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Ask HN: What do you fondly recall about the early days of the Internet?
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Re: Ask HN: What do you fondly recall about the early days of the Internet?
#21. My 33.6Kbps modem dialing my local ISP making those sounds
2. Me using Lynx, Pine and restricted shell on my ISP to browse the internet on a terminal.
3. Me finding a Pine exploit to breakout of the restricted shell to run Slirp to get full TCP/IP access to the internet to browse with Netscape Navigator.
4. Visiting Yahoo and Geocities in full 640x480 VGA color!
5. ICQ
Re: Ask HN: What do you fondly recall about the early days of the Internet?
#3The old school windows 98 file transfer video / icon. https://images.app.goo.gl/ZnBSqWrdd9iMi9Mv7
Re: Ask HN: What do you fondly recall about the early days of the Internet?
#4Early internet felt more like a community. A few years ago, I came across a book that is on the same wavelength. It used to be that being connected meant you were in an alternate world from the rest of everyone; now it's kind of the opposite.
Maybe it's my age, but there was a sense of shared exploration of the unknown that I don't feel anymore.
https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/jess-kimball-leslie...
Re: Ask HN: What do you fondly recall about the early days of the Internet?
#5Yahoo chat room "Down the pub". pure fun.
MS messenger, my young children continually wobbling my screen during chats.
The dial-up connection sounds.
provided default Wifi password: surname + postcode.
Re: Ask HN: What do you fondly recall about the early days of the Internet?
#6Netsurfer Digest
Re: Ask HN: What do you fondly recall about the early days of the Internet?
#7Not the earliest by any means, I joined the Internet (or, "surfed the information superhighway" as it were) in early '96. A few things come to mind:
- Accessing web pages (specifically www.idsoftware.com) using listservs that responded with HTML contents, when I had a free email account with Juno and no WWW yet
- Using various free web providers that were ad-based (I remember Freewwweb), and using various hacks to not see their ads
- Making a couple hundred bucks through AllAdvantage, which would pay to display an ad on your computer while browsing - more hacks
- Playing an online trivia game (Cosmo's Conundrum) with live chat, so many hours spent on it, very strong community there that is still connected via Facebook
- Getting excited about VRML and quickly getting over it
- Building pages in Frontpage/HoTMeTaL/others, then with Flash
- Finding pages primarily through Yahoo (+ web rings), then random search engines (Dogpile, HotBot, Excite, Infoseek), then standardizing on Altavista, then being blown away by Google
- AOL CDs everywhere and also AOL keywords in commercials before .com addresses became commonplace
- Early memes such as the dancing baby, the hampster dance, Mahir's "I kiss you" page, etc
- Listening to RealAudio radio stations online
- Downloading my first movie online - Mortal Kombat Annihilation in all its 32MB glory, in the now-defunct VIV format
- Being there when the DivX format started spreading like wildfire on IRC via movie trailers, the Matrix trailer blew me away
- Early p2p file sharing - first with Hotline (which nobody remembers about these days, it seems), then with Napster (finding someone with a song you're looking for, then checking out their whole library was amazing)
There's much, much more that I'm forgetting. It was a magical time when the Internet felt both huge and small at the same time.
Re: Ask HN: What do you fondly recall about the early days of the Internet?
#8Waiting for someone to give me a google mail invite
Using msn chat - this was amazing
Telling everyone I was eating a sandwich on twitter. That’s what it was like back then
Get off my lawn
Re: Ask HN: What do you fondly recall about the early days of the Internet?
#9I am not sure if it was the early Internet or my young age, but I fondly remember discovering random websites and spending hours reading them. (The first one I visited was about the X-Files.)
Re: Ask HN: What do you fondly recall about the early days of the Internet?
#10Probably one of the forgotten things missing today is the personal home page.
Even with a lowly ISP like AOL, in addition to web access you were encouraged to create a personal web page on their domain so you could upload things to share with the world.
This is what you were paying them monthly for.
Most people weren't actually using it since it's not all that easy to build a web page, then along came Myspace who made it easier to put a page on their network.
I guess ISPs silently withdrew one of the main things in their bundle which millions of people once had and no longer do.