Surfing the web 25 years later

Sure, your 14.4 external modem took forever to download images, and they hadn’t really fixed onto any clear notion of what slick web page design looked like, and simply finding things on the internet (with its’ hundreds, no, THOUSANDS of web sites) could even be problematic as you bounced between WebCrawler, AltaVista, Lycos, and/or Ask Jeeves…BUT…are there any aspects of the internet experience from back in the 90’s you look back on fondly or even perhaps miss today?

It felt more like a community of enthusiasts between everyone’s janky hand-made sites and guestbooks and web rings. You’d go looking for information on, I dunno, “Bewitched” and find someone’s lovingly made site versus some corporate sites, Wikipedia and IMDb. Maybe now it’s more comprehensive or accurate given the weight of the players behind it so, objectively, it’s better but I still miss the cozier feeling to it sometimes.

Remember the last page of the Internet? :slight_smile:

I remember printing off a single sheet of paper with a list of worth-while sites to visit (URLs of course). I think it got copied many times around my department as people were discovering that internet/web thingy. I wonder if I still have it…

NOW - what’s a URL and why do I care? Google can find it for me anyway (that’s what MLA says about using URL’s in citations - let a search engine find the latest iteration of the site, just in case the site moved)

Strange you didn’t know about Yahoo search back then.

I was really into Usenet back then, not websites.

Back then I used my real name on the Internet, now I think it crazy to do so except for business interactions (banking, online purchases…). Likewise spam, malware, intrusive ads, invasion of privacy were of very limited concern.

I remember the Coffee Pot website at a college.

There were a lot less commercials but boy was everything slow over modem.
In 1996, I remember how nice it was to find Amazon, the online bookstore. I was amazed at how poor the Sears site was as it seemed like they should be able to translate their catalog sales into a decent web sales system. Yahoo was seemingly good search engine. AltaVista was also good.

Baseball was the first sport with a big web presence. It really is the geek’s sport of choice.

It felt like half the servers in the US were named for Middle Earth, mythical Pantheons or Star Trek.

I agree there was more of a sense that you were interacting with other ‘hobbyists’ back then. The internet wasn’t seamlessly integrated into your daily life functions (e.g. online banking, paying bills, shopping for household items, etc.) like now.

Comparing the internet now to then is kind of like comparing today’s automobiles or airplanes with those of a century earlier; today’s vehicles have superior performance in every measurable respect, but even so, those fragile machines of yesteryear still manage to grab our interest and imagination.

Also, Big Money hadn’t yet figured out how to capitalize on the internet. Nor had crime.

Did anyone here follow Mirsky’s Worst of the Web? http://www.mirsky.com/
There were few enough web sites out there at the time that the creation of a few more new ones actually was capable of drawing some attention. He used to rag on sites mercilessly for their awful design, misspelling and grammatical mistakes, and/or theme.

One of the things I remember is that up until about 1997 or so, in a company with a couple hundred people at our location, we had one guy at work with internet access. If you needed to look something up, you had to go through him.

Not work related: there was an awesome website that someone put together for a fictional “Steve McQueen State University” in Papillon SD. I’ve tried to find it a number of times over the years but sadly, I think it’s long gone.

To me, this is difference. There was a time before EVERYTHING was monetized.

And a time when your search would not be narrowed by some type of localization algorithm (maybe I want to see Lithuanian stuff.)

Once we got web pages, my favorite was a web roulette page where you would spin the wheel and land on a totally random website. Fun stuff.

I was thinking about the last page of the internet site a couple of days ago.

On Internet Explorer there was a menu option called something like “find similar pages”. I was on a webpage I liked and did that. One of the similar pages was something called straightdope.com. It was interesting and I started reading the article of the day.

The rise of Usenet certainly preceded the rise of the web. I was poking around on a Unix terminal in '94 when I discovered the newsreader program and laid eyes on a gigantic list of Usenet newsgroups covering every conceivable topic. That was the day I discovered a newsgroup devoted to my particular fetish and learned for the first time that I wasn’t utterly alone. So yeah, I look back on that day fondly. :slight_smile:

A few years later I remember crashing the system of a major corporation by FTP-ing a 5MB file. it took their sysadmin several hours to unfuck things, during which time nobody at the company was able to send or receive email or any other traffic. :smiley:

You could get stuff for free just for visiting a web page. Books, a football, tools - it was like Christmas for insomniacs.

I could almost have been that one guy. When they gave everyone in my office internet access around 1997, I was the only person who knew how to use it. So I was constantly called on to help people with the very basics (if it’s underlined, that means it’s a link; yes, you are seeing today’s edition of the newspaper). Eventually they decided to have me give training courses and asked me to create a website for the company. And that’s how playing around on those early, hobbyist T.V. sites gave me my career.

Oh no, there’s two of them!

(Maybe there’s one at each end?)

While video streaming wasn’t really a thing, you could stream audio from just about everywhere without region restrictions and for free. Want to listen to the LA dodgers radio from Chicago? No problem and you’ll be craving Jack in the Box by the 3rd inning

When I first got regular access to the internet, one of the things I started doing was regularly reading health news headlines. I had a couple of issues that doctors weren’t helping with, and I was scanning to see if there was any information I could use.

Back then, it was all stuff aimed at news outlets, and leaving it up to the news outlet to determine whether to publish the story to their consumers. So there was a lot more detail, more special interest information, and a lot less hype than now. Now half is clickbait, and it’s all “which stories are going to be of interest to the most people” Probably true of most parts of the news world, but it was health information I was interested in.

When I was younger I was Hot Shit on dating sites (mostly Yahoo) because it was just all us Nerds out on the Internet and it was slim pickins. I never was without a boy to talk to, or meet for dinner. Then all the “normals” started getting online and it was game over. All the nerd boys started finding nice normal girls to talk to and the well dried up for me.

I was just talking to my brother about his 10-year-old and her access to whatever the Internet has to offer, via friends with unrestricted phone access. All this availability of media is really messing with her head. We were reminiscing about how when we were kids, you really had to work hard to find the weird stuff, and just the weird kids would find it. Everyone else was just happily consuming whatever was on TV or at Blockbuster, while we were crowded around the computer of the one King Dork who had his own phone line for his modem.

I know now that it’s thievery, but I enjoyed Napster when it first came out, with its remixes and red/yellow/green dots and ability to custom burn CDs. I remember thinking how fricking awesome it was to be able to download the exact songs I wanted (funky, crazy remixes and all) and burn them to a CD to take in my car. The very first CD I ever burned (I still have a copy of a copy of a copy of it) included a a Kris Kross/Britney Spears mash-up, an Eminem/Fatboy Slim mash-up, some alternate takes of various pop songs, a few more gems and the opening track? Homer Simpson singing the theme to the Flintstones with himself inserted into the lyrics. You can’t burn 'em like that anymore. Ah, memories…

I have been online since I started university in 1994. My tuition included free access to the internet through the school’s node. To get online I needed to do the following:

  • Dial into the school’s number using WinSock and access one of the Unix terminals there. I started off using a 14.4 modem but quickly upgraded to a 28.8 modem.
  • to crawl the web I needed to launch Netscape Navigator 1.0
  • Email access required a separate program who’s name eludes me at the moment.
  • Hope nobody picked up the phone in another room and kicked me off.

I remember when you would get 10-20 hits when searching for a topic on Webcrawler. Sometimes you would even get 0 hits!

I remember it taking hours to download a 50 MB program and you had to start over if it failed for some reason.