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The Unrecognizable Internet of 1996

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Re: The Unrecognizable Internet of 1996

#11

Post by gb »

robotron wrote: post #3

This article is looking at the older Internet from one point of view. There was much more to it than the Web. There were thriving communities on Usenet and IRC. People had personal home pages instead of MySpace/Facebook/Bebo/Whatever accounts. You hosted your own scanned photos.

I was on CompuServe back then (95 or 96 anyway), at the time I never even opened the web browser - my time online was spent in the CompuServe app looking at the board/chatroom/portal type things that it used to serve.

Strangely I can still remember the "phone number" style email address I had too...

Re: The Unrecognizable Internet of 1996

#12

Post by baddox »

tptacek wrote: post #7
robotron wrote: post #3

This article is looking at the older Internet from one point of view. There was much more to it than the Web. There were thriving communities on Usenet and IRC. People had personal home pages instead of MySpace/Facebook/Bebo/Whatever accounts. You hosted your own scanned photos.

There were thriving Usenet and IRC communities (I miss Usenet), but you had those things on BBS's too; it wasn't really a breakthrough.

Oh, Usenet is still out there. There are even still communities, although it's mostly just used for binaries now.

Re: The Unrecognizable Internet of 1996

#13

Post by kragen »

weegee wrote: post #10
trevelyan wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The web was awesome in 1996. It sucked in 1993. By 1996 you had actual webpages you could visit. IQ tests. News sites. Hotmail. But it was still difficult to tell professional content from amateur stuff. Conspiracy theory and Internet trolling were fresh and interesting and the blink tag was in wide use. And port 80 wasn't the only game in town still: there were still lots of independent BBS that had interesting cont…

The web in 1993? I don't remember NCSA Mosaic in 1993, I think I first used that app in 1994 in the lab at UW in Seattle. It was installed on a machine running X Windows, I think it was a DEC terminal. Before Mosaic I can remember an ftp site in Sweden that had a lot of photos. Downloading a photo of the space shuttle with Fetch and then opening it up a second later on the Mac IIsi with the 12" monochrome monitor and…

Mosaic was released in 1994, but Lynx was available by 1992. But yeah, in 1992 most of the action was in ftp sites. They were already a lot better than the local BBSes where I lived, though.

Re: The Unrecognizable Internet of 1996

#15

Post by tptacek »

lurkinggrue wrote: post #14

I was on the internet in 89 and found tons of things to do: Irc, Usenet, Mucks, Muds, Gopher, Ftp. By 1996 we were complaining about the Aol users ruining the internet.

In 89 you complained once every September about the students ruining the Internet; not a major change.

Re: The Unrecognizable Internet of 1996

#16

Post by tptacek »

baddox wrote: post #12
tptacek wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There were thriving Usenet and IRC communities (I miss Usenet), but you had those things on BBS's too; it wasn't really a breakthrough.

Oh, Usenet is still out there. There are even still communities, although it's mostly just used for binaries now.

Usenet is a crappy P2P file sharing system now, as pretty much everyone who ran a Freenix-rated Usenet server predicted. It was something much cooler than that before the file sharing douchebags wrecked it.

Re: The Unrecognizable Internet of 1996

#17

Post by nazgulnarsil »

I remember at a young age telling my step dad that he should be buying domain names of big companies and sitting on them. he laughed at me. :(

I'm the sort of kid who was buying candy in bulk and reselling it at school for a hefty markup. I'm pissed I missed out on all the easy money in web 1.0. If only I was born 10 years earlier.

Re: The Unrecognizable Internet of 1996

#18

Post by omouse »

eleitl wrote: post #4

Articles like these makes me want to strangle the author. No, Sir, my Indy with Ethernet and Mosaic/Netscape was quite up to the task. In fact, my telnet to the Sun and ftp and gopher pre-web was already immensely useful. If it sucked for you 1996, maybe it was just you.

Web pages loaded much faster if I remember correctly. I never really got a chance to use gopher till yesterday and it is a much much faster system for looking through a university library's catalog. Fuck I hate 2009 when everything is moving to the WWW even when it doesn't belong there :(

Re: The Unrecognizable Internet of 1996

#19

Post by tdavis »

In 1996 I was just starting to "code" web sites, so I found lots to do. That doesn't seem like a long time ago until I remember I was 12 at the time, but I digress.

Also, spending all evening on IRC was a common event.

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