What do you remember about the "old" internet?
Inspired by the post on HN, was curious about your favorite memories or nostalgia you feel about internet in the 90's or even earlier.
I really didn't come fully online until the early 2000's. We didn't have the means to get internet at home so until I could get online unless it was at school. Even so my most pleasant memories were spending time playing games on yahoo (yahooligans), with a tetris like clone being my favorite. Also spent a huge amount of time playing macromedia shockwave based games on various sites that I don't remember anymore. I do remember playing a game where you had to build up your hobo soap box car to see how far you could jump it.
It was soon followed by the discovery of various chat groups, making up identities, lying about age, revealing too much personal information in the process. At one point I even convinced a woman to send me photos that she claimed were for her modeling career. Not sure if it was some creepy old guy trying to lure me in with promises of being a real woman or if I legitimately fooled some poor girl into sending me modeling pictures.
Also remember my first foray into fan theory sites with the show LOST, ended up getting chewed out for suggesting a theory that was apparently well known. Was too embarrassed and scared to post after that and ended up lurking for the duration of my time there.
Some folks say that the "old internet" is now gone with the likes of reddit and Youtube, but for me it seems like what really changed was us and the sense of wonder. For those who are still discovering the internet as they're growing up, that sense of wonder is still there just waiting to be turned into nostalgia as they get older.
I think I'm too much of a pessimist to answer your question. I honestly think we've traded an amazing way to connect for an insane amount of advertising.
I do love your point about our sense of wonder, and I think this extends beyond the Internet and to our technology in general.
What I remember best about the "old" Internet? Picking up the phone when my cousin didn't respective that it was my turn at the computer.
Something I was just thinking about the other day were forum signatures. They were such a fad back when phpboards and similar forums were more dominant, and I remember going through Photoshop tutorials trying to learn how to make them myself. My old ones are lost somewhere in an old Photobucket account, and I'm sure I'd have a good laugh at them if I found them.
Oh yeah. We had a graphics subforum full of people who would just make random graphics in Photoshop and post them to share. Then they'd open "shops" where other members could request a signature.
Good times, those.
That was actually one of the things I distinctly remember. I didn't even have a concept of how I would I would write the HTML to show the signature or even where to host it but I wanted a signature. During one of the request threads I asked for a water looking sig and the person came through. Wish I still had it with me to cringe at how bad it looked.
Don't forget your little forum avatar to match.
Plenty of websites where a core feature was a forum avatar that you could dress up - often with some sort of "support" to the website granting unique items or a shop of some sort.
this is how i got into digital arts on a halo 2 forum. Now it's my job!
Another oldbie here :) . First "online" in 89 on BBSes, then online properly in 92 while at University.
The main thing to realise is what was missing.
No web. No browsers.
No HTTP.
No search engines.
No graphics. Not enough bandwidth to download them, really. Forget video.
So it was almost all text. Knowledge was power - knowing where to get something was valuable, things weren't easily "discoverable". I knew a collection of psytrance sets held in someone's account on sweden's academic account (in .au format!), was excellent to share that with people.
And that's the other thing - almost everyone until the "eternal september" was an academic. And a geek at that. The only way to get access was through university, and it was so obtuse it needed a computer geek to manage it. The equipment was tough to come across as well, outside a university context.
So email, gopher, ftp sites, MUDs, unix talk, eventually IRC and stuff. Going back even further, almost all BBSes had only a few connections, so only a few people could be online at once. You'd go on, send some messages, then log off so someone else can have a slot, and come back later and see if you had anything, or continue the conversation!
It's one thing to know how something came to be but completely something else when you live it. What's something you miss about being online during that time?
I first got online in 1993. Both the local BBS community (with global-ish reach thanks to Fidonet) and the actual Internet, thanks to the local university. I wasn't a student, but you could dial in, then either hop on to an open shell server and connect outbound from there, or get on Gopher and wind your way through that maze.
I spent a lot of evenings playing MUDs/MUCKs/MUSHes/MOOs. The social aspect was really cool - you could play and interact with people from all over the world. Nobody really cared if you were young or old, boy or girl, so long as you weren't an asshole and were reasonably literate. Used IRC a little bit, but it tended to be much more serious than it is today, and much more primitive. I look at IRC today, with all the services and bots and everything, and hardly recognize it. And it had already gotten to where most of the larger channels had established communities who all knew one another, and weren't always super welcoming to new folks. (Some things never change.)
Oh! Illinois Freenet. It was one of the first forums on the Internet. It had somewhere around ten rooms with predictable topical subjects, and anyone could connect and post. It only saved the last hundred posts in each room, because diskspace, but there were often fifteen or twenty people on at any given moment. There was a lot of RPing there, and general silliness. It was a very fun place.
Part of the magic of the Internet of that era was the just amazing speed and reach of it, by the standards of the time. Long-distance phone calls were something like a dollar a minute during the day, calling overseas was astonishingly expensive, a letter might take a week to reach someone cross-country. But you could dial up your local BBS, log in, send a message, and a day later, maybe quicker, have a reply back from someone hundreds of miles away, for free. I remember it would be years yet before my local library computerized their card catalog, but I could hop on Gopher for free and browse and search the card catalogs at Oxford and Cambridge.
BBSes were fun because they were local, and you could get to know people IRL at periodic "get-togethers". The userbase was mostly younger people with strong interests in computers, which wasn't a really "normal" thing to be into in 1993-1995. Made a lot of good friends through BBSes back then. What was really common back then was that people would only dial in once, maybe twice a day, often at exactly the same time, so you'd know, like "if I want to send Ph03n1x a note about that party this weekend, I need to do it before 7:35 or he won't see it until tomorrow". (Yes, we totally had terrible h4x0r n4m3z back then.)
Also, text files, dirty text files, goddamn Apple users with their weird file formats that required conversion programs to be readable under DOS, CP/M people and their thousand different compression utilities and completely non-indicative file extensions, and 8-bit dirty pictures, lol. Oh, and the advent of the WWW and HTML, and horrible people who wanted HTML to be a thing everywhere. I remember my first exposure to HTML was in a USENET group, someone formatted a table of stuff with HTML markup and there were like thirty replies, all variations on "what the hell is with all the less-than and greater-than signs?" And then the poster is like "Oh, just cut-and-paste this part through this part into a text file, save it, FTP to this server somewhere, download Mosaic, extract it, then load it and use it to view the text file, it's easy!" And those of us still using DOS screamed, and then laughed, confident that the comfortable text-based focus of the Internet could never be challenged by this bloated academic markup curiosity...
It would always blow my mind when in response to an A/S/L into you'd find out the people in the chat rooms were in countries you'd only seen in picture and cutures you'd never interacted with. BBS's were before my time but even that would have been amazing, finding local people interesting in basically the same things as you would have been amazing.
Yeah, today people are just completely blase about interacting with random people from all over the world. It's normal. The world used to be a lot smaller place, in many ways. Back then it was still really novel, and unique. Other kids at school were playing a NES game with their brother or classmate, and you'd be playing this huge open-ended game in a party with a Greek, a South African, and two Israelis. And you couldn't tell anyone about it because they'd never believe you, in part because even then the online world had its own inpenetrable lingo.
"You know a South African? No way! What's he like?"
"She's not very effective in combat, yells at the rest of us if we swear, emotes too much, and hogs all the good loot. But she can party heal 100HP every six-hundred ticks, and giving her all the good mob loot is still cheaper than buying healing potions and paying for resurrections all the time."
"..."
"..."
"...You know a GIRL?"
I'm with you on MUDs and IRC. Spent so much time between my favorite MUDs and IRC nets with older friends, it feels very strange that some of those old games that were bustling with life and has their own little subculture are now ghost towns compared to what they used to be.
I, too, came of age in questionable fashion via AIM chat rooms. I remember trading jpegs of a certain type with strangers, RPing in various ways, and overall getting into conversations I had no business being in as a 12-year-old
IRC was pretty awesome, though. I burned through a lot of awkwardness via a chat handle. Of course, I learned fun new words like "jizz" and "twat" and they did not mean what I thought they meant.
Really, I miss the frontier feel the whole thing had. Social media and tracking cookies have really made the whole thing feel a lot smaller.
EDIT: I think the things I miss the most are all the communities I drifted away from over the years. Forums, chat rooms, MMOs.
The bascially complete anonymity of chats made it so that you could get so much of that awkwardness out in front of strangers to avoid it IRL at least a little bit. So many conversations ended with me quiting chat very quickly once I realized what the person on the other end meant was totally not what I thought they did.
You'd abort one conversation and hop straight into another with a blank slate and no history of what just transpired.
I remember learning how to use proxies once when I fucked up and let it slip how young I was and they banned me. They were pretty confused when I popped back in a few minutes later. I might have been a bit of an asshole when I was younger...
The thing that I remember the most, and that is no longer present? A genuine sense of community. Everyone knowing everyone else, people having a reputation, that sort of thing.
Small and "cozy" places that have that sort of dynamic still exist, but they seem much harder to find. The vast, vast majority of communities out there are basically dead, with lurkers and temporary visitors - and they make it that much harder to find the good ones.
I'm pretty certain it used to not be this way. Perhaps because the barrier of entry to creating a community used to be much higher, and so the people involved actually cared.
Used to access the internet via Vax machines in the computer lab at college. Then once I had access to a Unix machine at another college, I started dialing up to a shell account on that machine and using SLIrP (If I rememeber by capitalizations correctly) that turned that shell account into a full internet account so I could connect with my Amiga. I then used a terminal program and had to use 'atdt' commands to 'dial' internet sites through telnet, so I could have a full color MUD session.
Those were the days...
A friend introduced me to MUDs only in college when they were just a shadow of their former selves, I can't even imagine how much time I would have spent in them if I had found them in my teens. They were both simple and complex, even with 10-20 people on the server when I would access it still made the world feel alive.
My most vivid memory of the 'old' internet (probably not that old to most of you) was watching some livestream for like the first or second time ever on justin.tv. I had asked some question to chat and was met with the one word response that destroyed my innocence forever. It was the link to meatspin
I remember the old youtube, all the oddly endearing blurry vids, without any of the subscriber culture or obnoxious ads and stupid algorithms. I remember it being a lot more "open," in a way that if you wanted a particular piece of information, place, etc, you had to go out of your way to find it a lot more than you do know, where you are "funneled" to particular sites to find what you're looking for...
I remember old youtube comments being the dumbest place on earth.
Now, they're still far from clever most of the time, but they seem to have vastly improved, overall.
I wonder, did anyone else notice this? Does anyone have an idea as to what happened?
I'll guess that voting might have helped out a bit.
I was totally on the google video bandwagon. I thought "what is this Youtube garbage, they're nothing!" Lo and behold, google aquires youtube and google video is no more
I remember growing up watching my brothers play Doom, Quake, and Duke Nukem on the computer then finding myself playing Diablo, and later, Diablo II for years afterwards.
I always remember trying to call friends to play, forgetting that someone else was using the internet at the same time.
My dad also never wanted to pay for AOL, so I remember trying to find music to stream while using JUNO.
Pre-internet was all about the local BBSs. Later on I got into using First Class, which was a mostly Mac based BBS with a really fancy GUI. I have no idea how we came about it, but my friends and I had so many pirated games back then.
Around 95 I got into usenet and IRC, which was already pretty late for Usenet. Nevertheless, it was fun. Between IRC and the BBSs, I met a lot of people in person... a lot of weirdos, but also a lot of really great people that I kept in touch with for years.
It was fun to find workarounds for running ads at the bottom of your screen that would essentially hide the ad all together while you raked in a whopping $5 per month or whatever. That, BonziBuddy, and all of the other crap I installed on my parents' computer. So much crap.
ICQ and AIM were really fun -- but IRC was, and still is, my favorite.
The internet felt more genuinely social back then. It was most likely because my social circle had more time to sit online and chit chat, but everything felt closer and healthier then, compared to now.
A few weeks ago I went digging through a few telnet BBSs for old-times-sake. It was fun, but I'm also glad that we've progressed away from that to sites like this one.
edit: whopping, not whipping -- thanks to @whisper
You can also look through Usenet on Google Groups, but most of it is spam now. However, COLA (comp.os.linux.advocacy) is still active (and generally spam-free), and the threads can be extremely interesting since the same people have been arguing with each other for so long.
Every few weeks I dig through a handful of newsgroups using Unison (a mac client.)
Some film groups are still quite active -- mostly dealing with older film, which is perfect for me. I think a few soap opera ones are popular, but that's not really my bag.
Oh man, I think the first thing I did when I was first shown the internet was look up Sailormoon fansites. Eating up all the info I could on this or that character, before I'd even watched it all. Shortly afterwards, I realized that people really liked to post poorly photoshopped photos of the Spice Girls' heads onto porn stars (in the top 10 of the first search I ever did on what passed for a search engine back in the day) and retreated back to my safe niche anime circles.
After that, I remember spending a lot of time playing silly Flash games on Orisinal and being asked ASL by 'big black dudes who wanted to show me a good time'. Ah, the innocent days.
IRC was a great place. Wheel of Time was recommended to me there.
This thread is almost too nostalgic to read through.
Nostalgia is a hugely powerful thing in my life. I imagine reading this thread is what older generations felt like when going through old photo albums. The memories are overwhelming.
I started in ~90. Did the whole BBSes thing, pre-images web, IRC, FTP server communities, Telnet BBSes, CGI based forums, ran some pretty huge forums, then social networks destroyed it all and added very little real value. Ever since then, I just stew away shooing kids off my lawn and talking about the good old days.
waiting overnight to download single music tracks off of kazaa lite at 5 kb/s.
loading them bitches onto your 64 mb MP3 player.
netsend was pretty cool in high school
i had AIM, and i remember those old chat room, office hijinks was my jam back in the late 90's. ALso you could add yourself to the directory so you could get random messages from people. glad im not a girl or i'd probably have been abducted or something.
at the very least you would have been sent a lot of dicks
true.
I'm only 23, so my experience with the old 'net is limited. I do recall having dial-up internet, though. Navigating the web was a painful experience. By the time I was able to competently use a computer my main interest was with Neopets. Today that site's a ghost town.
However, I recently was gifted an old laptop. An IMB 755CE with Windows 98SE on it (originally it would have came with 3.1 or 95). It's been interesting getting it up and running. I picked up a 10 Mb/s PCMCIA ethernet card (with RJ45 and BNC connectors!) and daisy-chained it off of the second ethernet port on my main desktop. Since it's not really possible to browse the web on the thing I'm left with IRC, FTP, and telnet. I'm one of the few people left in the world running a 20 year old version of mIRC.
I quickly learned that the FTP program that comes with 98 omits the most significant bit for transfers (text mode is the default). IRC clients from the days of yore seem to do more and still be less complete programs than irssi and weechat. And I enjoyed loading up
towel.blinkenlights.nlonce more.If you use KernelEx, you can run programs designed for more modern OSs. It's been awhile since I last booted my 98 VM (because of a Ryzen CPU hardware bug), but I think I had Opera 9 and Firefox 4 running, in addition to some version of VLC.
Consider that the computer has 40 MB of RAM and a 100 MHz 486DX4.
Hey, I have browsed the WWW on a 66MHz Sparcstation with less RAM.
And it was slow as hell, because I had the lowest-end framebuffer card. And was running KDE. (This was years and years ago, 2.2 kernel era, with Debian or NetBSD installed off of CD, and the CDs didn't contain any lightweight DEs.)
Worked perfectly fine for CLI stuff, though.
Definitely MOOs/MUDs. I was on MOOs more than MUDs though. I pretty much learned to socialize on the MOO long before I properly figured out real social interaction. Had more friends in other countries than I did in real life. Even got to meet quite a few of them. One guy from Norway actually moved in with us for a few years. Stoked to see so many other people who remember these MUD based stuff.
Also remember the local BBS. It was run by my friend's dad, and he only had one line to allow connections. But he had a great on there called Legend of the Red Dragon and I'd play it so often that he'd actually have to log in to tell me to let other people connect for a bit.
Never used AOL, always had connections through the university (as an assistant admin for my mom's MOO that she used for her classes). But I do remember ICQ (I even still remember my icq number, 7 digits!), geocities, altavista. But that was all later on. First real web browsing I did was through lynx, and it was all text based. I also remember getting into doing some basic Ray tracing with POV-Ray. I even made a submission for the 1995 internet Ray tracing competition. Had a scene that used fractals to build trees, bump map landscape, water, stars, atmosphere, metallic textures. Took days for it to render. Looks absolutely hideous nowadays, but back then it was a blast. I actually kept a notebook to model out all my scenes when I was bored in class because the input for the ray tracer was all text based. Moving on to wireframe interfaces after that was mind-blowing. Now I have a space mouse and my inner child just goes berserk. But I guess that's getting away from internet stuff a bit.
In maybe 96 or 97, I played a lot of MechWarrior 2 online. Even had a clan which I made cheesy 3d graphics for. It was all about lag shooting. Sometimes the lead would be 2 or 3 seconds ahead to be able to work. And that was at 56k, which was pretty dang styling at the time. The worst was trying to fight someone connected with a 14.4. There was just no way to anticipate where they'd be in 20 seconds.
Dang, this got me pretty good. I could go on for ages. Suffice to say, the MOO was my escape from middle school and high school awfulness. I was pretty much constantly on it from 93-00.
Oh man, I'd forgotten about door games. LORD, Trade Wars... some Roman gladiatorial combat themed thing I've forgotten the name of, which was amazingly difficult. LORD was all the rage. I remember some BBSes had people who'd basically dial in and join just to play it, to where some implemented rules about how you had to make so many posts in order to access the door area, etc.
And yeah, I was far better at socializing online than I was IRL.
One thing people forget is that before the WWW, just discovering stuff existed was hard. You worked hard to not alienate people and burn your bridges at a MOO or MUD, because you might only know of a half-dozen others that weren't too weird/niche to be interesting. Ditto IRC servers. There were a lot of them, but nothing like a comprehensive list. I had a notebook I used for years, jotting down hostnames and dotted-quads and port numbers, FTP logins (and the hours the sites were available), that kind of thing. The shortest paths between my school's Gopher server and the ones I visited the most. (For youngsters confused by this - there was no search function, no URL bar in Gopher, at least in those days. Once you were "in" the Gopher network, you had to select and follow links. And yes, if you had a shell account, you could just connect directly to the Gopher of your choice (boombox.micro.umn.edu was the "original" server, don't ask me why I remember this) but the local college, if you didn't have access to a (local) shell server, would only let you access the local Gopher from the dial-up pool. And word would get around on IRC and so on, because this was a common situation - hey, if you can make it to the University of Miami Gopher, and go to the computer science section, there are links you can follow to access Dalnet through Gopher!. Now the challenge was to find another Gopher that linked to that one, and so on. Hence almost literally needing a map to find what you wanted.)
Back in those days, one of the great benefits of having access to a shell server was it gave you a nice crib to find interesting services, because on the BSD of the day, "w" showed even regular non-root users what all the logged-in users were doing. So you might login, type "w", then scroll through forty or fifty people, and note down what people were FTP'ing to, what they were telnet'ing to on IRC ports, what they were telnet'ing to on non-IRC ports, etc.
Dang, that's starting to ring a bell. I didn't use gopher much because http was around when I first started poking around at things in like 92 or so. But I do remember learning to use it at some point. Seeing that activity list like you're talking about is so.... Argh! I can almost remember some of the addresses.
My first internet connection was a 1200 baud cu connection to an HP9000 at university. When downloading large stuff via FTP (like a few hundred kilobytes) I usually drove to the campus and copied the download to floppy disk, because the phone line was too flaky for a zmodem download.
I did have mail and Usenet news before that, though! My Unix box dialed in to the next node, using the same 1200-baud modem, and exchanged batches every night.
You valued software much more after staring at a progress indicator for hours or driving to campus to make a copy.
There was a miraculous moment when I got my hands on some 3.5" floppy disks and wasn't too bright as to how they worked. Thought I had downloaded a dozen or so images on it (knowing that usually 1 or 2 fit) at school wanting to bring them home with me. Only after arriving home I realized they were all thumbnails instead of the full size images.
There are different phases of the "old internet" at least in my lifetime.
Late 80s (when I started using it) - Prodigy/CompuServe modem-based e-mail and news. Later when pictures were introduced, I was like "wow!"
Early 90s - AIM (every. single. day), Gemstone II/III, and e-mail AD&D groups.
Mid 90s - Gemstone III leaves AOL, my heart breaks. The rise of gaming fan-sites - basically my second home, much to the chagrin of my high school teachers and their assignments.
Late 90s - Moving on to MUDs, after GSIII implemented their ridiculous (currently still ridiculous) subscription models.
Early 2000s - Personal, self-coded blogs. So many game fan-sites. AIM, and whatever other IM was the flavor of the month. More MUDs. Started actually coding MUDs and joined several (failed) development teams that wanted to capture the mobile/online market. Then in 2002 everything ended with WoW. Sad face.
Mid 2000s - the rise of blogger. More newspapers converted to online markets, but still extremely primitive.
Late 2000s - Hard to say. Moved to China where every year and more and websites got blocked by the GFW. Eventually mass adoption of Wordpress into the personal blogosphere, and for a brief moment was bright until blogs went dark and
The now - Facebook and other social media became the hives of activity. Au Revoir, "Old Internet".
I remember repeatedly using Compuserves trial period, with a credit card number generator, to read Usenet news.
Early online access was very expensive. People don't understand that we'd pay dollars per hour for 300 bps.