Slashdot Asks: What Do You Remember About the Web in 1994? (fastcompany.com) 171
"The Short Happy Reign of the CD-ROM" was just one article in a Fast Company series called 1994 Week. As the week rolled along they also re-visited Yahoo, Netscape, and how the U.S. Congress "forced the videogame industry to grow up."
But another article argues that it's in web pages from 1994 that "you can start to see in those weird, formative years some surprising signs of what the web would be, and what it could be." It's hard to say precisely when the tipping point was. Many point to September '93, when AOL users first flooded Usenet. But the web entered a new phase the following year. According to an MIT study, at the start of 1994, there were just 623 web servers. By year's end, it was estimated there were at least 10,000, hosting new sites including Yahoo!, the White House, the Library of Congress, Snopes, the BBC, sex.com, and something called The Amazing FishCam. The number of servers globally was doubling every two months. No one had seen growth quite like that before. According to a press release announcing the start of the World Wide Web Foundation that October, this network of pages "was widely considered to be the fastest-growing network phenomenon of all time."
As the year began, Web pages were by and large personal and intimate, made by research institutions, communities, or individuals, not companies or brands. Many pages embodied the spirit, or extended the presence, of newsgroups on Usenet, or "User's Net." (Snopes and the Internet Movie Database, which landed on the Web in 1993, began as crowd-sourced projects on Usenet.) But a number of big companies, including Microsoft, Sun, Apple, IBM, and Wells Fargo, established their first modest Web outposts in 1994, a hint of the shopping malls and content farms and slop factories and strip mines to come. 1994 also marked the start of banner ads and online transactions (a CD, pizzas), and the birth of spam and phishing...
[B]ack in '94, the salesmen and oilmen and land-grabbers and developers had barely arrived. In the calm before the storm, the Web was still weird, unruly, unpredictable, and fascinating to look at and get lost in. People around the world weren't just writing and illustrating these pages, they were coding and designing them. For the most part, the design was non-design. With a few eye-popping exceptions, formatting and layout choices were simple, haphazard, personal, and — in contrast to most of today's web — irrepressibly charming. There were no table layouts yet; cascading style sheets, though first proposed in October 1994 by Norwegian programmer Håkon Wium Lie, wouldn't arrive until December 1996... The highways and megalopolises would come later, courtesy of some of the world's biggest corporations and increasingly peopled by bots, but in 1994 the internet was still intimate, made by and for individuals... Soon, many people would add "under construction" signs to their Web pages, like a friendly request to pardon our dust. It was a reminder that someone was working on it — another indication of the craft and care that was going into this never-ending quilt of knowledge.
The article includes screenshots of Netscape in action from browser-emulating site OldWeb.Today (albeit without using a 14.4 kbps modems). "Look in and think about how and why this web grew the way it did, and what could have been. Or try to imagine what life was like when the web wasn't worldwide yet, and no one knew what it really was."
Slashdot reader tedlistens calls it "a trip down memory lane," offering "some telling glimpses of the future, and some lessons for it too." The article revisits 1994 sites like Global Network Navigator, Time-Warner's Pathfinder, and Wired's online site HotWired as well as 30-year-old versions of the home pages for Wells Fargo and Microsoft.
What did they miss? Share your own memories in the comments.
What do you remember about the web in 1994?
But another article argues that it's in web pages from 1994 that "you can start to see in those weird, formative years some surprising signs of what the web would be, and what it could be." It's hard to say precisely when the tipping point was. Many point to September '93, when AOL users first flooded Usenet. But the web entered a new phase the following year. According to an MIT study, at the start of 1994, there were just 623 web servers. By year's end, it was estimated there were at least 10,000, hosting new sites including Yahoo!, the White House, the Library of Congress, Snopes, the BBC, sex.com, and something called The Amazing FishCam. The number of servers globally was doubling every two months. No one had seen growth quite like that before. According to a press release announcing the start of the World Wide Web Foundation that October, this network of pages "was widely considered to be the fastest-growing network phenomenon of all time."
As the year began, Web pages were by and large personal and intimate, made by research institutions, communities, or individuals, not companies or brands. Many pages embodied the spirit, or extended the presence, of newsgroups on Usenet, or "User's Net." (Snopes and the Internet Movie Database, which landed on the Web in 1993, began as crowd-sourced projects on Usenet.) But a number of big companies, including Microsoft, Sun, Apple, IBM, and Wells Fargo, established their first modest Web outposts in 1994, a hint of the shopping malls and content farms and slop factories and strip mines to come. 1994 also marked the start of banner ads and online transactions (a CD, pizzas), and the birth of spam and phishing...
[B]ack in '94, the salesmen and oilmen and land-grabbers and developers had barely arrived. In the calm before the storm, the Web was still weird, unruly, unpredictable, and fascinating to look at and get lost in. People around the world weren't just writing and illustrating these pages, they were coding and designing them. For the most part, the design was non-design. With a few eye-popping exceptions, formatting and layout choices were simple, haphazard, personal, and — in contrast to most of today's web — irrepressibly charming. There were no table layouts yet; cascading style sheets, though first proposed in October 1994 by Norwegian programmer Håkon Wium Lie, wouldn't arrive until December 1996... The highways and megalopolises would come later, courtesy of some of the world's biggest corporations and increasingly peopled by bots, but in 1994 the internet was still intimate, made by and for individuals... Soon, many people would add "under construction" signs to their Web pages, like a friendly request to pardon our dust. It was a reminder that someone was working on it — another indication of the craft and care that was going into this never-ending quilt of knowledge.
The article includes screenshots of Netscape in action from browser-emulating site OldWeb.Today (albeit without using a 14.4 kbps modems). "Look in and think about how and why this web grew the way it did, and what could have been. Or try to imagine what life was like when the web wasn't worldwide yet, and no one knew what it really was."
Slashdot reader tedlistens calls it "a trip down memory lane," offering "some telling glimpses of the future, and some lessons for it too." The article revisits 1994 sites like Global Network Navigator, Time-Warner's Pathfinder, and Wired's online site HotWired as well as 30-year-old versions of the home pages for Wells Fargo and Microsoft.
What did they miss? Share your own memories in the comments.
What do you remember about the web in 1994?
Don't remember a ton. (Score:5, Interesting)
I remember archie and gopher and usenet and IRC. cdrom.com, wuarchive.wustl.edu, I even remember sex.com .gif and .mid files with even some playboy scans, one of which was sherilyn fenn.
I don't remember much at all what I was looking at in 1994 to be honest. Finding shareware games to download I guess. Pictures of boobs.
Lots of stuff was on FTP sites. I got a 1993 CD that had thousands of files collected from various BBS's FTP sites. Mostly
I remember a town in my province being labeled the "HATE capital of Canada!" around 94-96 because one guy ran a "hate" website that nobody knew about in a town of like 2000 people.
MUDs (Score:3)
Same here. I didn't first use the web until 95 but I'd been using the internet since 92 , mostly to play MUDs (google it kids) which got me into trouble more than once with the uni admins - the computer labs were for work only, not play etc etc back when the majority of people didn't have their own computer at uni (and even if they did, there was no way to network it).
Re:MUDs (Score:5, Insightful)
One thing that could have been is, I think, a web server should have been bundled with every web browser to make the web bidirectional and share things whenever connected.
Re:MUDs (Score:5, Informative)
"I finally stopped using Usenet about 8 years ago when the last remaining discussions moved completely to dedicated websites (at best)"
Its still around. I use eternal september for access. Requires registration but its free.
https://www.eternal-september.... [eternal-september.org]
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I know that I turned off the lights on one baseball related group.
There are still a few decent groups. comp.lang.c++ isn't bad, and a few linux groups: alt.os.linux.ubuntu and alt.os.linux.mageia have info.
But yeah, it's gone waaaaay downhill. F*** Canter & Siegel.
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A lot of uk specific groups are often busy.
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I had a work colleague/friend who was able to get us online while we were working in China, long before the great firewall came along. There was a very strictly enforced rule about not installing games on work computers so in a fit of boredom I started searching for online games. I started playing AnotherWorld MUD in 94 and had a great time, also MUME and another that I forget that used the inter University network that had several hundred users but it got into trouble because it was using so much transatla
Re:MUDs (Score:5, Interesting)
Yeah I had been on the net from about 92 , via a SLIRP connection established by the BBS I had been inhabiting for a couple of years (It was Omen BBS, which later became Omen ISP) . It was just mostly used to access a shell terminal that I read usenet and used IRC on (For whatever reason I hadn't clued onto MUDs till about 96). When the web first came about I had looked at it via , uh maybe lynx or one of those things, and was distinctly underwhelmed by it. I didnt have windows on my 286, so graphical things where just not in my radar.
It wasnt until I found myself living back at my parents place in 94 after breaking up with my girl and we attached that modem to the old mans windows 3.1 machine, downloaded Mosaic and loaded up Omens ISP web page, and there was a great big logo on it that my jaw dropped and I finally "got" what this web thing was about. A real 'holy shit' moment for me.
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People love to talk nostalgically about the early web, but I guarantee you, the vast majority of people here would be pulling out their hair in frustration at it by the end of the first day if they were forced to use it.
Re:Don't remember a ton. (Score:5, Insightful)
Depends what they wanted to use it for. If it was just reading stuff , eg wikipedia, then I doubt they'd notice much difference other than fewer fonts but for more complicated things sure. However back in the day you didn't have to contend with popup ads on every damn site ,even slashdot, and you didn't need a 4 core 3ghz CPU just to display a page full of garbage data scraping javashite.
Re:Don't remember a ton. (Score:5, Insightful)
[Illegible Font] [background.bmp] [UnderConstruction.gif] [Closing tag omitted] [Site renders differently in different browser versions] <BLINK>Interesting take, you should add your site about it to my webring!</BLINK> [site down or dead link] [searching for the site name yields a tons of unrelated pages (half of them porn) because Page Rank doesn't yet exist]
Wikipedia doesn't exist. Companies' sites, if they exist at all, are commonly "Gee, We're On The Internet, Run An Article About How Forward-Thinking We Are!" rather than anything useful. Forget online banking. It'll be years before we even get crappy Flash and Java applet plugins to do anything remotely complex. Even Hamsterdance is years out into the future. Even few newspapers are online. But hey, you have websites like "PizzaNet", for people in Santa Cruz, CA to order a Pizza Hut pizza online...
People have nostalgic memories of the early internet because we were young and it was transformative. We found other people across the world and found things that we would have struggled to find locally, or never even knew existed, and it was amazing. But compared to what we're used to now, it was terrible. Even before factoring in how bad the computers and net connections we had were.
Re:Don't remember a ton. (Score:5, Insightful)
But compared to what we're used to now, it was terrible
And... that's the problem. You're looking at 1994 and comparing it to now. Obviously it all seems complicated and generally terrible. But how about looking at 1994 and comparing it to what it was like before? It was AMAZING!
Re:Don't remember a ton. (Score:5, Insightful)
"But compared to what we're used to now, it was terrible"
You're conflsating the internet and the web. The web has moved on leaps and bounds, not necessarily in the right direction, but the old non graphics internet is still there and still being used.
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It was terrible, but it was also amazing how much stuff you could access. We used to be using dodgy calling cards and defrauding Royal Mail to trade software, and suddenly there were these massive free archives of it, no ratios or anything.
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At that point, the Internet was commercialized, but not monetized and capitalized to the extent it is now. Any hobbyist that threw together a web page with any real content would get significant traffic. I had cobbled together a handful of pages related to video games and I remember getting comments from around the world. Spam bots were rare and easy to defeat as long as you weren't using the same perl scripts the ISP provided for your web space that they got from elsewhere and never patched or updated.
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Re: Don't remember a ton. (Score:2)
That was someone using some WYSIWIG editor, most likely. Because early coders didnâ(TM)t bother with alt tags at all unless they had been someone who used Lynx or similar text-based client, and knew how important it was.
â[bullet.gif]â was a sign that someone didnâ(TM)t know what they were doing because if you didnâ(TM)t want to use UL/LI tags, you set the alt to â* â or similar so it was actually a bullet.
And I still think that adding the BR tag was a mistake. They shoul
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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People love to talk nostalgically about the early web, but I guarantee you, the vast majority of people here would be pulling out their hair in frustration at it by the end of the first day if they were forced to use it.
What, you mean most people don't want to boot into DOS, making sure the correct drivers are loading, launch Windows 3.1, launch a modem dialer, dial the ISP's (hopefully) local number, using your modem's AT commands if necessary (ATZ AT&F1 ATDT for my USR, IIRC!), launching Trumpet Winsock, launching Mozilla or Netscape and waiting 60 seconds for a photograph to download, morphing from a blurry mess to a 200x200 masterpierce (within a 640x480 screen) by the time it was done?
I loved those days. I wouldn'
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Oops! "Mozilla" = "Mosaic" ... wrong browser name.
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Many point to September '93, when AOL users first flooded Usenet
AOL didn't feature USENET until the spring of 1994. And despite claims otherwise, the world did not end and the internet did not collapse.
Re: Don't remember a ton. (Score:3)
Yeah.
"Eternal September" referred to the propensity for Usenet to turn into shit for a month or two when new university students got their computing accounts and started posting before lurking and learning the etiquette. Once AOL provided access, everything turned into September.
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What do I remember? (Score:3)
What do I remember?
Client was Mosaic Browser running on Solaris 2 on a Sparc Station. The Mosaic Browser showed the web to be vastly superior to Gopher.
I also remember that running a web server was really complicated in the time before the Apache HTTP server was born.
We started as an ISP in 1992. I am unsure when exactly our own web server came up. But it must have been in 1994 or shortly after.
Re:What do I remember? (Score:4, Funny)
Just checked:
Our first web server came up in 1994 using Cern HTTPD.
We developed that year a concept of mirrored web sites to keep non-local traffic low: the Bundesdatenautobahn. It was the first attempt of a CDN that didn't take of.
We also built a web shop that sold books online in 1994. Strangely we are no billionaires today.
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At CERN before Mosiac (Score:3)
Yahoo was almost the entire web in 1984 (Score:2)
Women used to want me despite my size problem (Score:2)
The web reminded me daily that hot Russian girls were in my area and wanted me specifically. I spanked a monkey frequently, and then afterwards was told I needed some pills to help with my girth.
Ironically despite Pornhub not being a thing yet, the internet seemed to be far fuller of incidental porn.
Also
Goatse.cx
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Oh wait that would have been closer to 1998. 1994 was more ascii art porn and a web experience that didn't differ too much from teletext.
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No web back then for me, just BTX and Fidonet.
Re: Women used to want me despite my size problem (Score:2)
alt.binaries.images.erotica
There is more to the Internet than just the web.
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I had been dialing the local university to get on Usenet, email, etc., back in the early 90s (in addition to other BBSes), but I first got an ISP in what must have been 1994. My only clear memory that dates it is that the ISP included a disc with Mosaic on it, but a friend told me that the first thing I should do is download this brand new beta software. Netscpae 0.9. So, I must have been logging on right around October 1994 for the first time.
I also remember having to dial up the IBM BBS to download 22 flo
Mosaic Cautins (Score:5, Interesting)
On Mosaic, there was a caution about what you read. I've been unsuccessful in trying to find the full version, and have to fall back on my incomplete memory: "Just because someone wrote it, does not mean that it is true. And just because someone wrote it does not mean that they know it to be true. We try to catch things, such as we know that Smirnoff is not the capitol of Russia, but we can't check everything."
There was advice for parents on there too, about them being responsible for what their children saw or read.
Does anyone have or know the complete version? It seems very appropriate in this age of "mis-information" and "fake news"
Re: Mosaic Cautins (Score:2)
It's a quote from Abraham Lincoln [pinimg.com].
Re: Mosaic Cautins (Score:2)
Mosaic on a Mac (Score:5, Interesting)
I do remember my first contact. Back at university (in Switzerland), in a computer room full of Macintosh systems, a fellow student introduced me to Mosaic, surfing to the CERN website. Only later did we get Netscape on the typical SPARC Solaris systems there. Even there on the LAN, images (tiny GIFs or JPGs) took a bit to load. Back then, no web-based fora, discussions took place on usenet. PCs were still pretty handicapped, as you had to install Trumpet WinSock to get a TCP/IP stack. And only after AOL came onto Internet did it all go down the drain - before, the Internet was from scientists for scientists.
Linux then could be had by downloading a number of floppy images from your favorite FTP mirror (Switch in my case) or, at some point, by buying a specialized magazine that came with Slackware on a couple of CDs.
Made a web site, not at Geocities (Score:2)
Someone I didn't know linked to my web site from their personal web site because they thought it was cool. Stupidly registered for birthday greetings on a web site before people stopped doing that for obvious reasons and long before people started stupidly doing that again. Visited new web sites daily and at some point thought I'd seen all the good ones. Read HTML. Had a Geocities web site after all. Marvelled at the first web cam - hot stuff. [wikipedia.org]
About the web? (Score:3)
I remember telneting into CERN to test the new magical protocol, because the software worked only on their machine.
And then we compiled it on ours, and it was like gopher.
And then we installed the PoS called Mosaic, which made all the difference :)
Re:About the web? (Score:5, Insightful)
But you may, unknown to yourself, to be asking what I remember of the Internet back then, and then that's a lot to put in one post, gopher, archie, fido, sendmail, ftp, blablabla.
And, of course, alt.binaries.* overt nntp and the xv image viewer, if you know what I mean.
We didn't have any Internet you insensitive clod (Score:3)
In Germany, we didn't have much access to the Internet until the late 1990ies, so that's all there is to remember.
Only a few chosen had access at University and outside of that very few had very expensive dial up lines. We were using Fidonet (and other networks based on Fidonet technology) and BBSes mostly. I didn't get fast Internet access until I moved to the UK in 1998 and even there it was only a trial which I was lucky to get into.
So many memories! (Score:3)
1994 was a time of very rapid change on the web. I remember it well be cause in order to use the WWW on my Acorn Archimedes [wikipedia.org] I had to first write a web browser [wikipedia.org] for it! Things that stand out from that time include:
The web has come a very long way since then. For the most part the browser technology changes have been positive (although one can debate that for some of the innovations) but it has become hugely bloated. The first version of the ANT Fresco browser would happily run on machines with 2MB of RAM and no swap; now many (if not most) of the sites that you visit fetch more than that just for the home page. As for the content, well, that's another story...
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"CSS didn't yet exist,"
Thats wasn't a bad thing. HTML was meant to do page layout and the browser was meant to set the user desired style. If all that was required was an online equivalent of a Word doc there were simpler solutions.,
Re: So many memories! (Score:2)
I remember the days of formatting content so that it would degrade gracefully if the browser didnâ(TM)t support tables or was text only. (but that was 1995 or so when HTML2 was published)
Netscape and most other browsers would put the table at the location of the close table tag, and would collapse multiple paragraphs filled only with white space⦠so youâ(TM)d first format your content as per-formatted text and put it in a PRE block, then add table tags, wrapping every TR in a P tag, an
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The flash tag was widely used, and really annoying
Flash 1.0 wasn't released until 1996. Also when applets were embedded in web pages, it was using the object and embed elements.
Mozilla on X11 was by far the best browser option
I preferred Netscape.
Re: So many memories! (Score:3)
Re: So many memories! (Score:2)
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Reading a article on a news site in 2024...
Many times there are CSS formatting issues (usually caused by bad ads served from advertising syndicator outside of the page design), and if I'm reading on a platform not envisioned by the "designer", a lot of scrolling in both planes is needed, or content is clipped off; javascript frameworks are using a GB or more of memory and 99% CPU; have to deal with a popup to allow cookies; after reading the first sentence, have to deal with another popup to "
Hobbes' Internet Timeline (Score:5, Informative)
Lots of info here Hobbes' Internet Timeline [zakon.org]
The Web Before SEO Pollution (Score:5, Informative)
Didn't have a personal computer at home, so I browsed the Web at work. Still accessing USENET newsgroups; I saw the WWW as a complement to that, not a replacement. (Obviously, that changed later.) Discovered the Yahoo! Directory early on. That was like visits to my University library. I would track down a book of interest via the card catalog, then head to the stacks. There I discovered all kinds of other interesting books surrounding the target of my search. (Yes, I was, and still am, a nerdy bibliophile.)
The Yahoo! Directory was like that. I'd look up a topic of personal interest. That would reveal the goodies, and also some stuff that, in my mind, belonged elsewhere in the index. The associated sites were crude at times, and there was a lot of naivete in the writing, but lovingly crafted by hobbyists and experts to share what they learned and knew. It did take a critical eye to separate the wheat from the chaff, sort of like with the mis- and dis-information posted today, but much easier to judge back then.
Then Google took over with PageRank. Focus on popularity as a proxy for relevance. (Basically a form of crowdsourcing, and sometimes equally off the mark.) No more delightful side trips and serendipitous discoveries; the Web was now focused on getting users to what they (supposedly) want, as quickly as possible. (Isn't that what American enculturation teaches us to do? Be productive, and diligent.)
My apologies in advance for what follows. I want to compare, but mostly contrast, what we had in the "golden age" to what exists today. The ranting may obscure my attempt to point out the good and not so good of the old versus the new.
*RANT ON (I guess) Later came advertising, because hey, how will you pay for this suff. (And capitalism as practiced in the U.S. says "nothing succeeds like excess".) Those naive early web authors didn't think much about that, or it least it seems that way based on what appeared to readers. *RANT OFF.
Probably the worst aspect of the web today is all the SEO pollution, as SEO consultants (those with little or no scruples) and ignorant small business people (not necessarily based in this country) flood their pages with tags and phrases designed to attract readers via search results, in hopes of a sale conversion to something they offer. The assumption here is that at least some consumers are easily distracted, and primed for an impulse buy. (The SEO consultants fan the flames with shouting: "get your results to the TOP of Google's search results", not necessarily because of relevance.)
There's a lot of good stuff out there today. Much more than back in the mid-90s, but sometimes it's much harder to find it due to all the cruft. Maybe I should call it what it is: CRAP! Kind of nice taking a trip down memory lane. Don't want to go back to that reality, but wish that some of the positives lived on today ... and were possible (easy?) to find.
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There's a lot of good stuff out there today. Much more than back in the mid-90s, but sometimes it's much harder to find it due to all the cruft.
One of my favorite quotes/truisms as uttered by Fry (from Futurama) as he laments future tv: "Sheesh, forty thousand channels and only 150 of them have anything good on."
Browsing text with no pictures to save money (Score:5, Interesting)
Did all my browsing with no pictures because my ISP charged by the byte downloaded. All the ISP's in my country did this. It wasn't a very rich experience, but every byte downloaded cost money.
In any case the dial-up modem I had was so slow that pictures would have taken all day. I don't remember what it was, but I remember upgrading to a 14.4k modem later. Fast!
I used the Mosaic Browser which could only download one picture at-a-time, but one day splashed out and got this new browser - Netscape - forerunner of Firefox. The 2 Mb download took all evening and crashed a few times before I got it. Never looked back.
Too early (Score:2)
In 1994, I heard only rumours about it. My only connection to the Internet was through a FidoNet-UseNet bridge called "BadNet", which a dial-up BBS I used subscribed to.
Home pages full of small animated gifs (Score:2)
Home pages full of small animated gifs
Wasn't a big deal at the time (Score:2)
And hypertext had been around a while - Hypercard. The Hypercard team had actually been approached to create the first web browser, but wanted to charge for it. Andresson wanted to give it away for free...so guess which got picked.
Chocolate (Score:2)
In late summer or early fall of 1994, I was working graveyard shifts as a MIS operator/tape monkey (Suns on the front end, Sequent Dynix/PTX on the back end), but applied for and was offered a helpdesk job at an early-ish ISP in the greater NYC area. My new employers suggested that I build a web page as practice. My then-girlfriend liked chocolate, so I looked around on Yahoo and made a page that listed the... roughly 11 web sites about chocolate that were then available.
Over the following decade or so, i
Peak DOT.com (Score:2)
The DOT.com bust hadn’t burst yet in 1994
The most influential thread on the internet was COM–PRIV
It felt like witnessing the birth of a new democracy online, more powerful, more individual latitude with higher moral values
Of course, by 1997 that bubble burst online. By 2008 it popped offline. And today its a shitshow identical to 1980’s encryption, digital cash and online sovereignty.
SpaceX is the only earth changing morally grounded company that succeeded escape from government censorship
I remember bookmarks and Pammy (Score:2)
Oh, I remember (Score:2)
Mosaic browser ... made it easy (well, in a relative way, lol) to try your hand at making web pages, not just viewing them.
Microsoft internet explorer ... on OS/2.
Connection speeds that made shops full of CDROMs, even of linux cdroms, a very good business model still.
Yes, the weird and wonderful web ... which everybody claims to miss, but really, most of y'all would stroke out at some of the, er, weird and wonderful opinions expressed.
Weird and wonderful transitional services ... I remember a service yo
No "User's Net". No "made for individuals." etc. (Score:3, Informative)
This is all very US centric:
Usenet evolved from uucp (user to user copy protocol) where computers weren't onlne, but they would dial each other and exchange "news articles." Email was sent the same way, and addresses where hosts separated by exclamation marks to "route" the message through intermediate servers.
The ARPANET had been used since 1969, and the NSFnet replaced it in the early 1980s, and then the ARPANET was decomissioned in 1989. Through the NSFnet days and past 1993 the way to get "on the Internet" was to be part of the NSF supercomputing community, the government, or a company providing products and services in support of the net.
The commercial use of the Internet started with the NSF allowing ANSnet to have commercial traffic on its backbone. While AOL did send out lots of free coasters, it was a walled garden. AOL didn't offer direct access to the Internet at the time because it wanted its users to stay on AOL and "pay for keywords." It was a common theme back then for TV and radio ads to end with "AOL keyword [whatever keyword they were paying AOL for]."
By late 1994 and early 1995 ISPs became a thing, and anyone with the meager funds to buy a modem rack and a T-1 upstream could be an ISP. I started an ISP in 1994 which was just after SPRINTLINK (h/t Larry Bouchy) managed to convince the CIX people to allow interconnection without being a member of the "regional NSFnet network" or ponying up $10,000 just to join. Up until then many people had discussed the concept but SPRINTLINK was the first to say "Open it up or we'll start our own interconnection point."
By 1995 the CIX had moved from the Beltway to Palo Alto and was renamed as the Palo Alto Internet eXchange (PAIX). Eventually it was renamed to be the Metro Area Ethernet - West (pun on actress MAE-WEST). The east coast exchange (MAE-EAST) lacked the pun. Other exchanges came to be, and since they were all on the ANSnet backbone, they were all interconnected, and THAT was the Internet in 1994/1995.
The Internet wasn't built for individuals. It was a government research network. When they added commercial traffic it was called ANS CO+RE (COmmercial + REsearch). Nobody expected everyone to have a computer.
In April of 1994 two scumbag lawyers from Phoenix AZ sent the first ever spam -- to usenet, not to email addresses. This was known as "green-card lawyers spamming the globe" and the term spam was attached to unsolicited messages, which over time became email and hence unsolicited commercial/bulk emali (UCE/UBE). Once people saw the "opportunities" with zero cost to advertise, well here we are where EVERYTHING has advertisements.
This was a year after the introduction of Intel's Pentium processor and in 1994 it was finally being produced in numbers to allow manufacturers to sell it in an IBM-PC compatible chassis. Most people still used a 486 processor with no more than 8MB (yes, MB not GB) of memory and a hard drive smaller than 500MB. This may not seem like much but a backup to a 500MB drive didn't require constantly shoving 1.44MB floppies into the computer.
14.4Kbps modems were no longer the thing in 1994. "Up to 56Kbps" was available but the US wireilne telephone network didn't reliably support that speed. 33.6Kbps sometimes ramping up to 48Kbps was more common. The net being very free of "rich content" meant that web pages loaded in 1994 faster than they do today for most home users.
Geocities was one of the few sites that provided tools so anyone could create a not-so-HTML-looking websites. The same ads that used to talk about AOL keywords now mentioned Geocities sites.
In may of 1994 the first international WWW conference was held, and less than 500 people showed up. Likely too few people had too little access to where they would have heard about it. Hard to imagine now, but that's how it was.
All the large telcos wanted to be ISPs but few had the resources to build out a national network. SPRINTLINK had the advantage because SPRINT (Southern P
About the web? (Score:2)
I remember digging through gopher, onto envirolink and envirochat. Later on when I came across an article in pc world about cyberia I fired up mozaic and went straight to the address that was listed on their gopher site. I don't remember bookmarks being available back then so I had to remember starting points. Then lycos popped up. Then sunsites startes popping up to showcase latest SPARCs. Then altavista to showcase DECs latest alphas. I always wondered why no PowerPC sites existed...
A/S/L (Score:2)
I remember the first thing you asked someone was "A/S/L" before anything else....
Re: A/S/L (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
I remember the first thing you asked someone was "A/S/L" before anything else....
That was the time when you didn't even have all that much chat penetration. ...
I'm trying to figure out if this phrasing is deliberate or not!
Trumpet winsock, usenet, watching images load... (Score:5, Informative)
So much nostalgia!
- Win 3.11 didn't have a tcp/ip stack, so you used trumpet winsock.
- Most images would slowly load from top to bottom, but interlaced gifs would give you a sense of the whole image as it loaded.
- No frames, no javascript.
- Gray was the default background color.
- The blink tag was in common use.
- Most content was static, but forms were a fancy thing and could send data to a CGI backend handler.
- Usenet was fun and cool!
- Gopher protocol was a thing, but had no obvious advantage over http.
- You didn't have an email spam filter, and you didn't need one.
- Majordomo handled email lists.
- Telnet and ftp were the tools everyone used.
- Finger protocol existed!
- Teardrop attacks (invalid packet fragmentation) weren't known yet.
- You could get guitar tabs for Nirvana songs, thinking those guys will make lots of albums in future decades.
- No usb.
- AT keyboards.
- Physical power switches for your AT power supply.
- Vesa local bus peripherals seemed like the future.
- Some dude was working on a unix variant you could run on a normal pc. Lee-nooks or something
I'm certainly forgetting a lot of things. Everyone had rollerblades on.
Downloading datasheets (Score:2)
in PDF form for board level repairs and my early circuit board designs.
I ran a bbs (Score:3)
I was started a bbs in 1994. There was no internet in my area and since it was a small town, had to call long distance for everything. I had accounts with compuserve, prodigy, aol and a year later, msn. It all ran up my monthly phone bills. That is what I especially remember, the high phone bills and all the subscription fees. Things just don't change.
Game.com (Score:2)
I guess this came out in 1997, but close enough. There was a handheld console called the game.com https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
The games on it were trash, like the cheapest things you could imagine. They were nowhere near Gameboy quality from 8 years earlier. Without the games though, the OS menu was pretty impressive! It had a touchscreen display with a weird grid. It had a modem that could connect to the internet for checking email too! Supposedly. After I got the game.com, I realized it was impractic
strawberry poptart blowtorches (Score:3, Insightful)
FSP the naughty alternative to FTP (Score:3)
FSP was the back street alternative to the high street offerings of FTP. While FTP was the sanctioned place to find files on offer that was blessed by the sysadmin, FSP ran mostly under the radar and could pop up almost anywhere.
It also had a speakeasy vibe in that you had to know where it was and how to get there.
You were first get into one FSP site and then find info for others. No knowing if a site would still be there in a few days time.
Way Back When (Score:2)
The first time I used it on a paid shell account on a service out of Seattle, and I had heard on Usenet about the lynx program. Popped in, wasn't overwhelmed, and stuck with gopher, which at that point had Project Gutenberg. It was another couple of years before I installed Mosaic on my OS/2 machine that connected via SLIP.
Yanoff"s list (Score:2)
Recalling the number of times Scott got interviewed by the media. It wasn't Mainstream media at the time because it was the only media.
the beginning of the browser wars (Score:3)
We were building "a browser" to deliver versioned documentation to customers. We were just at the point of replacing binders of paper documentation. There was hundreds of thousands of pages of docs for so many versions of the switches. A configuration management nightmare. We thought it was just God's work at the time. Imagine "browsing" thru documentation on a SCREEN. WOW! seemed like cutting edge stuff at the time <chuckle>... I wrote the specs and some nerd wrote it up. He was actually an amazing programmer, with no life obviously, because I couldn't believe what he came back with on Monday from specs I gave him on Friday... but we fought like cats and dogs in the meetings <more chuckles>...
There were corporate wide email warnings: Thou shalt NOT use
New corporate wide memo came out: THOU SHALT USE mozaic.
Our browser project was scrapped shortly after. <sad face>
the plague that is called avertising (Score:2)
web site (Score:2)
Whatever I looked for.. (Score:2)
Weekly Thinnet repairs (Score:2)
The inevitable end (Score:5, Informative)
In 1994 I was co-sysop of a local bulletin board system (BBS). In late 1994 all the local BBS sysops got together and had a meeting to address this new "danger" to our systems, LOL. Attending that meeting was the owner of the first ISP in town. We thought he was nuts thinking he could get people to pay for time to use the Internet. Within a year all of the local BBS systems were gone and the local ISP had switched to a $19.95 per month all you could eat Internet plan. Two more local ISPs had popped up in the meantime offing the same thing of which I was helping to operate one of them. At first we tried to give the Internet a "local" feel using software called "Worldnet" that allowed for local things like games, chat rooms, classifieds, etc.. but as the Internet grew it was apparent the local, personal feeling of being online was a thing of the past.
I realized the world was about to change (Score:3)
I would tell people about the Internet and how I thought it would be bigger than Gutenberg and moving type. They thought I was either weird, crazy or both. A few years later, I left the printing industry and starting developing web based software full time and have been doing so ever since.
I expect 30 years from now, people might ask, what do you remember about AI in 2024.
Not much, too early for me (Score:2)
I didn't have home Internet access until late 1995, so my only experience was with terminal based "Internet" services like Archie and Gopher at my local college library. I was only 17 at the time, so I didn't really understand how it worked.
I didn't get to try Netscape until the next year or so.
the web was hopeful! (Score:2)
In 94 i was working for NeXT on campus at Indiana University. We had a large cluster of NeXT machines and the browser was so much better than my old Windows 3.1 machine in my apartment which had mosaic on it.
The web was fun. New! Open! weird. not corporate. hopeful.
lots of usenet....rec.music.gdead!
BNC terminators
Pre-Win95? (Score:2)
Not sure of the timeline (Score:2)
1994 (Score:2)
I was still mostly using BBSes in 1994, but could access the web via the following procedure:
1. Dial in to my local university's free public information BBS
2. Drill through it's custom menu system to information services
3. Hit the link to hop over to the University of Minnesota's information system, which gets you on Gopher
4. From gopher, dig over to MIT's server (visiting an arbitrary gopher server was disabled, you had to drill through menus)
5. Dig through MIT's site to get to IT services, and fire up Lyn
Still using text mode in 1994 (Score:2)
In addition so some local BBSs, a local university had open dial-in to a machine with internet access, able to browse the newsgroups, telnet to various services, a gopher client, and this "new" Lynx application for access to the "world wide web".
By 1995, the local library had added Lynx as an option to their dial-up card catalog, so could also browse the web from there also (I moved on to a Pentium 166 and W
Mirsky's (Score:2)
Mirsky's Worst of the Web ...
If it isn't Mirsky's, it isn't the Worst!
My first web app (Score:2)
Funny thing is that the design was so perfectly functional that they kept it for over 10 years.
Pizza Hut (Score:2)
The very first I heard of the web was when I read that Pizza Hut was taking online orders using something called Mosaic.
I had no idea what http or Mosaic were, and just assumed Mosaic and its protocols were something proprietary (don't tell me "just google it" in 1994, please). That made me kind of mad, because I used a "marginal" platform (Amiga OS) that most things never got ported to. If something was standardized, then someone would implement it, but otherwise I generally couldn't play their reindeer ga
I want my MTV (Score:2)
I was part of a team that set up the very first web page for Youngstown State University. It was basically a bullet list kind of like a directory, with a couple other pages with contact information. It had images of the school logo and mascot. That was what was at ysu.edu for at least the first several months of its existence.
So what I remember... first of all, you couldn't actually DO anything online. It was all static read-only pages for the most part. Most all businesses were merely what I called "yell
Whose "web"? (Score:2)
Lynx the Mosaic: (Score:2)
I was the sysadmin for the grad student computer room at UNM physics. It was mostly DOS/WIN machines that could telnet into our Unix systems.
I regretfully remembered seeing a Usenet group about the WWW protocol and thought this was really neat, but too bad they didn't have the bandwidth. So, I didn't really follow it. Then they came up with caching and it just worked. My mistake.
Started off with lynx. I'd been using gopher for a bit. Mosaic was released for Windows and that was when things really took off f
I wuz there! (Score:2)
I remember how a browser was a piece of software in a box with floppy disks and a CD-ROM at Fry's.
Scott McNealy was appalled at the market valuation that Netscape was getting. "No deep intellectual property."
Re: (Score:2)
My page of jokes (Score:2)
I should look around and see if I have a copy of that MDB somewhere. The joke page doesn't seem to be linked up on my site anymore.
Guess the Macromolecule! (Score:2)
I remember a web game someone put together where you answer yes or no questions to walk through a computer-generated decision tree called "Guess the Macromolecule", and if you stumped it, you got to submit a new question to identify your specific macromolecule.
yahoo (Score:3)
Re: (Score:3)
Filters haven't really advanced
I taught science and electronics in a highschool in 2019. Dirtypcbs.com was blocked. It's an online shop that sells cheap PCBs. It's not porny at all. Duckduckgo was blocked. Yeah, you know, that search engine that is waaay less predatory than Google? It was blocked. I sent some very rude emails to various senior administrators about that, implying that by blocking DDG but allowing Google they WANTED children to be abused by big corporations. I left that job (for unrelated reasons) but sure as hell don't mi
Re: (Score:2)
Ah yes, setting up a ppp connection over my old modem on the Amiga 500, then using IRC... Wowo, how thingsw have changed. I think I had my first www experience in mid 1994.
And HTML wasn't really a big deal at the time, because the Amiga already had AmigaGuide which was used for clicky links in text. It was used not only for technical docs, but was also used in things like encyclopedias and clicky "choose your own adventure" games...