What was the internet like in the 90s?

[reallyscrued]

Haha geocities, I made my first website on there. :awe: Then there was angelfire, homestead, and a few others that I had also made my site on. Oh, and Tripod!

Holy shit, Homestead! Made my first website on there. Oh how pointless it was. I remember angelfire and Tripod as well.

Who remembers Netzero?

Yep, but they're still around. I remember when they merged with Juno and this other free internet service I used for about a year. Simpler times.

Now that I think about it, it's great how broadband has come so far...but no free versions of it exist, even with ads. Now we've got cable television that you PAY for with banner ads in the guide.

Some products in going through some 90s magazines:

Sorry for going slightly off topic, just things I used to look at on the internet in the late 90s. Never had the money to buy anything,

 

[zCypher]

I remember having a 33.6k US Robotics modem, it was pretty solid, but never connected higher than 31.6k and often only at 26.4k or 28.8k. We eventually got a 56k modem, which usually connected at 44k or 48k. It was faster, but it was pretty common for it to be nearly as slow as the 33.6k modem. Downloading a song could easily take 30-60 mins, and forget about streaming video. I could however play online games reasonably well, including Half-Life and StarCraft. I'd sometimes connect on Battle.net with only 2g bars of "lag", when some cable internet subscribers were getting worse lag!

The absolute worst thing is the tying up of the phone line. I remember not getting cable internet back then because it was too expensive, but dialup was relatively cheap maybe $25-30 I think. I remember a lot of chatting, ICQ, everything was new and endless.

Good times, but I sure am glad to have the connectivity that I have now!

 

[tboo]

Ah, the 90s. Used to visit The Hun's Yellow Pages on a daily basis back then.

 

[silverpig]

Anyone remember Flooz? Did anyone here ever own any?

Remember the Voodoo 5 6000?

 

[AMCRambler]

Started out with Prodigy on an IBM 386 with an external 14.4 kbps modem. 256 color display and sooooo slow.

Then came the 233mHz Pentium Packard Bell and a 56k modem and boy did I think I was the shit. Internet MCI for internet access. Before the whole WorldCom meltdown lol. I remember being so jealous of my friend who had a dedicated separate phone line for his pc. We used to play doom 2 and Quake over dial up and my mom would always be picking up the phone to call somebody and knocking our connection off.

 

[AMCRambler]

Oh yeah and the first video card I ever bought.

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ati-rage-fury-maxx-review,156.html

 

[Paratus]

Not for everyone. I always hated Yahoo. For me it was Webcrawler then Excite then MSN, then Google.

Fuck that. Metacrawler was where it was at.

 

[dennilfloss]

Slow and slower, speaking about the 80s and 90s.

Any of you remember CompuServe and the old BBS boards? Good time, hehehehehe.

Russ's funny pics.

 

[mizzou]

your PC wasn't a PC without a matrox millenium to back up some serious software graphics

 

[tcsenter]

Astalavista.box.sk

 

[luiswhite]

Two words:

Real Player

Yeah, it's one of the essence.

 

[IronWing]

There was that MIRC based virtual world thing that was really cool until asshats put billboards up in front of everybody's construction projects.

 

[darkewaffle]

imo the internet can be divided into ASNAYT and BSNAYT, before and after social networking and youtube. I feel like they really democratized the internet, changing it from something seen as a "tool" to something much more ubiquitous and accessible.

 

[Vdubchaos]

How was the 1st computer you ever used? Amazing

You can't really compare "new" technology to one that's 20-30 years down the road.....

 

[Mixolydian]

"Get off the Internet, I need to use the phone!"

 

[disappoint]

Infoseek was the Google of it's time.

 

[Mixolydian]

"Get off the Internet, I need to use the phone!"

or "Get off the phone, I need to use the Internet!"

 

[CraigRT]

I remember dialup and web crawler as my search engine.

The more fond memories I have of computing back then was hardware and OC'ing. Nowadays it doesn't matter, but back then improvements made a huge difference.

 

[Clemenza]

The good ole days of 400 baud modem and local BBS. I used to live for Trade Wars. I would wait till midnight and try to be the first person to get on the BBS when the TW moved reset so I could be the first to find and attack people.

I used to also MUD a lot. I don't think I got real "Internet" until 1996 when I started college. It was terrible. I don't remember much about it except web crawler and Netscape navigator.

 

[Jeffg010]

This is how it was back then:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d_6TSK-FnMY


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CU-SeeMe
Cu-SeeMe was the shit back then. It was the first video chat. It stated out out black and white. I had a ton of fun on Cu-SeeMe. It was slow but man I was hooked. Finding a privet reflector was like finding gold.

Quake online got me into gaming and was hot back then.

AltaVista was the hot search engine

News groups was hot for me.

One main difference is back then to download porn on a 28.8k modem was painfully slow so I was saving everything I was downloading. Now I never save anything.

Trumpet winsock was how I connected to my local ISP
http://www.answers.com/Winsock?cat=technology&gwp=13

 

[Possessed Freak]

modem init strings.
x/y/z modem protocols.

 

[nageov3t]

"Get off the Internet, I need to use the phone!"

scary to think that my house had multiple phone lines back then (4, in fact... my sister and I each had our own plus one for the computer, and the general house line)

but since then, I haven't had a landline since 1999 (went off to college, and after that, I moved out on my own where I had DSL for awhile)

 

[Fritzo]

You actually had internet on an XT? I had CompuServe but no internet until the mid 90's. Had much better than an XT by then.

Yeah, I had Compuserve on my Commodore 64. At 300 baud, you could actually watch each character of a page print out.

My IBM PS/1 286 was the first computer I had that got Internet access. It had a 2400 baud modem, and I connected through a service called Delphi (all text based). That knowledge came in handy as I was able to teach professors in my first year of college how to use Usenet and Gopher, and even email on the university's connection. Back then, they would actually say "Send me an electronic mail message..." Kind of funny when you hear it now.


BTW- If Facebook had been around in the 90's: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=xrYRH3PYYT0

 

[Arcadio]

Some products in going through some 90s magazines:

I remember I spent a good chunk of money on one of those so I could play GTA 3 when it came out. I think it was a Ti-4200 or something like that. I felt so guilty spending all of my money on one of those. It was worth it, though. GTA 3 was amazing.

 

[BUTCH1]

I don't miss it.

When I started using it there were no graphics, just text. IIRC, I was using WAIS and Gopher.

I think it was the later introduction of Mosaic that allow for graphics. At that point the race for faster modems and higher bandwidth was on. IIRC, the best modems were made by US Robotics. We were updating almost constantly.

And PC hardware much more expensive then.

The thing I think kind of funny is that most people were America Online (AOL). They used to give out free discs at grocery store checkout lines. You seemed to get one in the mail every week/month. The funny part to me is that AOL wasn't the web, it was an intra web. Sort of like a little WWW within the WWW. But if you were using AOL, you really weren't on the web. Took a long time for many people to realize that.

The only really good thing I remember is that there weren't any viruses at first.

And was interesting to watch all the new business models that people invented, and watch them evolve or get run over like road kill. (A lot were simply purchased and gobbled up by the big players like Microsoft. Gates was blowing money like crazy to get into, and try to carve out a big position in the internet.)

Fern

I remember when AOL so oversold their capacity during peak hours you would get suddenly disconnected with the famous "goodbye" voice, when I called to complain I was told, "don't worry, were developing an autodialer program to get you back online without you manually having to do it yourself!", I bolted for Earthlink which was tons better..