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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.
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.
Sadly, GeoCities existed then, and even scarier is: it still does.
And what the hell is Huffington Post and Gawker to put it inside this list?
"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.
Yet another person who is apparently unfamiliar with DCC. Why do you think we idled on IRC to begin with? It sure as hell wasn't for the intelligent conversation.
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Spyglass corporation's Mosaic was licensed by a company called Microsoft as the basis for a browser which they named Internet Explorer --- Spyglass had an absolutely fantastic deal where they got royalties on _every sale_ of the browser.
William
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
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.
Nerds were nerds long before the web. What is this "outside" of which you speak?
Blank until
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
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
Nah, we were trading files back then too. The only thing that's changed is the protocols.
Remember Angelfire?
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!
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.
You remember the MIT coffee pot cam? Some joker who worked upstairs put a digital camera next to the coffee pot so he could point his browser at the link and see if there was any coffee made, without having to get his ass up and walk to the pot.
Now that was entertainment. I knew people who didn't even go to MIT who checked that thing ALL THE TIME.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
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.
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?"
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.