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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.
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
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
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.
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.
Nerds were nerds long before the web. What is this "outside" of which you speak?
Blank until
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.
It was a sad time. There was no:
TubGirl
MeatSpin
Two Girls on Cup
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.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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?"
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)
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.
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 ;)
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.