, Gawker... Twitter, Facebook...
Am I the only one who finds such a world very comforting? Give me LORD, a 14.4 modem, and possibly let me keep SSH, and I'd feel like I'm on top of the world. I could probably even go without slashdot for a while... but don't bet on it.
There's a 68.71% chance you're right.
I read that a:
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The Slate guy wrote a book called True Enough: Learning To Live in a Post-Fact Society. For someone who could write about 1996's online activities and not mention IRC, Usenet, or the biggest story of 1996, fucking PointCast, I think he's following his own advice.
Da Blog
I must be lucky. I've not heard of this "meatspin".
IRC has been around since late 1988 or so, and I've been on it since around 1991... I'm surprised you weren't on it earlier.
You can get off my lawn, kthnx.
Hosting and Domain name coupons
Oh, it was worse than that, there was no USB and no such thing as 'unified drivers' either. Oh, what fun and joy there was trying to talk some poor bastard through getting his serial printer to play nice with Win95 while I hunted through the bosses massive 30GB hard drive setup(which IIRC we built by Frankensteining two PC cases together along with about a dozen SCSI drives and a bunch of cards jammed into his PC and then spot welded the cage together) trying to find the EXACT right driver for the damned video card after the schmuck got one of the nasty porn dialer infections(remember those?)
So look back all you want but me I'm damned happy for the way things are now tech wise. Computers have gotten 'good enough" that I'm not having to constantly build myself a new machine because my last one is too damned out of date to run any of the new stuff like in the old days(I went from 100-233-400-733-1000MHz in like a 4 and a half year period.) not to mention the fun of all those shitty VxD drivers back then and dealing with IRQ settings. Things may have been more simple back then but they were also a LOT bigger PITA.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
I think 1996 was the year I finally got on the Web, or was it 1997? We all laughed at it, nobody wanted to pay per hour to spend 20 minutes loading a bad picture. Why, when you could get on FidoNet or UseNet for the cost of the modem? I think I got on FidoNet for the first time around 1988... as well as other less-noble BBS systems such as Wildcat and HUB.
Ah, good old hole in the basement floor. And to think, if Dad never put me in there I might have grown up to be a pilot or a doctor.
I miss those days...
I myself spent an inordinate amount of time telneting into MUD games, looking for wares with Archie and Gopher, and meeting my wife (via irc).
30 minutes a month?
Back in 1996, you could see all of the web in 30 minutes!
I remember when I first had Internet, in 1998. I just surfed 20 minutes a day because of the high cost, and mainly IRC, ICQ, and my ISP's web xD
Minti: What's that huge shuriken in your back?! Kin: It's the instrument of my victory.
and only secondarily the graphical nature.
I had already been online for ten years by '96 but with proprietary environments like CompuServe and GEnie. It was probably more amazing that there were no longer any user boundaries as much as the graphical presentation of Mosaic. And my first "internet" access was a Delphi command-line portal in '94 so that emphasized the importance of the resources it opened up over the new presentation. And it could be said that there was some natural progression toward the browser in GUI versions the other internet resources like news, gopher and FTP.
In 1996 you could have visited my personal web site - it's been up since 1993:
http://www.atomicairship.com
Serving your airship needs since 1995.
Of course everyone does know that Internet!=web. But, the article poster was just getting on via AOL, not even a proper ISP. The comment that back then there was little to do on the web is right. That's because people weren't using it yet. There was LOTS to do online, but it was on Usenet. IRC. FTP. telnet. gopher.
For those who don't know:
usenet -- see "google groups". It's like those fourms where people could post to a thread and reply, but it was (and is!) also used for file transfer (warez etc.. not videos of course, they would be too big.)
IRC -- "Internet Relay Chat". Basically chat rooms. This of course ALSO has "DCC" for file transfer -- it had (and probably still has) plenty of warez available.
FTP -- file transfer protocol.
telnet -- like ssh, but unecrypted -- ssh didn't exist yet as far as I know. People would telnet in to use BBSes (Bulletin Board Systems), MUDS (Multi User Dungeons), freenets (provide free access to a shell on a UNIX box) and so on.
gopher -- kind of a direct predecessor to the world wide web. It had hyperlinks and text, but no image links, text formatting options, etc. I have no idea if this was very popular or I just happened to be in an area it was used.