Slashdot Mirror
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.
"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.
Sadly, GeoCities existed then, and even scarier is: it still does.
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 )
Spyglass corporation's Mosaic was licensed by a company called Microsoft as the basis for a browser which they named Internet Explorer --- Spyglass had an absolutely fantastic deal where they got royalties on _every sale_ of the browser.
William
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
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.
"There was still all the porn you could imagine though."
There was also all the porn I couldn't imagine too.
A commenter from 1992 reviewing the WWW on Usenet: "Too slow, not as much information as Gopher, lame."
My blog
Nerds were nerds long before the web. What is this "outside" of which you speak?
Blank until
Not to mention alerting my co-workers to the fact that I'm browsing sites in the office that I probably shouldn't be. Damn you embedded music players! Damn you to hell!!!
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.
They were all on geocities then. Now they're all on facebook/myspace.
Yep. Those awful 90's Geocitites user-generated content pages get my vote for worst use of disk space EVAH. Here's my resume (identical to every 90's college student CIS rez) here's my girlfriend (identical to every 90's college student g/f pics), here' my Honda Civic (ditto), here's pics of my g/f's cats.
=Smidge=
They were literally the same pictures. For disk space reasons they only had a few pictures of girlfriends/cat/civics and they just generate a page by picking one of each at random. Most people had so little individuality that they didn't notice.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
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.
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)
THIS PAGE UNDER CONSTRUCTION
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.
> 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.
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.
30 minutes a month?
Back in 1996, you could see all of the web in 30 minutes!