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.
"Wasn't So Long Ago?!" (Score:4, Insightful)
It wasn't so long ago ...
It was 13 years ago. Maybe I'm just young but that is an eternity in the world of computer technology.
I would argue that you should really be looking at the hardware & communication infrastructure because internet usage (in my opinion) is really a product of how cheap the hardware makes the connection and usage.
Spam? (Score:5, Insightful)
And what the hell is Huffington Post and Gawker to put it inside this list?
It wasn't so long ago (Score:3, Insightful)
But kids who were not even in school then are driving now. People who were first graders then may well have voted in the last election.
How many of us even had cell phones then?
Even from a 43 year old's perspective, thirteen years can be a long time.
Re:Ah, the era of homepages (Score:5, Insightful)
Is myspace fundamentally different to the homepage?
They are still gaudy shrines to the ego, constructed of copy-pasted crappy code.
In some ways it was much better in 1996 (Score:5, Insightful)
No Facebook, no MySpace, no Wikipedia, less spam and far less Flash-based sites -- yes, those were better days. Not to mention a lot less Buzzwordery and fuckwittery.
There was more porn, and it was more extreme and less restricted -- not so much video based, of course. And if you were a producer you could throw a site up and make money easily, now it's so hard as to be really not worthwhile.
While there's definitely improvements, I can't help looking back fondly to a lot of things that are no longer with us. And the massive intrusion that some things on the web have become.
Web? (Score:3, Insightful)
Its not too late. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:IMDB was up (Score:5, Insightful)
Most of the current stuff is either refined, or regressed versions of what we had back then.
Digg => Slashdot
Huffington Post => There wasn't any shortage of bullshit artists back then either
Google => Yahoo, AltaVista, etc..
Twitter => IRC > Twitter. Twitter is like IRC, except there's only one channel, and everybody's on ignore by default.
Wikipedia => Everything (up to the reader whether this was progress or regression)
And there's the things that social networks and tag clouds replaced..... AOL, Web Rings, Geocities, etc...
What should be more shocking is that in 12 years, there isn't actually all that much out there that is truely new.
Re:IMDB was up (Score:3, Insightful)
What should be more shocking is that in 12 years, there isn't actually all that much out there that is truely new.
Probably the closest thing to "new" is P2P filesharing. And major companies want to crush it.
So there's your proof. Corporations really do inhibit progress.
(Yes, I realize P2P networks existed well before Napster came along, but not in the same sense.)
Re:When I think about the internet in 1996 (Score:5, Insightful)
What, like Hamster Dance? Shrines to music stars? MIDI background music that sounded awful on the hardware of the day? Streaming RealPlayer files so blurry you needed to be half-blind to make them out? Web Rings containing hundreds of links pointing to nothing at all? Personal homepages consisting of an export of Netscape bookmarks? Company web pages that were little more than brochures? (Often less than that!) Everyone on the interwebz thinking they're 1337 h4x0rz? (The 'z' was real popular back then.) XTrek competitions? MSN-only Startrek.com? Pages that would only render in Netscape or IE? (Complete with a "this page looks best in X" buttons.) Frames?!?
The web was definitely a more innocent place back then, but it was in no way a more useful place. What you are remembering is the subculture that went with the web of the day. If you had Internet access... man, you had something special. This crazy ability to make friends from around the world, to meet people who like the same shows or games as you, the ability to load up your computer with all the shareware it could hold, to access amateur content like MODs, MIDIs, animations done in GIFs, fan fiction, web comics, and even Java Applet games!
It was an exciting and fun time to be alive and I'm glad I was a part of it. But like all things, its time has passed and very little content of value was lost. In fact, most of the truly interesting content is still around. It simply doesn't shine very well in the face of what the modern Internet can do.
Re:IMDB was up (Score:5, Insightful)
Nah, we were trading files back then too. The only thing that's changed is the protocols.
Re:"Wasn't So Long Ago?!" (Score:5, Insightful)
It was 13 years ago. Maybe I'm just young
See my sig, kid.
But you're right, I didn't get on the internet until a year later. It only cost me $12.95 per month, with "unlimited access" which really was unlimited. It even included an unlimited amount of personal web space that I abused horribly, trying to find the limit to my unlimited access and never could. I think all the game demos, patches, etc I posted was part of what made my Quake site so popular; once I got them uploaded to my ISP's server (which took quite a while to download, then to upload) others could download them from my site FAST.
I wasn't paying by the hour as TFS says; I had paid Compuserve by the hour ten or so years earlier, but I never was on AOL. I did appreciate all the free floppies they mailed me, though.
I would argue that you should really be looking at the hardware & communication infrastructure because internet usage (in my opinion) is really a product of how cheap the hardware makes the connection and usage.
The infrastructure was mostly the phone line and modems. They really weren't that expensive, and neither were computers so long as you built your own.
Yeah (Score:3, Insightful)
No Slashdot, no Facebook... all we did was work! ;-)
I know some people complain about Google having been taken over by spammers, but it still works for me and what I search for. Anyone else remember doing every search twice--once at Yahoo! and getting too few matches, and then AltaVista and getting too many?
Re:In some ways it was much better in 1996 (Score:2, Insightful)
These days, when most web sites are generating for you automatically or are taken from a pre-designed template, uniformity and rigidity are much more common. If you looked around back then, when there wasn't so much of a norm to adhere to, you'd regularly happen on a site that was, dare I say it, actually kind of artistic.
I sometimes think it'd be nice if more people today looked as web sites as a form of art, and not just a way of delivering content. Having seen some of the sites I did then, it's hard not to think that the web as an art form is more than just a latent possibility.
Re:"Wasn't So Long Ago?!" (Score:1, Insightful)
It was 13 years ago. Maybe I'm just young
Yes you are. 13 years ain't nothing.
but that is an eternity in the world of computer technology.
No, we've only see an explosion of new technology. Much like telephones, cars or televisions few people had them at first, then BAM all of the sudden it seemed like everyone had them. Same for cellphones and computers now. Few people had computers or cell phones in the 80's and even early 90's, now it seems everyone has at least 2 of either just like televisions, cars, etc.
It's just happened that these last 13 years has been that explosion of new tech. During the next 13 years we won't see much of a change, sure things may look different, get shiner, get faster and smaller, just like cars, TVs, phones, etc. But we're not going to see some new earth shattering websites like Amazon, Facebook, MySpace, Google, eBay, YouTube, Hulu, et al. The explosion is over or it's nearly over, now we'll just witness the slow and steady evolution of things.
Re:Spam? (Score:5, Insightful)
I could understand citing the political blogosphere as a whole, but to specifically mention the Huffington Post is just creepy. It's neither revolutionary nor reputable.
Re:IMDB was up (Score:3, Insightful)
alt.binaries on usenet, open FTP servers, DDC channels on IRC
While not P2P technology, the servers was not sued by RIAA or confiscated by the police. So P2P would have been a solution to a not yet existing problem.
1996? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:IMDB was up (Score:4, Insightful)
Scarier still: Yahoo still exists.
I remember fondly the first time I loaded Google's search page. No ads, no weather report, no links to personal ads. Just a search box, as Al Gore himself intended it.
I swore off garbage portal sites right then and I've never looked back.
Malware!!! (Score:3, Insightful)
That's the main tech boom since 1996! Think about it. Viruses existed back then, and they were destructive. They'd crash your machine on purpose, but not before alerting you to their presence. Botnets? Definitely a 21st-century tech. There was lots of spam, but it didn't contain viruses, and the web was pretty safe. Even using IE :) The big-name viruses: Melissa, ILoveYou, Blaster...all newer.
Heck Smashing the Stack for Fun and Profit [ethicalhacker.net] wasn't published until 1998.
The net hasn't improved much since '96. It's the bad guys that have. Where will THEY be in 13 years?
Same ****, different year (Score:3, Insightful)
It was 13 years ago. Maybe I'm just young but that is an eternity in the world of computer technology.
Is it really an eternity? What's so different anyway?
Let's take blogging as an example. The concept of posting your thoughts online is a constant of the Internet (it isn't a new concept like some green Internet users/media think). It's just been refined (or redefined if you don't like the implication that it is better now, just more "user-friendly") versus the available methods of the past.
Truth is, things haven't changed much on the net in 13 years. We're just implementing the same concepts with a different interfaces and tools. And some more bandwidth that allows larger, more robust concepts to be more feasible (streaming video for example). YouTube isn't anything new, it's just more realistic now than it was back then.
So if it really is an eternity, we haven't done much other than flood the "pipes" with more "unwashed masses" and make streaming video work a bit better. File sharing, BBS (social sites are just profile-centric forums), IRC/chat rooms, knowledge sharing, and user interaction/arguing are all things that have existed for years and years. The only thing that makes it all "unrecognizable" from 1996 is that we've got fresh paint, newer paintbrushes, and a larger fence to cover.
Re:IMDB was up (Score:3, Insightful)
If your UID has less than 5 digits, it just means you weren't sufficiently paranoid about what Taco was going to do with your personal information. :)
Jurassic Pre-Web (Score:2, Insightful)