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Well, certainly dial up. I remember when you could literally visit ever webpage. back in the 90’s I was one of the leading experts in VRML: Virtual Reality Modeling Language. Worked in Silicon Valley and traveled all over the world talking about “rich media” which was the term for audio, animation, vector graphics, movies on the internet, which was so new that advertising agencies (and Yahoo) had to be convinced it was a good thing. Yahoo was one of the big players that fought putting anything up but gif banner ads. See where they are today
I was at a national lab when it appeared. I can honestly say in the short period of time it was coming into being I went on EVERY web site in existence . I believe it was 86 sites then.
All hyper text or just text.
So I have said I once visited every spot on the internet as a bar bet 🙂
It was slow but nevertheless exciting. I can recall when eBay started and was actually more like a big garage sale; I remember paying by check was an option still and the last option you wanted if you were a seller. I remember being told I was insane for making purchases online because surely they would steal my credit card numbers. I remember downloading JPEGS that would take forever to load, gradually appearing on the screen from the top down. I remember Napster and the whole rush of downloading music before it all went wrong. Good times!
1998 I’m working as a librarian in a Mormon neighborhood next to a school. We have unlimited printing. A group of young boys like to come in and print off endless copies of pokemon for themselves. The filter is a not that great and porn is everywhere. It’s one of my professional duties to catch them and remind people they’re not alllowed. Gotta catch em all
I had worked with computers for years before the Internet (note capitalization), and had friends who administered news groups (roughly the equivalent of subreddits today) using something called UUCP (“Unix to Unix Call Processing”) that had existed for years prior to the emergence of the internet.
In 1994-5, colleagues were switching from Windows (3.1 at the time) to IBM’s OS/2 Warp, a competitor, just to get access to IBM’s internet service (Windows did not include dial-up capability at the time). I recognized it as a marketing opportunity and (with friends) started a dial-up Internet service provider using $30K that I invested. By the end of our first year we had over 10,000 subscribers in southwest Michigan, and a few years later sold the company to a regional ISP. We provided Windows and Mac software: dialup, email, and web browser, on a single floppy diskette to subscribers.
At the time, all web sites were developed with the *very limited* access speeds in mind. When we began our ISP, modems were in the 9-18 Kbytes/sec range, a tiny, tiny fraction of today’s speeds. The resulting web sites were not very visually rich or interactive.
Pre-google it was difficult to find what you were looking for. I was a social worker for people with neurological and orthopedic disorders and trying to get information on a condition I was unfamiliar with was hard. At work we had a notebook of handwritten websites that had been helpful to someone else.
AOL and chatting with people in your area or people around the world. Also tying up the phone line and people getting so annoyed they couldn’t reach you.
LOL so much bad stuff. Yahoo chat rooms, meeting up with strangers to hook up (no photos or bio!).
And good stuff… learning HTML, world news, online banking, making personal websites, ordering personal business cards, printing maps, burning CDs, a spreadsheet for everything…
It was such a learning experience and I was a sponge!
Everything taking forever to load, getting disconnected, trying several times to connect. Getting really excited at the lightening fast 56K connection.
The web was still the wild west, everybody was experimitning with geocities, angelfire and tripod. So much information and new stuff to find, one site linking to another, you just found stuff by accident.
Yahoo chat rooms, AOL IM, A/S/L everywhere. Those were fun times
I was working for a tech company at the time. We had high speed fiber optics at the same time we got the “world wide web”, I was about as excited as a kid at Christmas. They let us “browse”, at work, because we needed to learn about the possibilities this could mean for our business. It was awesome. Yes, we still had to do our work and get stuff done, but in our down time or slow times we could browse at will.
That dial up modem sound. It took forever to connect. It was all so slow compared to today. Web pages were so primitive. I taught myself how to write HTML code by looking at the source codes from all different web pages. It was such a wild time.
I started doing web development at work in late 1996. I started making more money than I ever had. Then, with the dot-com bust, it disappeared almost overnight.
The $800 phone bill I submitted to the company I worked for when they told me I could no longer use their 800 area code access number to remote into the office.
CompuServe! Needed an account for work and was the first foray into online communications and forums. Pictures downloaded one line at a time over modem.
Internet via Gopher and email, using my old Tandy Model 102 laptop with 32K RAM, eight lines of 40 character text on a gray LCD screen, with custom pack and 1200 baud modem. Big upgrade from the original 300 baud modem and phone handset adapter cups.
I miss MyDearDiary. I met people from all over the world. It was basically the first social media. You’d write and publish your diary entry, then people could read it and leave comments.
I remember loading a site, going and doing something, then coming back to see if it loaded. If not, repeat process. Gotta love dial up in a small town!!
I grew up with computers when most of my friends didn’t have them at home. We had “internet” as soon as it was available and it only could be used to contact college libraries and military bases, I think. It was for information and you had to be 18. I was about 13. In order to log on, you had to answer 4 questions to prove you were over 18, but they were trivia type questions. So we’d used the encyclopedias to answer them. Then we’d just try to talk with whomever answered on the other end. Until they figured out we were just kids and didn’t actually need anything. Then they’d disconnect. That was the very early 90’s and maybe late 80’s.
When I was in high school, before I left for college, I learned to code. My dad was a programmer. He thought I should work my way through all these coding/programming books he had. I did that. Never unpacked my PC because I didn’t feel like setting it up. When the World Wide Web became a thing, I did set up the PC and modem and the only website I knew to type in was for ButterBall turkeys. So, I typed in the web address and it was recipes. That was in the late 90’s and I just assumed the internet was simply a repository for recipes and whatnot and had zero interest in it.
Eventually, I got a job in an office and heard about Google and had to get someone to show me how to use it and the very first thing I googled was Vespa Scooters. And I haven’t looked back since.
I was a young college kid chatting on the Internet when someone asked for my location, Joliet? Are you at Statesville Prison? Um no I’m a 19 yr old at College of St. Francis.
Clicking to download a 2.3mb video, going outside and changing the oil and filter on my car, then coming back inside to see the file just finishing the download. Then the video was about 3in x 4in and lasted 20 secs.
I was doing freelance graphic design at the time and my client said very casually that I could also add their website address. I said ok no problem but I had no freaking idea what she was talking about lol.
Slow and clunky but one of the best inventions ever. Swamped with porn pop-ups if you typed the wrong thing Like First Ladies or Scat (music) Shack. I had to unplug the computer at the college library for the second one. Learning to Hack computers after my identity was stolen twice while buying stuff.
When I 1st used Lynx, I thought “cool, like networked Hypercard, way better than Gopher or Archie.” When Mosaic came I out I was really psyched, learned HTML, & put up a web site for the MUD I helped admin.
I downloaded Mosaic, it took a long time and I had to be very patient. I performed my first search and the top result was a long and detailed story about fucking goats (I mean literally fucking goats). I cannot remember what my search term was.
Early 90s (just out of high school) it was just BBS’s. Text based interactions, chat room, rudimentary email-like messaging. Websites were mostly black Times New Roman text on grey backgrounds, blue links that turned purple when you visited them.
Late 90s (just out of college) was better, but still mostly text based communication. Websites were GeoCities nightmare pages most of the time with spinning gifs and flash-based interfaces.
Internet persistence was almost unknown. Every interaction required extended setup to access it. That’s why we all have that screeching modem sound forever emblazoned in our brains, along with the tinnitus from badly amplified concerts.
The dial up noise, of course, AOL chat rooms/IM’s, yahooooo… and the fact that my parents didn’t want to subscribe to the internet we always relied on the free trial discs for AOL so we only had the internet intermittently
A few things. Friends and I would actually have conversations like “have you found any cool new websites?” And one of the first that I remember thinking was really cool was that the Sioux Nation made a website.
I couldn’t afford internet service so I signed onto the LA Freenet. It was a free web service and I think it came with an email account (my ID had the number 294, I was a very early adopter!) and a web browser called lynx, which was just following links from page to page. It didn’t really have a search engine.
Links were so important then. If someone had a popular website they would have a section with links to.other websites they liked. That was how you found things and got your website found by other users! And websites had hit counters, counting the number of people who visited.
Pictures loaded really slowly, video was barely worth it because it took forever to load and would be super glitchy. Games had simple graphics for this reason. Usenet was popular because it was all text and I’m not sure it was even part of the world wide web.
Badly composed midi files on every web page, horrible color schemes. mind bending fonts that should have been illegal, and annoying stupid animated gifs.
It was so much better before the corporations took it over. People creating sites and chat groups about their passions. Searching without invisible algorithms guiding you. It was the wild west.
Set up an account with Compuserve and a glacially slow dial-up connection. It took several minutes to open the image of a 4-panel comic strip. After a couple of weeks of slow access to limited content, I gave it up for a couple years.
I’ve always been an avid reader and was so happy to discover Amazon when it only sold books. I still have a baseball cap that they sent as a free gift with an order that has “World’s Biggest Bookstore” embroidered on the front. I stopped shopping on Amazon for a while…when I went back I was shocked to discover it had become the Walmart of the Internet.
The internet yellow pages to find web addresses. Downloading pictures and it would take 20 – 30 minutes. Installing two linked modems and using two phone lines to double my speed. Chat rooms on Yahoo
I remember the web before regional and national chains started putting up their own websites. I remember one day I was looking for information on Trader Joe’s, but they didn’t have a website yet. The only thing I found was someone with a blog who posted about visiting a Trader Joe’s and being impressed by the fancy snacks and imported food items, calling TJ’s a “serious party store”. Once companies started putting up websites, I had fun surfing the web looking up random stuff.
Super slow, you had to know the URL and type it in as there were no search engines at all. People would set up sites and list the URLs in newsgroups. Did I mention suuuuuuper slow, even with a university connection. And that was for text-only sites. It was a very big deal the first time I saw a site with a gray background … EGADS!
One of the first sites I frequented has been preserved here:
That is only the front page and none of the links work. But that was fairly indicative of what the first sites looked like, with line rules being all the rage and no images.
This predates what you’re asking but, my best friend went to Caltech and I visited the computer lab there with him where he showed me something called, “Mosaic.” We dicked around for a while, looking at scientific papers, stuff at CERN, recipes and Grateful Dead set lists and then went outside. I remember saying, “That was cool but I can’t see anybody wasting their time.”
I remember going from dial up to ISDN was incredible! Then I went to Australia in 2001 and couldn’t buy anything online or search for products in stores across town like I could in SF. Much better now though.
As I recall when I started there were different browsers for different parts of the web (web pages versus news groups, etc). I remember spending a lot of time in the alt. newsgroups. I also remember using ICQ which spun out of some Yahoo chat groups. Before that Prodigy (useless) and AOL (almost useless).
I’d been on the Internet for as long time already, but the world-wide-web was a more recent development, so it was 1994 that I first used one of the earliest world-wide-web browsers. It was text based, on a UNIX system.
Later, when Netscape Navigator hit (graphics!), I got totally into it in my spare time, making geocities pages like everyone else, etc
Geocities was mostly for amateurs and enthusiasts, so you expected visitors to be using dial up modems, not institutional connections, so we would optimize the hell out of graphics, using careful palette and bit depth reduction etc, squeezing them down into just a few kilobytes
By 1996 I had been using the a unix shell account from the university I attended for many years to send email, download shareware from FTP servers, read usenet (similar to Reddit), connected to remote severs (anyone remember ISCA? Also very similar to Reddit), and chatted with friends at other schools using the unix “talk” command. There was a command to see who was connected to the remote server then it was possible to send them a talk request which was basically a real time text session.
This was all 100% without a web browser. From my perspective the “WWW” the media was starting to get excited about around 1995 was only a small subset of the internet. Eventually I downloaded Netscape and figured out how to setup a SLIP connection to the university. The SLIP connection allowed my PC to connect directly to the Internet and run client software like netscape rather than emulating a unix terminal and connecting to a remote host server. Netscape was painfully slow and there wasn’t any meaningful content… maybe a fee news sites. It was very “meh” compared to what I was already doing on the internet. For a long time I only used a web browser when I was in a university computer lab with a direct connection.
After graduating and upgrading my computer (between 97 and 99) I used a combination unix shell from a private service and web browser. Around 2000 I was able get cable internet and my modern web browsing experience started.
Honestly, as a lifelong nerd I was so happy! Computers have always been my thing and the net just opened up the world to me.
Unfortunately, we had AOL and it was long distance. My asshole father racked up a $300 ($700 in our time) phone bill and various other charges so that ended quickly.
Years down the road I was banned from using computers because I knew how to use them better than my parents 🤣
We used Prodigy to get to the internet though we didn’t get on it much. This would have been back from 92 to around 94, I think. I’m not sure how much was Prodigy and how much was internet. I know you just had to know the IP Address for some of the sites to get to them. I remember we played Quake or maybe Doom online through Prodigy. After that, we had Netscape Navigator and it was much easier to find what you needed. We started chatting in a chatroom at The Park which was the first social network I had ever been a part of. It was pretty cool because I was at home raising the kids so it finally gave me some adult interactions. It would be in 97, that we would all have our first meet-up in real life. Some of them we (my husband and I) are still friends with today.
In the early eighties CompuServe Pacific cost $40 per hour, so I became a master of rapidly signing on, downloading headers, selecting and downloading bodies in Usenet. Still cost too much, but I loved it.
Dialing into my university library, hitting Ctrl-Z to get a shell prompt, then running a SLIP server to connect to the internet from home with Trumpet Winsock.
I felt rather intimidated by learning how to use a computer. But after watching my three year old nephew become proficient when he was barely able to read, I realized how silly I was being and just dove in.
The other thing I remember is how l o n g it took pages to load. I used to go put in a load of laundry and then come back and check. That, and the dial-up sound, and “You’ve got mail!” when we had AOL.
We had two computers with access at work. Played around on them before shift, don’t recall finding anything great at the time. Got dialup access at home at some point and by then content was better.
When the first rover landed on Mars my TV was on the fritz, so I only had the Internet to get the first images. It took about 5 minutes to download each picture but it was exciting and mind blowing that I could actually do it.
Not knowing exactly what to do with it. The OG web didn’t have search engines. They literally sold internet yellow pages. It took the non-curated web outside of AOL a little while to become useful to the regular public.
I was on Prodigy. I met amazing people. I had cyber with them in PMs (IM’s of the day). I fell in love, my heart got broke. I found the person I fell in love with a few years ago and discovered, I GOT FUCKING LUCKY to get out when I did.
If someone sent me a photo, I would go to the bathroom, throw in some laundry, make myself a sandwich and eat it, then go back to my computer to see if it had finished uploading yet.
The early internet was a lot more in your face than it is now. I remember going into Usenet forums, introducing myself and blah blah blah about why I’m interested in said topic and the first response or two was always fuck off. You needed to know your shit or you got called out on it.
Tbh the sound of the dialup modem connecting is burned into my brain.
Netscape Navigator was the best browser back then. We made fun of IE because it always crashed.
I remember when if you saw a European person online, you knew they were rich because they still had to pay for every minute on the phone bill. It used to be that way here too but we couldn’t afford the internet until later when it was like $20 a month flat rate, no matter how much you used it.
Everyone had a personal webpage on a free website like Angelfire or Geocities (often not so affectionately called Geoshitties). This is where we put all our stupid crap before MySpace became a thing.
So. Many. Search. Engines. To the point where they started making stuff like Metacrawler to search through all the other search engines.
Chat rooms everywhere. Later on, some of them had the option to write your test in funky colors and fonts.
IRC.
Neopets.
I remember having to buffer for 30 minutes to watch a 3 minute video on YouTube.
Mostly what I remember is that everything wasn’t all full of ads yet. Except for the stupid personal webpages.
I had dialup access from a local college (didn’t have to attend, they changed a one time $5 setup fee), which I mostly used for Usenet access. I remember one evening, circa 1998, when I realized I was perusing the collection of a university library halfway around the globe in Australia. I was dumbfounded for a moment.
Going into a college class in 1994 (I went back to school in my late 30s) and announcing that, “I got on the internet last night and it was all sex and Star Trek”
Found out later I’d been on IRC.
Got a Windows desktop circa 1996 and was thrilled to finally have graphics!
The fact that color displayed differently on different operating systems. There was the web safe color pallete that, as a web designer, was very limiting.
Dialup at 12K (is that right? feels right; first widely available speed) OMG.
Starting out with Mosaic (came on a floppy), then trying to download Netscape. File size was 4K. It would take a couple of hours and then time out. I think I had to try four times to actually get it. It had color!
One thing I miss and missed out on capitalising off of was how easily I grew with internet and computer programming at its core. We were poor but instead of Xmas one year our family shared a commodore vic 20. We played those text games together. A pirate one? A vampire one. But also it came with basic programming lessons and I must have devoured that science like I would masturbation a few years later during puberty. Until some tragedies in high school I was glued to all things computer tech. I miss being able to navigate the new and unfurling world that is so terrible and mundane these days.
I remember AOL! I have friends from there I have never met for the last twenty plus years and I may never meet them but we are still friends! I met my wife online in a yahoo chat room! I remember punters! Where somebody could type something and it would kick you and only you offline!I miss those days except the noise the internet made when it was trying to connect!
Early, early on there were just college students and tech companies on the web before it was commercialized. And Ragu Spaghetti Sauce. I’m guessing one of their IT guys was ahead of the curve.
A study of toaster fires with Strawberry pop tarts.
A house of college students agreed to blog life in their house without reading their housemates blogs. This was long before reality TV.
There was also a site called “gay or eurotrash” and it would have pictures of 6 people taken on the streets of nyc I believe and you had to guess if they were gay or European.
Then rotten.com was out there and I always regretted visiting it every single time.
Everything was new and exciting back then. People had conversations like they would face to face and were engaging. We didn’t hide behind anonymity because we didn’t know any better and we acted civil towards each other. It was an amazing time.
Vendors would send tons of porn via email. It was so normal to email it. Then getting viruses from the links. I just remember one guy would email porn all day to my work laptop. I guess it was before workplaces had blockers.
You had to dial up a local university and have an account and a password to get on. It was all text-based in MS DOS. There was no “web,” no browsers. The main draw was Usenet. You could read and post on newsgroups and talk to people around the world. It was pretty fascinating for the time. By 1992 I got the latest blazing fast 14,400 baud modem.
Eventually people figured out that you could post games and eventually movies on newsgroups. This was the mid to late 90s. You often had to download a hundred or more separate 1.44 mb parts of a zip file and reconstitute them with WinZip. It would take days to get one game or a movie.
Then Napster came along around 1999, with Kazaa and other peer to peer networks to follow.
By 1994 or so everyone was using browsers. It was archaic by today’s standards but pretty amazing. Sometimes you’d wait the better part of a minute for a webpage to load and display.
We take for granted today that webpages and YouTube videos load instantaneously. Back then everything took quite a lot of patience.
1992, I discovered list-servs while working on my college campus. I was sharing recipes with people across the country, talking about books and my favorite bands. It’s very normal to interact with strangers online now, but it was exhilarating to me at the time. Checking my email was like opening a gift every day.
First email received at work (psych hospital) in January of 1994. Big old monitor black screen, orange letters. One of our doctors was in Bosnia (doctors without borders) and emailed that a chicken had come into his bedroom that morning. We stared at the screen the same way we watched the moon landing.
In ’86 and ’87, we had CompuServe and GEnie and stuff like that. It was like a really scaled down internet.
In ’89 I worked for the World Bank and while we didn’t have the WWW, we had BITNET, which allowed me to send messages and have chats with people all over the world and that was pretty freaking cool.
And then in ’91, I remember using the prequel to WWW: Gopher. It’s like the DOS version of web browsing.
And then in ’94 Mosaic hit the scene.
In ’98 I helped open the first and second internet cafes in Playa del Carmen, Mexico.
Was consulting at Kodak in ‘91 and that was my first exposure to Usenet. Signed up with an Internet provider in ‘93 or ‘94. Remember i was customer #00017. Wrote my first corporate web site in ‘96. HTML using the hotdog editor. Now writing web apps with .net core MVC/javascript/etc.
Gopher. I’d connect to university libraries in countries like India and Bangladesh, peruse their card catalogs and reserve books. Just did it cause I could.
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AOL
How angry people got that you were on the phone “forever,” and they couldn’t get through, i.e., dialup!
Embarrassing myself by not knowing what a browsing history was.
Well, certainly dial up. I remember when you could literally visit ever webpage. back in the 90’s I was one of the leading experts in VRML: Virtual Reality Modeling Language. Worked in Silicon Valley and traveled all over the world talking about “rich media” which was the term for audio, animation, vector graphics, movies on the internet, which was so new that advertising agencies (and Yahoo) had to be convinced it was a good thing. Yahoo was one of the big players that fought putting anything up but gif banner ads. See where they are today
I was at a national lab when it appeared. I can honestly say in the short period of time it was coming into being I went on EVERY web site in existence . I believe it was 86 sites then.
All hyper text or just text.
So I have said I once visited every spot on the internet as a bar bet 🙂
It was slow but nevertheless exciting. I can recall when eBay started and was actually more like a big garage sale; I remember paying by check was an option still and the last option you wanted if you were a seller. I remember being told I was insane for making purchases online because surely they would steal my credit card numbers. I remember downloading JPEGS that would take forever to load, gradually appearing on the screen from the top down. I remember Napster and the whole rush of downloading music before it all went wrong. Good times!
1998 I’m working as a librarian in a Mormon neighborhood next to a school. We have unlimited printing. A group of young boys like to come in and print off endless copies of pokemon for themselves. The filter is a not that great and porn is everywhere. It’s one of my professional duties to catch them and remind people they’re not alllowed. Gotta catch em all
We had great celebrity gossip 😆
I had worked with computers for years before the Internet (note capitalization), and had friends who administered news groups (roughly the equivalent of subreddits today) using something called UUCP (“Unix to Unix Call Processing”) that had existed for years prior to the emergence of the internet.
In 1994-5, colleagues were switching from Windows (3.1 at the time) to IBM’s OS/2 Warp, a competitor, just to get access to IBM’s internet service (Windows did not include dial-up capability at the time). I recognized it as a marketing opportunity and (with friends) started a dial-up Internet service provider using $30K that I invested. By the end of our first year we had over 10,000 subscribers in southwest Michigan, and a few years later sold the company to a regional ISP. We provided Windows and Mac software: dialup, email, and web browser, on a single floppy diskette to subscribers.
At the time, all web sites were developed with the *very limited* access speeds in mind. When we began our ISP, modems were in the 9-18 Kbytes/sec range, a tiny, tiny fraction of today’s speeds. The resulting web sites were not very visually rich or interactive.
“You’ve got mail”
Pre-google it was difficult to find what you were looking for. I was a social worker for people with neurological and orthopedic disorders and trying to get information on a condition I was unfamiliar with was hard. At work we had a notebook of handwritten websites that had been helpful to someone else.
AOL and chatting with people in your area or people around the world. Also tying up the phone line and people getting so annoyed they couldn’t reach you.
LOL so much bad stuff. Yahoo chat rooms, meeting up with strangers to hook up (no photos or bio!).
And good stuff… learning HTML, world news, online banking, making personal websites, ordering personal business cards, printing maps, burning CDs, a spreadsheet for everything…
It was such a learning experience and I was a sponge!
My cousins stocked up on AOL discs and had free Internet for a long ass time.
Search engines like Lycos and a few others. Then AskJeeves. Google was a game changer when it came along, suddenly I had the world at my keyboard.
Truth in SEARCH. Without bias or sponsorship. Alta Vista, I worked at DEC who created Alta Vista.
Everything taking forever to load, getting disconnected, trying several times to connect. Getting really excited at the lightening fast 56K connection.
The web was still the wild west, everybody was experimitning with geocities, angelfire and tripod. So much information and new stuff to find, one site linking to another, you just found stuff by accident.
Yahoo chat rooms, AOL IM, A/S/L everywhere. Those were fun times
I was working for a tech company at the time. We had high speed fiber optics at the same time we got the “world wide web”, I was about as excited as a kid at Christmas. They let us “browse”, at work, because we needed to learn about the possibilities this could mean for our business. It was awesome. Yes, we still had to do our work and get stuff done, but in our down time or slow times we could browse at will.
Yahoo Chat. Books & Literature Room. We were a deranged, subversive lot.
Geocities.
It was weird when everything (tv, radio, print ads) starting getting a WWW.
I remember someone asking “whats all this www stuff“?
That dial up modem sound. It took forever to connect. It was all so slow compared to today. Web pages were so primitive. I taught myself how to write HTML code by looking at the source codes from all different web pages. It was such a wild time.
Usenet
I started doing web development at work in late 1996. I started making more money than I ever had. Then, with the dot-com bust, it disappeared almost overnight.
The $800 phone bill I submitted to the company I worked for when they told me I could no longer use their 800 area code access number to remote into the office.
CompuServe! Needed an account for work and was the first foray into online communications and forums. Pictures downloaded one line at a time over modem.
300 years to go on the download.
I called Rush Limbaugh a pumpkin head on a conservative board and they went nuts. Simpler times
I had an “Internet Yellow Pages” book that listed every website. It was maybe 30 pages long.
Signing on. Walking away to fold laundry while I waited for AOL to connect.
Reee-aaaaaaahhhhhhhhhh-reeeeeeeee eyaaaaawww.
My dogs jumping up when they heard ” Goodbye!”
“This page is under construction” (surrounded by little construction cones)
“Frames or No Frames?”
“This page is best viewed in Internet Explorer 3.0”
And, of course, the hit counter. “This page has been viewed 0000327 times since January 13, 1997”
Modem sounds
Internet via Gopher and email, using my old Tandy Model 102 laptop with 32K RAM, eight lines of 40 character text on a gray LCD screen, with custom pack and 1200 baud modem. Big upgrade from the original 300 baud modem and phone handset adapter cups.
Good times. s l o w. But good.
You were done before the picture loaded.
I miss MyDearDiary. I met people from all over the world. It was basically the first social media. You’d write and publish your diary entry, then people could read it and leave comments.
I remember loading a site, going and doing something, then coming back to see if it loaded. If not, repeat process. Gotta love dial up in a small town!!
getting into trouble usually lol. boy was I happy when they did a way with dial up!
Mostly the sounds of the modem
oh yeah! and fanfiction!
my biggest to read was star wars and harry potter fanfiction. no friends, severely isolated and abused. well that was my saving grace.
I grew up with computers when most of my friends didn’t have them at home. We had “internet” as soon as it was available and it only could be used to contact college libraries and military bases, I think. It was for information and you had to be 18. I was about 13. In order to log on, you had to answer 4 questions to prove you were over 18, but they were trivia type questions. So we’d used the encyclopedias to answer them. Then we’d just try to talk with whomever answered on the other end. Until they figured out we were just kids and didn’t actually need anything. Then they’d disconnect. That was the very early 90’s and maybe late 80’s.
When I was in high school, before I left for college, I learned to code. My dad was a programmer. He thought I should work my way through all these coding/programming books he had. I did that. Never unpacked my PC because I didn’t feel like setting it up. When the World Wide Web became a thing, I did set up the PC and modem and the only website I knew to type in was for ButterBall turkeys. So, I typed in the web address and it was recipes. That was in the late 90’s and I just assumed the internet was simply a repository for recipes and whatnot and had zero interest in it.
Eventually, I got a job in an office and heard about Google and had to get someone to show me how to use it and the very first thing I googled was Vespa Scooters. And I haven’t looked back since.
The lovely song the modem would sing every time you dialed up.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Dial_up_modem_noises.ogg
That’s right dialed.
AOL floppy discs
Freecell.
In the 80s. When the Internet first started, advertising was highly discouraged. Unfortunately, it didn’t last long enough.
Wow. Two similar posts by two different people in less than 30 minutes. Y’all really need to coordinate your questions better.
And get off my lawn.
I was a young college kid chatting on the Internet when someone asked for my location, Joliet? Are you at Statesville Prison? Um no I’m a 19 yr old at College of St. Francis.
Clicking to download a 2.3mb video, going outside and changing the oil and filter on my car, then coming back inside to see the file just finishing the download. Then the video was about 3in x 4in and lasted 20 secs.
I was doing freelance graphic design at the time and my client said very casually that I could also add their website address. I said ok no problem but I had no freaking idea what she was talking about lol.
https://originalhampster.ytmnd.com/
It was fun. Now it’s one hideous shitshow.
“Oh-wee-ooh, nap, nap, nap… I’m sorry the number you are dialing is no longer in service”
Slow and clunky but one of the best inventions ever. Swamped with porn pop-ups if you typed the wrong thing Like First Ladies or Scat (music) Shack. I had to unplug the computer at the college library for the second one. Learning to Hack computers after my identity was stolen twice while buying stuff.
When I 1st used Lynx, I thought “cool, like networked Hypercard, way better than Gopher or Archie.” When Mosaic came I out I was really psyched, learned HTML, & put up a web site for the MUD I helped admin.
I downloaded Mosaic, it took a long time and I had to be very patient. I performed my first search and the top result was a long and detailed story about fucking goats (I mean literally fucking goats). I cannot remember what my search term was.
Early 90s (just out of high school) it was just BBS’s. Text based interactions, chat room, rudimentary email-like messaging. Websites were mostly black Times New Roman text on grey backgrounds, blue links that turned purple when you visited them.
Late 90s (just out of college) was better, but still mostly text based communication. Websites were GeoCities nightmare pages most of the time with spinning gifs and flash-based interfaces.
Downloading 10 min per MB being about as fast as you could. 8MB of Ram costing 40 dollars! Usenet, FTP, and multiple 3.5 disks for early games.
Internet persistence was almost unknown. Every interaction required extended setup to access it. That’s why we all have that screeching modem sound forever emblazoned in our brains, along with the tinnitus from badly amplified concerts.
The dial up noise, of course, AOL chat rooms/IM’s, yahooooo… and the fact that my parents didn’t want to subscribe to the internet we always relied on the free trial discs for AOL so we only had the internet intermittently
Hamster dance !
A few things. Friends and I would actually have conversations like “have you found any cool new websites?” And one of the first that I remember thinking was really cool was that the Sioux Nation made a website.
I couldn’t afford internet service so I signed onto the LA Freenet. It was a free web service and I think it came with an email account (my ID had the number 294, I was a very early adopter!) and a web browser called lynx, which was just following links from page to page. It didn’t really have a search engine.
Links were so important then. If someone had a popular website they would have a section with links to.other websites they liked. That was how you found things and got your website found by other users! And websites had hit counters, counting the number of people who visited.
Pictures loaded really slowly, video was barely worth it because it took forever to load and would be super glitchy. Games had simple graphics for this reason. Usenet was popular because it was all text and I’m not sure it was even part of the world wide web.
Badly composed midi files on every web page, horrible color schemes. mind bending fonts that should have been illegal, and annoying stupid animated gifs.
AOL Chatrooms were so much fun
It was so much better before the corporations took it over. People creating sites and chat groups about their passions. Searching without invisible algorithms guiding you. It was the wild west.
Set up an account with Compuserve and a glacially slow dial-up connection. It took several minutes to open the image of a 4-panel comic strip. After a couple of weeks of slow access to limited content, I gave it up for a couple years.
The how to tell if your cow has mad cow disease website, preserved here:
https://youtu.be/S6ag1bIabg0?si=UrWmFZ9y1CXtyR9c
I’ve always been an avid reader and was so happy to discover Amazon when it only sold books. I still have a baseball cap that they sent as a free gift with an order that has “World’s Biggest Bookstore” embroidered on the front. I stopped shopping on Amazon for a while…when I went back I was shocked to discover it had become the Walmart of the Internet.
The internet was actually MORE useful back then than it is now. Today everything is a paid and gated garden.
The internet yellow pages to find web addresses. Downloading pictures and it would take 20 – 30 minutes. Installing two linked modems and using two phone lines to double my speed. Chat rooms on Yahoo
Germans are kinky as fuck
AOL chat rooms, playing solitaire, paying by the minute and the dial up noise!
It wasn’t graphics, it was just Text. Later when Netscape came out with the first GUI Graphics User Interface, everyone used it for porn.
I remember the web before regional and national chains started putting up their own websites. I remember one day I was looking for information on Trader Joe’s, but they didn’t have a website yet. The only thing I found was someone with a blog who posted about visiting a Trader Joe’s and being impressed by the fancy snacks and imported food items, calling TJ’s a “serious party store”. Once companies started putting up websites, I had fun surfing the web looking up random stuff.
First web browser I used was Mosaic.
Super slow, you had to know the URL and type it in as there were no search engines at all. People would set up sites and list the URLs in newsgroups. Did I mention suuuuuuper slow, even with a university connection. And that was for text-only sites. It was a very big deal the first time I saw a site with a gray background … EGADS!
One of the first sites I frequented has been preserved here:
https://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs/usr/vernon/www/packers.html
That is only the front page and none of the links work. But that was fairly indicative of what the first sites looked like, with line rules being all the rage and no images.
This predates what you’re asking but, my best friend went to Caltech and I visited the computer lab there with him where he showed me something called, “Mosaic.” We dicked around for a while, looking at scientific papers, stuff at CERN, recipes and Grateful Dead set lists and then went outside. I remember saying, “That was cool but I can’t see anybody wasting their time.”
Which, kids, is why I am not rich.
it was slow, and downloads were things you went to sleep when they happened, and check in the AM
the most popular software was the stuff that resumed an interrupted download resumer
Dial up with prodigy 😄
I remember going from dial up to ISDN was incredible! Then I went to Australia in 2001 and couldn’t buy anything online or search for products in stores across town like I could in SF. Much better now though.
As I recall when I started there were different browsers for different parts of the web (web pages versus news groups, etc). I remember spending a lot of time in the alt. newsgroups. I also remember using ICQ which spun out of some Yahoo chat groups. Before that Prodigy (useless) and AOL (almost useless).
I’d been on the Internet for as long time already, but the world-wide-web was a more recent development, so it was 1994 that I first used one of the earliest world-wide-web browsers. It was text based, on a UNIX system.
Later, when Netscape Navigator hit (graphics!), I got totally into it in my spare time, making geocities pages like everyone else, etc
Geocities was mostly for amateurs and enthusiasts, so you expected visitors to be using dial up modems, not institutional connections, so we would optimize the hell out of graphics, using careful palette and bit depth reduction etc, squeezing them down into just a few kilobytes
That there was no streaming services. If anything was animated it was a gif or 8/16 bit.
By 1996 I had been using the a unix shell account from the university I attended for many years to send email, download shareware from FTP servers, read usenet (similar to Reddit), connected to remote severs (anyone remember ISCA? Also very similar to Reddit), and chatted with friends at other schools using the unix “talk” command. There was a command to see who was connected to the remote server then it was possible to send them a talk request which was basically a real time text session.
This was all 100% without a web browser. From my perspective the “WWW” the media was starting to get excited about around 1995 was only a small subset of the internet. Eventually I downloaded Netscape and figured out how to setup a SLIP connection to the university. The SLIP connection allowed my PC to connect directly to the Internet and run client software like netscape rather than emulating a unix terminal and connecting to a remote host server. Netscape was painfully slow and there wasn’t any meaningful content… maybe a fee news sites. It was very “meh” compared to what I was already doing on the internet. For a long time I only used a web browser when I was in a university computer lab with a direct connection.
After graduating and upgrading my computer (between 97 and 99) I used a combination unix shell from a private service and web browser. Around 2000 I was able get cable internet and my modern web browsing experience started.
Honestly, as a lifelong nerd I was so happy! Computers have always been my thing and the net just opened up the world to me.
Unfortunately, we had AOL and it was long distance. My asshole father racked up a $300 ($700 in our time) phone bill and various other charges so that ended quickly.
Years down the road I was banned from using computers because I knew how to use them better than my parents 🤣
We used Prodigy to get to the internet though we didn’t get on it much. This would have been back from 92 to around 94, I think. I’m not sure how much was Prodigy and how much was internet. I know you just had to know the IP Address for some of the sites to get to them. I remember we played Quake or maybe Doom online through Prodigy. After that, we had Netscape Navigator and it was much easier to find what you needed. We started chatting in a chatroom at The Park which was the first social network I had ever been a part of. It was pretty cool because I was at home raising the kids so it finally gave me some adult interactions. It would be in 97, that we would all have our first meet-up in real life. Some of them we (my husband and I) are still friends with today.
Command line Unix, Lynx, Usenet in 1990. The good ol’ days, lol. Then came the web and waiting forever for images to load on dial up.
Netscape Navigator. That one shade of grey for the menu background. Hyperlinks were #0000FF blue.
Hand coding HTML for webpages- tables were fun.
The blink HTML tag.
That one animated gif of the yellow background sign with a stick figure wielding a hammer for “under construction”
Chat, I loved chat. As a shy introvert who hid in the shadows all my life, being able to chat with people allowed my alter ego shine.
Non-GUI messages boards. Text-based internet games.
Boolean searches
All in DOS…dot matrix printing…Veronica and Jughead…selling anything got you flamed…The We’ll…
Lots of chat rooms for all kinds of subjects that were really just for online hookups.
No videos
In the early eighties CompuServe Pacific cost $40 per hour, so I became a master of rapidly signing on, downloading headers, selecting and downloading bodies in Usenet. Still cost too much, but I loved it.
Dialing into my university library, hitting Ctrl-Z to get a shell prompt, then running a SLIP server to connect to the internet from home with Trumpet Winsock.
The length of time it took to do anything
Ssssllllllooooowwwww
I felt rather intimidated by learning how to use a computer. But after watching my three year old nephew become proficient when he was barely able to read, I realized how silly I was being and just dove in.
The other thing I remember is how l o n g it took pages to load. I used to go put in a load of laundry and then come back and check. That, and the dial-up sound, and “You’ve got mail!” when we had AOL.
Waiting an eternity for the web page to refresh or move to the next.
Page after page of text, loading at a snails pace. You could watch the text liad from top to bottom in 3-5 seconds.
Text based, longer page loading times – modems!! Porn wasn’t ruling the day
We had two computers with access at work. Played around on them before shift, don’t recall finding anything great at the time. Got dialup access at home at some point and by then content was better.
So much <BLINK>
When the first rover landed on Mars my TV was on the fritz, so I only had the Internet to get the first images. It took about 5 minutes to download each picture but it was exciting and mind blowing that I could actually do it.
Not knowing exactly what to do with it. The OG web didn’t have search engines. They literally sold internet yellow pages. It took the non-curated web outside of AOL a little while to become useful to the regular public.
Kozmo.com delivered VHS rentals and bodega snacks in NYC
I was on Prodigy. I met amazing people. I had cyber with them in PMs (IM’s of the day). I fell in love, my heart got broke. I found the person I fell in love with a few years ago and discovered, I GOT FUCKING LUCKY to get out when I did.
So, you know. like today really.
Still irl friends with my AOL mom group, though we moved to FB when AOL died. We’re mostly grandparents now!
If someone sent me a photo, I would go to the bathroom, throw in some laundry, make myself a sandwich and eat it, then go back to my computer to see if it had finished uploading yet.
The early internet was a lot more in your face than it is now. I remember going into Usenet forums, introducing myself and blah blah blah about why I’m interested in said topic and the first response or two was always fuck off. You needed to know your shit or you got called out on it.
lots of viruses…..and nobody could fix it. you had to get a new computer
In the summer of’94 other software developers in a Berkeley software company came to me do web searches for them.
Tbh the sound of the dialup modem connecting is burned into my brain.
Netscape Navigator was the best browser back then. We made fun of IE because it always crashed.
I remember when if you saw a European person online, you knew they were rich because they still had to pay for every minute on the phone bill. It used to be that way here too but we couldn’t afford the internet until later when it was like $20 a month flat rate, no matter how much you used it.
Everyone had a personal webpage on a free website like Angelfire or Geocities (often not so affectionately called Geoshitties). This is where we put all our stupid crap before MySpace became a thing.
So. Many. Search. Engines. To the point where they started making stuff like Metacrawler to search through all the other search engines.
Chat rooms everywhere. Later on, some of them had the option to write your test in funky colors and fonts.
IRC.
Neopets.
I remember having to buffer for 30 minutes to watch a 3 minute video on YouTube.
Mostly what I remember is that everything wasn’t all full of ads yet. Except for the stupid personal webpages.
I had dialup access from a local college (didn’t have to attend, they changed a one time $5 setup fee), which I mostly used for Usenet access. I remember one evening, circa 1998, when I realized I was perusing the collection of a university library halfway around the globe in Australia. I was dumbfounded for a moment.
Using netscape
Going into a college class in 1994 (I went back to school in my late 30s) and announcing that, “I got on the internet last night and it was all sex and Star Trek”
Found out later I’d been on IRC.
Got a Windows desktop circa 1996 and was thrilled to finally have graphics!
I remember getting an HTML editor from my local BBS. That was ~1995.
It was slow. Dialup connections took ages. Less porn 🤣
The noise of the dial up.
No online ads or spam back in the early days.
The internet was also populated by smarter people on average, as it took some effort to get online.
My friend found a fake Marcia Brady nude and absolutely lost his shit. He still thinks it was real.
Dialing into an internet access provider (AOL,etc) via land line. It took almost a minute to download a medium size jpeg.
Grabbing a bunch of free AOL disks for that free 30 day trial.
Waiting forever for Mozilla to load.
Kids crashing my computer all the time.
Elf bowling. My kids loved elf bowling.
My son finding a translation site to say the most outrageous things. ( German) “Help! My penis is stuck in the toaster!”
Myspace
thinking “OMG I never have to pay for a long distance call to keep in touch, EVER AGAIN!!!!”
Netscape was all the rage when it came out.
The AOL discs and the modem dial up sound.
The fact that color displayed differently on different operating systems. There was the web safe color pallete that, as a web designer, was very limiting.
The horrible sound of aol dialing up.
Vague
The plethora of strange noises that it made and how it would take forever. I can’t remember now if I got frustrated by the slowness of it all or not…
Business was trying hard to monetize it. DARPA created it ( See Al Gore)
Dialup at 12K (is that right? feels right; first widely available speed) OMG.
Starting out with Mosaic (came on a floppy), then trying to download Netscape. File size was 4K. It would take a couple of hours and then time out. I think I had to try four times to actually get it. It had color!
Kkkkkkkkrrrrrrrr tend tong beep beep oooooooppp ping. YOU’VE GOT MAIL
Lots of waiting for shit to load
“Get off the computer! I need to make a phone call!”
One thing I miss and missed out on capitalising off of was how easily I grew with internet and computer programming at its core. We were poor but instead of Xmas one year our family shared a commodore vic 20. We played those text games together. A pirate one? A vampire one. But also it came with basic programming lessons and I must have devoured that science like I would masturbation a few years later during puberty. Until some tragedies in high school I was glued to all things computer tech. I miss being able to navigate the new and unfurling world that is so terrible and mundane these days.
Goddammit.
I remember AOL! I have friends from there I have never met for the last twenty plus years and I may never meet them but we are still friends! I met my wife online in a yahoo chat room! I remember punters! Where somebody could type something and it would kick you and only you offline!I miss those days except the noise the internet made when it was trying to connect!
The modem sound never forget it!
Every month need to pay for using over the data. Online game was lagging like hell.
Early, early on there were just college students and tech companies on the web before it was commercialized. And Ragu Spaghetti Sauce. I’m guessing one of their IT guys was ahead of the curve.
A study of toaster fires with Strawberry pop tarts.
A house of college students agreed to blog life in their house without reading their housemates blogs. This was long before reality TV.
The MIT coffee pot
Lobstercam
Easter egg hunts on the web
The last page of the internet
Trumpet Winsock
Mosaic
This is basically a Smithsonian piece at this point:
http://blackpeopleloveus.com
There was also a site called “gay or eurotrash” and it would have pictures of 6 people taken on the streets of nyc I believe and you had to guess if they were gay or European.
Then rotten.com was out there and I always regretted visiting it every single time.
It seemed stuff was free or cheap, no ads or people trying to fuck you over. The 90’s were peak USA.
Dial up noises
That damn sound when the dial up connection connected
“You’ve Got Mail”🤩
How fun, and revolutionarily creative it all was.
What I remember most was about how serious the founders were about “net neutrality”, and an aspiration to keep it free and accessible for everyone.
AOL Slingo game with dial-up
I was fling then, and I’d click on a weather map, and go start the coffee pot. I’d usually finish loading when I got back
Screeching dialup and disconnects
First time I touched a connected computer, the first thing I did was go to the Nolimit records website and got super excited to see that Tank lol.
The screeching of the modems.
Everything was new and exciting back then. People had conversations like they would face to face and were engaging. We didn’t hide behind anonymity because we didn’t know any better and we acted civil towards each other. It was an amazing time.
You’ve got mail.
I didn’t have a computer, but bought a Web TV.
Basically it was hooked up to your television and could pretty much do things as far as the Internet.
Vendors would send tons of porn via email. It was so normal to email it. Then getting viruses from the links. I just remember one guy would email porn all day to my work laptop. I guess it was before workplaces had blockers.
How slow is was for pages to load.
Eventually people figured out that you could post games and eventually movies on newsgroups. This was the mid to late 90s. You often had to download a hundred or more separate 1.44 mb parts of a zip file and reconstitute them with WinZip. It would take days to get one game or a movie.
Then Napster came along around 1999, with Kazaa and other peer to peer networks to follow.
By 1994 or so everyone was using browsers. It was archaic by today’s standards but pretty amazing. Sometimes you’d wait the better part of a minute for a webpage to load and display.
We take for granted today that webpages and YouTube videos load instantaneously. Back then everything took quite a lot of patience.
I’d stare at Netscape and think “what’s a company that might have a website?” as I type http://www._______
How slow it was and how often 2Mb file downloads would fail after hours…
The sound when trying to connect
Reading this title got the dial up sound in my head
The dial-up sound.
I remember learning HTML and creating a page on Angelfire.
We had to get that program that alerted you when someone was trying to call because family was complaining they couldn’t get a hold of anyone.
The distinctive color palette, menu styles and font all websites used. The oldest unchanged site is the space jam website and this is evident.
1992, I discovered list-servs while working on my college campus. I was sharing recipes with people across the country, talking about books and my favorite bands. It’s very normal to interact with strangers online now, but it was exhilarating to me at the time. Checking my email was like opening a gift every day.
The noise of the dial-up modem handshake.
“You’ve got mail!” Also, Amazon was just a bookstore. Those were the days.
I was holding out for manual nonelectric typewriters and landline telephones. 🤣
First email received at work (psych hospital) in January of 1994. Big old monitor black screen, orange letters. One of our doctors was in Bosnia (doctors without borders) and emailed that a chicken had come into his bedroom that morning. We stared at the screen the same way we watched the moon landing.
Go to relentless.com
In ’86 and ’87, we had CompuServe and GEnie and stuff like that. It was like a really scaled down internet.
In ’89 I worked for the World Bank and while we didn’t have the WWW, we had BITNET, which allowed me to send messages and have chats with people all over the world and that was pretty freaking cool.
And then in ’91, I remember using the prequel to WWW: Gopher. It’s like the DOS version of web browsing.
And then in ’94 Mosaic hit the scene.
In ’98 I helped open the first and second internet cafes in Playa del Carmen, Mexico.
Was consulting at Kodak in ‘91 and that was my first exposure to Usenet. Signed up with an Internet provider in ‘93 or ‘94. Remember i was customer #00017. Wrote my first corporate web site in ‘96. HTML using the hotdog editor. Now writing web apps with .net core MVC/javascript/etc.
It was wild and free and full of cat pics and friendship and we lost something the day they monetized it.
sings the Hampster Dance song
the dial up sound
How angry the modem got. When you forcefully woke it up from its nap
Gopher. I’d connect to university libraries in countries like India and Bangladesh, peruse their card catalogs and reserve books. Just did it cause I could.