What was the internet like in the 90s?

[Sulaco]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gsNaR6FRuO0

 

[Ns1]

Anyone got a screen cap of warcraft 1 multiplayer setup? holy shit man, that was painful.

 

[tboo]

I loved playing the game Realmz back then.

 

[mmntech]

Bonzai Buddy.... dear god.

I don't know if security has gotten better or if I'm just not trawling such illicit sites anymore, but the spamware levels seemed so much worse in the late 90's/early 00's

Lol, that stupid purple gorilla was all over the web in the early 2000s. I just don't think they took security on home PCs very seriously back then. Microsoft was particularly bad. Those who remember Windows XP fondly forget that it was about as secure as a whore's drawers. Back then you had to secure your PC with antivirus, antispyware, and a third party firewall.

Spamware went down because security finally got taken seriously, and people stopped using IE. Law enforcement also aggressively went after the botnets distributing that garbage. The black hats also found bigger fish to fry. Why waste resources trying to get a couple credit card numbers from random PCs when you can hack major retailers and get thousands of them.

 

[nightspydk]

Well not present or maybe floppies where the thing.

 

[WhoBeDaPlaya]

"Hey baby, want to go back to my place?"
"Sorry honey, I only put out for men with a /. UID <= 1000"

*stares sadly at 5-digit /. UID*

 

[SketchMaster]

After reading though this thread I realized that one day my kids will watch documentaries about the early days of the web on their iSockets, and then ask me what it was like having to actually read text and type words into a computer manually. When that happens I'm going to sit on the porch, open up a bottle of scotch, then remember how awesome it was when I swapped out my Voodoo 2 SLI for a single Voodoo 3 and overclocking the crap out of it to play Tribes 2 at a decent FPS.

Then yell at some kids to get off my synth-lawn.


Besides what everyone else has talked about, the one thing that I remember from the early web days is how much Google changed the way people searched the web. Before Google it was a bit tricky to find what you were looking for since the very early search engines couldn't "guess" what it was you wanted. You had to know what to type into a search to actually get anything useful back, and that meant trying different keywords and scrolling through pages of results until you narrowed it down.

Most of the time I would use a search to get me close to what I was looking for then hop from forum/website to the next using links within those sites until I found the page I needed. These days Google has so much of the web indexed that you don't really have to try hard to find what you want, unless it's something off the beaten path. Back when I worked as help desk my coworker spent all day trying to track down a site that sold a disk sled for a laptop, but he couldn't find it. I offered to help and not only found it in five minutes but had multiple sites so he could get the best price.

There is a bit of an art to finding things on the web, I grew up with it and just learned how and where to look and never realized there was some skill needed until I saw younger/less tech-savvy people try to find something on the internet.

 

[blankslate]

Same as it is now, except with less liberals and atheism and with more productive discussions (about non-productive topics).

We were there. It's just that it took you guys some time to find us.

 

[OverVolt]

Bonzai Buddy haha.

I remember AOL chat rooms, IRC chat rooms, more chat rooms. Forums, then more forums. No facebook, it was awesome, in my opinion.

I remember ebaumsworld/college humor first making the rounds as popular places. I remember everyone having a yahoo or hotmail email.

URL address used to matter more. Once you finally found a place you liked you'd bookmark it etc. and just go directly there. Now I usually just go to google for everything first. I actually trust a google search for say my banks website more than I trust myself to not misspell my banks website and end up on some phishing site.

 

[Vic Vega]

I recently discovered the interesting world of internet message boards and forums. Ever since I've started to find things like Facebook and twitter boring and restrictive. I want to ask some of the computer veterans, what was the internet like in the 90s, with those 56k lines, large computers and IRC.

What were those days like. Do you miss them? Why/why not?

Yeah I miss them... gaming guilds/clans and their websites were a ton of fun. Yeah... they still exist now but it's different and I'm older.

 

[Fritzo]

Lol, that stupid purple gorilla was all over the web in the early 2000s. I just don't think they took security on home PCs very seriously back then. Microsoft was particularly bad. Those who remember Windows XP fondly forget that it was about as secure as a whore's drawers. Back then you had to secure your PC with antivirus, antispyware, and a third party firewall.

Spamware went down because security finally got taken seriously, and people stopped using IE. Law enforcement also aggressively went after the botnets distributing that garbage. The black hats also found bigger fish to fry. Why waste resources trying to get a couple credit card numbers from random PCs when you can hack major retailers and get thousands of them.

This was pretty much every old person's first view of the Internet:

 

[Vic Vega]

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.

I disagree... it was painfully slow, especially for those of us who worked in a networked office and were used to those speeds (both inside the network and out to the "web").

We had a T1 at work, it was like crack.

Remember the clout you had if you worked in an office with a T1 and could host Quake or some other game? "That guy has a T1? Holy shit!".

 

[Fritzo]

I disagree... it was painfully slow, especially for those of us who worked in a networked office and were used to those speeds (both inside the network and out to the "web").

We had a T1 at work, it was like crack.

Remember the clout you had if you worked in an office with a T1 and could host Quake or some other game? "That guy has a T1? Holy shit!".

Ha! I was that guy On weekends we would have LAN parties in the office and play Duke Nukem or Jedi Knight. Those were the days....

 

[Vic Vega]

I used to build maps for JK (albeit not good ones you could argue). Too many hours spent in Canyon Oasis.

 

[CountZero]

Around 1994-1995 I had procrastinated on doing a school project. Friend had an internet connection so I went over there and did all my "research" online. I got bonus point for using electronic resources. I seem to remember using a browser called Mosaic and the first time we came across an animated gif it was amazing. To say things changed quickly is an understatement, even a few years later as a freshman in college (97-98) it had exploded.

I think it is kind of interesting to have experienced the completely unfettered internet before corporate interests took such an interest in locking things down in the post Napster world.

 

[randomrogue]

I recently discovered the interesting world of internet message boards and forums. Ever since I've started to find things like Facebook and twitter boring and restrictive. I want to ask some of the computer veterans, what was the internet like in the 90s, with those 56k lines, large computers and IRC.

What were those days like. Do you miss them? Why/why not?

The internet as in WWW was the mid-late 1990's. Before that you had AOL and BBS boards. It wasn't much different. I don't think many really thought of it as slow but the annoying modem sound was something that I don't miss. If anything the biggest thing that's different is things like Wikipedia. Before the WWW you had programs that you updated each year with the encyclopedia. Now you can get instantly updated information online within moments of it happening.

 

[randomrogue]

Back in the 90's Yahoo was the search engine to use. But it wasn't like the search engines of today. Yahoo had a directory listing of websites and you searched that directory.

People that knew what they were doing used Altavista. It was way faster and better than Yahoo.

I remember going to my college campus to download MP3's on their T1 connection and then bringing them home on a handful of ZIP disks.

You were always upgrading your modem. I think my first one was 1200 baud. Then 2400. Then 14.4. Then 28.8. Then 56K. Then we sat at those speeds until we wanted to kill the world. It seemed to take forever for DSL and Cable to catch on.

 

[Ns1]

People that knew what they were doing used Altavista. It was way faster and better than Yahoo.

+1

 

[randomrogue]

Well if the show 24 was set in the 90s: http://youtu.be/JMLH_QyPTYM

OMG I can't stop laughing. I totally forgot about trying to log into AOL after my family had gone to sleep and getting a knock on my wall telling me to keep the noise down.

 

[Fritzo]

People that knew what they were doing used Altavista. It was way faster and better than Yahoo.

I remember going to my college campus to download MP3's on their T1 connection and then bringing them home on a handful of ZIP disks.

You were always upgrading your modem. I think my first one was 1200 baud. Then 2400. Then 14.4. Then 28.8. Then 56K. Then we sat at those speeds until we wanted to kill the world. It seemed to take forever for DSL and Cable to catch on.

80% of my Alta Vista searches: "Crack <name of software>"

 

[Zunhs]

I remember the first time I called a BBS. My English was pretty bad and I filled out my occupation as "modem". One minute later I was chatting with the owner of the BBS and he was very delighted with my answer. Text chatting felt awesome. It took me quite some time to decipher his good bye message, cul8er. I thought he had written see you 18:er and I couldn't understand why. ZyXEL and US Robotics made popular modems.

 

[Ns1]

I remember the first time I called a BBS. My English was pretty bad and I filled out my occupation as "modem". One minute later I was chatting with the owner of the BBS and he was very delighted with my answer. Text chatting felt awesome. It took me quite some time to decipher his good bye message, cul8er. ZyXEL and US Robotics made popular modems.

you were a baller if you could afford a US robotics modem.

 

[arch113]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qpMvS1Q1sos

 

[randomrogue]

you were a baller if you could afford a US robotics modem.

Yeah I remember that too but I don't remember why. What was so special about them?

I remember being the cool kid who knew all the local numbers for the best BBS boards. You could get any crack that way. Then when the WWW hit every game imaginable was cracked and accessible. Gamecopyworld!

 

[Ns1]

Yeah I remember that too but I don't remember why. What was so special about them?

It was name brand and had less problems then the crappy modems that the rest of us bought from Fry's.