
The Unrecognizable Internet of 1996 - rogercosseboom
http://slate.com/id/2212108
======
robotron
This article is looking at the older Internet from one point of view. There
was much more to it than the Web. There were thriving communities on Usenet
and IRC. People had personal home pages instead of
MySpace/Facebook/Bebo/Whatever accounts. You hosted your own scanned photos.

~~~
tptacek
There were thriving Usenet and IRC communities (I miss Usenet), but you had
those things on BBS's too; it wasn't really a breakthrough.

~~~
baddox
Oh, Usenet is still out there. There are even still communities, although it's
mostly just used for binaries now.

~~~
tptacek
Usenet is a crappy P2P file sharing system now, as pretty much everyone who
ran a Freenix-rated Usenet server predicted. It was something much cooler than
that before the file sharing douchebags wrecked it.

~~~
baddox
P2P?

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eleitl
Articles like these makes me want to strangle the author.

No, Sir, my Indy with Ethernet and Mosaic/Netscape was quite up to the task.
In fact, my telnet to the Sun and ftp and gopher pre-web was already immensely
useful.

If it sucked for you 1996, maybe it was just you.

~~~
tptacek
I don't take your meaning. You think compared to what we have in 2008, the web
of 1996 didn't suck? I was connected directly to the backbone (I ran an ISP),
and I agree with him.

~~~
trevelyan
The web was awesome in 1996. It sucked in 1993.

By 1996 you had actual webpages you could visit. IQ tests. News sites.
Hotmail. But it was still difficult to tell professional content from amateur
stuff. Conspiracy theory and Internet trolling were fresh and interesting and
the blink tag was in wide use. And port 80 wasn't the only game in town still:
there were still lots of independent BBS that had interesting content and
where TELNET was king.

So what if you weren't online all the time. The communities that existed
expected asynchronous access. You could grab lots of content and download it
for use offline. There were brilliant software applications and games ready
for the taking: DOOM had left Wolfenstein in it's wake? Online was liberating.
Online was brilliant. It still is.

~~~
weegee
The web in 1993? I don't remember NCSA Mosaic in 1993, I think I first used
that app in 1994 in the lab at UW in Seattle. It was installed on a machine
running X Windows, I think it was a DEC terminal. Before Mosaic I can remember
an ftp site in Sweden that had a lot of photos. Downloading a photo of the
space shuttle with Fetch and then opening it up a second later on the Mac IIsi
with the 12" monochrome monitor and being pretty blown away by being able to
do that so fast. I had a modem at home and could dial in to the UW Switch (via
a friends student id number) with my external ViVa 9600 baud modem that I got
for $75. That was a big improvement over my first modem, an external ViVa 2400
baud job that I paid $130 for. The early web was sparsely populated, photo.net
wasn't born yet and Philip Greenspun had a nice site "Travels with Samantha"
and that had some good advice on scanning your slides with Kodak PhotoCD
technology, and then how to remove the magenta cast in Photoshop. AOL always
sent out free discs, so after the UW access dried up (my friend graduated) I
used that free access (17 hours of free access!) and then got a dial up
account from Eskimo North in Seattle. Later found out about nocharge.com free
dialup. MUD games were cool back in 1991 when all there was was rn and irc and
ftp.sumex-aim.stanford.edu for entertainment.

~~~
kragen
Mosaic was released in 1994, but Lynx was available by 1992. But yeah, in 1992
most of the action was in ftp sites. They were already a lot better than the
local BBSes where I lived, though.

------
lurkinggrue
I was on the internet in 89 and found tons of things to do:

Irc, Usenet, Mucks, Muds, Gopher, Ftp.

By 1996 we were complaining about the Aol users ruining the internet.

~~~
tptacek
In 89 you complained once every September about the students ruining the
Internet; not a major change.

~~~
lurkinggrue
This is true and by 98 gave up complaining about Internet newbies.

------
nazgulnarsil
I remember at a young age telling my step dad that he should be buying domain
names of big companies and sitting on them. he laughed at me. :(

I'm the sort of kid who was buying candy in bulk and reselling it at school
for a hefty markup. I'm pissed I missed out on all the easy money in web 1.0.
If only I was born 10 years earlier.

~~~
blgraves
Domain Squatting is illegal and has been for about 10 years.

~~~
wallflower
If you had a time machine and wanted to make decent amounts of money, one way
would be to register the generic keyword domains (like creditcards.com which
sold for $3m)

------
jaspertheghost
Most people these days are lamenting about the death of innovation in the
valley. It reminds me of when Arthur Rock said that innovation was dead right
before the internet started taking off.

"He predicts few dramatic technological breakthroughs in the next several
years, but expects that recent inventions will enable dozens of companies to
push electronics into every aspect of life."

[http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,949965-1,00...](http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,949965-1,00.html)

Many people copy success so tons of "me-too" companies get started, but
technology just like all industries are dominated by black swans.

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tdavis
In 1996 I was just starting to "code" web sites, so I found lots to do. That
doesn't seem like a long time ago until I remember I was 12 at the time, but I
digress.

Also, spending all evening on IRC was a common event.

------
omouse
Journalists shouldn't write science- or technology-related articles. Ever.

