Although I progressed from my childhood into my teens in the 90s, l don’t retain much memory of the internet back then as l had no exposure to it.
One of my first exposures to the internet was in school, a teacher plugged a computer into a telephone, it made weird noises, then we waited five minutes to load a website with facts about frogs, I’m pretty sure he had to type in an ip address that was written down on paper. Later I printed out videogame walkthroughs at the library. It wasn’t until after Y2K that I really started using its more interactive features.
Y2K was not the problem. Eternal September is. Before that, the Internet was a better place. Much better.
Man, it was glorious.
Remember when it was generally accepted that an advert was a small banner at the top of your phpnuke forum, while you listened to Iron Maiden in musicmatch jukebox, while hanging on msn messenger and talked about your geocities website.
Hey, I remember the internet before ads and SPAM…
So I was in college till 95 and the internet up to that point was basically command line. I mean a guy was doing html at the university which was like the first to get these things a year or so before but it was not mainstream really. I was not really using it much in the next year or two with what I was doing and then in 97 or 98 I encountered it at the library. The big thing to me at that point was my customized excite page which folder and then my yahoo page. Honestly it kinda stayed that way even after y2k. google and youtube and google offerning email with a gig of storage really changed things a lot. Then you had facebook and such. Basically early aughts were way different than late aughts. Also disk, ram, cpu sizes per unit of money increased massively during that time.
Internet was mostly used for my people to find each other and do nerd shit. The rest were normies being trolls or casual people that just kind of stumbled through it. Corporations had websites but they were mostly just a one page description of the company and not really useful. Social media was basically chat rooms and message forums. Ads were mostly banners and maybe a few pop ups, sometimes a website would have so many pop ups that your computer would lock up. Search engines would bring up the wildest results. It was basically free and open and mostly unregulated, until Metallica attacked P2P (Napster) sharing and that’s about the time it started to fall apart and the glory days ended.
The Internet was 95% shit posting.
Look at the Japanese web, they’ve not really moved on from the early 90s.
Same as post Y2K, but with more stressed out IT and programming staff.
Y2K didn’t happen, because of massive coordinated efforts to avoid it. Nothing changed as a result of y2k.
The dot com bubble burst and a few years later web2.0 happened. Those events were much bigger.
The Internet was a place.
Compared to now, you had to go somewhere physical to be on the Internet. That changed the relationship that people had with the Internet, you went there to do something rather than have it entertain you when bored. It also meant you weren’t always available to being messaged.
There were also a lot less videos online due to bandwidth. Animation was a far bigger deal since the bandwidth needed to show an animation was significantly less than the bandwidth needed to show even SD video.
That really changed more in 2008+ with the invention of smartphones.
I really need to understand this term, bandwidth. Also latency.
Bandwidth is akin to number of lanes on an interstate, latency is how long it takes each car to go from point A to B (or X, or wherever you’re measuring to).
Technically, bandwidth is the difference between the upper and lower frequencies in a continuous band of frequencies. It is typically measured in unit of hertz (so how “wide” is the signal) - in ye olden days the signal width corresponded to transmission capacity.
While latency is a measure of how long a specified bit of data took to transit a system, especially when compared against the “ideal” performance of the system.
I’m going to use some descriptive metaphors to explain this as best I can. Apologies to my fellow Lemmy nerds for the small inaccuracies this might create, but I think I can get the basic point across in plain language.
Bandwidth is how much data can flow over a rate of time. It is similar to a water pipe—a bigger pipe can flow more water into your home, and a smaller one will flow less. If we’re comparing internet data to water, downloading a file is like filling up a bucket until the bucket is full and it is a complete bucket of water. Bigger files are like bigger buckets—you need more water (data) to fill them.
In the case of streaming a video, the bucket has a hole in the bottom because the playing of the video is the equivalent of the water being used and discarded. The flow of data needs to be faster than the play rate of the video (the drain rate of the hole in this case), otherwise the video will pause because it has not received the next section of data to play that video content (the bucket runs out of water). In the 90’s, we all had really small internet “pipes”, so sending data could not happen very quickly, and thus sending video that could be streamed was very difficult (or in many cases, impossible).
Now let’s talk about latency. Internet is unlike a water pipe in that not any old data will do—it has to be that specific data from that specific server.
In plain language, latency is the amount of time it takes to send a signal from a server to your computer and back.
Your computer has to contact that server and tell it “I need YOU to send me water.” The server has to react to that and start sending you the data, but the server has its own pipes to contend with, and it has other requests from other water users it needs to deliver too. If their pipes are slow, or they have too many requests, then the data will not flow to you quickly. If the data does not flow to you quickly, it will not outrun the play rate of the video, and the video will pause.
I hope that helped you gain a basic understanding of these concepts—I did my best. I welcome any other nerds out there to chime in if I misrepresented anything too much.
That means, if l wish to catch up with the live action of FIFA World Cup on the internet, it needs a high bandwidth and high latency. We watch all our TV channels and movies on Jio airfiber, which is an internet connection. It involves very high bandwidth and latency.
Close. High bandwidth, low latency.
High amount of data able to stream, low time to communicate with the server.
That said, servers are a lot faster than they used to be, and video compression has come a long way too, so you can stream more things on a worse connection than you could in the 90’s.
Video compression would be an interesting area to study.
Well, I guess there was 1 PC for the whole family. Analogue modems would scream as they talked over wires. A lot. If you picked up a phone in the house, you would hear the scream of not just the modem, but the person using the internet to put it down.
A lot of people had their own homepages hosted on Geocities or Angelfire - which were like free-form expressions of your facebook profile. Utterly abusing HTML and GIFs.
And to communicate with your friends, you used IRC, MSN Messenger, ICQ or AIM. All of them, as some friends wouldn’t be on one or the other.
You searched for information using Alta Vista, Web Crawler, Yahoo!, Lycos or Ask Jeeves.
Your email address usually ended in @hotmail.com or @yahoo.com (and regional variations, like .de or .co.uk, etc.), BUT, you also had an email address from your ISP (so aol.com, freeserve.co.uk, free.fr, etc.) were really common.
Listening to music was different. You would search for MP3s (people would ‘rip’ songs from CDs into MP3 format and upload them) using free services like Napster (the OG), then WinMX, Limewire, eDonkey. and you would listen to them using an audio player like WInAmp (on the family PC). MP3 players (like the iPod or Zune) were just starting out I think, so you tended to get MP3s and then burn them to a CD so you could listen to them in your car, or in your portable CD player, or even your HiFi.
Streaming video wasn’t really a thing, as modems are too slow, but, you could download movies (it just took FOREVER) and they would almost always be the worst cam quality you could imagine and compressed as much as possible.
Using Linux/Unix was really a huge pain as most of the modems were actually Winmodems so none of the manufacturers would provide binaries or modules for anything other than Windows, so they were almost always reverse engineered - and it was just a pain.
I could probably ramble on for longer, but this feels like a good place to stop and say “get off my lawn”.
I think most of the filesharing you mentioned was post year 2000. The only thing really around before then that was close to mainstream was Napster. Almost everyone was on dialup so downloading movies was basically not a thing. The dancing baby meme was a very low resolution, 30 seconds long, and would have a taken 10 to 20 minutes to download with a typical 1996 modem
They didn’t run cable to my area back then, so we tried to watch South Park via the Internet. If we left the computer running overnight, and nobody called on the telephone during those 10 hours, there weren’t any other connection issues, or too much traffic, and the file wasn’t mislabeled, there’d be one new episode waiting for us in the morning.
Not to be bitpicky, but all of the above except IRC (and all the UNIX commentary) existed about two or three years after the WWW came into existence.
You are talking about a very short period of time, two three years at most, before the year 2000.
That said, your description of that time is spot on. This is the beginning of the so-called golden age.
I feel ya’ 🥲
I’m glad that the boring old Internet survives and people are still actively making FOSS products without all of the awful innovations that have enshittified the Internet experience.
i still have an email from my isp. so retro!
“This page is designed for 800x600 monitors, sign my guestbook.”
“Join the webring”
Instead of like a handful of big corporate run websites, everyone had a personal one. Businesses didn’t just make a Facebook page; they had their own .com domain. You could very easily find stuff that you would only be able to find on the dark web now; though this is sometimes a good thing, like when it comes to accidentally coming across CP. Not very likely today as it was back in the Wild West of the 'net.
Biggest change was there use to be more internet than web.
What does this mean ?
People used other protocols to communicate on the internet (FTP, Gopher, Usenet, telnet, etc…). The web (http) came later, and grew pretty slowly in the beginning, though some were smart enough to see where the web was headed and started domain squatting from get go.
FTP was in its heyday for obtaining files. Usenet was the place to be for grouped content.
Old Gopher information services were mostly dead by '99 but there were still a few holdouts.
E-mail in actual mail clients reigned supreme.
Also, depending of what you think of as “web” these days, most old web stuff was basically just nice-looking text with graphics thrown in and maybe a little JavaScript here and there, not full blown interactive experiences and applications like we have now.
I remember Gmail being revolutionary for being able to load new content without reloading the whole page. Also a lot of people thought it was fake because 1gb of storage was a ridiculous amount - hot mail offered lined 5mb total or something at the time. And that was a few years after 2000
The world wide web isn’t the same thing as the internet. The internet is a network of computer networks, allowing your home network to INTERcommunicate (pls be a word so I don’t look stupid) with your ISP’s NETwork and in turn a globally interconnected network of computers. The world wide web is specifically a type of thing communicated over the internet. Don’t 100% remember what counts as a webpage but I’m going to guess the wikipedia url and if I got it right then I’ll have saved you looking it up yourself. IIRC it’s just meant to be human-readable HyperTextMarkupLanguage (HTML) pages that you can view in your browser without having to download a file to your computer. Downloading a file is something you might do on an FileTransportProtocol website (ftp.example.com vs www.example.com).
The thing is, after everything I’ve said, it basically doesn’t matter because in case you haven’t noticed, lots of, if not most, websites omit the www. subdomain from their url. The reason for this is just because almost everyone who used the internet only cares about the web. Only very specific domains and users will communicate using an ftp, imap, git, etc subdomain. Not to say these types of sites and protocols aren’t widely used, just that for eg imap, you’re much more likely to go to a website like gmail.com, outlook.com, proton.me, etc (all of which are websites but ommit the www.) and then you will access the imap part of those sites via the website.
The only part of this comment that I’m reasonably confident I didn’t get wrong is how little the difference between internet and web matters today, because almost every single time I went to talk about a non www site, I started writing “website” (instead of domain, site, url etc) and had to delete it to write something else instead.
Did you mean this : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WorldWideWeb ?
Probably a reference to there being more than just HTTP. There was protocols like Gopher and tech like Usenet which were kinda precursors to HTTP and the WWW for information sharing/reading/communicating.
You are visitor number 0000000000000027
P.s. under construction… (animated gif of men at work sign)
The first 25 were the owner checking to see if anyone else had visited.
Slow and full of mystery and wonder.
All the gifs and jpegs were in sepia.
Back then internet servers were getting a bit of flack from environmentalists for the destruction of cuttlefish populations.
But napster kept the masses placated so there was never a revolution.
Oh I remember! And data was transported by animal-drawn vehicles. The stench!
Ahh, yes, I remember hearing the clop clop of the FTP man coming down our road. It was often the highlight of the day! I would go running through house yelling “Mummy! Mummy! The downloads are here!”
We would meet him out front of the house and everyone would hope that he had brought a new photo or shareware demo just for them!
