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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.
And what the hell is Huffington Post and Gawker to put it inside this list?
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.
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, 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.
It was 13 years ago. Maybe I'm just young
See my sig, kid.
But you're right, I didn't get on the internet until a year later. It only cost me $12.95 per month, with "unlimited access" which really was unlimited. It even included an unlimited amount of personal web space that I abused horribly, trying to find the limit to my unlimited access and never could. I think all the game demos, patches, etc I posted was part of what made my Quake site so popular; once I got them uploaded to my ISP's server (which took quite a while to download, then to upload) others could download them from my site FAST.
I wasn't paying by the hour as TFS says; I had paid Compuserve by the hour ten or so years earlier, but I never was on AOL. I did appreciate all the free floppies they mailed me, though.
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.
The infrastructure was mostly the phone line and modems. They really weren't that expensive, and neither were computers so long as you built your own.
Free Martian Whores!