I miss Netscape Navigator. There was something calming and optimistic about that logo with the ship steering wheel appearing every time the browser loaded: https://www.reddit.com/r/nostalgia/comments/ahwc0w/discovering_the_world_wide_web_with_netscape/
If it were still available, I would be using Navigator to this day.
For the past few years, we’ve been downloading multi-gigabyte software install packages over the internet.
For about a decade before that, install packages came on DVD-ROMs.
For about a decade before that, install packages came on CD-ROMs.
Back in the 1990s, I once installed Microsoft’s Visual C/C++ from a set of *twenty[/i ] 3.5" floppy disks. Not only did the data transfer take forever, but you had to sit there through the whole thing so you could change disks on cue. PITA.
I loved looking for lyrics to songs that didn’t come with the album they were on. Enthusiasts would try their best to provide them. Now if someone posts one with errors it get propagated to hundreds of lyric sites.
I miss the altavista search engine. Imagine one that would happily tell you there was nothing to match your criteria, rather than trying its damnedest to give you something that maybe had a 5% relationship to what you care about. And it had the greatest keyword for searches: “NEAR”. You could winnow out so much chaff by using it.
Speaking of nostalgia, I do have to admit, when the graphical interface (web browsers) to the Internet and WWW started becoming popular (I remember by summer of 94 is when I really started to see it take off), I kind of felt like it was a “dumbed down” version of the Internet. After all, I had spent all this time learning my way around telnet, gopher, usenet groups and terminal shell commands and now any idiot can do this!? 
On the other hand, as I saw the web grow, I thought it was great to have that much information at our fingertips, and believed that finally we can nip urban legends and idiotic conspiracy theories in the bud because, hey, you can now fact check whatever garbage you read. Yes, I honestly thought, optimist that I was, having access to the wealth of human knowledge, newspaper archives, dictionaries, historical documents, actual audio and video recordings, etc., that our bullshit detectors would be more finely calibrated and facts and truth would finally triumph.
Boy, was I really wrong on that last one.
I think of it as digital kudzu.
Thank you for helping me to learn something new. I had previously heard of Kudzu but never knew what it was. Turns out it is a vegetable used in Japanese cuisine. It’s a kind of creeping vine which explains the analogy to the Internet.
Sorry. Double post.
This bit of info ties with your location. Trust me, if you lived in southern US, you would never describe kudzu as “a vegetable used in Japanese cuisine”. 
I miss things like telneting into various places, or getting actual “pen pals” from around the world when that would actually be novel. I miss learning how to use each piece of software do do the other, e.g. FTP over email, FTP over the WWW, FTP, Telnet, and WWW over Gopher, etc. (I don’t miss newsgroups, but only because I never had an ISP that allowed them.) I miss having so much to figure out and that sense of actual exploration.
But I definitely prefer the Internet now.
[quote=“Chronos, post:38, topic:847113”]
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./QUOTE]
That’s what I remember too- for a long time, every time you got on and looked for something, you might (did, usually) go down the rabbit hole of links.
Now it’s the one hub/trillion spoke model for the most part- some sites like Wikipedia and to a lesser extent, YouTube still have remnants of this sort of thing, although both are totally within their own platforms, and in the case of YouTube, it’s totally dependent on what they show as “related videos” or whatever.
That said, I remember it being more geared toward “communities” if you will. Things like message boards, newsgroups and the Yahoo! groups were wildly popular, and corporate websites just weren’t as common.
Finally, it was a bit brainier overall, in that until about 1997-ish, internet access just wasn’t much of a thing outside of higher education and a few businesses. So most of your users were more educated than today, where any boob with a phone can get online and post cretinous nonsense, as well as consume equally dubious information from shady sources like Facebook.
I liked counters. Too bad that fell out of favor.
My father got into the Beta test for Windows 95, so I had the job of installing that on our computer from a large stack of floppy disks. The release version came on 14-15 disks but I am pretty sure that the beta was not optimized and came on 20+ disks. It is hard to believe that Windows used to be 24-30 MB, the windows directory on my laptop is 1000x larger. Of course our hard drive at the time was only 3-400 MB.
I’m chuckling over here, because almost the only thing I did on a computer back in '99 and '00 was… lurk on the Straight Dope! And in '19 and '20… same thing.
So apparently, the internet experience evolves, but I forgot to.
As I think of it evolving, I have vivid memories of getting up early and getting into work before anyone else so that I could use the ONE computer we had that was connected to the internet.
It’d take a good ten minutes to fire it up, launch Netscape and get a page to load…
Oh, and I’d print out a thread or two to read later. Fun!
I still remember my first evening with newfangled internet access, in '93 or '94. Slower than hell Dial-up modem of course, not that I had any way of knowing how fast things would get. Sitting at home in San Diego. Found my way to some service (Webcrawler?) that had a “random website” button. Clicked on it and found myself looking at a site for Norwegians who were into growing and admiring fuschias. The “Norwegian Fuschia Society” or some such thing. And right then I knew “This interwebs thing is going to be interesting.”
I forgot about those. That was largely before crawlers & bots too.
I have vague memories of an endorphin rush when my Comcast Site jumping over 1000 viewers due to some interest in my toy making. I think my sister had something to do with that as she was very active on Myspace and linked to my site.
But this was in the early 2000s, not the 1990s. My Cablevision site probably didn’t get much past 100 views. That was in the 90s.
Back around that time it was common to share comical text files via email. There was one that discussed what driving to the grocery store would be like if various operating systems ran your car:
http://thepetersonsplace.com/dave/Fun/analogy_os_cars.html
The entry for Windows was prophetic:
I remember looking at newsgroups on my UNIX PC, back when there was no spam and there was one alt.sex group of low volume. I came to the Dope because newsgroup volume was just too much to keep up with.
Most people didn’t know much about the Internet. I was on a Mike Oldfield mail list about '93. I was going to Madrid to work, so I asked where to get his stuff there. I was told about a little record store that sold bootlegs. I dragged the guy I went with (he worked for me so he had no choice) there, which was a little hole in the wall on a small commercial street. He was amazed I could have found out about it.
I knew the good old days were over when I saw my first url on an advertisement on the side of a bus.
Now the web is so crowded hardly anyone goes there anymore. 
The best search engine ever was Infoseek. I used to compare the results to other search engines and they usually couldn’t find any of the things I found on Infoseek. It was a sad day when Yahoo took it over but revamped it to use their own search algorithms. So far as I know the logic they used has never been duplicated.
Dennis
I miss the kind of “wow that’s so coooool!” newness of everything. Having internet access was uncommon and special and a modern marvel, and now it’s just one more thing everyone takes for granted.
I remember getting a copy of HTML for Dummies because oh wow I can make an actual real life web site! Complete with tiled graphics background that’s so busy you can’t read the words, animated GIF’s, counters galore because what if one counter stops working how will I know how many people visited my site! Hoping someone would sign my guestbook-remember those too?
Basically my sites were everything they probably teach in “how NOT to design web sites” classes.
When my first nephew was born my brother made a web site where he posted all 9 billion pictures he took of the kid with his newfangled digital camera and just gave the URL to the immediate family and it was safe because there was no way to find it otherwise. You’d never dare so something like that now.
I remember upgrading to a 2400 baud modem, staying with that for a while, then a major jump to a 14.4k modem, woot!
Most of my online activity at the time was with local BBS’s. I particularly enjoyed the daily games like Trade Wars. Ah, Trade Wars.
Next I got into online gaming over the internet, specifically Populous, then Warcraft 2.
Then, years later, I got into usenet. Something like late 90s, and by then my favorite online game was Age of Empires. So good! Rise of Rome was even better, but then Starcraft came out almost at the same time and blew me away completely. (I still to this day have Age of Empires, Rise of Rome, and Starcraft: Broodwars installed on my Windows 10 machine, and still play them all at least a couple times per year. Also Star Control 2, but that was never really an online game as I recall.)
Then I found the SDMB. Crazy that I’ve been here almost 17 years; almost 17 years before I joined the SDMB was 1986, right around the time I started in the BBS world.
CompuServe?