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.
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.
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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.
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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.
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I was a freshman in high school, and the Internet wasn't as unrecognizable as the story summary implies. People played graphics-focused first person shooters online, used annoying chat acronyms like "lol," and flamed each other on message boards about stupid shit. I got home dialup access in 1997, and it was unlimited access with a flat fee. There were already banner ads, annoying Flash sites, and commercialization. I believe Drudge Report was even around then, with almost the exact same visual design t
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.
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
Re:No Huffie Post!?! Oh My GOSH!!! (Score:5, Funny)
Nerds were nerds long before the web. What is this "outside" of which you speak?
Comment removed (Score:5, Funny)
Re:No Huffie Post!?! Oh My GOSH!!! (Score:4, Funny)
Aaaah, you mean the caves under the basement...
I think that "outside" is that thing with sun and stuff. I saw it on a photo, it's incredible.
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News flash: amateur astronomers are nerds, as are geologists and peleontologists. You can hardly do any of thet that without going outside.
Re:No Huffie Post!?! Oh My GOSH!!! (Score:5, Funny)
News flash: amateur astronomers are nerds, as are geologists and peleontologists. You can hardly do any of thet that without going outside.
Uh, yes you can:
astronomers: Bedroom window
geologists and paleontologists: Hole in the basement floor
Re:No Huffie Post!?! Oh My GOSH!!! (Score:4, Funny)
You should see the mess that kid made in the basement with his research on geothermal energy!
On the plus site, his parents unplugged the hot water heater and the water still stays at a toasty 2,000F.
Re:No Huffie Post!?! Oh My GOSH!!! (Score:4, Funny)
That's the place where the T-Rex ambushed you in the middle of an open plain whenever you were going in the opposite direction from what the DM wanted you to go.
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So times were terrible back then! Imagine. I sometimes had to go to "friends' houses" and to the "theaters" and even step outside once or twice. I am very glad we have come this far.
I didn't have to go out in 1988. There was more than enough reading on USENET to keep me occupied 24/7. And the shit was so much more interesting than on the sites mentioned. Ever read sci.nanotech?
IMDB was up (Score:4, Informative)
Re:IMDB was up (Score:5, Funny)
Sadly, GeoCities existed then, and even scarier is: it still does.
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.
Re:Yahoo (Score:3, Informative)
Almost like search.yahoo.com [yahoo.com]?
Re:IMDB was up (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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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.)
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Does hosting your own bbs count as peer to peer? I didn't do that, a little before my time, but many people did host files on their bbs boards.
Re:IMDB was up (Score:5, Insightful)
Nah, we were trading files back then too. The only thing that's changed is the protocols.
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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.
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Wikipedia => Everything (up to the reader whether this was progress or regression)
Wikipedia has roots right back in the first versions of WorldWideWeb. TBL's idea was that every web browser would be a web server as well. Every user would serve a few pages and browse a lot. His design also incorporated editing directly into the browser, so you could edit any page you had permissions for.
This didn't really catch on, because a lot of users were on dial-up connections which were too slow for serving and were only online for a small amount of time per month and so could not be used for
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I think you mean: Digg/Slashdot => usenet > 'blogs'
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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. :)
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.
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.
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Bring back blinking text! And while you're at it, bring back the cowbell to rock music! Can't have too much cowbell...
Funny how porn was one of the first major uses of the 'net. I think that was one of the major motivators of early-adopters. I can remember one of my buds signing up for that express purpose.
And yeah, I spent many a night frittering away my time on IRC in 1996. Route66 was the place to be! Now I fritter on Slashdot.
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.
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Not really. Porn is often one of the first major uses of a new media. Videotape built its success on porn.
On the other hand (heh) porn built its current, epic level of success on videotape.
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No, that's a myth. There are no serious sources that indicate that.
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.
Re:Ah, the era of homepages (Score:5, Funny)
"There was still all the porn you could imagine though."
There was also all the porn I couldn't imagine too.
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Gentler and nicer but with a whole lot less information, delivered at a much slower rate, and even if the information was out there, most search engines were far too inadequate to actually find anything worthwhile.
RE: Ah, the era of homepages (Score:2, Interesting)
If you ask me, the facebooks/myspaces of today are way worse aesthetically. The worst you had to fear in those days was an embedded MIDI; now I've got high-quality MP3s streaming themselves without asking and fucking up the music I'm already listening to.
Also, maybe they just didn't have the technology or bandwidth to piss away, but people didn't leave high-res 1562x968 pictures in co
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With terrible blinking text and eyesore backgrounds.
It did make looking at porn much more annoying, but part of me misses the challenge.
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Doom.
Re:Ah, the era of homepages (Score:4, Funny)
They were all on geocities then. Now they're all on facebook/myspace.
Yep. Those awful 90's Geocitites user-generated content pages get my vote for worst use of disk space EVAH. Here's my resume (identical to every 90's college student CIS rez) here's my girlfriend (identical to every 90's college student g/f pics), here' my Honda Civic (ditto), here's pics of my g/f's cats.
=Smidge=
They were literally the same pictures. For disk space reasons they only had a few pictures of girlfriends/cat/civics and they just generate a page by picking one of each at random. Most people had so little individuality that they didn't notice.
Re:Ah, the era of homepages (Score:5, Funny)
THIS PAGE UNDER CONSTRUCTION
1996 nothing... (Score:4, Interesting)
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It didn't Netscape Did.
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A commenter from 1992 reviewing the WWW on Usenet: "Too slow, not as much information as Gopher, lame."
Re:1996 nothing... (Score:5, Funny)
Spyglass corporation's Mosaic was licensed by a company called Microsoft as the basis for a browser which they named Internet Explorer --- Spyglass had an absolutely fantastic deal where they got royalties on _every sale_ of the browser.
William
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heh that's harsh. Was there ever a period during which MS sold copies?
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Yes, early on with the plus pack. And Spyglass has a new license anyway.
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.
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Who would use this internet thing when you could download warez and play doors on BBSs.
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Actually back then that was the bulk what I was using the internet for. As some BBS's were going TCP/IP so you can telnet (days before encryption of you communication wasn't a big deal) in and go to these BBS's online without having to pay long distance, and Play Doors and downloads software world wide. As for world wide messaging that is what the FidoNet was for. Heck you can even send internet emails with horrible email addresses threw FidoNet.
Telnet and FTP was the big way of doing things back then. Goph
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Actually back then that was the bulk what I was using the internet for.
Yeah I was thinking more 92-93ish...hell I think 94-95 was the last time I used POTS for net access.
In 96 a company I worked for had the crazy idea of trying to use javascript to write webapps and running some sort of dynamically generated content in on the webserver using java and some sort of templating system. I'm glad that never went anywhere it would have been such a mess...
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9600...I remember blowing $450+ for an internal 14400 baud modem when those came out. It was a full length ISA board that was slightly beyond spec in width so you couldn't have anything sitting in the next slot.
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If you were using Mosaic it must have been 1993 or later.
Funny thing though, I remember saying pretty much exactly the same thing in 1994. (Although I was looking at serving GIS related files at the time)
Re:1996 nothing... (Score:5, Interesting)
You remember the MIT coffee pot cam? Some joker who worked upstairs put a digital camera next to the coffee pot so he could point his browser at the link and see if there was any coffee made, without having to get his ass up and walk to the pot.
Now that was entertainment. I knew people who didn't even go to MIT who checked that thing ALL THE TIME.
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The coffee machine still exists! After it broke in 2001, it was bought by german magazine "Der Spiegel". They got the machine fixed by the vendor and created a new webcam. See here: http://www.spiegel.de/static/popup/coffeecam/cam2.html [spiegel.de]
IRC channels? (Score:4, Funny)
"I thought in 1996 all we did was idle in IRC channels while we wrote code in other terminals."
Yet another person who does not know he can find porn on the net.
Re:IRC channels? (Score:5, Interesting)
"I thought in 1996 all we did was idle in IRC channels while we wrote code in other terminals."
Yet another person who does not know he can find porn on the net.
Yet another person who is apparently unfamiliar with DCC. Why do you think we idled on IRC to begin with? It sure as hell wasn't for the intelligent conversation.
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God, I'm such an idiot. Despite the fact that I used IRC to download MP3s back in the 90s, I forgot that it's not merely a chat program. Bad Anita Coney, go to your room!
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God, I'm such an idiot. Despite the fact that I used IRC to download MP3s back in the 90s, I forgot that it's not merely a chat program. Bad Anita Coney, go to your room!
No, it really is only a chat program, in the way that MSNM is only a chat program. There's other features in there, but it doesn't really do any of them well. IIRC DCC is based on xmodem. There's an advanced forms of DCC based on zmodem. No joke. Why don't we just fucking UUCP each other while we're at it?
The thing about irc that made it appealing for transferring files is that you didn't have to spawn another program, figure out how to run a server, et cetera. But with the appalling overhead of the combina
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Actually, seems to me there was a time when conversation on IRC was somewhat intelligent. In the early days it was all academics, scientists, engineers, grads, etc. Then it was a yearly flood of university freshmen. As it grew, quality of conversation declined. Then there was the AOL invasion (1996?) where everyone and their developmentally delayed hormone challenged nephews suddenly had access to IRC. It's never been the same again.
So the average mental and chronological age of the conversationalists
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You and I must be remembering a different IRC. I remember chanwars and netsplits. In one channel I visited, there was a guy with a timed script that just said "heh." Over and over and over. Also, people constantly slapped each other with trouts thanks to mIRC.
I actually think IRC is more intelligent now.
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Alright fine, all we did was idle in IRC while we downloaded posts from alt.binaries.pictures.erotica in other terminals for later uudecoding.
Spam? (Score:5, Insightful)
And what the hell is Huffington Post and Gawker to put it inside this list?
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Whether you agree with HuffPo's openly liberal politics or not, it's hard to deny that there was nothing like this kind of widespread online political commentary 10 years ago - certainly nothing that attracted the kind of traffic - or had the same kind of influence - that it now enjoys. Got to be a good thing - people need to be more interested in politics.
As for Gawker... ummmmmm... errrrrr.... yep you're right.
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.
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Aren't you forgetting Drudge Report? It came out in what, 1997? It also kind of broke a major news story about a certain president that Newsweek was planning to cover up.
The mainstream media outlets STILL hate Matt Drudge for scooping it.
When I think about the internet in 1996 (Score:3, Interesting)
I don't think about what was there, then, I think about what we have lost since then.
So many sites that were popular in that timeframe are no longer around. Internet Archives doesn't capture all those funny, cool sites that used to be there and are, sadly, no longer around.
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.
My first web page 1998 (Score:2, Funny)
Did it with Netscape Composer.
Surprisingly, it still exists today... http://scudhavoc2.chez.com/ [chez.com]
(It's in french, but look at the layout and press ctrl-w )
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.
The most important change is not on the list (Score:2)
Infinite porno movies!
Netsurfer Digest (Score:2)
That was my baby, and we had been around for two years by 1996.
Our archive of back issues is available to all. Go cruise our 1996: http://www.netsurf.com/nsd/sub/v02/index.html [netsurf.com]
One sample issue, NSD 2.20, leads with the launch of Quake and the new MSNBC, whose DNS entry was suspended for lack of payment.
The main archive is here: http://www.netsurf.com/nsd/backiss.html [netsurf.com]
Ugh (Score:5, Funny)
I can't believe I read this and immediately thought "...but AOL didn't allow screen names over 10 characters until 1999..."
I'm a loser.
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...No, losers are those who actually -did- press Alt-F4 when you told them to. Eh, fun times!
Hmm (Score:2)
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And people still use them! telnet://uberworld.org:2020/ [uberworld.org]
I wrote a paper back in 1995 for the WWW conf. (Score:3, Interesting)
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)
At least we had Kickban (Score:2)
Its not too late. (Score:4, Insightful)
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I'm still waiting for the Web 2.0 SP1 that removes all the bloat.
Huh? (Score:2)
I thought in 1996 all we did was idle in IRC channels while we wrote code in other terminals.
Isn't that what we do now?
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.
No Tub Girl?!?!?! (Score:3, Interesting)
TubGirl
MeatSpin
Two Girls on Cup
1996 not like the article (Score:2)
I get the impression that the article author was not on the web then. I used ATT Worldnet back then and paid a monthly fee for unlimited dialup. I recall using Infoseek and Excite to search for information, as well as use IRC. My tinkering on the net back then launched my IT career. Can't say I ever used AOL...
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?
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.
It wasn't that bad... (Score:2)
Back then we still had a functional usenet, people generally used IRC a lot more, altavista was one one of the most popular search engines, anon.penet.fi was still up, and the personal webpage was a lot more important than today.
We may overall be better off today, but where we were had its own charms, some of which are now lost.
A David Pogue by any other name. (Score:2)
So he says that back then people were self-important pricks who seldom went past AOl for their online experience. I didn't know everyone in the past was named Farhad Manjoo.
1996? (Score:4, Insightful)
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?
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In 1996 I was playing multiplayer Quake online. I was reading email, hanging out in group chats on IRC, browsing websites, and chatting with online contacts via instant messaging.
Sheesh. It's not like it was THAT different.
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I was thinking the same thing. Except Usenet was a lot more useful, email was a lot more useful, the web had some great sites on them. I loved exploring the web for new interesting sites.
The problem now is that Google is too good. You want to learn something you just Google it or use Wikipedia.
The signal to noise ratio was much better back then. It was even better in 94 even if you had to use Trumpet WinSock on Windows 3.1
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.
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Not so bad given the size of the pages.
Do a "view source" on the linked Yahoo archived front pages--they're super-tiny by today's standards.