I remember back in the mid-1990s, I’d come across some new thing that you could do online, and my reaction would be “Wow, you can do that online now? How cool is that!” Like some guy had rigged up some sensors and a web server so he could go online and check the temperature of his hot tub. And some MIT students had done something similar with the temperature of the soda in their vending machine. And these were all on public websites, not something that required a login, so everyone in the world would see the temperature of this guys hot tub. And it seemed really cool that that was possible. Nowadays it’s just assumed that you can do pretty much anything online, and anything can be connected to the internet.
I lament the sad demise of Gopher.
I miss the MetaSpy setting of MetaCrawler; it was fun actually watching what was being looked for on the internet basically as it happened - the searches done. OK, some was porn but a lot wasn’t and I found a few interesting things through it.
I miss the old AOL Community and newsgroups in general. Other than that put me down as another who fondly remembers a time before the internet was pretty much even more commercialized than Christmas.
Ah, yes…I remember when Napster first came out, I didn’t get any work done for a couple of weeks. It was like music Christmas, and I downloaded every favorite I could think of. And I did notice that most of what I downloaded came from folders labeled Mom’s Music or My Parent’s Stuff.
And my most favorite early Internet place was the AOL SDMB. I pretty much spent all my online time there.
Pegasus?
I do so miss the <BLINK> tag.
no, it was a terminal based program that only showed text. I only used it for a short time before Netscape added a mail viewer.
Things changed quickly in the mid 90s. I remember being able to disable graphics in netscape and/or IE to speed up surfing. Those early flashing headers took a long time to load at 28.8 kbps.
It’s not the web, but you said internet experience: IRC. I know it’s still around, but it’s a shadow of what it was. I know there are other chat systems out there, but they’re not the same, either. Nowadays they’re either dead most of the time, or full of inane chatter, bots, and spam.
Yes, that stuff did exist on IRC, but it was also easy to find engaging conversation with like-minded people at any hour of the day. There were also regional channels that were quite active. I moved out to MN for a couple years, and met countless “real life” friends through IRC. Now, I’ve moved to ME for good, and wish something like that still existed.
I started with GEnie, which was one of the various online services before the Internet was easily accessed. It was several years before you could email people on other services like Compuserve, Prodigy, AOL, and the Well. Eventually you could get on the Internet via GEnie.
The best thing about it was the Science Fiction Round Table, where SF pros hung out. You could talk to J. Michael Straczynski as he was developing Babylon 5, George R. R. Martin, Jerry Pournelle, and many others.
Of course, once I got on the Internet, there were things like The Hampster Dance.
I kind of went straight from a few BBS’s to the Internet. I did a little IRC stuff before the Internet, but not a whole lot. Mostly a Tolkien IRC and a game called Acrophobia.
I miss Napster. I was able to find and download songs from artists that I never thought I could find again, and I was able to contribute a few like that to the masses.
just cause im curious… do they still make file sharing progs ? all the ones i used were sued to death like Napster Winmx Kazaa … one called BearShare…
I just miss old-style AOL sometimes … There were official and unofficial RP rooms
I remember all these things. Except BBSs, I never used those. I always used to be on the Usenet. Each group just seemed to have a smallish group of people who talked over a specific issue, like chips, or some aspect of politics, or who would win in a fight between Star Trek and Babylon 5. The closest thing now is probably reddit, and that’s just not the same.
I’m not going to advocate piracy or tell you how it’s done these days, not on here, but yeah, there are modern equivalents to napster and piracy is very common. Spotify almost put paid to music piracy, but it’s still out there.
I did. It was hilarious, and the web sites he criticized in those days truly needed to be called out.
Ah, Mirsky. I miss you.
In 2005; still on a 286, dialup to text-only freenet. One-second refresh times, regularly sniped e-bay bidders waiting for their flashy Windows to load.
I look back fondly at the very beginning of the Internet. A time before all the scurrilous con artists and hackers found the best use for them was to lie, cheat and steal from people.
Fairly amazing how evil spreads so quickly when the door is open and how long it takes to eradicate that evil from the places it takes hold.
Also amazing how someone or something beautiful and wonderful can be born into this world only to have all the filthy cockroaches come pouring in and feed off of the lives of the people who created the beauty in the first place.
I didn’t understand what I was working with. We started with closed-network (or whatever the term is) Prodigy. I remember my friend dialing into BBSs but I never learned how. We got AOL in early 1995 but it took a few months before we left their walled garden. I don’t even remember what I looked for or how. I tried Gopher but quickly switched to some other method of searching. I was probably looking for game cheat codes and walkthroughs.
I remember not understanding why anyone would send an email. I remember seeing companies start to list their websites and wondering why anyone would go to a company’s website.
We bought a printed, phone book-sized internet directory. :smack:
I’m glad I wasn’t in charge of all this because I had zero imagination re: how much potential there was.
I still have some fondness for that garish geocities look.
The shape of the Web has changed. You know how sometimes, on TV Tropes or Wikipedia, you’ll get lost following links to other pages, which go to yet more pages, and so on, until five hours later you’re reading a page about radioactive wombats and you have no idea why? That’s what the entire Web used to be like.
Nowadays, though, it’s like a hub-and-spokes model, but with only one hub, and a trillion spokes. “Surfing” involves two sites: Google, and whatever site Google directs you to, and then you’re done.
I don’t, however, have much memory of dial-up speeds. 1995 was my first year of college, and all the dorms (and later, my apartment, in grad school) had built-in high-speed networking.
Or possibly “pine.” We used elm back when I started school in '93, but by '95, it seemed like most people had moved on to pine, which I guess had a slightly neater interface, but I can’t remember the differences that much, as I pretty much used elm exclusively. There was also apparently a client called ‘mutt’, but I’ve never used it.
Is there anything I miss about the early days? Not really. I seem to recall exact string matches being possible with altavista, which I kind of miss. Yes, you have quotation marks and “+” and all that with Google, but there’s no way that I’ve found to force a true character-for-character match that I remember being able to do with altavista (or perhaps one of its competitors, like alltheweb.com).
But, nah, nostalgia aside, don’t really miss the early days of the web.
I was a CS prof so as things finally started getting organized in the 80s I had fairly good to great ARPA/NSF/Internet access at work.
Home was another story.
So a lot of find something at work, put it on floppies, bring it home. Sneakernet even on 1.44M floppies was better than using the 2400 baud modem.
Once modems got faster, I set it up for us to surf the Net from home by dialing into the school’s modems and then using their connection. First using text programs and then later SLIP to do real web browsing.
As I’ve said before, I was reasonably impressed with Lynx text browser. But the first time I ran Mosaic it was like I had suddenly landed in a William Gibson novel. Cyberspace was real. I knew things were going to dramatically change.