The old internet

[Queso]

The "old internet"? Kermit and a heavy use of grep is what my left temporal lobe is attempting to recall.

You lot don't know you're born!! I remember using text-only browsers when the Web first started. Predictably enough, the only non-CERN or university sites were about Star Trek!!

 

[sushi]

Kermit

Youngster!

 

[Hmac]

I remember The Source and Compuserve, then AppleLink Personal Edition, which became AOL. Yes, I remember when Usenet and Gopher were the pinnacle of internet browsing tools.

No, the internet, when it was dependent on those old, restrictive interfaces, was a very faint shadow of the useful tool is is now. Good riddance.

 

[7031]

I completely agree with that.

I run a server from home and I want to start a small website, similar to the ones we used to have.

Also, there were less n00bs, because less people used the internet, and the fact it was so slow meant that people were far less likely to have really bloated sites that take ages to load.

Time to create our own internet? Make our own DNS servers and use that?

 

[zelmo]

While overall I prefer the internet as it is now and will no doubt enjoy watching it continue to evolve, I do miss the intimacy of the early days and I wish we could have gotten to this point without all of the commercialization...and Myspace.

 

[SkyBell]

My dad always tells me stories about when he first got on the internet back in '95 or so. He said he had to pay by the minute to use the internet, and it was pretty expensive too.

I didn't really start getting into the internet until about '98 or '99, so I don't really know all that much about the earlier days. I do remember using IE 4 on Windows 98 though. That was absolute torture.

 

[Queso]

I do remember using IE 4 on Windows 98 though. That was absolute torture.

As opposed to using IE7 on Windows Vista?

 

[JNB]

The "old" internet. What a hoot.

 

[Bobdude161]

I too was in the AOL/Prodigy internet cocoon. I thought AOL and Prodigy were the only ways to get on the internet. Not only that, I thought the internet was restricted to "channels": news channel, game channel, and so forth. The thought of typing a URL was unimaginable!!!!!!!!!!! The first thing I remembered on the internet was Mad Maze, a really cool adventure game. I could never beat it tho.

 

[Axemantitan]

i remember those aol disks. thank God those are gone

They made good coasters!

 

[Schtumple]

I remember going to the library with my dad when I was very young, I think he had to pay something like £15 for half hour, the first thing I ever looked up was a Looney Tunes e-postcard site that took a good minute or 2 to load.

Then later on that year getting a Windows 95 machine and marveling at the fact that you didn't have to type in command lines to boot up (we had a Amstrad machine with Windows 3.1 that booted off the floppy disc...)

 

[Cromulent]

The only thing I can remember was trying to look at porn with my 14.4k modem when I was 13 or 14 or something and getting bored after a few minutes because I could only see their heads, the rest of the images hadn't loaded.

 

[mkrishnan]

but what i mean is the internet back in its early WWW days u know up until aroun 99 or 2000.

Is this incredibly artistic writing, or are you unaware of drowning in your own deep irony?

 

[MacBH928]

Ok,
for who ever thought that I meant the early days of the internet back in '99 2000, its just mis-understanding,
I meant that it probably ended around '99-2000 , for me it was when DSL was affordable and available for a lot of people.

I really like the internet in the WWW days, when HTML is used with gray backgrounds. You had to wait for pictures to load, and tiny animated GIF's because video was a big "no-no". I recall at one point before dsl waiting for like a 4 mb mp3 file to load for like half an hour!
Waiting for pages to load probably made them valuable and appreciate them much more back in the day.

I don't miss embedded MIDI and websites that look like they were made on Microsoft publisher!

man, you brought back so much memories. I almost forgot that people used to embed music into the sites, and the midi melodies is sooo nostalgic .

TO whomever said that the internet used to be personal and now its about business and corporations couldn't have summed it in a better way. It just tells so much about how things have changed.
Yes , it was fun just browsing the internet and looking at the efforts of what people put in and information, there was no stupid websites. People who made websites made them filled with useful information. Today everyone has a personal web profile on all of social networks and a blog because its the next big thing, even though he has nothing to offer at all.

I dont want to sound like those extra sensitive hard to understand people, that inernet back then was better. The technology today is better with faster file transfer of all types of media and cool options to create interactive websites. But it is sooo misused.

Back then internet was about sharing information, few websites with the right information, you dont search a lot for what you want. Today lots of website with lots of information , hardly you can find the useful information that you want. back then it was about the information your website has and how many HITS you got on that counter, and new guest book signings, and the cool webring you recently joined, and sending email the "WEBMASTER" .
Toady its about how to turn profit from the website, and stealing information from every-other website with news updating by the nano-second all put and folded into a bloated hard to load website. Its not original any more.

It would be really cool if we can have like archived internet. I know it exists, i think its archive.org but hardly any images load just the text.
I think they can do it as I believe most large companies that dealt with the internet still exist like Yahoo, Geocities, tripod, xoom, and all other big hosting companies. I dont think they get rid of old information, so i think its archive-able!

One thing I really miss, are chat rooms where you can get in and chat with people about a certain subject. I have no idea why that is no more!

 

[velocityg4]

My dad always tells me stories about when he first got on the internet back in '95 or so. He said he had to pay by the minute to use the internet, and it was pretty expensive too.

I didn't really start getting into the internet until about '98 or '99, so I don't really know all that much about the earlier days. I do remember using IE 4 on Windows 98 though. That was absolute torture.

On that note between my Sister and I we ran up a $500 AOL bill once in a one or two month period.

 

[ihabime]

I blame google and the blogging explosion for the over commercialization of personal websites. On the old internet, you put up a website and filled it with things you were interested in, if you got traffic it was neat, maybe you met people into the same things you were, but it was hard to make any money off it. You had to find your own advertisers and sponsors, track traffic, figure out billing and chase down payments.

With adsense it's easy, just sign up and insert a bit of code. After that it becomes more about attracting traffic, becoming more commercial, having more widely palatable content. Once some started making a living from it a ton of others jumped on the bandwagon. Some sites have stayed true to their original intent, but there are a lot of people looking for the big score, getting bought out by yahoo or google or getting hired to blog for a big corp.

 

[pdxflint]

My first encounter with the beginnings of the internet was in 1984 with a Commodore 64 and 300 baud modem. I dialed up bulletin boards, had a whole list of numbers. Then came Compuserve. The rest is history.

 

[spork183]

Youngster!

My first computer was a Royal, inherited from my Grandfather. That thing NEVER crashed...

 

[DiamondMac]

I still remember my first night logging onto the internet

Back in 1995 when I got AOL and my first desktop which was a piece of crap no-name system.

I remember logging onto their chat rooms and seeing that they had an interview with some star and that because I was logged into the chat room that I could talk to the star directly

IM's were so cool
Just looking up info on Green Day was so damn cool
EMails were amazing

 

[ProwlingTiger]

The only thing I can remember was trying to look at porn with my 14.4k modem when I was 13 or 14 or something and getting bored after a few minutes because I could only see their heads, the rest of the images hadn't loaded.

ROFL

 

[MacBH928]

I blame google and the blogging explosion for the over commercialization of personal websites. On the old internet, you put up a website and filled it with things you were interested in, if you got traffic it was neat, maybe you met people into the same things you were, but it was hard to make any money off it. You had to find your own advertisers and sponsors, track traffic, figure out billing and chase down payments.

With adsense it's easy, just sign up and insert a bit of code. After that it becomes more about attracting traffic, becoming more commercial, having more widely palatable content. Once some started making a living from it a ton of others jumped on the bandwagon. Some sites have stayed true to their original intent, but there are a lot of people looking for the big score, getting bought out by yahoo or google or getting hired to blog for a big corp.

Yeah that is true,
man I miss times where you could 'BROWSE' the internet, now its just a lot load of non-sense information. Back then you could really surf and find new stuff. today every one copies what is on the website of the other, be it pictures, news, video, or whatever

I am amazed they had chatting with stars in 95, as for IM I thought that was introduced later on ICQ in 98 maybe?

 

[Virgil-TB2]

"all links and no sausage"

.. .Does any one share with me the feeling of missing the old internet?. ...

I also miss the "old internet" but in a different way.

In the first place, what you are talking about is the early World Wide Web, not the Internet, which was around before the web existed, but that's a minor point.

What I miss is not all those crappy self-made pages (although some were very good), but the information that was available back then. Before the web was commercialised, before the ads, and before the big retail outfits took everything over, there was actually more information out there than there is now and it was indeed easier to find.

Now we do searches to find anything at all, and when we find it, we find hundreds of pages referencing the information we need but rarely do we find the actual information. We are locked into a sort of bad-search nightmare where all we find is links to other searches.

Another irony is the original purpose of the web was to digitise all the old paper documents and put them online so they are searchable and safe forever, but here we are about twenty years on and this still hasn't happened to any appreciable degree. Thousands of libraries have burned down in the interim and millions of documents have been lost forever because of this failure and it's mostly attributable to the commercial interests that took over the web in the mid nineties.

Just proves that rampant Capitalism and proprietary interests can ruin almost anything.

 

[localoid]

Zen And The Art Of The Internet

Internet of Old:
.It was the best of times, it was the worst of times...

Internet of Today:
.It is the best of times, it is the worst of times...

Internet of the Future:
.It will be the best of times, it will be the worst of times...

 

[tsice19]

I like the internet the way it is now.

That's probably because I wasn't allowed on the computer until like 2004 when we got DSL. I was 10.

 

[ChrisA]

Hello

Does any one share with me the feeling of missing the old internet?

I know its probably weird to you by what do I mean the old internet, but what i mean is the internet back in its early WWW days u know up until aroun 99 or 2000.

Funny how some people refer to the "Old Days" as being 1999 pr 2000. Maybe if you at 15 years old 2000 would be a "long time ago".

When I think of the "Old Internet" I think about the DARPANET and how amazed I was that I could sit at a terminal at UCLA and log into a computer that was on the east cost. That was in about 1975. Even later in the 1980's there were no commercial ISPs and no web browsers. The "old internet" means before there were web browsers. Graphical browsers are what changed it and made it accessible to the masses.

Actually nothing has gone away. Pick a date, any date. It is possable to simple ignore anything that happened after that date.