What was the internet like in the 90s?

[ghost recon88]

Hahaha AltaVista FTW!

That site was great, before I had even heard the word "torrent" before.

 

[KlokWyze]

Honestly, the limitations on bandwidth and processing power made it all way more interesting. Now we are just spoiled....

Message boards > mass social media sites

You just get more detailed genuine responses, rather than endless thumb ups, lolz & cat pics.

 

[Wyndru]

I remember I was a little bummed to see BBS's drop off in popularity when the Inet started getting popular. I felt like it was just a prettier graphical way to do the same thing when it first came out. I remember my friend's dad refusing to go to the inet and staying on the BBS's for years after. We used to make fun of him for that.

I miss the little ISP's that popped up all over in the early to mid 90's. There was a lot of competition in my area, so prices dropped. I think I was paying $5 or $6 a month for dial-up and the place I bought it from was literally a single small office in downtown Albany that had a few servers and switches in it. I think there were 2 or 3 people working there total. They were around for a few years, and it was faster and just as reliable as the big competitors (AOL, Prodigy, Earthlink).

 

[IronWing]

90% of tech support:

Line 1: "My internet is broken."

Line 2: "Is Winsock running?"

Line 3: GOTO Line 1


Also, Trumpet Winsock was just plain magic.

 

[shortylickens]

The biggest thing I remember is using ad block programs to save bandwidth, as opposed to avoid harassment.

Also, very few people had digital cameras (or quality digital cameras) and most pics on the web were scanned from film prints. And they looked like shit.

 

[mizzou]

internet gaming was still fun, even with a dialup. Often though, you had to "lead" your intended target in a twitch gamer like Quake or Mechwarrior

With a 33.6 i could play Ultima Online, Quake, Diablo, etc. etc. Anything under a 300ping was deemed playable, and I think the fastest I ever had was 150 ping.

 

[exdeath]

Internet was faster. It was only 5kb/s but web pages didn't freeze up and load 100 MB of flash video ads first and your 5kb of text last when you didn't have an ad blocker.

 

[nageov3t]

MMORPG's:

 

[shortylickens]

Internet was faster. It was only 5kb/s but web pages didn't freeze up and load 100 MB of flash video ads first and your 5kb of text last when you didn't have an ad blocker.

Yeah I've noticed as the average household bandwidth has gone up, more and more companies moved to Flash and FMV with audio, sometimes in HD. IMDB is infamous for this.
I hate it.

 

[tboo]

I remember seeing my first scat-porn pic back in the 90s. Some German punk rock singer pinching a loaf into a guys mouth. Its been all downhill since then.

 

[shortylickens]

I remember seeing my first scat-porn pic back in the 90s. Some German punk rock singer pinching a loaf into a guys mouth. Its been all downhill since then.

Yeah the first time you see something really depraved a little part of you dies inside.

I think for me it was a dog with a gorgeous blonde woman.

 

[OutHouse]

90% of tech support:

Line 1: "My internet is broken."

Line 2: "Is Winsock running?"

Line 3: GOTO Line 1


Also, Trumpet Winsock was just plain magic.

lol god I had erased winsock from my head until now.

 

[OutHouse]

MMORPG's:

lol... That is hanus.

 

[M0oG0oGaiPan]

It might have been a little uglier before css got popular. The thing was people had a lot of interesting ways to pretty up pages using invisible tables. When frames were popular the web was a pretty ugly place also. Webcrawler, hotbot, infoseek, yahoo, alta vista were popular search engines but they only crawled pages every few months or something like that. Actually I think yahoo was still just a directory back then.

I'm pretty sure there was a limited # of colors available for images. You had to make sure it fit into a websafe pallette, otherwise it would look off. [edit] yeah apparently it was 256 colors:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_colors

 

[Fritzo]

lol... That is hanus.

This is how remember my first MMO:

Ultima Online was more about people stealing from you than anything else. People would shapeshift in towns to make you think the town was being invaded, then you would attack them and the guards would kill you---and all of your stuff could then be looted...I HATED that.

Getting black dye was a major feat, and I managed to get a black cloak...kept it for a week before I was jumped and looted. I wonder if it's any better (I understand UO is still around).

 

[JulesMaximus]

Dial up sucked...

 

[shortylickens]

It might have been a little uglier before css got popular. The thing was people had a lot of interesting ways to pretty up pages using invisible tables. When frames were popular the web was a pretty ugly place also. Webcrawler, hotbot, infoseek, yahoo, alta vista were popular search engines but they only crawled pages every few months or something like that. Actually I think yahoo was still just a directory back then.

I'm pretty sure there was a limited # of colors available for images. You had to make sure it fit into a websafe pallette, otherwise it would look off. [edit] yeah apparently it was 256 colors:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_colors

Yeah my biggest complaint was all search engines sucked. They were slow and gave piss poor results. Word of mouth was still the best way to learn about cool sites.

My dad actually kept a list on a sheet of paper because Win95 was unreliable and we frequently lost all our bookmarks.

Also having to use email from your ISP was a hassle. Everyone had a different login procedure. Some required you use an app like Outlook. Shit, some even required you use their special program. That was a pain. Consolidating and moving emails was a nightmare. And again, if you wanted to be absolutely certain you never lost something important, you probably had to print it out.

Reliable web based email is probably the most underappreciated innovation we've gotten in the last decade. If you had to go back you would know the difference, trust me.

 

[Fritzo]

Yeah my biggest complaint was all search engines sucked. They were slow and gave piss poor results. Word of mouth was still the best way to learn about cool sites.

My dad actually kept a list on a sheet of paper because Win95 was unreliable and we frequently lost all our bookmarks.

Also having to use email from your ISP was a hassle. Everyone had a different login procedure. Some required you use an app like Outlook. Shit, some even required you use their special program. That was a pain. Consolidating and moving emails was a nightmare. And again, if you wanted to be absolutely certain you never lost something important, you probably had to print it out.

Reliable web based email is probably the most underappreciated innovation we've gotten in the last decade. If you had to go back you would know the difference, trust me.

Remember this idiotic thing?

 

[J3S73R]

It was awesome. I'd spend all day downloading pictures of license plates and Dragonball Z and just admire their sub-640x480 glory. And animated gifs were the bomb, fuck anyone that tells you otherwise.

That wasn't really that bad though back then! I mean... your resolution sizes were like what 1024x768 or 800x600 in 1994/5? I think by 1997/8 I had a 1600x1200 19in though haha

 

[tranceport]

It was like the wild west.

 

[shortylickens]

That wasn't really that bad though back then! I mean... your resolution sizes were like what 1024x768 or 800x600 in 1994/5? I think by 1997/8 I had a 1600x1200 19in though haha

Umm no, in 1994/95 most of us were still rocking DOS with Windows 3.1 and nothing ran higher than 640x480. After win95 became popular most people stuck with 640x480 cuz they didnt feel like spending money on 800x600. Monitors were expensive, even relative to the hideously expensive computers of the time.
800x600 was not the standard until much later.

 

[rh71]

I started with Prodigy and a 2400 baud modem that was included in the purchase. I met a girl while seeking for pen pals that I still keep in touch with today through facebook. And to think we used to write actual letters to each other. I believe it was 1992 or so we started? Anyway, the dialing-up process was always a crapshoot. When you got anywhere near the fastest possible speed you had a good day. Don't ask me wtf I did on Prodigy - I can't even remember what it consisted of right now. On that same PC I played some NHL game that was incredible - so much so that I had my parents pay ~$80 for a couple more MBs of RAM. At one point I also deleted some WIN 3.1 system files so I could gain some disk space. Ooops.

I really didn't get on the non-Prodigy internet until college which was like '95. Still dial-up and I hogged the phone line and my roommate had to go next door to make phone calls. Lynx was the flavor of the year and I just remember a lot of keyboard tabbing rather than mouse clicking. Also played a text MMORPG with nearly all my free time - none of our significant others approved - surprised we had any. That's how we all got so fast at typing. Sort of the equivalent to the fast phone-texters of today. Junior year ~'98 I think ethernet was finally put into the rooms and we all went nuts with downloading MP3s. I remember doing that with dial-up and it was 10min for 1MB and that's if you didn't get disconnected along the way.

EDIT>> I also remember those ad-programs you'd install to have a bar at the bottom of your screen and you'd get paid as long as you were active. Of course they would be exploited by bots that would keep it active. I earned some cash back then. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AllAdvantage

 

[MarkXIX]

My friend convinced me to build a "kit computer" using a motherboard that came with a Cyrix 586 processor and a 14.4k modem. That was my first experience with computing really and I was hooked instantly.

Shit was slow back then, real slow, but it was a wide open world.

About 4 years ago I was looking to hire someone and I ended up interviewing the guy that ran the local dial-up ISP. I remember back then thinking he must be a God of some kind to run an ISP, but the interview clearly indicated he was just very, very lucky and probably underpaid the smart guys who made the shit actually work.

 

[IronWing]

Things were so open. I wanted to start a web/ftp server from my university computer so I downloaded the software, set it up, shot an email to the university's DNS admin requesting a host name, had an answer in a couple hours, and was off and running. Things were truer to the peer-to-peer* potential of the web. You didn't need a separate web host and ISP. With every great new thing we move further away from peer-to-peer and back to Central Services.


* Not peer-to-peer as in stealing stuff, peer-to-peer as in anyone could provide their own content from their own machine.

 

[shortylickens]

Things were so open. I wanted to start a web/ftp server from my university computer so I downloaded the software, set it up, shot an email to the university's DNS admin requesting a host name, had an answer in a couple hours, and was off and running. Things were truer to the peer-to-peer* potential of the web. You didn't need a separate web host and ISP. With every great new thing we move further away from peer-to-peer and back to Central Services.


* Not peer-to-peer as in stealing stuff, peer-to-peer as in anyone could provide their own content from their own machine.

Thats because storage was expensive and the ISP's didnt want to host stuff unless you paid extra for it. But they always wanted to control content. Now that the internet is much faster for people on average, and storage is dirt cheap, they'd prefer to take back the control they always wished for. Media providers breathing down their necks doesnt help either (MPAA, RIAA, etc.)