What was the internet like in the 90s?

[Gintaras]

good.. but i am talking about the forum culture.. that used to exist back then..

Back then guys were guys, not as sensitive as today...today a lot of guys do act like a girls...

Today you can't call an idiot: "you're an idiot"(if you could, it would force them to learn something instead of being an idiot). Idiots today are protected species on the net...They can ask so many stupid questions, but you can choose either to answer or to ignore...

Why do you think, someone made a site:

Let Me Google That For You ???

 

[Gintaras]

AOL was the only ISP in my area when I first had internet. It was very, very scary, and permanently dimmed my view of humanity.

AOL was my 1st ISP - trial version. Never had after that that POS - AOL.
Next, was Mindspring which later became Earthlink...still have Earthlink as my personal e-mail.

In between, for about a year or 2, I had free internet - Freeweb - no monthly pay...It should have been banners on top of the browser, but it was a way to go "around their way"....

I think, Diamond Supra Express was one of the best 56K modems and make internet faster - to loasd pages faster, there was a trick - in modem properties to limit speed - slightly less speed - less errors and pages load faster...

Lots still to remember...

With Napster, it took prolly 1/2 hr to download 128 song...
The, it was a way better - WinMX....

People were more FreeMinded...I remember, I got a copy of Win2000 from one of forum admin(not anandtech) week before Win2K officially came out...

More people were: "Not everything what illegal is immoral, not everything what's legal is moral" - more Free Spirited...

Back then it wasn't like now - when some i love you turning his hips around and asking: "did you download that song legally?"

Back then...it was Al Gore - who created internet...

 

[Fingolfin269]

Less... obvious? Not really sure how to describe it as it's really hard to think back to those times. It was slow. I remember using telnet a lot, I remember some place called QSD, I remember IRC, MUDs, etc.

To be quite honest I remember the BBS world of the 80s and early 90s a lot better than I remember the internet of the 90s.

 

[nageov3t]

I remember doing a lot of book reading back in the day.

click on a link, and read my book as it loaded.

 

[Ichinisan]

It wasn't painfully slow, because we didn't have anything faster to compare it to. By the future's standards, today's broadband will probably be considered "painfully slow." I remember the discovery of MP3s. Back then, you could download a 3.5Mb song in about 30 seconds.

But, you're right about the biggest difference - the early adopters tended to be more of your science/technology geeks. The typical person online was more intelligent.

It took a lot longer to download an MP3 song on the dial up connections I used back in the 90s. Your dial-up connection was amazing.

 

[Eureka]

this was considered an acceptable website for a blockbuster film from a major studio:

http://www2.warnerbros.com/spacejam/movie/jam.htm

otoh, anyone who could string together two lines of HTML could call themselves a "web developer."

Isn't it amazing how far we've come in 15 years? I can't wait to see what we come up with by the time I'm old.

 

[waggy]

You've been on anandtech for 13 years, probably posting every day, probably about the same recycled shit too.

lol.

you got a point.

 

[AdamK47]

Operation 3Dfx

Checked it daily. Now the web barely remembers it.

 

[Childs]

I miss dialing a BBS, talking with someone in chat, and after you get to virtual third base you realize they are a bot.

 

[QueBert]

Thinking back one of the things that was the greatest about the mid 90's internet was the lack of grammar nazi's. I've never really pondered it until right now, but I don't remember them exiting. I'm sure there were some out there, but I never encountered them.

 

[umbrella39]

What was it like?

It was pretty baud...

 

[Paratus]

This how I first got online when I was 6:

http://www.columbia.edu/cu/computinghistory/couplers.html

And this is what I did


http://www.lcurtisboyle.com/nitros9/rogue.html

 

[CurseTheSky]

More text, less graphics, virtually no movies.

Scrolling marquees. Animated GIFs everywhere. Website under construction signs (most likely animated). Background music (ugh). Horrible color / contrast combinations, like blue text on a bright red background. Multiple scrolling frames. Etc.

Things were far less polished - not just websites, but the way we interacted with them. These days, if you download a large file (500+ MB) and your browser crashes, you can generally expect it to either continue where it left off (cached), or just wait the 5 minutes it takes to download again. Back then, if your browser crashed or your dial-up connection got interrupted, you painstakingly had to start the download all over again, and for a 5MB file, that could take hours.

 

[Childs]

This how I first got online when I was 6:

http://www.columbia.edu/cu/computinghistory/couplers.html

And this is what I did


http://www.lcurtisboyle.com/nitros9/rogue.html

 

[IGemini]

I started direct dial gaming with a friend on a 14.4K modem. When I got a 56K and true internet, I don't think the speed rate broke 12kbps on a good day. 30 minutes to get a song on Napster sounds about right. Phone lines in my area were pretty noisy/old up to the point where the infrastructure got shredded to the point of rebuilding, but by then we were on cable broadband. Most gaming was done on the MSN Zone or occasionally MPlayer (back when they existed or were known as that).

I miss the direct dial at times, but not the really slow net speeds.

 

[chalmers]

I miss Cincinnati multiplayer BBS though, 15 max connections...doom2 all night. What a blast.

 

[chalmers]

Just found a post on Google for it...wow this brings me back 20 years ago.

CINCINNATI MULTI-PLAYER CONNECTION BBS


Telnet: cinmpc.com (205.133.194.10)
Email: Sysop@cinmpc.com
Location: Cincinnati OH USA
Dial-Up: 513.825.7900
Software: MBBS Total Nodes: 20 Pay?: YES Login: NEW

Best Gamers Board in Cincinnati! Top DOOM Players! Play 4 way
deathmatch, 8 Player Descent, Heretic, and many other Popular Modem-to
Modem games. Great On-line Games like TW 2002 (Random Option Package),
Blademaster, Vga Planets, etc.. Support Live E-mail, Telenet, FTP, WWW.
We support Ripterm, ANSI, and WorldGroup (Windows Graphical Interface).
Best Sysops, with Great Tech Support! Check-it OUT!

Gary and Wayne /Sysops

 

[PrinceofWands]

Essentially text only. Also 56k was a later development. Common man was rockin the 1200baud. Most of what was out there was academics or TRUE geeks (not like the word is used today).

 

[mmntech]

I can't remember when we got the internet but it was in the very early days of the World Wide Web. Sometime around 1994 or 1995. My dad needed email for his business.

Back then it was mostly web portals. I can't remember exactly who our first ISP was but I do recall it being in this format. It wasn't AOL, though we did have it briefly. Probably got some floppy for it lying around.

My dad would sit with me if I wanted to do anything online because of all the pervs trolling chatrooms even back then. Most of my online activity at the time was research for school projects. I never got into online gaming, website building, BBS, or any of that stuff. By the late 90s, early 2000s I began to realize how slow dialup was. At the time I had discovered some other, uh, uses for the internet. Besides that, I had begun downloading mods for games. On a 56k modem, it takes two and a half minutes to download one meg. Yeah, that wasn't fun. I also built a website dedicated to flight sims around this time. Even had my own forum at one point dedicated to RC flying, sadly nobody used it. The website got sent to hell when Geocities closed.

 

[jumpncrash]

I think I got on teh internet first on my dad's Macintosh LC3 with an external 14.4kbpos modem, then my mom's boyfriend got a fancy pentium 200 with 28.8kbps modem that I couldn't touch.

Then I started getting my own computers, started with a 486 dx4-120 with 14.4kbps

 

[Ichinisan]

Thinking back one of the things that was the greatest about the mid 90's internet was the lack of grammar nazi's. I've never really pondered it until right now, but I don't remember them exiting. I'm sure there were some out there, but I never encountered them.

Most people on the Internet at the time had much better grammar skills.

 

[IGemini]

Most people on the Internet at the time had much better grammar skills.

Depends on which corner of the internet you're on. I remember a few sites way back then with people that had downright atrocious grammar. Nothing here on AT has even come close yet. It hasn't really gotten better or worse, it's just seen a lot more with the sheer volume of people online these days.

 

[WhoBeDaPlaya]

I remember hanging out in the Overclocker's List, then The Hardware Group. IINM, even Anand himself got his start on the OC list.

 

[rpanic]

Seemed like everyone on the BBS' s were same age. Remember Tyco, Boothill, I think one was called Madame butterfly in OC and LA area

First broadband connection was cable modem that wieghed 20lbs and had huge heatsink fins.

 

[yhelothar]

Online gaming, you had frequent disconnects, especially when people called if you had call-waiting. The beeps from the call waiting would screw up the connection, if they rung it for more than 4 times.

I remember playing candystand arcade a lot as a kid back in the 90s.

LOTS OF POPUPS. There would be random sites you could go to that would flood your screen with popups, especially warez/gamez sites

Lots of Top 100 ranking sites for various things.

A 20MB download felt like a massive burden, and/or an incredible download.