

The unrecognizable Internet of 1996 - inertialforce
http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2009/02/jurassic_web.html

======
rdl
That wasn't the Internet I had in 1996. I'd had unlimited free dialup to a
UNIX system since 1992 or so, and by 1996 was at MIT with 10 or 100Mbps
connections to ~3x45Mbps backbone.

Big UNIX systems with either black and white huge monitors (the ones which
were already outdated, and thus free), or in some cases (on the oldest
systems), or huge color trinitrons (Indy, Crimson, Suns, and my P90-based
Linux workstation in my dorm).

Pervasive IM from 1992 onward (IRC + screen), and then Zephyr at MIT. Great
filesharing via AFS (huge overhead to run, but once set up, better than even
Dropbox is today). USENET.

~~~
danelectro
That's what broadband was for.

So you could have dramatically better speeds than the vast majority of users.

That way, pages which nominally took 20 slow seconds to load over a phone
modem, would appear instantly for you if you were privileged enough to have
broadband.

Nowadays, "everybody" has broadband. But instead of the rapid browsing
experience which everyone was looking forward to, we now have a slower user
experience with broadband on most web sites than there was in 1996 with dial-
up modems.

Back in 1996, most people did not yet have 56Kbaud modems, so the wise
webmasters made sure their sites were optimized enough for mainstream
consumers having 28.8K or at most 33.6K which would guarantee outstanding
performance to the widest variety of visitors. When they were really serious
about engaging users who did not have brand new computers, a site would need
to perform decently at 9600 baud which was what the majority of installed
modems still ran at, originally purchased for faxing.

When you occasionally went went to a slow, bloated page from a major
technology company you knew right away it was "privileged idiots" on broadband
without a clue as to how slow their "masterpiece" website behaved compared to
what was expected from modem users.

Downloading files was expected to be slow, but web sites were not. Actually
lots of MP3's were downloaded over modems, that's what MP3 was developed for.
If you posted something, copyright was not a problem since you were not
sharing it with the public, only those few who were online.

Almost 20years later, technology has progressed but it's clear that PEOPLE
used to be more advanced than they are now.

There are probably engineers who are making sure their sites perform at 2G
speeds without sinking below 1996 performance experiences, but from what I've
been reading about interviewing & hiring trends it looks like they are
excluded as extreme minorities within their percentiles.

Oh, well, I don't make the rules, just observing their disfunction.

------
wazoox
We had something really great back then: Usenet. We used it much like most
people use social media nowadays I guess, talking about stuff, sharing images,
etc

Usenet even allows noting threads, blacklisting users, etc. But not controlled
by any single company... I miss Usenet.

~~~
bluedino
I'm going to get down-voted into oblivion, but I never saw the love for
Usenet. Sure, every topic under the sun was covered and anyone could access
it, but it was far from perfect.

Impossible to search until things like DejaNews came along

Even going back a few months was a huge PITA on slower connections

Your ISP might not have carried every newsgroup, or it might update very
slowly

I never cared much for mailing lists either, but at least many of them had a
search interface that worked well.

For all the problems that web-based bulletin boards had, they were a huge
improvement over Usenet. Much easier to use and faster to browse through. You
can argue that if you want to, but they were adopted so much faster.

~~~
wtbob
On the contrary, Usenet was very fast when used as intended, from a local news
feed. Indeed, it'd work even were the network down.

Web forums took off because users wanted to use browsers for everything, and
ad-supported had lower barriers to use than subscription-based.

~~~
ArkyBeagle
People also started downloading binaries in earnest, which made ISPs want to
get rid of the NNTP server.

------
Joeri
I had a routine. I would go online and start or continue a big download using
some downloader tool. I don't recall when continuing a download over ftp and
http became a thing, but it was a big improvement when your connection dropped
out once an hour and you couldn't download more than a few megabytes in that
time. The download could be a game or a new netscape or mcafee version (mcafee
had a backdoor on their ftp that let me download the full version). I also
remember downloading 3ds max 1.0 some time in 1996 or 1997, all 100 mb of it,
at 5 kb per second. Then while the download was running i would surf the web,
with images disabled ofcourse. Start from yahoo's directory and follow new
links, which led to more links, which led to more links. I didn't really visit
the same sites all that often, it was the newness that interested. Surfing
wasn't visiting the same 5 sites in a round robin pattern, it was like tracing
a path through wikipedia, but without wikipedia. There were a lot more
webpages with wikipedia-like content, or so it seems in retrospect.

The first site i recall visiting on a daily basis was slashdot, to which i
immediately developed an addiction. But that was 1997, not 1996. I also
started university in 1997, and would hang out in the computer class to surf
at megabit speeds, which felt like what happened when picard said 'engage'.
Ofcourse, webpages were measured in kilobytes, not megabytes, so at the
network speeds of the university I was typically gated by the speed of the web
server on the other end.

I frequented usenet a lot, but just to read, not to post. Irc didn't interest
me. I only started chatting when icq showed up, which led to my first online
friend, a very kind south african girl, who I ended up visiting in the late
90's. I have a hard time imagining that scenario on the modern web.

I miss the old internet, but I would miss the new internet as well. If only we
could have both.

~~~
junto
I was the same but rather than 3ds Max I downloaded Bryce 3D. I spent so much
time planning out and rendering what seemed like amazing landscapes. Oh those
were the days.

------
beamatronic
I found quite a bit to do on the web in 1996, I was getting online with a UNIX
machine and a modem. No mention of USENET or IRC in this article? You could
check webcams like the coffee pot webcam [1], finger the coke machine [2], and
telnet into your university's CS lab.

[1]
[http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/coffee/coffee.html](http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/coffee/coffee.html)

[2] [http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/internet-coke-
machine](http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/internet-coke-machine)

------
codingdave
MUDs. We played MUDs.

~~~
ilikepi
CircleMUD forever.

And Quake/QuakeWorld.

~~~
rafaelm
I don't even know how much time I spent on IRC (dalnet) and when I discovered
my local ISP had a Quake server it was huge!

We used to play Duke Nukem or Doom 1 vs 1 via a direct dialup connection, but
playing agains 20 other guys on a Quakeworld server was just something else.
The server was so badly run that every now and then something would happen to
it that we used to be able to outrun our own rockets. I shot myself in the
back with my own rockets many, many times.

I don't know how I even managed to graduate from high school really.

~~~
will_work4tears
Hah, this. I thought it was pure magic being able to play Doom with a person
not the the same room/house (we had a LAN setup for playing against people in
different rooms), but it was so laggy.

Also, I played a lot of MajorMUD and LORD.

------
Zancarius
I remember getting lost on hornet.org somewhere around this time frame,
impressed by _so much free music_ (if a bit cheesy by today's standards).
There was plenty to do, if you knew where to look, and like others have said:
IRC/Usenet were helpful to that end. Local BBSs were still around but starting
to fade, but some (WorldGroup) had the capability to serve as Usenet readers
or IRC clients for machines that didn't have their own installed.

Gosh, I think I still have an archive of MODs, S3Ms, and others somewhere on a
backup drive.

This article _does_ offer a window into the life of the average person who saw
little use in the Internet, either by lack of curiosity or the walled gardens
of AOL. I think it should also serve as a warning to us to keep the Internet
open.

------
al2o3cr
LOL, an article about 1996 Internet that doesn't contain "Usenet" once.
#slatefail

------
ChuckMcM
The first startup I joined, in 1995, was GolfWeb[1] which was an online
magazine about Golf. It was a bit early :-). Although earlier that year I had
shown my inlaws the "Internet" using HotJava and they were amazed that I could
get data from Brazil in real time like that. Like others here though the
"internet" for me was largely email, ftp, and netnews (aka usenet). That net
still exists, sort of like cosmic background radiation, but its there.

[1]
[http://web.archive.org/web/19961105120854/http://www.golfweb...](http://web.archive.org/web/19961105120854/http://www.golfweb.com/)

------
89vision
Hours and hours of IRC

------
rafaelm
I always think about all the time I wasted on IRC or playing Doom/Quake/Duke
Nukem back then or building crappy sites on Geocities.

I always think if only 15 year old me had looked instead in to trying to make
money off the internet back then...

I remember reading back then that you could put up an adult website with 20
images, add Adultcheck (some of you have to remember that) to it and just lay
back and count the money. Of course, I was much more innocent back then...

------
ashmud
Kali to play IPX games.

------
nasalgoat
Archie.

