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.

Comments

IMDB was up

[LotsOfPhil]

The first (non obvious) big site that pops to mind is IMDB. Other than that I just remember IRC and BBSes.

Re:IMDB was up

[RMH101]

Remember Angelfire?

Re:IMDB was up

[neomunk]

I met my wife back in '96 on a telnet BBS. shadow.scc(or acc).iit.edu to be specific.

I was getting internet access back then via a hole in the library dial-up information access system. Mostly used for gopher access, some links to other libraries would allow you to escape out to a telnet prompt. From there it was just a matter of knowing where to telnet. BBSs came first, then after I learned the magic of a shell, it wasn't long until I figured out how to implement PPP. By summer '95 I had slackware installed and (thanks to a friend of mine) access at an early-adopter local dial-up ISP. Even though the whole web was "mine" at that point, I retained a special love for shadow, and ended up meeting my wifey there...

Ahh, nostalgia.

Ah, the era of homepages

[Nursie]

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.

Re:Ah, the era of homepages

[Chris Mattern]

Funny how porn was one of the first major uses of the 'net.

Not really. Porn is often one of the first major uses of a new media. Videotape built its success on porn.

Re:Paying for Internet by the hour?

[TheRaven64]

Multiplayer Quake was too slow.

It was okay for 2 players. QuakeWorld was released in 1996, however, and made things a lot better. 4-8 player games were quite playable over my modem in '96.

IRC was getting flooded by clueless n00bs

It still is. People with a clue have moved to SILC.

Instant messaging == AIM. Without file transfers, voice, etc.

In 1996? Really? AIM was released in 1997. Back in '96, ICQ was the only option for IM.

All I did was NOT work

[wsanders]

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.

Our memories are faulty devices

[freeweed]

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.