Definitely not. We never had CompuServe, AOL, or any of the early/pre internet services. I looked around at a few of the text based terminal programs of the era and none jumped out at me. I used email so infrequently at the time. I would estimate that less than half of the students at my university were online despite being given free access.
The nice thing about the Windows 95 Preview Program is that it gave you unlimited free access to the MSN (Microsoft Network) beta back when other services were still charging by the minute. There wasn’t too much there, but there were shareware libraries, chat rooms and eventually (most important to me) a portal to Usenet, including the binary groups. (I had the software on CD, though–I still have the Prewiew Program CD and a couple of real beta build discs stored in a CD wallet somewhere.)
There’s a site called, very appropriately… www.WebsitesthatSuck.com
It’s now inactive,but you can still have fun browsing its archive, to see god-awful sites from earlier days of the web. Websites that hurt your eyes.
The site started back in the earliest days of the internet, and was a serious place run by a professional website designer explaining to newbies how NOT to make a website. It was continuously updated until about 5 years ago, when I suppose people finally got smart, and websites adopted the standard look that we all expect today.
But the purpose of the site was amazing—web designers in the early days needed an expert to explain obvious things like:
[ul]
Use reasonable colors,so your text is readable, and doesn’t get swallowed by the background color.
Don’t make the opening screen automatically play a 60-second long flash video, preventing the user from actually, well, using your site.
Label your icon buttons! yes, really…it’s a bad idea to randomly scatter colored buttons around the screen with no explanation, so that only after the user makes a guess about what to click on, a new page opens and he discovers where the link led to.
In internal windows within the site,offer an obvious way for the user to go back to the main menu.
[/ul]
I remember back in the early days of the web it wasn’t uncommon for businesses to hire some 16 year old kid who was “good with computers” to design a website for them. People who didn’t know any better considered web design to be basically a coding task, when it’s really a graphic design / UI design project.
I first used the dialup BBS’s in the late '80s, but I really got started on the Internet in the early-mid 90s at college when I discovered Usenet. That’s the origin of my standard screen name. I first started using “Jet Jaguar” in the Mystery Science Theater 3000 newsgroups, and then started using it elsewhere so people I knew from RATM* would recognize me.
I had a series of web pages (for which I wrote the html by hand, in Notepad!). One was a spoof of the Blair Witch Project web site (based on the TV show Bewitched) that got over 200,000 hits, and a Gran Turismo race car setup/tuning guide that got like 86,000 hits before I stopped paying attention. That one even got a note from an Australian V8 Supercars driver in the guestbook! Remember those, web page guestbooks? This would have been around '98 or '99.
I also had a page that spoofed really bad web design. At the time I had a few teachers email me to tell me that they use it as an example in class of how to not design a web page.
The main difference, IMO, is that back then there wasn’t the constant feeling of being exploited in one way or another while using Internet. For example, being used to train AIs by completing captchas, to say nothing of what we put up with in terms of the syphoning of personal information this days would had made everyone livid.
Also back then it was all about the user, now it’s all about the consumer.
It’s the difference between a community and a population.
I can’t remember the name of it but back in the early 80s a friend and I used to attend a tech show in San Jose every year. At first the displays were all entrepreneurs showing off their own soft- or hardware but every year the enthusiasts working out of a garage were fewer and the suits were more numerous until it wasn’t worthwhile going anymore.
I miss the community of friends I made on ICQ. I was 11547117. I not only “met” people from around the world and had live chats with them, I made friendships that lasted years, and who convinced me to move to Australia.
I can barely even remember their names now.
I also miss websites that only had information on them, and kept to agreed upon standards of design. Now they are full of ads and pop-ups, load images that reshuffle the page format, and still push the limits of reasonable load-times.
The porn is better now, though.
I started with Mosiac. A buddy in IT put me on it back in 93. There was not much to see so I got on Usenet and read alt.music groups about rock bands I liked.
Then once Netscape went public I checked out their new fangled web again to see a lot has popped up.
The interesting thing I see now is how a lot of people surf the web these days.
With so much traffic on mobile these days people are using a lot more apps vs the way I still surf which is via browser. I do this on my mobile devises as well and since I am old and unpopular, I don’t use social media at all.
Do you think getting your web info from an app say like Facebook has a big impact of how you see the world?
I noticed a lot of toxicity on Usenet a long time before I joined forums like these so I think it was there even way back then.
That last sentence wasn’t meant to be construed that this forum is toxic. It is not. I was referring to the format of a web page which has forums on different topics.
LOL.
Back in the day, you didn’t have to worry about hacking as much. The hacking tools weren’t as sophisticated, and there wasn’t much point, since the most you would get would be the ability to post on the newsgroup under their name. So passwords were much simpler. None of this 10 characters must include a number and a special character, not include any portion of your login ID, etc… Most people got by with a single English word. My first password was phoenix.
I remember in 1993 or 94, I was at a bar drinking some beers on a Friday night and playing pool. There was a guy there who I sort of knew, and we got into a converstation while waiting for our turn at the table. He was an artist of some sort, and I had been a computer programmer for a number of years, but not one who necessarily kept up on the latest tech stuff. I remember him saying that he was going to leave earlier than usual, because he wanted to get home and finish up his “home page”. I had a vague idea of what that was, but not wanting to let on that I, a tech guy, didn’t really know what he was talking about, just sort of nodded and said “yeah, good idea, you should definitely get that all finished up. Gotta have that home page.”
And others mentioned guestbooks. The modern day equivalent of “Kilroy was here.”
And, Usenet. I was working at a Wall Street company in 1992 or so, when a new hire started talking about it, and these “newsgroups” you could “subscribe” to, and he showed me a newsreader. Of course I knew what it meant to subscribe to something, but had no idea what he meant by a newsgroup. He clicked on a number of them showing me all the categories available, but I couldn’t quite fathom what they were, or where all the information would come from.
I remember reading an article very early in WWW days where a journalist (perhaps with Wired Magazine) registered the obvious domain name for a very large corporation and then asked them, “Don’t you want this? Isn’t this something you care about?” Not trying to extort money from them but instead trying to get them to understand why this was important. And the company’s response was basically, “What’s a domain name?”
And then there were the people who registered generic domains like “business.com” and tried to sell them. Some made a little money but if you look today, most of the large domains aren’t that sort of obvious term but something invented or more unique.
Nissan (the car company) figured out that www.nissan.com was valuable only after it was registered by Uzi Nissan in the early 1990s for his computer repair business. The latter party fought a bitter legal battle to keep the domain, ultimately winning a pyrrhic victory:
That wasn’t uncommon back in the 1990s for the “obvious” domain name for a company to end up with someone else, because the bigger company didn’t realize its importance until it was too late. IIRC until some time in the 2000s the domain www.delta.com belonged not to the airline, but to the faucet company. That’s not quite the David versus Goliath story as the Nissan one, and I don’t know if there was a lawsuit involved, but I imagine the airline had to pay the other Delta a lot of money to get that domain name.
During pre-Y2K, part of my job was updating about 30 OS/2 workstations with the Y2K-safe version of the OS. Which was probably about 20 diskettes I had to lug around from PC to PC. I’d start the update on one PC, then when it was ready for disk 2 I’d put disk 1 in the next PC, and so on until I had five or six PCs updating at once. And of course I couldn’t do this while people were using their PCs, so I’d have to come in on weekends.
Scoobysnax is Eudora the email reader you were trying to remember?
In those days, everybody’s computer was full of viruses. There were no free efficient malware detectors or scanners. Your computer judt kept running slower and slower intil you threw it away and bought a new one, and by then you needed a memory upgrade by about an order of magnitude, as well as suppport for new hardware.’
At my part-time job processing surplus goods, I recently found an invoice for a “Y2K upgrade” to the tune of about $4,200, performed in June of 1999. This was on some sort of server used to store data generated by lab equipment. I assume it was a critical system if they were willing to pay so much, but I’d be curious if anyone had a guess as to what most of the cost of that invoice was paying for.
God. I remember the yellow fonts on black backgrounds. It was awful.
People would post waay too much information about themselves on their pages. I don’t remember name of the service, but lots of people in Japan would make homepages on that.