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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
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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?"
> 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.
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.