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.
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.
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!