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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.
And what the hell is Huffington Post and Gawker to put it inside this list?
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.
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Is myspace fundamentally different to the homepage?
They are still gaudy shrines to the ego, constructed of copy-pasted crappy code.
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.
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.
Most of the current stuff is either refined, or regressed versions of what we had back then.
Digg => Slashdot
Huffington Post => There wasn't any shortage of bullshit artists back then either
Google => Yahoo, AltaVista, etc..
Twitter => IRC > Twitter. Twitter is like IRC, except there's only one channel, and everybody's on ignore by default.
Wikipedia => Everything (up to the reader whether this was progress or regression)
And there's the things that social networks and tag clouds replaced..... AOL, Web Rings, Geocities, etc...
What should be more shocking is that in 12 years, there isn't actually all that much out there that is truely new.
What should be more shocking is that in 12 years, there isn't actually all that much out there that is truely new.
Probably the closest thing to "new" is P2P filesharing. And major companies want to crush it.
So there's your proof. Corporations really do inhibit progress.
(Yes, I realize P2P networks existed well before Napster came along, but not in the same sense.)
"City hall" in German is "Rathaus" Kinda explains a few things......
What, like Hamster Dance? Shrines to music stars? MIDI background music that sounded awful on the hardware of the day? Streaming RealPlayer files so blurry you needed to be half-blind to make them out? Web Rings containing hundreds of links pointing to nothing at all? Personal homepages consisting of an export of Netscape bookmarks? Company web pages that were little more than brochures? (Often less than that!) Everyone on the interwebz thinking they're 1337 h4x0rz? (The 'z' was real popular back then.) XTrek competitions? MSN-only Startrek.com? Pages that would only render in Netscape or IE? (Complete with a "this page looks best in X" buttons.) Frames?!?
The web was definitely a more innocent place back then, but it was in no way a more useful place. 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, the ability to load up your computer with all the shareware it could hold, to access amateur content like MODs, MIDIs, animations done in GIFs, fan fiction, web comics, and even Java Applet games!
It was an exciting and fun time to be alive and I'm glad I was a part of it. But like all things, its time has passed and very little content of value was lost. In fact, most of the truly interesting content is still around. It simply doesn't shine very well in the face of what the modern Internet can do.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Nah, we were trading files back then too. The only thing that's changed is the protocols.
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.
alt.binaries on usenet, open FTP servers, DDC channels on IRC
While not P2P technology, the servers was not sued by RIAA or confiscated by the police. So P2P would have been a solution to a not yet existing problem.
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.
Scarier still: Yahoo still exists.
I remember fondly the first time I loaded Google's search page. No ads, no weather report, no links to personal ads. Just a search box, as Al Gore himself intended it.
I swore off garbage portal sites right then and I've never looked back.
"Sacrifice for the good of The State" - The State
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.
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.
If your UID has less than 5 digits, it just means you weren't sufficiently paranoid about what Taco was going to do with your personal information. :)
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.