What was the internet like in the 90s?

[OOBradm]

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.

http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_display.asp

Looks like 800x600 was the most popular resolution until 2003, and 1024x768 was the most popular until 2008.

 

[bigrash]

Two words:

Real Player

What a pos software that was. Glad it's gone.

 

[Childs]

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.

A lot of companies didnt have restrictive firewalls back then, and your workstation was publicly accessible to everyone on the internet. I used to host a website, dns and mail on my sparc. I wrote my own version of a news site and comment system. It was like shacknews or stomped.

 

[Oyeve]

I miss my Boca modem.

 

[Hugo Drax]

USENET forums. I used them quite a bit back in the 90s Now USENET is useless.

 

[IronWing]

What a pos software that was. Glad it's gone.

Thank goodness we still have Acrobat Reader so a new generation can experience the joy of advertising via incessant, verbose updates.

 

[dighn]

USENET forums. I used them quite a bit back in the 90s Now USENET is useless.

usenet was pretty cool; it was nice having one place where you can discuss things instead of going through forums scattered among various sites. though I did find some of the users to be anally retentive, complaining about stuff like "top posting" or whatever.

multiplayer gaming back then was a pain. most games supported only lan protocols like IPX, so you had to run these software (kahn/kali) that tunneled IPX over TCP/IP. they were not free but there were "ways" around that (hey i was a kid), but it was not reliable so it was an endless cycle of awesome game play (descent 2 <3) and problems.

 

[Scarpozzi]

I started with Qlink (300baud modem) on the Commodore C64 in the mid-late 80s....then made the jump to IBM/DOS and Windows 3 to BBS hop.

By 1993/1994 I had Compuserve, AOL, and Prodigy.... At the time, I was working on a 386 and eventually upgraded to a 486DX..then a DX2...then a P75... Typically, I remember connecting at 2400 baud, then things started getting faster up to 9600...then 14.4....then 28.8....then 33.6.... The companies were moving to replace all their modem stacks to keep up with competition. There was that old discrepency between standard 56k and US Robotics 56k X2 technology.

Web browsing back then sucked because there weren't search engines available. I remember using lynx to browse the web on the 386 in dos. Compuserve used SpryMosaic as its browser and was better than AOL, but you could keep using free AOL disks to conserve your time and AOL had a lot of cool chat rooms available. mIRC was a lot of fun and was cool being able to chat in a user-regulated space.... I used to spend a lot of time on there. I bought Internet Phone and used it over a 28.8 modem to video chat with people around the world....cool technology around 1996ish. Everything was slow and often the phone lines to the ISPs got busy during prime-time. I eventually dumped the online services and switched to a traditional ISP in 1995 that was cheaper. (unlimited use versus pay per minute) Downloads for software and music took many hours... The worst was when you started to download something and it would stop or you'd get disconnected. I used GetRight download manager to do most of my downloading for me so I could pickup where it lost its connection.

It's great having places to purchase software, music, and stream movies as easily as we do. I'm sure most people take the download speeds we've been getting for the past decade for granted. I know most software companies do. Think about how many companies sell software and have 50-100meg updates you have to download. (tax software, for instance). That wouldn't have worked 20 years ago...

 

[Saint Nick]

*nt*

Wasn't that because the threaded view was the only option available? Just wondering.

 

[Saint Nick]

What a pos software that was. Glad it's gone.

I don't think it's gone.... I just installed a product on my new PC the other night and it wanted me to install RealPlayer

 

[silverpig]

I remember reformatting a friend's computer around about 2000 because of all the spyware and viruses on it. I got it all fresh and clean and then 2 days later she said it wasn't working again.

I fired it up and Bonzi Buddy popped up.

silverpig - Aw crap. Bonzai Buddy is on there again. You've got spyware everywhere now. I have to re-format again to get rid of it *grumble grumble*

friend - But I like Bonzi Buddy

silverpig - You didn't put him on there yourself did you?!?

friend - Yeah. He's helpful. It's the first thing I install.

silverpig - *grumble grumble*

 

[zinfamous]

lol... That is hanus.

your spelling is torcher

 

[nageov3t]

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

 

[zinfamous]

I don't think it's gone.... I just installed a product on my new PC the other night and it wanted me to install RealPlayer

RealPlayer is alive and well in Europe. In fact, they are the plaintiff in the various anti-monopoly Euro-led lawsuits against Microsoft and Media player, iirc.

It boggles my mind, really, that there seems to be a population of users that actually agree to install what is pretty clearly a Trojan disguised as useable software. ....and that these assclowns at RP can get legal support for their software.

 

[BurnItDwn]

It was always too slow until I got the college T1 in 1998. then, I loved being an LPB.

 

[Ichinisan]

Wasn't that because the threaded view was the only option available? Just wondering.

Yeah.

 

[GTaudiophile]

I remember using Mosaic for the first time! Wow.

It was all good fun.

I am thankful that I've been able to grow up along with the Interweb instead of taking it for granted.

 

[IronWing]

I remember using Mosaic for the first time! Wow.

It was all good fun.

I am thankful that I've been able to grow up along with the Interweb instead of taking it for granted.

Yeah, I was using gopher on a unix box when one of the other students said "Try this instead" and directing me to Mosaic. A few weeks later the first alpha release for Windows came out and the world changed.

 

[CZroe]

Yeah.

Ninja250.org forums still use it. The admins disable all other view options.

 

[Fritzo]

Best line in college: "Hey! Am I able to Finger you?"

 

[Jeffg010]

I remember using Mosaic for the first time! Wow.

It was all good fun.

I am thankful that I've been able to grow up along with the Interweb instead of taking it for granted.

Forgot about Mosaic. Then every site that had pics said it works with Netscape and man was it much better with it.

 

[IndyColtsFan]

I started off on a 300 baud VICmodem in 1982 or 1983 from what I recall (I still have the VICmodem AND the VIC 20). I used to love dialing in to BBS systems, CompuServe, etc.

Internet in the 90s was slow but interesting and you really did feel like you were on a frontier or something unexplored. Everything on the web has become pretty commoditized now.

I tend to reflect on the past quite a bit and while the 80s are always my gold standard, I've come to appreciate the 90s more and more as time passes (I was not a big fan of the 90s DURING the 90s). At the risk of being flamed, I think that good PC gaming died in the early 2000s and the glory years were in the 90s.

 

[slag]

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.

I played a mud on an 8088 with a few k of memory with an external 1200 baud modem (I think it was 1200, that was a long time ago).


The screen scrolled so slowly due to the slow data transfer over the lines I'd be dead in game several seconds before the words would scroll across the screen that I had actually perished. Made entering rooms and attacking monsters that could instakill you a lot of fun.

 

[Midwayman]

I remember BBSing on my XT with a 1200 baud modem. That's 1.2k. I could read ASCII text quicker than it could download it.

 

[GTaudiophile]

Haha. You all got me going down memory lane now. I remember my dad screaming at me from downstairs to get off the modem because he would pick up the phone receiver and hear the static. This of course would be followed by the question, "How long have you been online?" [Blocking incoming calls because we only had one line.] and I would give a weak, "Not long!" retort. But of course this didn't ever suffice because the second I would log off of Compuserve or whatever, the phone would wring nonstop for hours with people complaining that they they had gotten a busy signal for hours.

Haha! Those were the days.

You all also got me thinking of my PC history...

1. Apple Macintosh Plus (ca. 1986-87).
2. Mac SE30 (ca. 1991-1992).
3. Mac LCIII (ca. 1993). This one got me online for the first time. I think it was an external 1200 or 2400 Bps modem. There was no GUI. I used a form of Telnet that got you into a text-based system with access to the newsgroups!

And then after begging and pleading for years...

4. A Gateway Pentium Pro 180 MHz variant (ca. 1996).

This blazing-fast machine contained my first ever dedicated graphics card:

A STB S3 Virge/VX card with a whopping 4MB on VRAM:

5. A Gateway G6-450 Pentium II 450 Mhz "Deschutes" variant (ca. 1998).

This was the first machine that I started to tinker with. I swapped everything in it with the exception of the motherboard and CPU. It came with an amazing STB Velocity 128 + 3Dfx Voodoo2 12MB combo. I replaced this with a Creative 3D Blaster TNT2 Ultra and then finally the ATI Radeon DDR32!

6. Self-built Pentium IV 2.0Ghz "Northwood" (ca. 2002) with an ATI Radeon 9600 Pro. (Blasted me passed the 1GHz barrier!)

7. Self-built AMD Opteron 170 "Denmark" (ca. 2006) with an nVidia GeForce 7900GT. (Dual cores!!)

8. Self-built Intel Core2Quad 9550 (ca. 2009) with an ATI Radeon HD 4850. (Quad cores!!!!)

9. 2013: Something new this year? Or perhaps abandon the desktop altogether?