What was the internet like in the 90s?

[JujuFish]

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.

When I was on 56K, I maxed out around 5KB/s, so a 3.5MB download would take nearly 12 minutes optimally.

 

[nageov3t]

the first 56k modem wasn't released until like 1998, though, right?

I remember my midi downloads taking much longer than that.

 

[zinfamous]

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

Are you an alien entity that created this account to probe for knowledge on decades-old internet culture, only to travel back in time with your alien time machine and hijack old internet forums and create the ultimate troll far ahead of its scheduled appearance and before proto-internet culture was prepared to handle such levels of trolling, thus ending internet life before it could blossom and in so doing doom present day human culture by removing the internet from our daily routine of dependence?

:hmm:

 

[I Saw OJ]

Great thread.

My parents first internet connection was through an AOL server. We had a computer for a while but it didnt have a modem. Once they finally put one in and connected it to the interwebs the first website I remember going to....playboy.com

 

[lucklessgorath]

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.

 

[CZroe]

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.

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

 

[KaOTiK]

I remember using AltaVista back then lol

 

[reallyscrued]

Got onto the internet in the late 90s, not as far back as you old farts, but I do remember

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1WuC9q_A2Fc

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z4ssRKE0CG4

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BFkry3zzutI

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=svmYyeRY11o

First internet provider was dial-up access with AT&T, 4.99 a month but it had a small banner at the top.

DirectHit and AskJeeves

GeoCities, Lycos, and Go.com

 

[JD50]

Punting people in AOL was awesome.

 

[Red Squirrel]

It's funny to think how downloading a single MP3 could take like an hour. The thought of being able to download a full length movie was unheard of. The thought of downloading ANY file that is in the GB's was unheard of. Even 50MB was considered a very large file. I remember when Napster came out, I showed my mom how to use it, and she was in heaven. So much music at your finger tips! Now, we just take all this for granted. Heck, nevermind the speed, just the fact that the connection is "always on" and not tying up the phone line. Just that alone is a big plus compared to before.

 

[Red Squirrel]

Got onto the internet in the late 90s, not as far back as you old farts, but I do remember

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1WuC9q_A2Fc

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z4ssRKE0CG4

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BFkry3zzutI

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=svmYyeRY11o

First internet provider was dial-up access with AT&T, 4.99 a month but it had a small banner at the top.

DirectHit and AskJeeves

GeoCities, Lycos, and Go.com

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!

 

[manlymatt83]

mIRC on DALNET was awesome

 

[manlymatt83]

Who remembers Netzero?

 

[TallBill]

Who remembers Netzero?

I had it, and the app to hide the ads.

 

[HamburgerBoy]

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.

Dogpile yo.

 

[HeXen]

AOL. But heck i remember party line 800 numbers on the telephone use to be the instant messages. If you could get through.

 

[Shortcut]

NO CARRIER

pine

Lynx

 

[Murloc]

I didn't use the internet at all before ADSL because it made receiving phone calls impossible and costed like a phone call or something.

 

[LumbergTech]

AOL 2.5 was the first internet that I ever had....followed by earthlink

 

[Fern]

the first 56k modem wasn't released until like 1998, though, right?

I remember my midi downloads taking much longer than that.

Yeah.

IIRC, my first modem was 14.4

Fern

 

[Mixolydian]

I remember using AltaVista back then lol

Hahaha AltaVista FTW!

 

[Imp]

Shitty. POS first ISP was trash. You could never get on after 8:30pm. POS went out of business, thank goodness. I don't think we ever upgraded to 56k. The only upgrade modem we ever got was 56k, but our POS (different than first one) ISP limited us to 32k-ish.

We finally moved to DSL in 2000-ish. That was also a POS. Cable and DSL finally went mainstream and was cheaper, except the max speed we could get was 130 kb/s downloading. Online game latency was 200 ms-ish.

 

[IronWing]

PowWow was a decade or better ahead of its time. It was a chat, file transfer, net meeting type program that was just plain amazing. And it never caught on.

 

[postmortemIA]

Yahoo, Altavista, GeoCities

 

[FallenHero]

God...i went from 1 28.8 modem to cable..1.5 down and 256k up. Holy crap, the hours I spent...