I'm a fucking webmaster (2016)

Page loads were slow, but you don't get that weird thing you get today when a page is slow even after it's loaded, or stuff keeps loading in and changing the layout so you need to sit and wait for an unknown period before you can interact with it.

It feels like websites are a lot jankier today. The old web was slow, but it was predictable. Like I know a site where if you don't wait for it to finish to load (and it's javascript loading, so you get no browser indication that it's actually loading), then the all the links will be wrong. That is, you get the wrong content if you click a link. It's quietly kind of amazing how they've managed to break hyperlinks, given they're a part of HTML itself and work well out of the box.

It was quite the opposite. Transfer speed was slow, it sometimes took minutes to load a page and I only had access to internet at school or conferences. The machines were also slow, browsers were taxing on the hardware too in the old times as well.

Pages were anything but intuitive, there were no design standards. Most marketing pages looked like their art director imagined a futuristic movie prop.

There's still a ton of interesting pages out there, check out this collection: https://www.hoverstat.es/

Images would load forever. Good websites had images twice, a low-resolution variant to load fast, to be replaced by the high-resolution one that eventually loaded. Other websites had images that loaded interlaced - separated in 4 strata that you could watch being built up.

I remember when some supergenius sent the first email as a word document with a 2 mb company logo embedded, and loading that took some 20 minutes - each minute being metered indivdually, only to then contain two lines of text that ought have been the mail body...

The internet was better back in the day - but it was not faster.

> Eh, 30 seconds maybe if it was a lot of images?

Depends on the amount of gifs people were placing on their website :D We only had a 56k modem at the time. The Browser was provided by the ISP at first due to lack of dial-up software that supported the German ISPs, so it was loading all kinds of injected stuff from the ISP, too.

But yeah, I agree with the general sentiment that websites usually loaded way faster if you were using e.g. IE3 on purpose because it didn't load all the stylesheets and images.

My 1996 self feels very seen.

I think a lot about the way the web was back in the mid 90s, compared to the bleeding-edge technologies of today, particularly blockchain and cryptocurrency.

And one major aspect I keep coming back to is that web technologies in the 90s, and even their descendent technologies now, are simple enough for most technology-literate people to understand, and that carried with it a lot of comfort and trust.

For anyone who had been using desktop computers and office software in the early 90s, which was basically everyone who was a student or an office worker, the web was just files on a computer, served over a network, which we already had plenty of experience using. And I think that's why my father, who was only a little older than I am now when I first showed him the web, grasped it straight away and was supportive of me building a website for his business.

These days I'm not spending much time writing HTML files in a text editor and uploading them via FTP; rather I'm writing programmatic code that talks to a database (A database! Just like MS Access or FileMaker Pro), does some processing, and displays the result on the screen with some elaborate JavaScript to make it look and function how I want (I’m happily a heavy user of React for building rich web apps), but it's still fundamentally the same concepts. Files on servers, accessed over a network and delivering useful information to my browser or app. The beautiful simplicity is still there, and it still doesn't feel like a big leap from the kind of computing we were doing 1993.

The world of blockchains and cryptocurrencies and "web3" feels vastly more opaque and esoteric by comparison and therefore untrustworthy to many of us, which I think is a significant answer to the question that was asked here in the past couple of days: "Why is Hacker News so anti-crypto?" [1].

I can't quite accept that it's just that I'm "old"; firstly because first heard about Bitcoin soon after it appeared and was excited by its potential, but also because I remember how people older than me reacted when the web arrived, and there was much more rapid acceptance and embrace than there I currently see for cryptocurrency, outside of those who are just chasing quick riches.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31302494