
Ask HN: What was the Internet like before corporations got their hands on it? - varrock
What was the Internet like in its purest form? Was  it mainly information sharing, and if so, how reliable was the information?
======
justanother
1990\. Not very many people had even heard of it. Some of us who'd gotten
tired of wardialing and Telenet/Tymnet might have had friends in local
universities who clued us in with our first hacked accounts, usually accessed
by first dialing into university DECServers or X.25 networks. Overseas links
from NSFNet could be as slow as 128kbit and you were encouraged to curtail
your anonymous FTP use accordingly. Yes you could chat and play MUDs, but you
could also hack so many different things. And admins were often relatively
cool as long as you didn't use their machines as staging points to hack more
things. If you got your hands on an outdial modem or x.25 gateway, you were
sitting pretty sweet (until someone examined the bill and kicked you out). It
really helped to be conversant in not just Unix, but also VMS, IBM VM/CMS, and
maybe even Primenet. When Phrack came out, you immediately read it and removed
it from your mail spool, not just because it was enormous, but because admins
would see it and label you a troublemaker.

We knew what the future was, but it was largely a secret. We learned Unix from
library books and honed skills on hacked accounts, without any ethical issue
because we honestly felt we were preparing ourselves and others for a future
where this kind of thing should be available to everyone.

We just didn't foresee it being wirelessly available at McDonalds, for free.
That part still surprises me.

~~~
mehrdadn
What do you see as the future ~20 years from now?

~~~
justanother
A few years back, I once mused to friends: What happened to the hackers and
revolutionaries, the teenage determination to liberate technology at all cost,
writing cool text-philes along the way? A friend's answer has stuck with me
ever since: "I think that says more about you than the disappearing hackers."
I knew he was right: My attitude has a lot to do with how I handle the present
and future. Indeed, at the smallest conferences (small-town B-Sides, 2600
meetings, even Apple II KansasFest and so forth, definitely not Defcon), I can
still catch a glimpse of that gritty excitement to which I was literally
addicted, night and day. To stay up all night discovering, hacking, and
plotting to use the new knowledge to build a more democratic knowledge-
centered world.

I mention this because so far, the future seems to involve more DRM and
paywalls, less neutrality, more megabytes of poorly-written crappy Javascript.
And if you let that line of thinking get to you, you just feel like tossing
your iPad in the trash and going hiking. At least then, you don't have to read
all those dumb Alex Jones forwards from your crazy aunt.

But it doesn't have to be that way. The re-decentralization movement is slowly
gaining mindshare. What happens in 2040 depends 100% on how we act now. The
great utopian sharing mindspace that we wrote about endlessly in Mondo 2000
(or Computer Lib / Machine Dreams) can still happen if we want.

~~~
bane
When I think of what I wanted the internet to become, HN, Wikipedia, github
and Archive.org spring very heavily to mind.

I think it's easy to lose site of the fact that the "old" internet is still
there, there's just so many new layers of people and layers of things on top
of it that it's hard to remember that you can still setup a /~bane/ website
pretty trivially...lots of other services could still exist but nobody wants
to foot the bill.

I think one of the best representations of the old internet is how the
demoscene operates. Free, volunteer, information rich, a bit quirky and
communal.

------
csours
An indirect answer, by way of analogy:

I chose my house because of the walking trail behind it. One of my neighbors
really loves the walking trail too, but he hates the fact that the city took
it over and made it a public park. He hates the fact that it is improved and
there is parking because now other people use it too (See also Eternal
September).

My neighbor also hates the stores that came in on the edge of the park and
cleared the brush between the park and the roads. Plenty of people drive on
those roads, and visit those stores and never know that the park is there.

I feel like the internet is very similar: The old part is still there, but
most people use the stores, roads, and gathering places next to it instead of
visiting it.

~~~
comboy
I would add that you could meet people on this walking trail who enjoy peace
and nature and who aren't there anymore. Or if they are, they are mixed with
others so you can't just say hi and have a moment together just based on the
fact that you both know this trail.

People used to have personal pages, not just blogs, often trying to share
their knowledge and notes on different topics. I miss that. Plus casual IRC.

~~~
greenyoda
Some people still have personal pages. Here are some that I've run into while
reading HN:

[https://www.gwern.net](https://www.gwern.net)

[https://bellard.org](https://bellard.org)

~~~
njarboe
A search engine for only pages catered by an individual and not a company
would be very cool. The first PageRank patent recently expired[1], so one
could use the early Google methods for setting up such a thing. I thought
early google was great and much better than today's.

~~~
toyg
Say hello to Stephanie Kowalski, spammer-generated bot with a homepage
entirely dedicated to the joys of essential oils.

~~~
ghettoimp
Yes. This is exactly what would happen. It is sad.

~~~
tastroder
I occasionally feel like that already happened.

Looking at quite a few modern social networks, like Instagram, "success" and
engagement on many of these platforms seems to follow many of the same rules
people use for SEO in regular websites. From an outside perspective much of
the difference between many influencer or aggregation accounts and a bot with
nice imagery escapes me. (Although I realize much of that is just me being old
and grumpy and the difference is likely the community around those figures
that I am simply not a part of)

------
tokyodude
This will probably come across as Get Of My Lawn type of comment.

What I remember most about internet pre Facebook in particular and maybe Pre-
smart phones. It was mostly a place for geeks. Geeks wrote blogs or had
personal websites. Non geek stuff was more limited. It felt like a place where
the geeks that were semi socially outcast kind of ran the place.

Today the internet feels like the real world where the popular people in the
real world are the most popular people online. Where all the things that I
felt like I escaped from on the net before I can no longer avoid.

I'm not saying that's bad. I think it's awesome that my non tech friends and
family can connect and or share their lives and thoughts easily where as
before there was a barrier to entry. I'm only pointing out that, at least for
me, it changed. It was a place I liked or felt connected to or something,
maybe like I was "in the know" or I can't put my finger on it. To now where I
have no such feelings.

Maybe it's the same feeling as liking something before it's popular and it
loses that feeling of specialness once everyone else is into it. (which is
probably a bad feeling to begin with)

~~~
philpem
This is how I feel about it too. It's almost like the Eternal September just
kept getting worse.

I remember in my early days online, I was learning electronics design as a
hobby. I posted a rather silly question to sci.electronics (silly in the sense
that even a first-year student would have known the answer). A couple of hours
later, a professor at an Ivy League university and a professional electronics
designer had not only answered the question, but suggested some things I
should learn and brush up on, and some books to do it. All very polite.

These days, it feels like the only answer you're likely to get is "lol git
gud". The questions I come across sound almost like "I'm paying my ISP, I
deserve an answer". The politeness and respect seems to have been lost over
time.

That's not saying it's gone from everywhere -- StackExchange seems to get the
balance right, with people willing to help newcomers to get involved. It's
just that nice places like that are becoming fewer and further between, and I
think that's sad.

~~~
ianai
It was also possible to run your own services much easier. If you wanted a
domain name it or something close to it were unlikely to be squatted. I was
able to setup and run a mail server in a colocation as a high school student.
Not to mention I easily got email names or account names that didn’t suck - Ie
not artificially long or number inclusive. At several points I had email
accounts like jobs@domain.com. Most everything has been thought of or just
squatted by someone looking to make a big buck.

There was also optimism. The internet seemed impenetrable to the concentrating
effects of society - but now we’ve got about 5 companies that run anything
you’re looking to do online or with a computer. Even things like movies or
shows are dominated with dystopian plots. They’ve even killed Star Trek, a
hallmark of scifi eutopias.

------
neltnerb
Individuals hosting servers with whatever functionality they wanted that
people would connect to, substantially spread by word of mouth (like MUDs and
IRC channels) but otherwise difficult to search. People would link to others
they found interesting in "rings" to help visitors find new people to read,
and often online communities were made up of a lot of people who knew each
other in person and wanted a way to communicate from home more easily.

Information you found was generally published or organized by a passionate
individual, for instance if you wanted to know about Star Trek you could find
a star trek website that had factoids assembled manually by a few people. So
you can imagine that the information was probably pretty reliable, delivered
without commercial intent, but the breadth of availability was limited to what
individual people felt like publishing.

In the beginning, I remember borrowing books on the internet from the local
public library which had a CDROM that had basic software like mosaic to browse
the web, and many would provide IP addresses and port numbers for public FTP
servers containing things like freeware games and open source software. I was
about 11, I'm not sure how adults at the time got online but it's probably not
that far different.

Basically, imagine the entire content of the internet being like open source
-- if someone was passionate about something and wanted to share it it was
there. If not, it wasn't. Servers were often located in people's homes, I
remember many times services just not responding because the hosts home
internet was down.

~~~
lucb1e
> Individuals hosting servers with whatever functionality they wanted that
> people would connect to, substantially spread by word of mouth ...
> Information you found was generally published or organized by a passionate
> individual ... delivered without commercial intent ... if someone was
> passionate about something and wanted to share it it was there. ... Servers
> were often located in people's homes

Woa, I'm not old enough to have experienced that period of the internet, but
this perfectly describes what I do. My servers are at home, I have lots of
little tools in a folder that I'm happy for people to use ('connect to'), I
used to run a lot more services but with my email hosted on it that is quite a
security risk (maybe I'll start doing it again on the new system that I'm
setting up, which is much more compartmentalized), my websites do not have ads
and only one has visitor counting (using StatCounter, installed when I was 16
and curious how people used my first site). In the early days, I collected
facts, links, and flash games about BMXing because I thought that sport was
epic. I also shamelessly hacked those games' online highscores, if they had
one, and that's how I ended up where I am today (security consultant) :-)

~~~
topkai22
If you want to see what the tail end of that, where we had the web but content
generation was still largely amateur, a lurkers guide to Babylon 5 is exactly
as I remember

[http://www.midwinter.com/lurk/lurker.html](http://www.midwinter.com/lurk/lurker.html)

------
jslabovitz
ARPAnet, 1982: Late nights on a Heathkit H89 running CP/M, 24x80 green
screen... dialing up at 300 baud to a terminal server, probably across the
Potomac at the Pentagon, typing magic numbers (pre-TCP/IP) to connect over NCP
to unseen computers at MIT. Stallman and others were happy to give out guest
accounts to random teenagers like me, so I spent hours futzing around systems
like the bizarre MIT-ITS (Incompatible Time-sharing System) or the only
slightly less bizarre V6 Unix at mit-ccc. Discovered Usenet news and mailing
lists and FTP archives and dove in headfirst. There was a feeling of rough
travel then, with no paved roads, no centralized maps, few guidelines, but
many kind strangers along the way. It wasn't all tech or sci-fi geekery -- I
was parts of mailing lists as diverse as alternative music (Love-Hounds) and
body piercing.

Proto-WWW, 1993: Happened across O'Reilly & Associates at a network
conference, and joined up with their Global Network Navigator project, the
first commercial web publication (my first gig there was the first ad). Even
so, every last one of us at GNN was passionate and excited about this medium
exploding before our eyes. Everything was new, untried. There was no breaking
things because so little was formed. There was a fluidity of expression (even
within its constraints), a vast potential that was almost tangible, a sense
that the web itself was a creative material to be molded. In this short time
between the web's inception (~1993) and platforms like Geocities (~1995), we
played in the raw muck of the primal web: HTTP + HTML + GIF + you.

~~~
JohnJamesRambo
What do you think of how it has turned out so far?

~~~
jslabovitz
Meh. Not great. (But thanks for asking.)

Sure, there's definite improvements. More people have access, more of the
time, and that's brought in interesting & creative people and projects. (As
well as the obvious opposite.) It's easier to publish graphics, sound, video
-- anything beyond text was difficult before. For a while, discovery was much
improved, although I actually think that's gotten worse lately.

What gets to me the most, though, are three things:

1\. __The loss of interoperability. __When the internet started, there was a
clear, strong value placed on interconnection. First it was through low-level
protocols like NCP or TCP /IP, then through application protocols like FTP,
SMTP/POP/IMAP, Gopher, HTTP. This effort seemed to peak with network APIs
(RESTful or not) and other standards like RSS/Atom. The protocols changed, but
the idea remained: we, the users, should be able to build our own view of the
internet, each according to our needs. This whole trajectory seems to have
been greatly devalued in modern times. I understand that it's due to economics
-- advertising wins over community -- but it's depressing as hell.

2\. __Centralization of services. __We talk about this a lot on Hacker News; I
don 't need to elaborate. But take it from an old net.geezer that it feels
extremely uncomfortable that most people only use a literal handful of sites
-- and more and more people seem to question the idea of independent websites
at all.

3\. __General complexity. __I 've retired from the tech world, in part,
because of the overwhelming complexity of the technology. Maybe this is like
the old days of science, where after a point, one person could not comprehend
the field. But still, it saddens me that there seems less and less space for
simplicity. I run all-static sites (with no Javascript and minimal CSS), not
much different than I did in the mid-1990s -- and for that I'm a radical. I
find that strange.

~~~
JohnJamesRambo
Thank you for your great answer.

I read an HN poster the other day saying they ONLY use news aggregator sites
because they are afraid of venturing on the web now. A little part of me died
inside because the hidden corners of the web where you learn something new are
the best virtue of the internet to me.

------
rocky1138
One thing that hasn't been mentioned in this thread is chat rooms. It was
quite common to enter a chat room with complete strangers and become actual
friends with them. The Internet was truly the first "safe space" where no one
felt they needed to hide the real part of themselves or self-censor. You might
never learn their real name, but you learned the person behind the handle.

I've written about this before: [https://johnrockefeller.net/you-know-what-i-
miss-the-unlimit...](https://johnrockefeller.net/you-know-what-i-miss-the-
unlimited-internet/)

There were quite a few instances where people from chat rooms on Yahoo and
otherwise became real friends separated by distance only, talking on the
telephone nightly.

~~~
tokyodude
Can you explain a different between that and the millions of slack/discord etc
"chat rooms" of today through which I've met people in real life?

~~~
rocky1138
The difference is the mentality of the people going into them. It was a
different time; you'd join one looking for friends and the novelty of the
experience meant that everyone at the same level, exploring this new place
together.

------
Apreche
Look at all the parts of the Internet today that don't make any money. Now
imagine that is the only part there is. Lots of IRC chats, BBSes, newsgroups,
email, MUDs, FTP, fan sites, and sharing of software. Lots and lots of text.
What few images, and later video/audio, there were was very low quality. Try
the wayback machine and you can at least see the old web even though it would
be harder to see the other old parts.

~~~
u801e
You can see at least some of the old parts of usenet via Google Groups.

~~~
dwd
Usenet was awesome back in '89-92.

Best place to find interesting new music and bands. Also miss some of the
funny quirky spots like alt.religion.kibology

~~~
u801e
I didn't get on usenet until 1998 (didn't have internet access before 1995),
but I found it quite informative for the topics I was interested in.
Unfortunately, the groups frequented died out around 2013 when pretty much all
the regulars stopped posting.

------
raydev
I first "logged on" as a teenager in the late 90s. My access was exclusively
at my friend's house, whose dad needed a separate phone line for work-related
internet tasks.

I would say nothing has changed and everything has changed. Community-wise,
you could find a niche and talk about hobbies and interests (Compuserve chat
rooms!) and all that, but all the world's information wasn't indexed yet, so
anyone speaking authoritatively would be infallible since no was able to prove
them wrong or right unless they cracked open an Encyclopedia Britannica. Or
maybe had a CD-ROM and Encarta.

Now, literally everyone is "online" in some form. Instead of turning to one of
the 3 or 5 trusted news sources that report across their home country, they
are now just gathering their info from other users like themselves.

If anything the "corporations" have put us more in touch with each other, and
people tend to trust an individual more than a corporation, which leads to
individuals __and __corporations attempting to game the system.

\----

I gotta say, I like it all better now. I do miss how quaint it all used to
feel. The concept of using the internet was special in itself.

But it was super hard to find communities that weren't centered around sci-fi
or people trying to cyber or people who were obsessed with "computing" in
general. I'm a programmer now but my heart has always been in the arts and
music, and those art-nerd types didn't start "logging on" until the late 00s
imo. Perhaps that's partially due to bandwidth constraints.

~~~
walshemj
Not Always Ivan Pope (who was in the same class as some of the BYA) was
involved in setting up Cyberia and some of the early zines.

------
skilled
Fun!

First and foremost, a lot of IRC. Also, a lot of Counter-Strike & HLTV. RFI
(Remote File Injection -- r57 / c99 anyone? :P) and SQL exploitation in the
wild. Enjoying being a part of actual forum communities with proper moderators
and clearly defined subject matters. DDoS'ing other IRC networks that were
talking shit. Manipulating Google search results for AdSense revenue and
otherwise -- I jumped on this too late, unfortunately. Going to Russian hacker
forums to read up on the latest exploits. Learning Perl and Visual Basic to
build shitty programs and scripts.

Indeed, the word pure feels appropriate. Sure, in my circles a lot of people
were no-lifers (including myself), but I learned a lot and I also got to work
on my English skills over the years. It was crazy to look at my writing when I
started in comparison to 3-4 years later... astonishing, even!

Fond memories...

~~~
ianai
On fun, games have certainly lost somethings along the way. I watched a friend
view some snippets of Overwatch this past week. I was genuinely unimpressed
with how little the graphics have come since quake2/3\. I know other games
look different, but I’m not seeing 20 years of progress. The mechanics of the
game were clearly missing some of the old fun factors too.

~~~
Washuu
Overwatch is not the best example of graphical progress since they optimize
for performance to be able to hit high FPS targets.

~~~
ianai
And that’s a good point. I’d expect better graphics at the same fps. But
graphics hardware seems to be stagnant.

~~~
BoorishBears
I can’t tell if you’re trolling or just have the strongest case of nostalgia
I’ve ever seen.

------
joseph8th
Heh I mostly remember redialing BBSes waiting for the line to open so I could
check for replies, play games, find other BBSes to call. It was all modem-to-
modem and most BBS sysops only had one or 2 lines, with different phone
numbers, so it was hard to connect. Also, as a teen, it was too expensive to
dial long distance so I mostly just dialed into local boards. AmNet was an
animal rights board. Wabbit Hole was my buddy Josh. We'd meet up IRL for beer
(well those old enough had beer) and to trade software on floppies.

My first modem was 300 baud and looked like the one in War Games, with the
rubber cups [1]. Upgraded to 1200 bps, then saved and got a 2400 bps so I
could run my own BBS, called Digital Mind with ASCII art I made of a brain
made of 1s and 0s. Everyone had a handle. I was Quince. Dunno why now.

LOVED IT.

Had a program for my Apple IIgs that dialed random numbers and recorded any
that answered with a modem. Then later I'd dial up and try to get in.

My buddy, The Wabbit, had money and I remember in 1989 or so he started
hosting an email node. I was so jelly I turned green.

Then I graduated HS, decided to major in art, ended up travelling a few years
and missed a few milestones. Made my first HTML site in 1996 and got paid
$1500. Man I thought I was the shit. Then 4 years later I get a gig for a drum
company and encounter PHP for the first time. Whoa. This ain't like Pascal,
baby! Haha.

[1]
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modem](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modem)

~~~
nerflad
Which drum company? I'm an aborted software developer and jazz drummer by
trade.

~~~
joseph8th
Taos Drums (defunct now) made by Native American drummakers from Taos Pueblo.
Beautiful but not traditional.

------
harel
1992 or 93. It was fun, exciting, nothing like anything we've experienced
before on a computer. You surfed the net back then. A lot of centred text and
DIY design aesthetics. Text was king, animated GIFs were used for rotating
skulls and flames, and e-books (text files really) like the Anarchist Cookbook
were the thing to read. IRC was where we talked to each other. Email was
magic. I printed every single email I received during my first year or so.
There was no spam. At a certain point Internet Explorer was actually ok if you
can believe it. But before that Netscape was king. Yahoo was where things
where organised. It was the "index", The Directory. Search engines made the
directory obsolete. Google made search engines obsolete.

During our first session I asked my friend if he thinks anyone will ever make
money off this thing. We both answered with a "naaah" and kept on "surfing".

I think today is better in many ways (and less so in some), but it would take
a lot to impress old me now, while back then it was all just gobsmacking
awesome.

------
kasey_junk
Slow and rare. It’s easy to forget this now with near ubiquitous high speed
access but when you used the internet it was for a _session_. You’d sit down
with an intention and be there for a while because the overhead of connecting
and the loading speeds.

Also when traveling finding a Internet cafe or a hotel with a connection was
an important event because you could check in.

~~~
buboard
"Up all night and you only saw eight women."

------
mondo9000
You had to make it interesting. No twitter/instagram/youtube feed. You had to
dig around for the exiting areas.

One thing lost (maybe I am projecting here) is a sense of optimism... and the
power of the individual (once upon a time L0pht declared they could take down
the Internet in 30 mins) I once thought the information age would have a
profound impact on democratic institutions, but this hasn't really panned out.

Now the new frontier is being conquered by the State, hard censorship in
China, soft censorship in the West (what if my employer reads this? will this
get me banned from youtube / patreon / ...)

------
inDigiNeous
I want to touch on a subject that is not mentioned here so much yet, and that
is online gaming.

Specifically, Quakeworld and games coming after that. I still remember fondly
how small the circles were, especially with Quakeworld. You could play on a
server, and there were not that many, and actually see the same people there
night after night, getting to know them and feel respect when you saw the more
veteran ones entering the server.

And actually talk to those same people in IRC afterwards. Nowadays, there are
so many players everywhere that it's very difficult to have a sense of
connection to the people, as most times you might never see the same players
again or connect with them in any way.

There was just so much more fun stuff happening there, when games were not
nerfed to death and designed for everyone. I mean, nowadays when you play a
online game, it's just so goddamn balanced and researched and overdesigned in
many ways in modern games, and don't me let even start on the loot boxes and
experience and all the crap around the core game logic that is not even
relevant.

Sometimes I miss those days where everything was smaller and not everyone was
on the internet.

~~~
cybwraith
> And actually talk to those same people in IRC afterwards. Nowadays, there
> are so many players everywhere that it's very difficult to have a sense of
> connection to the people, as most times you might never see the same players
> again or connect with them in any way.

Its not just that theres so many players. The big issue there is lack of
server lists and player-run dedicated servers. Matchmaking largely kills that
'close-knit' sense of community where you play with and against the same
rotation of players and get to know them. The only way to accomplish something
similar is to find a community on discord, make a party together, etc. Its far
simpler for everyone already owning and in the game to just click "Bob's great
Quake CTF server" and know they'll be with whoever is normally on that server.

~~~
jungler
The money incentives have changed things too. People stream their gameplay for
cash, and that has led to a rapid professionalization of gaming that wasn't
there in the era of demo recordings and an occasional LAN event. It makes for
more incentives to hide cheating or gatekeep your game sessions behind private
Discords etc.

Since the rise of Minecraft the games themselves have also gradually shifted
towards being long-term platforms for streamer content, vs simply providing a
fixed experience. Free-to-play economics likewise aim towards maximizing total
lifetime value of each user(with a built in expectation of user turnover)
instead of marketing towards the initial purchase.

~~~
jackfraser
> People stream their gameplay for cash

This is still such a very strange thing for me. Truly one of the first things
that has made me (as someone in my mid-30s) feel disconnected from the next
generation.

Why would I want to watch someone else play video games? If I had the time to
do that, why wouldn't I just play the games myself? Where's the joy in it? The
commentary? If I wanted commentary to listen to, wouldn't it make more sense
for it to be about something _real_?

I guess I'll just tie that onion onto my belt and call it a day.

~~~
kls
Same reason people watch sports. Many of the streamers are top of their game
and people watch them to pick up tips and the learn new skill-sets in the
gaming world. I am 44, I don't watch them but my boys do and I get it, where
at first I had the same reaction. Which was basically why would you waist you
time doing that.

------
ArtWomb
There is a really great data dump for this: The USENET Archive of UTZOO Tapes.
7GB of plain text ASCII spanning the decade pre-1991, totaling more than 2M
messages.

[https://ianmilligan.ca/2013/03/06/exploring-the-usenet-
archi...](https://ianmilligan.ca/2013/03/06/exploring-the-usenet-archive-
early-thoughts/)

Similar archives exist for Gopherspace and FTP binary collections. But as far
as I know, there isn't really a great web frontend, indexed and searchable, to
individual documents dated before 1994.

As an example, original mosaic http browser post from Marc Andreessen ;)

"Here is is, World!"

[https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/comp.infosystems.www.u...](https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/comp.infosystems.www.users/Nmb-
TiGzqeI/KIMncl8OIZoJ)

~~~
joseph8th
I love that it was "so lame" and "useless" that Netscape Mosaic didn't have a
print option in v0.9beta for Windows. Because obviously your gonna wanna
print! Ah how times have changed. I don't even own a printer.

~~~
dingaling
I had several lever-arch folders of printed-out websites. Dial-up in the UK
was too expensive to 'look it up again when I need it' so it was committed to
hard-copy. I particularly remember NASA aerospace projects and the script of
Aliens!

Also common was dialling-in to download e-mail and Usenet and then going
offline again to read them and compile responses which were cached until the
next dial-in. Communication was much more async back then.

I never really got into IRC as that required 'wasting phone time', in the UK
we were charged by the minute just like a local phone call. So you made a
plan, connected and went as fast as possible. This was assisted with printed
Web Directory books which had URLs and summaries of the websites' contents!

------
higherpayusa
It was glorious. It really was. It felt like a childhood Christmas or Birthday
every day for months. It was such an exciting time I could hardly sleep. That
was 1997-98 after I broke free from AOL and started using Internet Explorer to
surf the "real" web.

I created my first website in 1998 simply because I had an idea I wanted to
share and it went semi-viral. It wasn't about money or fame or anything else.
10 pages, Front Page 2.0, largest page 3K, $29.95/month hosting. Of course, if
you count the 7K logo graphic (gif) the pages were really 10K!

In my adult life only a few things have given me that same feeling of
unbounded childhood excitement and freedom. Perhaps that's why I can't give up
yet on the "promise" of the web even though corporate control and government
surveillance seem to increasing daily.

------
flomo
I think I started using the Internet in 1990, and I was at the center of
"GopherSpace". Email was the killer app, but otherwise it was only slightly
useful for "information sharing". I recall pulling some US Census data, using
a gateway to the university library catalog mainframe, and downloading
Macintosh System 6 disk images. The entire AP wire was on Usenet too. But
email was the real cool thing, you could communicate with your professors or
friends at other colleges, or even meet people in bars who would give you
their email address. This is when long-distance phone calls were like
$1/minute so it was revolutionary.

Usenet was a slow-moving discussion board consisting mostly of college
students where you could argue about computers or Star Trek or whatever. The
most popular group by far was "alt.sex". Most people posted with their real
names, but when my friend posted with a female name, she quickly acquired a
stalker. (Who was dealt with by being banned from the Internet by his
college's sysadmins.)

By the time Wired magazine was a thing and I wanted to start using the World
Wide Web, Netscape 0.9 had come out and I guess corporations had already
gotten their hands on it.

I still have a printout of "Zen and the Art of the Internet" [0]. Check it out
if you want to get an idea of what using the pre-commercial internet was like.

[0]
[https://www.cs.indiana.edu/docproject/zen/zen-1.0_toc.html](https://www.cs.indiana.edu/docproject/zen/zen-1.0_toc.html)

~~~
josho
Usenet was incredible. For me it was like discovering Hacker News, but not
just on a single topic, on any topic I could imagine. For those that never
used Usenet it was a distributed point to point discussion system. Through
your client you would download any updates of the forums you subscribed, and
uploaded any new posts/replies. The server periodically synchronized with
other servers.

Because of its distributed and assumed trust nature there were no built in
safeguards to combat spam. Over time spam increased, a tolerable amount at
first. But, the problem grew until it killed the utility of the service.

The closest analogy to usenet today is Reddit. Where we've normalized spam
into a tolerable number of advertisements. Where we've traded off distributed
systems to a single corporate control. The distributed nature meant you had
multiple competing clients, corporate control today means you access through
whatever mechanism the company authorizes.

I miss usenet.

~~~
flomo
I miss pre-commercial Usenet too. But I think it was a completely different
feel than HN/Reddit. You could surf the net for a couple hours, engage in a
long-form argument, forget about it and come back a couple days later to
reply. It wasn't like this where I'm replying to your "28 minutes ago" post.

Also the environment was completely different. When people talk about Linus
Torvalds being mean, there were a lot of people back then who had the
mentality "I'm going to flame this moron off the Internet." I like the more
friendly confines of HN.

My take is Usenet was not so much killed by spam, but the lack of moderation.
Eventually the unchecked kooks, flamers, stalkers, and etc made it
uninhabitable.

~~~
saltcured
We had both aspects. Even on Usenet, some groups were so active and internet-
connected that you would see the threaded discussion exploding around you in
the minutes it took to write a reply. Others were more like putting a message
in a bottle and checking back each day to see if a reply was floating back.

In university, I also remember we had informal protocols for upgrading a
conversation from email or newsgroup to more real time via shared systems on
campus. We would use "talk" and "ytalk" to have something more instant than
instant messaging... you would see each letter as the other party typed,
rather than only seeing one chunk of text per enter key. One student group
also used the MOTD on a shared system as a communal bulletin board, hosting
elaborate chats a bit like graffiti tags answering each other.

~~~
jackfraser
I miss ytalk. Back in the day, a friend and I would essentially make our own
RPGs over ytalk - one of us would be the game leader and would describe what
happened like the perfect text adventure (which understands context and makes
reasonable assumptions). Being able to see the other person type in realtime
made it that much more fun.

Simpler joys for a simpler time.

------
lmorchard
If memory serves, the internet before 1993 had an official policy via the NSF
that all but forbid commercial use. No e-commerce, no advertising, etc.

Sure, folks set up trades and conducted private sales via Usenet and whatnot.
I think it was kind of frowned upon in many places, though. But, overall, it's
weird to think that at one point, the whole net was basically non-profit.

I think it was around 1993 that NSF started bringing in commercial network
providers. By 1998, the core pieces of the net had gone private.

~~~
tptacek
It did. There was NSFNet and there was "UUNet". I remember a mid-1990s
Internet-wide netsplit that cut Ripco off from all the .EDU sites.

------
buboard
It would help if you stated your age. The internet was probably most exciting
before and around the 2000s, when there was an actual ton of information and
facebook hadn't come around. A major thing is people did not use their real
identity / names anywhere. It just wasn't a thing before facebook, and you
could really be a dog or talk to a dog. That made everything exciting ,
mysterious and people found it a lot more easy to experiment , i.e. freedom.
After facebook and real identity, the audience and the behaviors changed.
There is distinctive lack of 'free spirits' in the internet that we see today.
There was not an overabundance of information , and the audience was more
technical / academic, so most of the information was OK.

OTOH, the main applications were mostly the same: search, forums, groups,
chat, packaged in different forms and in many small gardens instead of behind
huge walled gardens.

------
makecheck
One thing that fascinated me early on was how the web was equal: <famous-
company>.com had _exactly_ the same lame, gray-with-text-and-slow-images site
as some silly student web site. Or sometimes _worse_ , as students had lots of
time to fiddle around with HTML and Netscape, and companies hadn’t yet amassed
entire organizations devoted to web presence. :) Most sites were also
utilitarian; aside from maybe a logo here or there, they just gave you what
you wanted (since they literally did not have much else).

You really noticed image-loading. Each image gradually rendered into view, and
sites still knew how to use them judiciously. And yet, since we’d never seen
anything quite like it, we patiently waited to load every time. It was too
cool to be a bother.

The most mind-blowing thing was that you didn’t really need to know much to
connect. I didn’t need network numbers or other weird stuff. I could simply
guess a dot-com for something, and there it was! It wasn’t material printed in
a book or mailed to me, it was just there, right when I asked, like a personal
butler. At the time it was astounding.

------
open-source-ux
I don't think there was ever a point where the Internet existed in a "pure"
form. Everyone will have their own recollection of the past, different from
someone else. It's easy to be nostalgic about the past: some things were
better then (industrial scale tracking of users was not a thing), other things
are better now (like video streaming).

\- Search engines: There was more variety in search engines (including
country-specific search engines). Examples: Alta Vista, Lycos, Yahoo, Excite,
meta-search engines like Dogpile.

\- Serendipity: The earlier web felt more serendipitous - free web hosting
sites encouraged people to put up personal sites on any topic that led you
down a rabbit-hole of discovery. You may say: isn't that the case now? Maybe.
It doesn't feel that way - but maybe that's perception rather than reality?

\- Designing web sites: CSS was full of crippling layout limitations in the
early days. But there were also dozens of desktop website builders. They may
have spit out horrible code, but they were far more accessible and usable to
non-technical users compared to the dozens of static site generators loved
only by developers today.

\- Complexity: Developers love complexity, and they simply cannot recognise
it. What's striking today is how ludicrously complicated it is to deploy and
host your site or app on a server. Who would have thought in 2019 that only
WordPress would offer users a simply one-click install on the server.
Meanwhile, developers stuck in their own little command-line bubble, remain
baffled that anyone would struggle to self-host using a docker image or via
cloudron ("What do you mean it's complicated?")

\- How reliable was information in the past? I don't think it was any more or
less reliable in the past. There are reliable sources now that didn't exist in
the early days of the internet (e.g.
[https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/](https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/)). But there
also plenty of unreliable sources.

------
josteink
In one simple word: wonderful.

A lot less useful, a lot less developed, but like the Wild West it was a place
where you got to have fun, experiment, go wild and bend the rules. And unless
you went too far, you would always be welcome back into the saloon once you’ve
paid your penance.

Everyone involved was passionate in what they did.

Right now it looks like a country forever lost.

------
SuperNinKenDo
Harder to navigate, but great fun. Think searching through a record store by
hand, not always knowing what you're looking for. Sometimes you're after that
one album. Sometimes you're carefully parsing liner notes, sometimes you're
just looking at the covers. And this record store gets all kinds of stuff in,
from super mainstream, right through to limited run Split EPs of bands you've
never heard of. And they're all mixed in together, but every record has
instructions on how to find other records you might find interesting.

I just realised this is a terrible metaphor because you're probably too young
to get this metaphor. Actually I'm arguably too young, but I tend to like
physical releases.

------
gabesk
Middle schooler in the mid 90's, sitting in the backseat of the car while
parents drove around town on errands. 2 meter ham radio antenna on the roof,
with a packet radio modem and black and white power book laptop running off
the cigarette lighter jack. The local university had a packet radio - UNIX
gateway with which you got a shell prompt via something akin to telnet. Fond
memories of wireless browing the web over lynx and talking to people on IRC
before anyone I knew had a cellphone.

Also, the special treat of getting to go to the parent's lab from time to time
and using this new fangled Netscape Navigator Beta on a blazing fast Macintosh
II CI with more than 8 bit color! The fish cam was still one of the featured
links on the browser homepage, and browsing NASA's site and being blown away
at being able to see monitor-filling celestial objects in seconds.

------
webreac
When I was student (1990-1993), there was no firewall. My girlfriend was in
another school in Paris (I was in Brest). I used xhtalk to see if she was
logged in and chat with her. I could perform a rlogin on any computer of the
other school. When I was at her school, I could run programs (like xdvi)
remotely by exporting the DISPLAY. The file /etc/passwd contained the hashed
passwords and with a simple dictionnary, you could find passwords in minutes.

At that time, the main tools were newsgroups (for information sharing) and
xarchie (to find ftp mirrors of free programs). I have used also gopher to
find CERT list of vulnerabilities. I have found how to exploit one of them. I
have notified the administrator. A couple of weeks latter, this was not fixed,
I have setup a permanent root backdoor that was still working one year after
my departure.

There were "site" you could connect using telnet. For example igs
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Go_server](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Go_server)).
I remember also a site in australia that was used to find email adress of
people from their name and their approximative location.

Using the ping delay, you could know if your communication was going throw a
satelite or not.

------
AngryData
Back when it was new everyone was telling kids "You know you can't believe
whats on the internet, anyone can say anything!", but you actually could
believe most of shit online at the time, there wasn't enough audience to
attract trolls or vapid popularity contest types. The people online were
people that tended to ignore social and cultural convention, idealists and
progressive thinkers, since the people using the internet were largely still
seen as stereotypical geeks or nerds with a similar assumed social status to
neckbeards or hipsters have today.

However, now that the internet has gotten popular, more people seem to just
assume everything they see is real, which gives advertisers,
trolls,corporations, pranksters, assholes, political propaganda, and crazies
the platforms they need to spew their nonsense and get the feedback and
responses they were looking for, reinforcing views and beliefs in that crazy
shit no matter how obscure or unusual.

------
rb808
It was sparse. Strip away Facebook, Google, all the phone apps, all the
commercial news sites, blogs, you're left with a a few specialist resources.
Now imagine without browsers, just ftp and email (for students, academics and
a few tech companies only). That is about it. It was exciting and new but not
really that useful. Usenet was a bit like Reddit but smaller and text only,
and friendly, but that was the highlight for me.

~~~
neffy
Usenet being "friendly" was not exactly my recollection of alt.politics.*

Whatever happened to Serdar Argic?!

~~~
macintux
Serdar Argic’s successors run a depressing amount of the world today.

------
vnorilo
Some of my teenager memories from the late 90s: suddenly finding communities
sharing my niche interests (fantasy books, korg trinity sequences) that I
never had access to. I also found Julius Smith's DSP book and several lecture
notes from different universities which made a big impact on my career decades
later. The only ads were for web rings, which seems quaint now. At least the
DSP stuff was world class and freely shared.

------
systematical
By the time I started using the internet around 1995 businesses definitely had
a presence. But the web felt far more decentralized, open, and laissez-faire.
It was a movement and like any new movement it just felt so happening. Today,
outside of a random tech blog, it feels like I go to the same sites over and
over again.

In the mid-nineties if you wanted to talk about your favorite band, you'd
cobble together a site in something like tripod, geocities, or even expages.
Then link to other slapdash fan pages. Today you go to a subreddit or setup a
medium blog. Want to chat? Then you'd go onto IRC, ICQ (remember that?) or a
random website running a Java Applet. Today its slack.

Economies of scale always win. We lose something beautiful in the process,
gaining only nostalgia for something we'll never get back.

I actually write about this a bit in a book I'm slowly writing, Wanking in
Hostels,
[https://pastebin.com/u/drifterzero](https://pastebin.com/u/drifterzero)

------
lisper
That depends on what you consider to be "the Internet". Strictly speaking,
"the Internet" is the infrastructure that moves data around using the IP
protocol. But what most people think of as "the Internet" is really the
"world-wide web", i.e. a collection of content served via HTTP and accessed
with a browser.

There was never a "purest form" of the WWW. Corporations had their hand in
that almost from the very beginning. Netscape was founded to make money, and
today's Internet would not exist but for that motivation.

One the other hand, the "purest form" of the Internet still exists today. That
consists of someone writing some code that opens a TCP or UDP socket and
starts sending bytes. That resulted in things like FTP, NNTP (i.e. usenet),
gopher, and even HTTP (for a very short period of time before Netscape came
along). Since then that same motivation and dynamic has produced TOR, bitcoin,
Skype, Signal, and dozens of other applications, most of which languish in
well deserved obscurity. The main difference between today's dynamic and the
pre-netscape dynamic is 1) the net is much, much faster and universally
accessible today and 2) the vast majority of people on the net today are non-
technical, whereas in the good old days the net was populated almost
exclusively by science and engineering academics.

The quality of the information available on the net is both better and worse
today than it was in the early days. Wikipedia is a modern miracle. There has
never been anything like it in the history of human civilization. Before 1990
if you wanted access to the kind of information that you can get on Wikipedia
you had to go to a university library.

One the down side, all that good information is often drowned out by bad
information put out by people who are poorly informed or who have political
agendas. But it's not too hard to build yourself a pretty effective bullshit
detector. That's a useful life skill to have both on-line and IRL.

------
hkt
The purest representation of this I can conceive of is SDF. See: SDF.org

I remember reading the descriptions of user areas on their MUD when I was a
teenager in the 00s and feeling like it was a portal back in time (to the
early 90s, admittedly) when the internet was more about creation and
communication rather than media consumption. It was incredible to feel the
continuity in this beautiful, fragile and very very idealistic but which was
able to be true to those ideals as well.

The area I refer to is still there in the MUD, by the way, it is called
Swanbrook. If you ever play, look behind the altar and you get to read a
message from the area's creator, signed off as Snowbird. That message actually
introduced me to the rolling stones. Not bad for something written thirty
years ago on a very obscure bit of the internet.

------
spiritcat
Everything was always under construction.

~~~
philjohn
And viewed best in either IE 4 or Netscape Navigator.

~~~
M2Ys4U
Which is totally different from today when everything is in beta and best
viewed in Chrome!

------
latchkey
When I got my first email address in college in 1991, I had no idea what to do
with it cause I didn't know anyone else with one.

Ended up finding some lists where you could e-penpal with random people around
the world. Chatted with some people in Australia (I was in Los Angeles), when
their internet was working (the connection would go down or be slow for them
quite a bit).

I ran an internet BBS called 'Dolphin Cove BBS' [1] which had people randomly
chatting about stuff I don't even remember.

I setup a CU-SeeMe server (early video chat room software) and found out from
some other people that it had been used for... oh gawd... porn!, over the
weekend while I was gone.

I remember when it was frowned upon to advertise for business purposes on
places like usenet. I setup a gopher and ftp server and put information about
my school on it. That didn't last long because Mosiac came out not too long
after that.

finger was a big thing to share information and snoop on people.

The green terminals were so slow that you could read the letters as they
formed words on the screen.

There used to be a lot of well maintained FAQ's hosted on usenet. The
information there was quite good and informative. The early days were filled
with the smart people who were focused on building the early internet, so I
think the information was a lot more trusted.

[1]
[http://bio4human.fortunecity.ws/jang/bbs.htm](http://bio4human.fortunecity.ws/jang/bbs.htm)

------
gorpomon
Mid 90's internet user here.

A lot of CD's in the mail from ISP's and AOL, we'd try a new one out
periodically that offered free internet access. For a while we used Juno's
free internet tier. It had a permanent pop-up you couldn't remove from your
desktop, but it was free internet so we kept it for a long time.

There were also weird local ways of getting online. Our small town had a
school supplied ISP type thing. It loaded up a local town bulletin board, and
I don't think you could access other sites. Within a few years it was phased
out.

The content was sparse, but always engaging. Before there were blogs, people
just had sites and the sites had interesting content. As I recall it went far
beyond nerd/sci-fi stuff. I remember finding a site that had images of scans
of things people put up their rectum, it was wild. I remember going to my
local gas station to get a money order to pay for a Japanese Sega Saturn game
I bought on Ebay with a money order. I mailed the money order and got the
game.

Nothing was openly monetized, but ads were ever present, and by the late 90's
pretty hard to avoid. It was hard to imagine the ads would wind up as openly
malevolent as they are now, but I guess young kids don't have that type of
imagination. I'm sure many saw the writing on the wall.

I miss that internet. That internet immediately reminds me of home. It's an
internet that is largely gone, but not because it's destroyed, but because we
moved on. We could all still spin up sites in html/css, but we don't. That's
ok, time changes and folks move on.

------
digitalzombie
Uh... pretty close knit. There were no search engines. There were only
directories with dedication toward search hobby/interesting.

I was pretty big into anime fanfic so anipike was the web directory I went to.
The fan sites via xoom, geocities, tripod, angelfire are linked via web ring.
Web ring is like a circle of website with similar interest and individual
anime website would have a web ring to help find other similar website within
the web ring.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webring](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webring)

The ads weren't bad it was banners and it blinks or slide across like marquee
html tag. The majority of the web ads felt like print paper ads less
scientific like today. Today ads they got metric, funnel, and trying to get
more eyeballs on it, very gamey to get your attention which I believe leads to
addiction and click bait stuff.

The user involvement was less, social aspect seems to be around hobbies. Now a
day you can try to catch up with your friends via facebook, snapchat, etc.. it
seems like everybody is trying to get approval by online friends by having
that awesome picture while traveling and doing stuff.

There was a famous newsletter I follow for my fanfiction too
(rec.arts.anime.creative).

~~~
classichasclass
> no search engines

There was Veronica in the Gopher days. It was always busy, but it was nice
that it came from educational institutions (UNR's is what I used locally). I
don't think anyone at UNR remembers they ran it.

Oh, and Archie.

~~~
jerrysievert
and altavista. OP noted a few things that started around the same time as
altavista. fun was looking yourself up in altavista and being amazed.

webrings were fun, but I really have nostalgia for Archie and MUDs.

------
manicdee
The Internet has never existed in a “pure” form. It has always been
balkanised, with different groups of people mixing with themselves more or
less oblivious to the other groups around them.

Information sharing in “the good old days” was often via Usenet, IRC, BBS or
email. The networks that were important were the people you knew, and
membership of an IRC channel was a privilege not a right. If you stepped out
of line you would be warned and banned. Large groups were still easily
moderated because the peak level of “firehose” traffic was still humanly
consumable. There were career-affecting repercussions from misbehaving in,
say, Scary Devil Monastery. You would lose access to your support base and
have to fend for yourself.

Information was mostly reliable, mostly because the level of expertise was
high, the signal to noise ratio was high, and the chances were if you gave
some advice there would be someone testing your claims and reporting back.

The “denvercoder9” problem was always there of course. Stack Overflow and
Quora have neither invented that problem nor solved it.

Ultimately my rose-coloured nostalgia of the original Internet is that the
level of expertise and interpersonal support was quite high, simply because
non-academic access to the Internet was not easily available.

~~~
jrumbut
The flip side of the level of expertise being high was that the expected level
of expertise was high. If you even found documentation showing how to do stuff
it would often be taken for granted that you knew you had to recompile your
kernel after step 4 and update your PATH and all that.

The ethos at the time was that you had to learn things the hard way, RTFM, and
not spoon feed others who hadn't put in the work.

If there's one thing I'm glad about on the new Internet, it's that there's a
lot more effort given to reader friendly documentation.

All of this is to say, kids these days have it easy!

------
wyck
It was amazing, so much energy and excitement. No one used HTTP, no one was
selling anything. It was mainly about communication over usenet , email, and
irc. Public ISP's didn't exist.

The corporations were not really the first one to monetise and usher in
e-commerce/www, it was porn, this ushered in lots of new tech.

The internet switched from active participation to passive consumption, and
now we have both except now everything is monetised, monitored, and moderated.

It was the wild west.

~~~
turtlecloud
Is it still the Wild West??

~~~
wyck
No, not at all.

~~~
philpem
It's more like Walmart than the Wild West.

------
gooseyard
I was on in the early 90s via my university's 56k frame relay rig. Maybe the
most exciting thing I can ever remember doing was that, because this was way
before dialup TCP/IP, I'd use my 2400 baud modem to dial the university's
modem pool, which was attached to a DECnet terminal server. Since this was a
state university, if you knew the name of any other terminal server on that
DECnet network, you could attach to it and issue commands. We had a few local
BBSs, but the city where the larger state university was located had many more
(I couldn't dial them direct because it was long distance and $$$), but once I
found the name of a terminal server in the other city, I could connect to it,
and if any of the attached modems were not in use, you could send AT commands
to dial out.

The first time I was able to log in to one of the BBSs in the other city by
dialing my local terminal server, hopping over decnet to Morgantown and then
dialing out to a BBS with no long distance charges, I thought I would die of
joy. Closest thing to magic I ever experienced I think, despite how low tech
it sees now.

------
smelendez
I'm not sure if there was ever a purest form or that we'll ever agree on what
it was. Pre-Web? Pre-smartphone?

But smartphones drove a huge push towards centralization. Ten years ago, when
the Internet was mostly on desktops and laptops, you might have a few sites
you regularly visited and would pop open in different browser tabs when you
sat down at your computer. Once smartphones became dominant, people started
spending a lot more time on a handful of big sites and apps: Facebook, Twitter
and friends.

It's harder to build a site that works reasonably well on smartphones than on
desktops, so companies with big IT budgets to develop a nice cross-device UI
suddenly had a huge leg up on attracting visitors and getting them to come
back. It's also harder to type on a phone, which meant people spent less time
searching and typing in memorized URLs and more time scrolling through
newsfeeds.

------
pier25
I connected for the first time in 96 with a 28.8k modem to print lyrics on
paper from my favorite bands. At that time it was usual to go to a friend's
house to go online. A lot of people didn't even have a PC at home (at least in
Spain).

It was like being in a little village in the far west. Very few sources of
information. Not very sophisticated. Everyone saw the potential and was super
optimistic about it. Like all new things it was a very special feeling.

Now it's like being in a huge megalopolis. There's information and people
everywhere, a lot of noise. Civilization is here with its good and bad things.

I'm not sure I preferred it before. Connections were super slow which meant no
Youtube, no Netflix, no online gaming (other than slow Yahoo games), no Wifi,
etc.

------
blihp
In the pre-web world email, FTP (or going back further Kermit), Usenet and for
some IRC was the Internet for most users. For many who weren't directly
connected, things like UUCP (Unix-to-Unix Copy) was used to batch transfer
email and Usenet feeds in the middle of the night. Anonymity was the norm.
Plaintext passwords (telnet/FTP) in transit... when passwords were even
used.[1] Everything was standards-based and mostly text-based. Text based
UIs... even the GUIs on high-end (for the time) desktops were just wrappers
around text. Manually maintained host files in the pre-DNS world. No
advertising.[1] No user tracking. Server logs were considered chaff and
discarded after a couple of months if there were no security/server issues to
investigate. Slow... yet felt more responsive since getting 2k of text only
took a bit over 2k of data transfer rather than the 500k+ it takes on many
pages today with their Javascript/CSS/etc payloads. While primitive, to
someone tech savvy who grew up with tech in the last 10 years it probably
wouldn't feel completely alien... just spartan and antiquated.

[1] It's really hard to convey this but because the community was so much
smaller back then bad behavior could and would get you banned from the few key
service providers, servers available and/or shunned by other users. So if you
wanted to be online you generally behaved semi-decently or you were gone. It
was not uncommon for complete a-holes to be killfile-d by many on Usenet
effectively rendering them invisible. Spamming people's email would get you
filtered (sometimes at the server level) and, again, rendered you invisible.
If none of that worked, complaints would pile up with your service provider
(while you could be anonymous, your provider often wasn't in the form of
mail/Usenet headers) and depending on how bad it was they (often your school
or employer for most) would have no problem terminating your access. The rise
of AOL really marked the beginning of the end of these norms... (see
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September))

------
scanr
Terry Pratchett used to hang around on alt.fan.pratchett. When he came to
South Africa, me and a few other folk from the news group had dinner with him.

~~~
peteri
Judging by his first message
[https://groups.google.com/forum/#!original/alt.fan.pratchett...](https://groups.google.com/forum/#!original/alt.fan.pratchett/bWb4gGA2Tbs/y_ZiKds_-
YQJ) , connectivity was via demon so I'm guessing from the date (Demon
launched on the 1st July 92) he was one the first tenner a month subscribers.
I seem to remember that his cix account had something along the lines of "Yes
I am that Terry Pratchett" in the equivalent to the finger command.

Sadly demon as a brand has been killed by it's current owners
[https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/01/11/vodafone_to_shutter...](https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/01/11/vodafone_to_shutter_demon_internet/)
.

I think I got on the internet properly a year or so later, although I had
access via various means early than that.

------
ForHackernews
Some of the great old sites are still there, for example, The Lurker's Guide
to Babylon 5:
[http://www.midwinter.com/lurk/lurker.html](http://www.midwinter.com/lurk/lurker.html)
(updated since 1994)

------
yodsanklai
I started using internet in 1996 I think. And I remember reading an article at
that time saying that we should enjoy internet now before it becomes full of
ads and taken over by corporations. At that time, I didn't get the point of
the article and couldn't envision what internet would become.

To answer the question, I remember using IRC and newsgroups. I spent nights
trying to find interesting content on the web (mostly personal webpages,
before blogging was a thing). There was no wikipedia, no youtube, search
engines sucked. Besides, there wasn't that much content in my language and I
didn't speak so much English at the time.

I also remember when Youtube started. I naively wondered how personal videos
could ever be interesting!

------
jerkstate
I remember, from the early 90s, reading _all sorts_ of text files, from Phrack
to Cult of the Dead Cow to Anarchists Cookbook to the Jargon File and Hacker
Purity Test type stuff. I remember one "phile" in particular about how to make
a soda machine malfunction and dump its coins by pouring saltwater into the
coin slot, to phreaking and "social engineering" tutorials in phrack, to drug
use and hacking war stories from cDc. Many of these "philes" were indexed on
FTP and Gopher servers, or available from BBS download areas.

Early websites.. I remember reading Dr. Fun which was pretty similar to Far
Side and all online. Church of the Subgenius had some really excellent
subversive humor online, lots of fun as a young subversive teenager to read it
and imagine what the authors were like. I think that just hearing about that
kind of culture was a big escape for me as a teen in a rural area.

Searching was _terrible_ especially in the early days before the web. There
was a tool called Archie to search for filenames on FTP servers, and it took
hours to generate results. Yahoo made it easier to find good resources, Lycos,
Hotbot, and eventually Altavista were rudimentary web search engines that were
pretty low quality. Site admins linked their websites to other like-minded
sites in "webrings" to help find similar content.

I think that the lack of discoverability, fragmentation, and ephemerality
(because hosting space WAS expensive so things DID get deleted) led to a
greater sense of freedom of expression. I remember the old saying "on the
internet nobody knows that you're a dog." (I just looked that up and it's a
New Yorker cartoon from 1993 - very apropos for the time). I feel like that's
the biggest change over the last ~30 years I have been online, the fact that
most popular forums either use your real identity or are barely
pseudononymous, and the understanding that today everything you do online is
tracked, stored forever, and analyzed by multiple government and commercial
entities.

So yeah, it was pretty great when it was like the wild west, but it's a lot
more "useful" today.

------
axaxs
For starters, most people on the internet were science/tech minded, since it
was rather niche. Webrings were a big thing, as a way to attempt to try to
share traffic between similar sites.

As for the websites themselves, it was pure HTML. It generally wasn't pretty,
but loaded as fast as it does now due to the lack of JS and CSS imports, ads,
analytics, etc. One of my favorite sites to browse to this day is reminiscent
of how most pages of that time looked -
[http://www.thekeyboard.org.uk](http://www.thekeyboard.org.uk).

Don't be fooled into thinking it was more innocent, though. But it sure was a
fun time, and felt a lot more wild west, in a good way, than it does today.

------
api
I was there, but barely.

Sites were generally labors of love regardless of accuracy or credibility.
There were cold hard facts and hard science. There was also a substantial
amount of wild theorizing about UFOs, parapolitics, or bigfoot, but almost all
of it was presented in this basically honest way. It was just people putting
up information that interested them.

There were political sites but they were mostly straightforward and honest,
even the extreme ones. If a site or forum was for Nazis or Leninists, it said
so.

Ads and other clutter were more minimal. This was before the dynamic web so
documents were just hypertext except for a few forms and little basic widgets.

A condensed description of the early net would be: uncluttered and mostly
honest.

IMHO three things killed this information (relative) paradise: spam,
gamification, and manipulative propaganda techniques.

These are listed roughly in order.

Spam came first and killed all the open federated systems like usenet, free
blog comments, trackbacks, etc. Anything not gated became deluged by spam.
Email almost died too but in the end was too valuable to abandon, but it was
"saved" largely by being taken over by a small number of providers with the
resources to fight spam. To this day running your own mail server is a big
PITA.

The next blow was gamified social media and the algorithmic timeline. Social
media started to eat the open web quickly, but social media itself was still
mostly neutral until social feeds started to be driven by engagement
maximizing algorithms and popularity started to be gamified. Humans started
getting trained to optimize the content they create for the algorithm, and
since that is optimizing for engagement that means divisive, sensational, or
click bait content wins. The algorithms have basically nudge theory trained us
all to be tabloid copy writers.

Last came firms like Cambridge Analytica and their ilk that view the net as a
way to do con artistry at scale. Now you can't even trust that the content is
real at all or that the "people" posting it are honest or are real people. I
also call this "spam 2.0". Spam 1.0 was the same message blasted everywhere.
Spam 2.0 is spam personalized by AI and content mills.

------
kyriakos
I remember a time when search engines were just link directories. Finding
stuff was hard but at the same time we used to pay more attention and read
through the information, I feel like now attention span is very short.

------
zupatol
Around the year 2000, there still was almost no advertising on the internet. I
remember that a search for "how to meet women" returned a website with lots of
pages/chapters into which someone had obviously poured a lot of earnest
effort. The advice sounded sensible. The only thing I remember is that it
recommended to work on yourself, in particular to develop a sense of
responsibility, and said that getting a dog could give you a first taste of
it.

I think it was actually called "how to meet women", but it's impossible to
find today.

------
rtchau
I first got on the internet in 1996, so it was pretty much all IRC and
personal sites built in Netscape. :-) And a (now conspicuous) lack of
information landfill (the sheer amount of garbage on the internet today
saddens me).

In all seriousness, even though 1996 is not "early" internet, I still look
back on when it still seemed like a frontier. I hope there's another
innovation that gives everyone the same sense of exploration and being on the
bleeding edge - I've no doubt there will be, but I'll be damned if I know what
it is.

~~~
buboard
> but I'll be damned if I know what it is

probably biology, or brain-machine stuff

------
vertline3
I think it was better, but maybe less addicting. Quirky blogs, when you wanted
to know something very often you were linked to a professor's page, more text,
less interaction. Though there still were forums, there was less of the
comment board stuff everywhere. Less emphasis on social. Also there was some
really bad design. HTML was trying to also style things and people would get
really cute with colors and animation effects. It was pretty tacky. I guess
this is after the time when it was academic, but before Facebook.

------
napsterbr
Not exactly related to big corporations getting control over the Internet, but
I remember when I was 12 I would browse all day on underground hacking sites.

These sites had usually a dark theme, the hilarious feature of blocking right
click (usually followed by a JS alert saying something like "Copyright -
create your own content") and several script kiddies tutorial. There even were
some phreaking articles!

It wasn't that long ago, maybe around 2005, same period I started using
computers. I wonder, do websites like these still exist?

------
greyhaireduser
Anyone else remember netcom.com? [1]

When I finished college in 1989 I moved to Silicon Valley and found work. I
sorely missed the Internet access I had enjoyed at the University. About a
year later I heard about a dial up system called Netcom and immediately signed
up. They offered email, internet news (NNTP), and even command line access.
Wonderful!

One story I can recall:

The system grew until netcom consisted of 15 or 20 Sun OS 4.x servers.

One night a user wrote a shell script to poll all the servers, locate the
server with the lightest load, and then log into that system. They shared the
script and within hours many users were running the script in their login
file. Since there was no check to see if the script was already in use in that
session, long chains of user logins bounced around the systems resulting in an
early DDOS shutdown.

Good times, until about 2000 when the buyers of Netcom eventually shut down
shell account service [2]

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netcom_%28United_States%29](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netcom_%28United_States%29)

[2]
[https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/business/technology/2...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/business/technology/2000/10/06/the-
last-days-of-netcom/2511f750-1371-46bb-a21e-05e9ac342469/?noredirect=on)

~~~
DrScump

      Anyone else remember netcom.com?
    

I was an early Netcom user. In fact, I had what they called a PNC (Personal
Network Connection) account, which offered full TCP/IP connectivity and shell
access.

When that was killed, I moved to accesscom.com to keep full access, including
shell... until that went away as well.

------
sys_64738
It was mostly academic with some small ISPs until that fateful day in Sept
1993 when AOL cast its shadow of death over the internet. It's been downhill
since then all the way, IMO.

~~~
jasonjayr
AKA -- "The Eternal September". Remember, previously September only lasted as
long as it took new college kids with fresh access to the internet (Usenet) to
learn the customs and ways of the community....

------
mrami
My first experience on the Internet was when I got to college in the fall of
1992.

I had done lots of BBSing before that, and I treated the Internet the same way
- a bunch of different tools to get the same sort of social experience.

Email w/ pine. BBS message boards became Usenet w/ trn. Gopher. Finding random
people with finger, and chatting with ytalk. Once talked with a random girl
named Thuy in Perth, which blew my mind at the time. Some shlub in the US
sending messages live to Australia. Downloading all sorts of freeware from
wuarchive.wustl.edu.

It felt smaller then, and something inviting (to me at least). You'd recognize
email addresses from one corner popping into a new one, and it gave the whole
Internet a sense of continuity. It was a place I wanted to interact with.

Usenet, in particular, was usually a pretty good source of information. As a
matter of course, people attached their email address to each posting. And
they usually only had one - HoTMaiL and its ilk wouldn't come around until '96
or so. If you saw an email address you recognized, you'd have an idea of
trustability.

Today, I really don't contribute much. I don't surf r/new or whatever, so
somebody else has usually said anything I want to say. C'est la vie.

------
TheOtherHobbes
Somewhere I have a printout (made by a lineprinter on genuine lined computer
paper) of the full list of hosts accessible on Arpanet in the early 80s.

It has something like 30 systems on it.

Email sort of worked between compatible systems, and telnet - or something
like telnet, more or less - was the primary way of getting around.

Sometime around 1983 I had an IRC conversation with someone at a big US
consultancy who couldn't believe that I was in another country and not
trolling him from a nearby room.

I rejoined in 1994 when The Real Internet was just getting started. Technical
setup with a TCP stack and 9600 modem on Windows was a nightmare, and dial-up
costs were charged per minute, so usage soon got expensive.

Demon, then the UK's only-ish ISP, didn't have enough lines, so it was usual
to have to attempt ten or more calls before getting a slot.

The web was appallingly slow, with grainy low-res imagery and shitty stock
fonts. MP3s file took minutes to download. Video might as well have been
science fiction, although a lot of both were distributed on Usenet in parts -
sometimes hundreds of parts, which had to be stitched together before the file
could be played.

But the culture was cool. Very weird and oddball. And HTML 1.0 was so simple
almost anyone could make a page. Most ISPs included some web hosting, so a lot
of people did. (I had friends who knew very little about computing who made
simple pages with a text editor.)

The corporates moved in a few years later. Quirk still exists in odd little
corners, but the Internet is much more of a relentless money machine now.

~~~
bluedino
>> Sometime around 1983 I had an IRC conversation with someone at a big US
consultancy

IRC didn’t exist then. So it was some other chat or you mistyped the date

~~~
tejtm
most likely 'talk'

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk_(software)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk_\(software\))

It is how I got my first rude internet experience. Some brat started writing
weird cursing things at someone they did not even know! I reported them to the
sysops so I'm sure they received a sternly worded reprimand with a warning
they could be banned and certainly they would see the error of their ways and
never do anything like that again ...

I should have seen this comming

------
keithnz
In the early 90s the internet wasn't very well known. But when I got on, you'd
dial in to a shell with a terminal emulator and it was all Usenet, FTP,
Telnet, Email, IRC, Gopher and this new WWW thing was being talked about.
Usenet was probably the king of the net at that stage. When I first got on ( I
actually did use usenet in the 80s at my dads work, but it wasn't till I could
dial up from home did I engage with the internet), it was like discovering
this secret world that virtually no one else knew about.

I used FTP, Usenet and Gopher a lot to get information, and while its nothing
compared today, in those days it was magic. Instead on being entirely reliant
on books and magazines to give you information, you suddenly could start
consuming a whole bunch of info for free. It's hard to describe how amazing
that felt, it unlocked information for the information starved.

The ability to download software was also amazing. I used to get magazines
with disks on their covers with cool things to play with, but now, I could get
LOTS of software. ( Also used BBS's for this )

IRC was in the early days when I first went on ( only a few hundred users at
any given time on EFnet, the only network at the time) and I made friends all
around the world ( including some of the very first IRC users ). At that
stage, everyone was equally awed by how you could talk live with people all
around the world. Also you got live updates on world events by people who were
there. No waiting to hear about things on the news or in the newspaper.
Amazing.

Then within a few years, people started making some big money from the
internet, and things quickly started to change, peaking with the dot.com boom
and bust.

------
fartcannon
I recall chatrooms that were bulletin boards that you had to manuall refresh
to see new messages. I remember webrings, webcrawler and how all chat services
had a 'random' option.. so you could chat to people you'd never met. Typically
you'd open with "hi a/s/l?" Hi, Emma.

I met many long term long distance friends on early bulletin boards. My
favourite of which was the unmod board at ocremix. Thanks djpretzel!

------
z_
It was like a giant phone book that could take you to magical places, hours
would pass in an instant, and discovery was beautiful.

------
ryanmercer
Pre-Google search engines were pretty hit or miss, you were better off finding
a relevant webring and clicking 'next' until you found a page that had what
you wanted. I used Infoseek, WebCrawler when it would load, ditched Infoseek
for Lycos, ditched Lycos for Excite. I used AltaVista semi-frequently from 95
up to 2000 or 2001 when I'd almost entirely switched to Google. I'm fairly
certain I've used Yahoo to search EXCLUSIVELY for when I was checking search
rankings for my own page and never for anything else.

I remember the first time I saw a video clip, the first time I saw a gif, the
first time I saw a still image on a website.

I remember having to redial multiple times to get connected during high demand
times.

I remember IRC (still use it daily).

I remember MUDs (still play one weekly, that I played starting in 97 or 98 and
it still has 10-15 people on whenever I log on).

I remember the dial-up handshake, in fact I recorded it and it has been my
ringtone since 2004.

------
petemc_
Worked at a university in the 90s. Staff (above a certain level) had access to
dial back system, for which we would configure their modem to dial our system
and then drop the call and we would call them back and provide
network/internet access. This was in the uk where free local calls weren't the
norm and dial up isps such as freeserve hadn't appeared yet. There was also a
noticeable drop in the speed of the universities internet connection around
lunchtime which was generally put down to "America logging on".

When I got my first cable modem around 2000 you could scan local network
segment for open smb ports and map other users drives, usually rw. Saw some
interesting stuff doing that. Was pretty cool to access the many open ftp
servers too. I think the original version of the audiogalaxy music finder app
was just a front end to search those.

------
markdeloura
What I remember most is what a big deal it was when UseNet started allowing
ads - I want to say that was 1992 or so. Pre-WWW, UseNet was essentially a big
BBS or social network for information sharing. I helped run the virtual
reality newsgroup, sci.virtual-worlds, and the community building that
happened as a result of the open sharing of information was incredible. It
seemed as if all the experts were connected and willing to discuss their work
for the good of the field. You assumed that if a person was on the Net, they
were probably at a research institution or site with enough importance to be
connected. Advertising your company's products was a real taboo, and people
would get booted for it. Don't get me wrong, there were definitely flame
wars... but for academic information sharing, the early Net in this period was
invaluable.

------
nopriorarrests
It was not "browser only" internet.

There were plenty of apps for different things.

At least for music/file sharing, there were: Napster, Soulseek, eMule and many
others. Then, chat clients: AIM, ICQ, IRC.

I was also using chess clients, and it was perfectly normal to have 5-6
different apps running, all of them being clients to different web services.

fun times

------
ngcc_hk
Actually before al gore allow USA firm to do internet it is very hard to get
to it. At least not around the world.

Around 1993 it started to move to the world after film can sell internet
bandwidth (and in fact mine come from a firm under a U). As mac user at home,
has to wait until the mac internet guide before dialup modem work.

As commentary before it is very exploratory. Zen and the Art, gopher, mosaic
comes along.

And email group. And you can pay internet Go server even then using ascii
client.

Still remember answer a question what and where is Vulcan? The usual answers
pop up but my answer that it is the planet sit between mercury and the sun is
a big surprise in those days without wiki. Even for Trekkie. Just nice days.

------
kkylin
I got my email address when I started college, in the early 90s. You didn't
use it much except to communicate with people you knew in real life. It
replaced letter-writing, certainly, but otherwise not a huge change.

During college years, first we got Mosaic then Netscape, and more and more one
went on-line to look for non-academic information, e.g., I remmeber when NYT
on-line started. My first summer job in college, at the MIT Media Lab, was in
a group where people were talking about building a mainframe, digitize movies,
and serve (this was before "stream" became mainstream) them to people at home.
I remember thinking: "Who'd pay for that?"

------
Meph504
Really depends, as what you are describing spanned likely a nearly 25 year
span (give or take a few.)

but for me, the heyday, was the mid90s to early 2000s. it was a magical place
full of "Under Construction" webpages (static hand coded HTML webpages), and
user run linking networks called "Web Rings." Web rings, basically if someone
linked to you, you linked back to them, and to someone else, typically there
would also be a link to an index of all in the ring, a random button, and
generally some sort of image related to the ring, they generally followed some
sort of theme, star trek fans, college alumni, mudds/fantasy games, etc...

The browser wars where still a thing, and the look and feel of the internet
wasn't settled, browsers where implementing there own features, that were
wildly divergent from each other, and sometimes the same functionality, that
required completely different code to perform it. Java Applets, where the bees
knees, and mostly pointless, but pretty features to the web (water ripple
effects on images...)

Gif or any animated image format was still a heavily contested copyright
issue. And droves of people from all over the world were pouring "online."

Highschool and colleges, trying to come up with a way to "cite" webpages like
book authors. (url, author, publish date.)

The organization of the net, was very much akin to the wild west, small
clusters of interlinked sites serving as frontier towns, universities played a
huge role, as they often had the students who had the brains, time, and
inclination, to create sites, and generally small of enough to maintain a
"sitemap" of all of their pages.

No real way to search all of the net, no "social networks", chatrooms and IRC
were hot beds of communications, and because of the loose coupling, it was
much easier to meet people, and actually become friends with them.

I'd say it wasn't until pop-ups started showing up everywhere and people
started buying goods online, did the web shift its direction.

And though I tech is amazing today, I still feel we aren't the better for it.

------
jbuzbee
A couple of things that I recall. Any commercial activity was severely frowned
upon. No adds, promotion, etc. Anyone remember the "Green Card Lawyer"?[1]
Raised quite a stink with his spamming usenet for business. And I recall there
being rumors of anonymous ftp sites containing pornography. But word was such
a site couldn't exist as it would immediately swamped with so much traffic
that it would be shut down. Times have changed...

[1] [https://www.wired.com/1999/04/the-spam-that-started-it-
all/](https://www.wired.com/1999/04/the-spam-that-started-it-all/)

------
jancsika
The reliability question is difficult to answer as the current internet
includes a lot of the information that was available in the early forms.

So with the current internet you get access to those RFCs, much usenet and
mailing list content from early days, and videos of people from that era
reliably recounting how the network operated. Plus all the benefits of things
like Stackoverflow, Wikipedia, and others that give more context than you
could get solely from the early internet.

However, the edges of the network weren't weaponized as they are today. So
there was probably less likelihood of an early internet user coming away as an
anti-vaxxer/flat-earther.

~~~
grkvlt
Actually, there were _plenty_ of anti-vaxxers on the early Net, as I recall -
Look up some of the Sun vs. DEC vs. IBM vs. SGI vs. ... holy wars! ;)

------
paulcole
Been online over 20 years now. It’s much better today than it ever was. I can
buy, watch, read, listen to whatever I want, all for a relatively small amount
of money. People romanticize what the Internet was and IMO it wasn’t that
great.

~~~
tom_
I agree. The internet today is fast, cheap, pervasive, and well-supported. We
have Google, GitHub and YouTube. What is not to like?

I missed Usenet at one point, but I've come to find HN/Reddit/Twitter/web
forums have filled that gap, from my point of view at least. HN/Reddit/web
forums are quite similar in many respects, and while the UX is quite
different, over time I've come not to mind, and in some ways to even prefer
it.

(Twitter? - well, it is not really much like Usenet at all, is it? But it is a
place where I've found myself finding out about new stuff, and found myself
amused by seeing people write performatively, and it reminds me of Usenet on
that basis.)

------
hnick
Speaking of corporations: I was a teenager in the mid-90s and one thing that
has stuck in my memory is a Coca-Cola truck. It had a website address on it.
I'd been using the internet for a few years, but had never seen that happen
before. The website probably existed but until now they'd felt no need to let
anyone know.

I was too young to think about what it might mean in the long run, but it
hinted that perhaps it wouldn't just stay a nerd's playground forever. It felt
like a form of validation, that this internet thing would now become
mainstream, and it definitely did in the lead-up to 2000 and all that
happened.

~~~
jaxn
That's funny. The first thing I searched to try "I'm feeling lucky" when
Google came out was coca-cola (probably searched "coke")

------
SeattleCpp
I was on USENET, an ancestor of the internet, in 1981. I knew the personal
names of all hundred or so people who posted to USENET news groups. There was
a newsgroup called net.general for discussion of anything at all. The average
I.Q. of posters was probably 130+. There was political debate, but it was all
thoughtful.

In those days, you knew the topology of USENET, so if you wanted to send mail
to a person outside of your system, you described the route that reached this
person. It wasn't as hard as it sounds, because there were certain systems
that had an immense number of connections.

------
classichasclass
I don't know about purest form but in 1993 when I first got access it was
Gopher, email, MUDs, NNTP and IRC. Lots of different clients for different
protocols. Anonymous FTP was how you got your stuff. Lots of Telnet (things
like MUDs and library systems in particular). Very few ads. Images were
something you actively sought out to download. Websites were new, relatively
unusual and mostly text. Veronica seemed to be down all the time. No one
worried that anyone else could see what you were doing, and most of the time,
nobody cared.

That last is what I miss the most.

------
trixie_
I can speak of the internet in 94. It was pretty inaccessible and/or unknown
by most people. Most people paid like 20 a month for walled garden services
like aol/compserve/prodigy which had no internet access only access to their
internal services. Real internet access when it was available to me near
Boston was like $30 a month for 20 hours (dialup) or you could get a shell
account unlimited for $20 a month. Needless to say I had a shell account for
awhile so IRC, muds, lynx, etc.. Lots more memories but I gotta go, maybe
later :P

------
Tempest1981
There was UUCP email, where you had to know the path of hostnames to route the
mail. No FQDNs! Just a list of hostnames separated by "!"

Example from [0]: "User barbox!user would generally publish their UUCP email
address in a form such as …!bigsite!foovax!barbox!user."

You had to learn how machines were connected, and which were high capacity.
Otherwise, delivery might take days, or fail.

[0]
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/UUCP#Mail_routing](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/UUCP#Mail_routing)

------
whistlerbrk
I miss a lot of it. You could build a vibrant community without bizops,
marketing, partnerships, and a whole host of other people because you could
generate meaningful traffic from search engines.

------
WalterBright
I put a hard disk in my original IBM PC in the 1980s and ran it as an RBBS
system supporting Datalight/Zortech C for many years.

I still have the disk drive, but no way to read it anymore.

------
sys_64738
The first commercial productization of the internet I recall is the big book
of email addresses. That book was a list of email addresses and nothing else.
I think it cost 30 quid. I was in it!

------
pknerd
I started using the Internet in 1996 when It got introduced in my university.
Like many, I also got introduced with Netscape and IRC(mIRC). It was really
fun. IRC used to make new friends. Especially from my part of the
world(Pakistan), talking with people in West was a fun experiment. IE3 was new
but Netscape(3.x?) was way faster and helped to load images much better on
14.4 Zoltrix modems.

I still miss that Internet which was not manipulated by Algorithms and where
even Ads were not irritating.

------
kowdermeister
I've read many comments here about not finding these sites anymore or that the
90`s web is gone. It's not the case. Remember directories and Dmoz in
particular? It's closed now, but it was the gateway for many. It was so
influential that it had a huge impact on your Google ranking if your site get
listed there because of its crazy high PageRank.

Anyways, here's a backup with 3,573,022 sites

[http://dmozlive.com/](http://dmozlive.com/)

------
djhaskin987
Much of it still survives -- freenode.net IRC, instant messaging, email,
independent blogs, domestic and overseas message boards. It's just that back
then that's all we relied on. Nowadays many people may or may not check their
email, but they always check their Facebook page. Lots of them browse it on a
device which listens in on their conversations and monitors practically
everything they type (Android). I myself am typing this on an Android.

------
paulie_a
A lot of pointlessness and novelty. People arguing on forums. Genuinely good
info. Oh and piracy and copyright infringement. So basically nothing has
changed.

------
DanBC
You've asked about "The Internet". But in the early years there was a mish-
mash of local BBC, national BBS, things like FIDOnet (and off-line email
readers such as Bluewave), online services like Compuserve or Prodigy or
AOL[1], and then Internet if you had access.

One thing that hasn't been mentioned in the eye watering cost of getting
online.

In 1988 Compuserve was charging $11 _per hour_ \- about $22 per hour today.

------
ebcase
The Cuckoo's Egg by Cliff Stoll does a great (and entertaining) job of showing
what the Internet was like early on:

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cuckoo%27s_Egg](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cuckoo%27s_Egg)

Telnet, academic connectivity, military networks, international intrigue and
espionage, UC Berkeley hippy/nerd culture -- it's a fun read.

------
Illniyar
Like most things are before corporations get involved - a hobby.

That is - it was filled with people who were excited about it and dedicated
their time for free to help other enthusiasts and grow the community. It was
filled with character and personal content.

It was also hard to use for people who aren't part of a dedicated group and
it's utility was limited to the needs those group had and could provide for to
others.

------
jotm
Same as now but with fewer "normies" (for lack of a better word), and
corporations had no interest in investing a lot of money.

------
pknerd
There was no CSS, no React, VU or Angular. You could just publish whatever you
wanted to without worrying about styles and analytics.

------
warp_factor
It was the best of times. Internet was very technical and you had to know your
ways around.

People created websites without any specific goals.

Today, I became very cynical about the state of Internet. The big $$ companies
took it over. people use it as a way to market themselves.

It went as a fun technology for geeks that the masses made fun of. The arrival
of the masses changed everything.

------
jhallenworld
In a word, USENET.

It's still alive today, to get a feel check out sci.electronics.design (which
is a still active newsgroup - Winfield Hill still posts to it):

[https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/sci.electronics.desi...](https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/sci.electronics.design)

------
Waterluvian
Born in 86 so my memory of the web was the late 90s and early 00s.

There's a magic I can't describe well. Part of it is surely nostalgia. But
there was something magical about staying up in the wee hours of the night
while the world around you was asleep and exploring the web. Finding new
people, new ideas, new Java applet games.

------
haolez
One negative aspect of yesterday’s web was bad links and lost pages. Since the
web relied a lot in users and small businesses to host their own pages, it was
common to lose content if its owner lost interest.

The social aspect was different. Only a few people had an online presence, but
the engagement felt more real.

------
destitude
Was in college in early 90's and remember being on an email list that everyone
used to announce creation of a new website. Most striking thing from today and
back then is it was all highly educated people using the internet and it was
very friendly and open to sharing and discussing ideas.

------
neverminder
Yeah, feeling nostalgic about it. No censorship, no politics, none of that
bullshit. IRC served the purpose of facebook, reddit and match.com combined.
Communities like Rogue Science that today would be the worst nightmare of
certain 3 letter agencies. One word to describe that era: freedom.

------
refurb
Very user unfriendly compared to today, but that made discovering things fun.

Frequented BBSs as a teenager, then heard about the internet. Joined local ISP
in 1993 or so.

Usenet was huge and the content had a much better signal to noise ratio. Lots
of academics and students online, so generally intelligent discourse.

------
sbfeibish
I only knew of the internet through what was said at management meetings at a
Palo Alto research institute circa 1988. They wanted to send documents back
and forth between the research institute and universities. I believe it was
titled "Technology Transfer".

------
ykevinator
I used mosaic in 1994. It was bad and good. It was good because it was
authentic. It was bad because it was low fidelity but lots and lots of great
information. The post corporate Internet is definitely better. It's a good
example of a well regulated free market.

------
ridgeguy
It was very cool. I remember sometime in 2001 when iTunes was released, I was
able to listen to other peoples' music libraries without restriction.

That got shut down pretty fast, but I still remember it fondly as a thing from
before the net became all about monetization.

------
CuriousSkeptic
Not really about the internet as such. But do checkout the book “Masters of
Deception: The Gang That Ruled Cyberspace”

IIRC it does a wonderful job of capturing the cyberpunk feel of growing up
with it.

------
franze
Frustrating. IE6 had a marketshare of 95%+ (the rest was IE5.5 and IE5), we
saw what was possible, but we could not deploy it to production as we had to
fix IE6 bugs.

Not everything was better then.

~~~
protomyth
I think IE6 belongs to the corporate era.

------
jmickey
This is still my favourite website from those days -
[https://hamsterrepublic.com/](https://hamsterrepublic.com/) :)

------
fghtr
I guess you can enjoy a similar situation in I2P today:
[https://geti2p.net](https://geti2p.net)

------
dawhizkid
In elementary school I remember the dancing hamsters.

~~~
klibertp
Not badgers?

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Badgers_(animation)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Badgers_\(animation\))

~~~
M2Ys4U
That came later. This is what they're talking about:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hampsterdance_Song](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hampsterdance_Song)

------
koonsolo
I remember when Google first became popular, I challenged my friends to find a
search term that did not have a porn result in the top 10 results.

They failed.

------
mancerayder
It depends by how strictly you mean that "corporations got their hands on it,"
but to summarize my experience:

Before, you went to stuff. Now stuff comes to you.

I started off in the BBS world in the early 90's, with Internet being
something available to universities and sometimes high schools. As it turns
out, I lived in a university town at one point.

The BBS world had a higher bar of entry, so it tended to attract people of
higher IQ, miscreants, or tech nerds. I was the writing tech nerd (which
hasn't changed, as I type here unironically). The intermediate between the
Internet and the BBS messaging world was something like FIDONet, where your
BBS would dial up and bulk import and export messages. Those of us who didn't
have access (or know about) Usenet early on.

The WWW killed the BBS.

Prodigy and CompuServe and Sierra Online among others were something like
hybrids, since they offered glorious (at the time) online worlds before they
started weaving in the Internet like Prodigy did (my first e-mail experience).
For example, you'd log in and read the news or play games, before the Internet
connected itself to Prodigy.

The early commercialized WWW was flat HTML, with flashy purple and popup-y
things of a dubious nature all over the place. You had to be careful that your
parents didn't click on something mean that installed something horrific on
their Windows 98 PC's. On the other hand, You Went To Stuff. So while things
like Yahoo and Webcrawler (was that the name of the browser) were nothing
compared to Google, we didn't have a corruption of advertising manipulating
search results on a grand scale (pay to play).

Today, we live increasingly in a world where Stuff Comes To You. For example,
there's a tightening of the screws of not just Google, but also sites (and
especially, especially Apps) like YouTube, Amazon and others that try to use
magic to 'guess' what you will like algorithmically.

Let's stop for a second: is it in your interests for them (the corporations)
to guess what you want, or is it in the interest of profit-motivated
interests? And if they ALWAYS 'guess what you want' at what point does 'what
you want' become self-referential? And what someone else wants you to want?
How long are they guessing what you want before what you want isn't being
expressed by you anymore very much? And what about your young kids, how in the
world can kids even want stuff from scratch without being manipulated by the
'what do they want'-type offerings provided by algorithms?

I deeply miss being able to "Go To Stuff" without corrupted and manipulated
search results, and I think a lot of younger people don't realize how much
Stuff Goes to Them. Sure, Facebook and Instagram are obviously doing it, but
there's something about the re-training of the human mind going on, here.

I will stop before conspiracy theories get out of hand and I need a drink.

------
nostrademons
I first got online in 1993, which is pretty far from the beginning of the
Internet, which technically started as ARPANET in 1967. It was definitely the
early-adopter phase for the WWW, but the WWW is a relatively late development
for the Internet.

1993-1995: Mostly scientific & technical papers & discussions. Deeply
intellectual, with almost everyone on the Internet having a professional
background and many being top experts in their fields. The WWW was a
relatively minor protocol on the Internet; much discussion still happened over
E-mail, Usenet, and Gopher, and Telnet and FTP had as many sites up as the
WWW. (Although fact-checking my memory, apparently AOL opened up Internet
access in September 1993 and that was the beginning of an influx of kids -
like myself - onto the Internet, which is what started degrading the
Internet.)

1995-1998: AOL's Internet access was in full swing, Yahoo and Geocities were
founded, the trivial "fun" usages of the Internet started to overshadow the
scientific & technical ones. This was the era of WebRings, Geocities pages,
<blink> tags, garish colors, and sites that looked like they were made by a
12-year-old because they probably were. Lot of band pages, fan pages, joke
sites, and trivial pop culture. First Internet advertisements started to
appear.

1998-2000: Dot-com boom heyday. Peak gold rush. The dot-com boom is normally
dated from 1995-2000, but it _massively_ accelerated in 1998 after the Amazon
& E-bay IPOs, resolution of the Asian Financial Crisis, and drop in interest
rates. This was the era when VCs were throwing hundreds of millions of dollars
at ideas on napkins and then taking them public 3 months later. Most activity
was centered around E-commerce, where the belief was that an online version of
every retail sector would take over and dominate (which turned out to be true,
but happened 20 years later with Amazon).

2001-2004: Dot-com bust. Many pundits declared the Internet over, though
anyone looking around could see that wasn't the case. Most of the big VC-
funded companies founded in 1998-2000 went bankrupt, thousands of people lost
their jobs, many people get out of the field entirely. People talk about how
all software engineering jobs will be outsourced to India. Microsoft "wins"
the browser wars with IE6, and also has heavy adoption in the server (NT
Server + IIS), database (SQL Server), and programming framework (ASP.NET)
areas. Enterprises start moving their software to the browser. Consumer
attention is largely focused on P2P filesharing (Napster, Kazaa, Gnutella,
Audiogalaxy, etc.) and on early proto-social-networks (Xanga, LiveJournal,
EZBoards, 4chan, Friendster, MySpace).

2004-2008: Social networking boom and return of Web 2.0. Facebook kicks it off
in 2004, along with the acquisitions of Blogger, Flickr, and Del.icio.us (all
of which had been steadily building throughout the bust) and then in rapid
succession we get Digg, Reddit, YouTube, and Twitter. At this point the
corporation names start getting recognizable, so I'll stop there.

~~~
JohnHammersley
Thanks for this summary -- I read through the other comments on this Ask HN
and was surprised that this one wasn't higher up; it strikes a nice balance
between covering a good portion of the timeline whilst staying at a high
level. Made me specifically look it up again when logged in so I could upvote
it :)

------
salgernon
Check out telehack.com - it’s kind of a simulation / game /community. The
early internet was about exploration.

------
asjo
One of the things I remember talking about back then was: how nice it would
be, if everybody could be reached by email.

------
bawana
before there was profit to be made, there was no evil. people shared.
everything was free, like the air is today. people could take as much as they
wanted. eventually that was boring so they started giving. then they realized
that giving felt good. without profit to motivate greed, people's good nature
appeared.

------
j45
It felt early. It felt like choosing something unpopular, because it
interested you.. At a time, computers weren't cool, no one knew what the
internet was.. And then my user to the whole world arriving in your area of
interest.

A lot of firsts are memorable.. The first time using cable modem instead of
dialup, the first time using wifi on a laptop and it seeming like magic..
"usable" GPRS mobile data.

One thing that felt different was there seemed to be far more creation than
there is today vs consuming. In some ways, the only way to participate was
creating because there was far less to consume.

Another memory and remaining gift today is the feeling of what authentic
community and social interaction felt like online. Despite social media being
ubiquitous today, there seemed a deeper community during the late 90's / early
2000's.. pre Facebook. I'd say reddit is the closest experience to the feeling
today, but Reddit is more awesome with the sheer amount of people on it.

I still have a few friendships formed from irc as teenagers and we still
remain in touch nearly 15-20 years later. Maybe not as often, but the depth
and respect often remains. It's not uncommon to get a random call or long
email during a major life event to reconnect for a few weeks to support each
other along until the next thing.

I don't think the 90s internet generations' minds were as skewed by anxiety
because they used technology to create, and connect.. not consume what others
are up to, and as mainstream society has picked up the internet the
consumption (gaming included) mindset has arrived in much greater numbers. The
big shift from irc to instant messengers was one wave of disconnection, but
when social networks started replacing words with photos.. The substance
became visual instead of learning to use your words. I got to create games,
music, web, mobile apps, video and web apps.

In a way, all my friends who joined the internet 10-15 years after me are
10-15 years behind and catching up on topics like privacy, managing
distractions, paying attention to how much value tech actually provides me.

They are also going thru internet and technology addiction on a curve after I
did. But we're starting to come out of the addiction cycle of building
humanities weakest online social bonds of showing off, being phony, jealousy
and the resulting anxiety for something far more positive: becoming creators.

There's an interesting overlap between the group who grew up online before the
world discovered the internet and saw the world arrive, and the current group
that knew no life without the internet.

I still have faith thoough.. Any young minded and open minded ppl (armed with
today's possibilities have some pretty incredible opportunities if they can
focus on what they're doing and not what, or how others are doing.

------
hacknat
It was great, but inaccessible to the average person.

------
jungler
I think my favorite way of describing the 90's internet(I was alive but not
there for the 80's version) is that it was unfinished. Things were slow.
Things broke a lot. Your computer crashed a lot. You didn't have the space to
download a lot of stuff(a lot of people turned to printing out web pages). The
number of venues was small enough that they could be listed(I had a 1992-era
book that acted like a phone directory of all the interesting things there
were to do). But there was a promise of possibility there. Once in a while,
things did work. A site did what you wanted it to, seamlessly. You could go on
Usenet or IRC or a MUD, and just talk to people. They were roughly as terrible
as people today, but with a higher average level of income and education. You
could occasionally talk to someone from a foreign country, too. Because the
scale and sophistication of everything was small, there were many unlocked
doors - limited or no protections. You could reasonably expect to moderate an
online community on your own, and not drown in spambots, brigading, or DDOS
attacks.

But the barriers to entry were high, as well. A state-of-the-art build
consistently ran in the $2000 range - you could go cheaper but it often meant
being several years in the past at a moment when Moore's Law was steamrolling
every assumption in 18 month cycles, and software that kept pace with more and
more features. Games in particular heavily targeted the enthusiasts. Many
people got into PCs upon experiencing Doom for the first time. And running a
server - well, most people were on dial-up lines, and in the early part of the
decade, shell accounts, not the PPP connections that gave you full TCP/IP
connectivity. If you ran a server, it was most likely part of a school or
business connection. And then you had to maintain all of it yourself. The
onset of free hosting - first with Geocities style static HTML, and then
webpage builders and even PHP scripting, was a kind of early example of
Internet commercialization. It allowed lots of folks to make their own web
site for the first time, which they promptly filled up with "about me: i am 13
years old and have two dogs. sorry ill finish this later"

There were no real expectations around early Web content, after all. It was
whatever you thought you needed to put there, and a consumer-branding mindset
hadn't sunk in yet among Web surfers. You explored Web sites because there
were no places with upvotes and newsfeeds, just pages you bookmarked and
checked regularly in hopes of an update. If you wanted the drip feed of news,
mailing lists and Usenet worked better. But gradually publishing and
aggregation came into play on the Web, with both traditional news players and
the likes of Slashdot, and web forums took up the baton from Usenet of
allowing you to engage in topical discussion, except that over time all web
forums turned into meta-communities defined by their off-topic discussion.

Then as now, the single most useful thing you could do in most circumstances
was to send someone an email.

------
make3
it was before Google, so stuff was really hard to find

------
karatefylla
Like the wild west.

------
rafiki6
A lot less porn...

------
crb002
It was ARPANET.

------
DoreenMichele
There was a lot of good stuff available for free, but sometimes only
temporarily.

I had internet access starting about 26 or 27 years ago, but it became much
more important to me when I was living in the middle of nowhere and began
homeschooling. Then it became much more central to my life.

I was on some email lists to support my homeschooling effort. At the time,
they were hosted for free by a university. The founder was an IT professional.
You kind of had to be. There wasn't anything plug-and-play, like Yahoo Groups
or Google Groups.

I had access to some excellent homeschooling stuff for free via internet, but
there wasn't anything like Patreon or tip jars, so they had no way to monetize
it.

One handwriting site eventually pulled it's free materials off the internet
and began charging consulting fees or something. Some excellent math resource
disappeared altogether. The best explanation for faceblindness that I've ever
seen is now only available via The Wayback Machine aka The Internet Archive
(last I checked).

I did a free homeschooling and parenting site for a bit, but hand coding
everything when I'm not a professional programmer was a huge burden and
impeded updates. I eventually moved to Word Press and, later, BlogSpot. I post
a great deal more content using BlogSpot.

I'm mostly okay with the commercialization of the internet. If you want good
content, it takes time, effort and expertise to put that out there. It isn't
realistic to expect talented people to provide such for free forever. If you
want such, you should be willing to allow them to somehow make money from it.

I still try to provide free resources available to the public while trying to
monetize it with tips and patrons. Ads aren't doing so well on the internet
generally and seem to be an especially poor fit for much of my writing. I
haven't yet figured out how to get adequate income from my own websites, but
some people do successfully monetize their work while providing cool stuff
available for free to anyone.

I recently had a piece do well on HN in terms of traffic and comments: more
than 600 upvotes, more than 300 comments and more than 60k page views.

I'm pleased with that aspect of it, but it didn't result in any money
whatsoever for me and I'm on track to be broke by the end of the day tomorrow.
HN members complain bitterly about ads and are aggressive about using ad
blockers. My experience has been you don't make much ad money from hitting the
front page of HN and I would rather get tips and patrons anyway.

I don't know if I did something wrong or if it is a case of "sexism is alive
and well, so the world expects me to work for free even if I'm literally
starving and they know it" or just what.

People who imagine the internet was better back then or would be better if we
could get rid of the corporate influence are people who literally expect
everything to somehow magically be high quality, completely and totally free
and also be reliably available and trustworthy with no hidden gotcha.

I don't know if I will ever succeed in what I want to do, but it's clear to me
that patronage, tips and other forms of monetization make it possible for
independent creatives to pursue high minded endeavors without compromising
their vision in order to pay the bills. I think that's exactly what folks
imagine the internet used to be and maybe was to some degree, minus the
implicit expectation of basically slave labor making it happen.

And those things are possible thanks to commercialization of the internet.
They would work better if more folks felt like it mattered to pay the people
providing high quality independent content instead of bad-mouthing
commercialization as if it were the root of all evil.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18842009](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18842009)

------
bane
I don't go back as far as some of the folks here, but I think my first ever
sip of the Internet was maybe...'90 or '91? The Web had been invented but
wasn't really something people used for a few more years yet.

My first ever connection to the Internet came from a local, but large,
Bulletin Board System that prided itself in lots of dial-in numbers, large
file and message board collection and good FidoNet service. You could dial-in
for 20 or 30 minutes a day for free and a couple hours if you paid something
like $10 or $15 a month.

At some point they thought it would be cool to provide an internet email
gateway for a couple dollars more which I excitedly paid until I realized I
knew literally nobody else I could possible message with.

It's hard for modern users who didn't see the emergence of the Internet as
basically the Web and highspeed always on connections. Before that time it was
expensive, slow, and highly geared towards universities and whatever people
could personally offer. Most of the university stuff I knew about were sites
run by enthusiastic faculty or students who had found an unmonitored corner of
a server somewhere on their university network and put up various interesting
collections of things they had pulled together.

Maybe around '91 or so my friend's father got a very limited usage dial-up
shell account from a local ISP that dropped you into a shell for 30 minutes a
day. You could use various text-only tools to send and receive email (we never
did since it was a corporate account), and a couple megabytes of diskspace we
could use to stage files we ftp'd down from other sites. Then we'd login over
the next couple days and use most of his account time to download whatever
random thing we had found somewhere.

Gopher was also a common tool that made getting around and finding things
faster, if and only if you could find a well maintained gopher site. For those
not familiar with gopher, it was a bit like an easy to navigate text-only
hypertext system that predated the WWW.

I think it was in '92 that I was selected by my county to participate in a
special sponsored program that would give a few students at each school a
dial-up internet account on the local mainframe with 30 minutes of time per
day. They had no idea at all what we'd do with it and had rigged the accounts
to first drop into a school-system gopher screen. It took a few days to figure
out how to kill the gopher client and get back to a shell. I think telnet and
ftp were also installed and I was able to connect to various sites I knew
about (and kept a little notebook with information about).

One thing I remember distinctly, having been a heavy BBS user was not really
understanding that I could connect to remote servers and it was using a
different information network than the phone system to do it. What this meant
was that if I dialed into a BBS in a different state or country I'd get a huge
phone bill. But if I dialed into my local ISP, and then telneted to a server
in a different state or country it didn't matter. That first month waiting to
see if we'd get a bill for all the time I spent connecting to servers all over
the world was terrifying (as was the relief when the bill didn't arrive!)

It's important to remember that at this exact same time BBS usage was at its
peak and there were several very large and competitive BBS services around:
America Online (did not provide Internet Access originally), Prodigy, GEnie,
CompuServe and a handful of more local offerings (like I mentioned above). We
never really had the money for these services, but a few of my friends did and
they were interesting in different ways, often trying to figure out how to get
around the very low dial-up rates of the time (typically 1200 or 2400 baud).
For example, Prodigy offered a vector-based graphical interface with nice
splash screens for various games and services. It took a while to load each
screen, but they charged you by the minute so they didn't care.

At some point, the hobbyist BBS scene also tried to provide graphical
interfaces. There was a handful of various client/server software setups
available, often with a text-only fallback. I remember a the names of a few
pieces of software, Excalibur, there was an interesting Macintosh only system
I think called FirstClass that had a special transport layer protocol and so
on. The reason I bring this up is that when the WWW first really started
appearing it wasn't really understood that this could become "the interface to
the global supernetwork" and it was just assumed that some kind of graphical
interface to local systems was a natural technological evolution of BBSs and
that they would continue to compliment if not dominate internet access.

I think around '94 or '95 it started to become pretty common that you could
just find an ISP in the phone book, call them up and get some kind of "getting
started" software kit or a dial-up shell account. The getting started kits
usually had some kind of dialing software, a TCP/IP stack (OSs didn't ship
with them in general at the time), Mosaic and some kind of Email client...all
on a couple of floppies! Usually with some large number of minutes of time per
day your account would connect for (or a per minute charge after). People used
to keep usage logs in notebooks to make sure they wouldn't blow their
connection cap and either run out of internet or end up with huge monthly
bills.

The transition away from BBSs and onto the web happened very quickly after
that and I think coincided neatly with the transition of MS-DOS users to
Windows '95 (which didn't ship with a TCP/IP stack!). You could kind of feel
BBS's start to decay right around this time as users just started moving
wholesale onto the web.

(continued)

~~~
bane
(part 2)

For a long time, personal web pages were sort of the equivalent of what BBSs
used to offer, but very decentralized. IRC took over for BBS Chat, ftp sites
took over for local BBS file offerings and email took over for BBS mail and
FidoNet -- Usenet was suddenly introduced to an entire generation of users.
Except instead of whoever was the local user community of your local BBS it
was some slice of technically minded people all over the planet. Most ISPs
gave you a few MB to put up your own page and a few pointers on basic HTML,
how to ftp, and off you went!

There really weren't any "corporate" sites or big centralized sites at the
time. So people came up with all kinds of ways to try to connect. The earliest
was just people putting up links to favorite sites on their personal pages.
Soon larger indexes of sites were started (and suddenly Yahoo! appeared). The
other was to connect similarly themed personal sites via a "web ring".

It still wasn't entirely obvious that the WWW would be "it" though. Many many
services were started pushing their own protocol and systems to fill major
technical gaps that existed at the time. Streaming video for example was
pushed very heavily by RealPlayer. There was a number of experiments for
"push" news clients for example.

Oddly, I don't really remember any credible attempts at another technology
that was more or less like the WWW but with unique spins or tech approaches.
It seems that the core approach was so good that everybody just tried to grab
it and bastardize it to their own ways early on.

Many _many_ small and local ISPs were started to service the growing dial-up
business and the competition was awesome. I ended up work for an ISP from '96
to maybe '99\. It wasn't long before unlimited dial-up became a thing. By the
late 90s you could even get "free" dial-up if you used special dial-up
software that filled a portion of your screen with ads. At some point I think
I got a second phone line and just dialed-in 100% of the time. Always on
internet was... _amazing_. Suddenly download managers started appearing to
handle broken connections and redials and to help manage bandwidth over then
28.8kbps connections (kilo _BITS_ per second).

There was a huge industry change up near the end of the 90s with the advent of
56k modems. Suddenly POTs phone lines had to be of very high quality, higher
than most people had. It was very common to buy a brand new 56k modem and
never get the maximum of something like 53kbps (it wasn't really possible to
ever get 56kbps connections for various reasons. Most people would get 40k or
so, but of course it was always the mom & pop ISPs fault for not getting the
giant telecom to have clean lines :/

The desire for more speed, and the low quality of service most small ISPs
could offer over 56k meant very rapid consolidation and investment in more
expensive connection technologies like ISDN. When ADSL was finally announced,
it was clear that the industry was going to move to a model with the phone
company being the ISP and inside of a year or two almost every ISP who
couldn't got out of the business.

During all this, AOL started offering more and more internet services, but
resisted just becoming an ISP. This resulted in years of eternal septembers on
various message boards and other services as millions of AOL users, newly
introduced to some part of the internet for the first time ever engaged in
typical eternal september behaviors. Among the more technically inclined
users, an @aol.com email address wasn't even worth responding to.

At some point, maybe in the mind to late 90s, there was a concerted effort by
a few pioneers to try to do business on the WWW. The technology wasn't really
there for a while, and many of the efforts were weirdly skeuomorphic "online
malls" and such. Very clumsy, but the technology was clumsy and web pages
couldn't really be all the sophisticated. Amazon stuck it through, first as a
bookstore and then they started to add more and more things. Another retailer,
ThinkGeek was started in the late 90s and is still around. Most of the rest
are long dead. It's interesting that both of those early "e-commerce"
companies is now experimenting with brick-and-mortar stores.

It's worth it for somebody interested to lookup old videos and screenshots
(and web captures) of the _just_ pre-internet to early internet interfaces and
tools. There's at least one effort I know of that's trying to revive the
Prodigy Vector Art graphics as well as a couple of the smaller graphical BBS
artworks.

------
matte_black
Part of the charm about the early days of the internet for me was that I was a
child and I had child-like logic about how things worked.

My view of the internet was very skeuomorphic. Websites were like "places" and
by riding the web-rings I felt like I was surfing through cyberspace. When I
would come across new information I would store it in my bookmarks which I
thought of as a sort of inventory. If I came across a small tribe on some
random internet forum somewhere I might share some of my best links with them
to win them over. If I found a guest book I would sign it as a way of planting
my flag.

I viewed anyone who actually "owned" a website to be something like a God, a
MASTER of the web. I also viewed hackers as very dangerous people, where if
they wanted to, they could blow up my computer in my face.

------
ArrayList
Amazing reddit post that sums up my feelings perfectly:

"What I miss is how mysterious the internet could be and how gullible we were.
The Internet felt like this strange underbelly of obscure information.

First you're growing up in some little town and only know about Star Wars and
Green Day. Then suddenly you're finding niche websites and reading about
obscure movies and bands and movies you definitely won't find on the radio or
in the video store. Youd find dedicated fan sites that had deleted scenes from
Alien that you'd never even heard of!

You'd find bizarre paranormal websites that every story felt so real and
believable. Every low res UFO and ghost picture could be real. Every story was
accepted as real. I read the Ted the Caver geocities page back then at 2 in
the morning and was totally convinced it was real. Nowadays we're skeptical of
every story and some photoshop guy will dissect any picture and reveal how the
shadows dont fall right or something.

If you could find the right program and file, you could download pretty much
any Nintendo game ever! Your tiny world and library of just Mario and Ninja
Gaiden completely exploded with potential. I was now able to play this holy
grail Chrono Trigger I'd always heard of. Or I would go through great lengths
to find a good English patch of this Japanese only game called Front Mission.
And you'd convince yourself that you weren't stealing because Nintendo hadn't
sold these games for years, they were unobtainable! You felt like a hacker and
a pirate doing that stuff.

The internet back then made you feel like an explorer on the fringe. The
mysterious frontier just waiting for you to engage its endless opportunity.
Man I miss that shit."

permalink/original:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/980rrc/what_do_y...](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/980rrc/what_do_you_miss_about_the_early_internet/e4cjgnr/)

------
aaronscat
Reminds me of this. There was a time when this was true and nobody knew or
cared who you were. [https://aaronscat.com/blog/on-the-internet-nobody-knows-
you-...](https://aaronscat.com/blog/on-the-internet-nobody-knows-you-are-a-
dog/)

------
ArrayList
Does anyone, ANYONE remember Fat Cat Café? With the "Fat Cat Chatrooms?" This
is likely very early 2000s.

