Jurassic Web 430
theodp writes "It wasn't so long ago, but Slate's Farhad Manjoo notes that The Internet of 1996 is almost unrecognizable compared with what we have today. No YouTube, Digg, Huffington Post, Gawker, Google, Twitter, Facebook, or Wikipedia. In 1996, Americans with Internet access spent fewer than 30 minutes a month surfing the Web and were paying for the Internet by the hour. Today, Nielsen says we spend about 27 hours a month online (present company excepted, of course!)." I thought in 1996 all we did was idle in IRC channels while we wrote code in other terminals.
IMDB was up (Score:4, Informative)
Ah, the era of homepages (Score:5, Informative)
With terrible blinking text and eyesore backgrounds.
They were all on geocities then. Now they're all on facebook/myspace.
It was a nicer, gentler internet. Less advertising, less malware. Less crap and less people too... e-Commerce was a rarity. Naive users and online shops would transact via card-detail containing emails.
There was still all the porn you could imagine though.
Re:IMDB was up (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Ah, the era of homepages (Score:4, Informative)
Not really. Porn is often one of the first major uses of a new media. Videotape built its success on porn.
Ah...1996 (Score:2, Informative)
I was surfing the Eudora e-mail forums on my company's dial-out internet (in an office of 80 people we all shared a 26K Baud modem), trying to figure out how to share address books. This was before Eudora went POP/IMAP and was still just LAN mail. Mail was queued up in the gateway, and once enough was stored, the modem would dial out and release.
In late 1997 we'd gone from dial-up, to ISDN, to 1/4 T-1...but that's a whole other era.
IRC?? What's that? (Score:1, Informative)
Pre-1996 I was using UNIX talk [wikipedia.org] (and ytalk) to chat with my friends via IP addresses.
IRC? Pfftt. You kids and your newfangled technologies, although it is an entertaining observation that both the ancient talk program and IRC were both pretty vulnerable to various exploits over their history.
Anyway, get off my lawn.
Re:Paying for Internet by the hour? (Score:5, Informative)
Multiplayer Quake was too slow.
It was okay for 2 players. QuakeWorld was released in 1996, however, and made things a lot better. 4-8 player games were quite playable over my modem in '96.
IRC was getting flooded by clueless n00bs
It still is. People with a clue have moved to SILC.
Instant messaging == AIM. Without file transfers, voice, etc.
In 1996? Really? AIM was released in 1997. Back in '96, ICQ was the only option for IM.
Re:IMDB was up (Score:5, Informative)
SpyGlass MS settlement (Score:3, Informative)
SpyGlass sued MS and according to Wikipedia they settled for $8 Million.
Internet Explorer 3.0 was released free of charge in August 1996 by bundling it with Windows 95, another OEM release. Microsoft thus made no direct revenues on IE and was liable to pay Spyglass only the minimum quarterly fee. In 1997, Spyglass threatened Microsoft with a contractual audit, in response to which Microsoft settled for US $8 million.[4]
Wikipedia Article [wikipedia.org]
I seem to remember rumors that the settlement was for $50 Million, but perhaps that was what they were suing for, and settled for less.
Re:IMDB was up (Score:4, Informative)
I met my wife back in '96 on a telnet BBS. shadow.scc(or acc).iit.edu to be specific.
I was getting internet access back then via a hole in the library dial-up information access system. Mostly used for gopher access, some links to other libraries would allow you to escape out to a telnet prompt. From there it was just a matter of knowing where to telnet. BBSs came first, then after I learned the magic of a shell, it wasn't long until I figured out how to implement PPP. By summer '95 I had slackware installed and (thanks to a friend of mine) access at an early-adopter local dial-up ISP. Even though the whole web was "mine" at that point, I retained a special love for shadow, and ended up meeting my wifey there...
Ahh, nostalgia.
Re:1996 nothing... (Score:2, Informative)
That was at Cambridge University, in a room full of hackers and shelves full of empty champagne bottles. Oddly the camera didn't point at these, just the coffee pot which was mounted inside a ghetto metal rack.
Re:"Wasn't So Long Ago?!" (Score:3, Informative)
I have issue with the summary. Back in 96 I was paying a flat rate for internet access, and I spent quite a few hours fiddling around with it. Granted, about 90% of my time online involved MUDs.
All I did was NOT work (Score:5, Informative)
Back in the last century, Usenet was alive and well and not yet overwhelmed by f-tards. You could actually make friends on alt.sysadmin.recovery or your local [a-z]*.singles group, or ask a technical question on comp.sys.something or other and get an intelligent response instead of a death threat from a fanboy.
That my friend is the biggest change in the net for me.
Google News is trying to keep the flame alive but it's a lost cause.
Yes, 92 was a heaven for developpers (Score:1, Informative)
finding open source software was a piece of cake with xarchie. Unix games were never binary, but sources ;-)
There were tenths of ftp sites which were miroring each others.
Finding the email adress of someone with only its name was easy: there was a site in australia (telnet on a port) just for that.
finger was working.
I have used xdvi remotly (display in Paris and xdvi running in Brest) to finish a project report without any latency.
xhtalk was very effective as IM.
usenet was a lot more polite and with very few spams.
IRC (I learned it only in 93) was also a good way to chat with girls ;-)
Re:Yahoo (Score:3, Informative)
Almost like search.yahoo.com [yahoo.com]?
Re:"Wasn't So Long Ago?!" (Score:3, Informative)
I was paying for 100 hours a month, then unlimited by 1995 as well (but my "innanet" usage began in university in full earnest addiction circa 1993). Gopher, IRC and USENET. I think I spent more time 'hanging out' on IRC and in newsgroups than I do on the Web these days.
1996 ... those were the days ... (Score:2, Informative)
We started our business in March 96 ... went online 3/6/96 ... back then, a 128k line was enough to supply a total of three POPs with internet ... private users were limited to use during off-hours (5PM through 8AM), though IIRC we didn't have hourly charges (apart from the dial-in cost for the people for their modem or ISDN connection)
Ah, what fond memories - Web browsing without any M$ IE in sight ;)
Re:Ah...1996 (Score:1, Informative)
Were we using the same Eudora? Even version 1.0 supported POP.
Our memories are faulty devices (Score:5, Informative)
Starcraft was released March 31, 1998. [wikipedia.org]
Posted not to be a pedantic douche, but to point out that our memories are often imperfect. Starcraft, a revolution in online gaming in many respects, did not come out until 2 years after this article describes.
Everyone posting in this thread about how they had all this unlimited, highspeed, MMO-full gaming with massive multimedia collections in 1996 - I'm sorry, but you're not remembering things very well. And it's easy enough to find examples that show why.
1996 might not have been the $10/hr CIS days (that was 1994 for me), but it sure as hell wasn't anything like today. In 1996 we saw the very first TCP/IP games that weren't IPX tunneled through something like Heat.net. Web browsers existed, yes - and 95% of the pages out there were about someone's cat. Napster (ie: mp3 sharing of any large scale) was 3 years in the future. Software mp3 players [wikipedia.org] had just appeared in the fall of 1995. Winamp, the first truly popular player, was a year away. Hardware players were at least 2 years away. Flash didn't really exist until the end of 1996 [wikipedia.org].
Anyway, that's just pulled from the first few posts I could find. Y'all are remembering 1999 at earliest. 1996 was a very different online beast. Splitting hairs? No, showing just how much changed in such a short period of time.
Web isn't everything. (Score:1, Informative)
Interesting article, but it assumes that the internet begins with http:// and ends with .com
A lot of the things people rely on webpages for today could be still be done then, just in a different form, such as Usenet, IRC, ICQ, FTP, or MUDs.
I can't remember a time back then that I had so little to do that I logged off in disgust or boredom. Quite the opposite, actually: I had to find an unlimited plan for my dialup because I spent far too much time exploring the internet, in all its varied protocols.
Meanwhile, in 2009, "internet" has been reduced to an alias for webpages, and if it can't be done in a browser, nobody seems to want it. Sure, "the web" expanded (arguably not for the better), but it did so at the expense of the rest of the internet.