old school gamer man wrote on 2025-06-06, 13:52:

but dose anyone remember long distance call charges for using sites and servers outside your area code?

Hey, that was the problem with BBSes, not with the Internet!
For Internet access, you only called a dial-up server *inside* your area, and didn't care about location of the WWW/FTP/whatever site.

and for anyone wanting to relive some old school web give this a go https://makefrontendshitagain.party/

Oh yeah, that's what's called "HTML Hell" - http://www.catb.org/esr/html-hell.html

Grzyb wrote on 2025-06-06, 14:56:

For Internet access, you only called a dial-up server *inside* your area,

assuming you had one.

old school gamer man wrote on 2025-06-06, 13:52:

on a more serious note wiby is a search engine for mostly older sires.
https://wiby.org/

Cool! I've used wiby.me to find vintage sites that work on Minuet (DOS)..
It's not just a nostalgia thing, though! I've found recent non-mainstream sites via Wiby that are very interesting!
With Wiby, I continue to discover parts of the world wide web that I thought had been lost to time forever.

Btw, there's also http://retroreddit.com/
It's a proxy that converts the reddit.com site to HTML/HTTP 1.0!
I couldn't believe it when it loaded perfecrly fine on Minuet's www browser on a 4,77 MHz PC with NE2000 network card!

Edit:

old school gamer man wrote on 2025-06-06, 15:15:

Grzyb wrote on 2025-06-06, 14:56:

For Internet access, you only called a dial-up server *inside* your area,

assuming you had one.

Hi, good point! Here in good old Germany, we had such problems, too.

The national online service (T-Online aka BTX aka Datex-J) had a nation-wide number for login that cost little.
But it was 1200 Baud download/75 Baud upload (V.23 standard), dating back to the 80s.

More contemporary, normal modem logins at 2400 Baud or 9600 Baud were spread across the country, mainly next to big cities.
There also were a bunch of local PADs for Datex-P (commercial X.25 service of our telco)..

Now the problem was to find a dial-up login for an ISP or one of the T-Online competitors (AOL, CompuServe etc).

In absence of such logins, CompuServe users in Germany originally had to login via T-Online's Datex services.
So the users had to pay for phone bill, T-Online and CompuServe.

AOL was similar, but worse, because AOL was late in Germany by many years.
That's why CompuServe was more popular here, also. It was an ancient e-mail provider, too.
In WinCIM, there are many gateways for login - a memento of that time.

ISDN also was expensive, but at least it worked fine if it worked.
Full 64 or 128 KBit/s in a time when most 56k modems even ran at 33k6 due to bad telephone quality.

PS: I didn't mean to get the place where live so much into focus,
but sadly I can merely talk about how it was in my place, after all. 🤷‍♂️
And it seemingly was a bit different to the US or other parts of Europe, simply.
Germany was like Austria/Switzerland and France in this respect, I assume.
We had these Minitel/Prestel type of services that predated ISPs.

Edit: Screenshot attached.

We had cable modems rolled out in 1997+ in Austria.
When I moved to Germany in 1999 it was like going to Stone Age:
-pay per tick (usually some minutes)
-modem speed
-modem ping
-dialup (instead of permanent connection)
-dynamic ip address

Grzyb wrote on 2025-06-06, 14:56:

Oh yeah, that's what's called "HTML Hell" - http://www.catb.org/esr/html-hell.html

"Better than that, pages with 25K of Javascript followed by < 5K of actual content [...]. In general, any page whose source has more Javascript than content should be sent to the recycle bin."

Oh, how time has marched on and not for the better. I am not exaggerating when I say I saw pages load quicker in the dial-up days than on my current 70Mb connection. Since Firefox handily disabled NoScript (for security, no less) I now browse with 'javascript.enabled' set to false, which has made for a markedly snappier web experience. And any sites refusing to load save me wasting my time reading their garbage.

When I moved to Germany in 1999 it was like going to Stone Age

Because it was living in an alternate reality where the internet wasn't the next big thing.
In the 80s and 90s, it was all about BTX/Datex-J (and Datex-P) and ISDN.
- Japan was similar, btw, it had evaluated ISDN since the 1980s.

The internet wasn't being planned in, originally, in short.
By 1996, the BTX T-Online 1.2 software had just gotten the KIT Decoder,
to update classic BTX system and make it look HTML-like.
That was same time when the cool kids had their Scall pager or a Skyper.

It wasn't until late 90s that Telekom/T-Online had fully realized the internet won't go away..
That's when the move over to DSL was going to happen
(with many German DSL routers being emulating ISDN, the S0 port, for ISDN equipment).

In Switzerland/BTX had existed, too. BTX was even more popular over there, even.
In the 80s, Austria had the Mupid computer, for example.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MUPID

Edit: It was like living in another reality, really.
Ordinary citizen didn't even know what this internet thing was.
Printed magazines and books had online site references such as GO WEATHER, *QUELLE# and so on.
Only a few had mentioned that new, mysterious "world wide web" and "internet".
However, e-mail was known. Most online services allowed sending both messages and international e-mail.

Edit: There also was a "mailbox scene" at the time.
It wasn't being too uncommon that PC users dialed into a manufacturer's mailbox (BBS) via terminal program and download files via X/Y/ZModem.
Mailbox lists were mentioned in BTX Magazin and other printed media.
Many mailbox systems in mid-90s had an ISDN port, too.
That's what ISDN was about - providing a digital landline. It wasn't just an internet connection, like DSL or cable were.

I enjoyed it from 1997 to around 2001... golden times.

Grzyb wrote on 2025-06-06, 14:56:

Oh yeah, that's what's called "HTML Hell" - http://www.catb.org/esr/html-hell.html

My school (school website) was guilty of most of this! 🥲
We've used frames, non-clickable miniature pictures, 1024x768 resolution, and "made for Internet Explorer".
Also JPGs with stretched aspect ratio and bitmap navigation buttons without alternative text description.
No web-safe colours. MS FrontPage was the primary tool. The whole M$ hell, in short.

amadeus777999 wrote on 2025-06-06, 17:40:

I enjoyed it from 1997 to around 2001... golden times.

In that time frame, there used to be WAP pages and handhelds and PDAs, too.
I remember that some Palm Pilot users could put their unit in the craddle, press sync button and the favorite web pages had been converted/transferred to be read "on the go".
This had involved some third-party software that worked in tandem with Palm Desktop and Internet Explorer, I think.

Personally, I had owned an used HP Jornada handheld with a WLAN card for CF slot.
Browsing the internet on Pocket Internet Explorer was something to first to get used to.
That was rather in 2003/2004, though, I believe. When WEP 128 encryption was still allowed.

Another thing in the 1990's was playing games in browser, i remember there being card games and the like that could be played online against real opponents - i remember yahoo games as being a big hub for that. There were also some graphical games, though i think flash games waited until the early 2000's. One game i remember was a java applet asteroids games, that must have been around 1996, still early days for the tech.

gerry wrote on 2025-06-09, 09:11:

Another thing in the 1990's was playing games in browser, i remember there being card games and the like that could be played online against real opponents - i remember yahoo games as being a big hub for that. There were also some graphical games, though i think flash games waited until the early 2000's. One game i remember was a java applet asteroids games, that must have been around 1996, still early days for the tech.

ohh yeah all the cool flash games where fun back in the day, and the crude flash clips and games like elf bowling or joes cartoons 🤣. Seemed like everyone was making flash games back in the day.

old school gamer man wrote on 2025-06-09, 14:24:

gerry wrote on 2025-06-09, 09:11:

Another thing in the 1990's was playing games in browser, i remember there being card games and the like that could be played online against real opponents - i remember yahoo games as being a big hub for that. There were also some graphical games, though i think flash games waited until the early 2000's. One game i remember was a java applet asteroids games, that must have been around 1996, still early days for the tech.

ohh yeah all the cool flash games where fun back in the day, and the crude flash clips and games like elf bowling or joes cartoons 🤣. Seemed like everyone was making flash games back in the day.

some of the flash games are now emulated and still payable as a category in some browser games sites but so many are gone forever, in the mid 90's i think there were largely non graphical games that involved refreshing and php or early javascript/html. Some were as java applets. Shockwave was around before Flash too, it was also a plug-in, i remember it but not well - i can't really think of any games from its very early days, but i think some games were there from around 1996 onwards

gerry wrote on 2025-06-09, 15:42:

old school gamer man wrote on 2025-06-09, 14:24:

gerry wrote on 2025-06-09, 09:11:

Another thing in the 1990's was playing games in browser, i remember there being card games and the like that could be played online against real opponents - i remember yahoo games as being a big hub for that. There were also some graphical games, though i think flash games waited until the early 2000's. One game i remember was a java applet asteroids games, that must have been around 1996, still early days for the tech.

ohh yeah all the cool flash games where fun back in the day, and the crude flash clips and games like elf bowling or joes cartoons lol. Seemed like everyone was making flash games back in the day.

some of the flash games are now emulated and still payable as a category in some browser games sites but so many are gone forever, in the mid 90's i think there were largely non graphical games that involved refreshing and php or early javascript/html. Some were as java applets. Shockwave was around before Flash too, it was also a plug-in, i remember it but not well - i can't really think of any games from its very early days, but i think some games were there from around 1996 onwards

The Flashpoint Archive has saved a huge amount of them. It's almost up to 2TB in size.

gerry wrote on 2025-06-09, 15:42:

old school gamer man wrote on 2025-06-09, 14:24:

gerry wrote on 2025-06-09, 09:11:

Another thing in the 1990's was playing games in browser, i remember there being card games and the like that could be played online against real opponents - i remember yahoo games as being a big hub for that. There were also some graphical games, though i think flash games waited until the early 2000's. One game i remember was a java applet asteroids games, that must have been around 1996, still early days for the tech.

ohh yeah all the cool flash games where fun back in the day, and the crude flash clips and games like elf bowling or joes cartoons 🤣. Seemed like everyone was making flash games back in the day.

some of the flash games are now emulated and still payable as a category in some browser games sites but so many are gone forever, in the mid 90's i think there were largely non graphical games that involved refreshing and php or early javascript/html. Some were as java applets. Shockwave was around before Flash too, it was also a plug-in, i remember it but not well - i can't really think of any games from its very early days, but i think some games were there from around 1996 onwards

That triggered a memory I had... Well known 90s PC game website Happypuppy.com had an area of the site for Internet/browser games around 96 or so. One of them was called Destruction Derby, which made me think that somehow it was the Psygnosis 3D game, but instead it was along the lines of clicking on a picture to trigger a new picture being loaded, such as clicking on a picture of a car and then the page refreshing and showing you a picture of the car crashed into the guard rail. Perhaps there was some limited interactivity where clicking in different places on a picture might trigger a different result/picture to open up ... But I remember thinking that this could barely be considered a game.

I know the way back machine has some cached copies of happypuppy, I wouldn't be surprised if a simple picture loading "game" along those lines might have been archived by the way back machine itself. I'll have to check later

Edit, found the happy puppy list via the web games button on this page. Don't see destruction Derby though. Might have been another name. https://web.archive.org/web/19980505210559/ht … ames/index.html

liqmat wrote on 2025-06-09, 16:34:

The Flashpoint Archive has saved a huge amount of them. It's almost up to 2TB in size.

that's going to be a lot of games! i'm glad this happened though, there are so many games that will have been in many lives that could have vanished completely, now at least there is a good chance its still out there

dukeofurl wrote on 2025-06-09, 16:54:

That triggered a memory I had... Well known 90s PC game website Happypuppy.com had an area of the site for Internet/browser games around 96 or so. One of them was called Destruction Derby, which made me think that somehow it was the Psygnosis 3D game, but instead it was along the lines of clicking on a picture to trigger a new picture being loaded, such as clicking on a picture of a car and then the page refreshing and showing you a picture of the car crashed into the guard rail. Perhaps there was some limited interactivity where clicking in different places on a picture might trigger a different result/picture to open up ... But I remember thinking that this could barely be considered a game.

I know the way back machine has some cached copies of happypuppy, I wouldn't be surprised if a simple picture loading "game" along those lines might have been archived by the way back machine itself. I'll have to check later

Edit, found the happy puppy list via the web games button on this page. Don't see destruction Derby though. Might have been another name. https://web.archive.org/web/19980505210559/ht … ames/index.html

good find, i remember happypuppy too, this and some of the sites here: What old video game modding sites are still up? have really taken me back to that time, where everything was new and fast moving

I know HappyPuppy had Java games but I've never really played them. If I wanted to play a game "on-line" I'd have headed to the mpogs instead.

Just stumbled over this old news report about the internet.
Especially these lines hit very hard, I think.

"There's an interesting kind of restraint... there's not a lot of cursing or swearing, there's not a lot of personal cuts, there's not a lot of putdowns..."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KDxqfgIDvEY

Just got reminded about probably the #1 reason why the 90s internet was better than the modern one...

EVERYTHING WAS EASY TO DOWNLOAD.

Now, trying to download something from Spotify... no luck as of yet.
I'm sure I will find a working tool, sooner or later - and there's always the analog hole - but the point remains valid: online services providers do everything they can to prevent users from downloading stuff.

There are always some third-party tools to do it, but they are all aiming at a moving target - one day they work, the next they fail...
Definitely the #1 annoyance of the internet in this Retarded New World(TM).

Grzyb wrote on 2025-06-22, 07:22:

Just got reminded about probably the #1 reason why the 90s internet was better than the modern one... […]
Show full quote

Just got reminded about probably the #1 reason why the 90s internet was better than the modern one...

EVERYTHING WAS EASY TO DOWNLOAD.

Now, trying to download something from Spotify... no luck as of yet.
I'm sure I will find a working tool, sooner or later - and there's always the analog hole - but the point remains valid: online services providers do everything they can to prevent users from downloading stuff.

There are always some third-party tools to do it, but they are all aiming at a moving target - one day they work, the next they fail...
Definitely the #1 annoyance of the internet in this Retarded New World(TM).

slower to download too, but indeed there are now more barriers to downloading something 'streamed'. I can see why, copyright and all that. I am at the point where if its behind a wall it can stay there, whatever it is just isn't worth it either way

What I remember most about the World Wide Web from 1994 thru about 1998 was the persistent need to keep changing dial-up ISPs once your trial period ran out, anywhere from 14-days to, eventually, 3 months. You only had so many included hours per month, then you'd get billed by the minute or hour for uptime. I ran through about a dozen ISPs during this period. I remember first signing up with an outfit called GNN in mid-1994; it was later acquired by AOL.

Another thing I recall from this period was needing to jot down all the international ISP dial-up numbers which had an agreement with your ISP. This was needed when travelling outside North America, that is, if you wanted to connect your computer remotely.

The last annoyance I recall was the early cell phone days. Most cell phones had adaptors to connect to your laptop's PCMCIA card. Often you had to use a PCMCIA "cell modem" to connect to your cell phone. I think I also had one phone which connected via a PCMCIA serial port card. I don't recall ever getting more than 1200 or 2400 baud using the cell phone. It was mostly good for checking e-mails and talking rubbish on IRC. I used an LG Phenom Express from (I think) 1998 to 2005. https://www.pencomputing.com/showcase/lg_phenom_express.html Remember handheld PC's?

Some random memories from pre-2000, in no particular order:

I was a strong user of the hotbot search engine.

I miss the sounds emitted when connecting through a dial-up modem.

I do not miss having the internet disconnect when a phone call came in. It didn't take me long to order a second phone line just for the internet.

I miss the novelty of 1990's internet and its simplicity. If I was given 10 years left to live and was given the opportunity to go back to any 10-year period of time I had already lived, it would probably be 1990-2000.

I'm still on IRC and never took a break from it. It's an idler's paradise now, but I do find people from 25 years ago coming back to it again. I remember when I was learning programming, the guys on the C channel were quite helpful.

My favourite ISP of the time was CompuServe.

I remember most libraries had a dial-up service to search their catalogues. My memory is a bit foggy, but I think we used HyperTerminal to log in there, normally at 9600 or 14400 baud.

Before mainstream internet, we used dial-in BBS services as a newsgroup and a place to download firmware or BIOS updates.

I didn't have DSL until around 2001 and the lousy phone lines in my ancient apartment building never let me connect at more than 26400 baud. Even when I had DSL, it as very slow, about 128K max.

Napster and Bearshare remind me of early DSL days. ICQ reminds me of the dial-up days.

I remember there being some rather sleezy Macromedia Flash games. I specifically recall one related to condums.

I enjoyed experimenting with shareware from Tucows.

I do not miss the noise those early Ultra2-LVD SCSI drives made, even when brand new. I didn't measure the dB, but it felt up to 10x louder than ordinary IDE drives of the time (both the platter spin noise and the read/write head noise). The noise would sometimes wake me up.

That's all I can think of for now.

user33331 wrote on 2025-05-30, 07:41:

I used Telewell 56k modem and it was pay per usage time.
- So every time I clocked my total online time, planned ahead what few online pages I would visit to and saved lots of offline pages to view them when I was back in offline.

Conexant was the leading brand here, though it was better known - for reasons that should be obvious to anyone who had a softmodem - as "Generic Soft56K Data Fax" 😀
Speaking about the "fax" I used that once, using the optional install program on the XP CD, to send crap I made in Paint to my mom at work - I think she liked it...

Yes, typical online strategy was to open Outlook Express and IE6, have the first auto-download mail and about 6 newsgroups, meanwhile open the desired website almost invariably Pokemon related, open 6-8 links in separate tabs windows, then disconnect and come back once everything has been read 😀

feipoa wrote on 2025-06-23, 08:08:

What I remember most about the World Wide Web from 1994 thru about 1998 was the persistent need to keep changing dial-up ISPs once your trial period ran out, anywhere from 14-days to, eventually, 3 months. You only had so many included hours per month, then you'd get billed by the minute or hour for uptime. I ran through about a dozen ISPs during this period.

dionb wrote on 2025-06-06, 11:02:

It wasn't just the duration either, also the cost. Hours online back then could be a major expense, with both the phone line and the ISP themselves metered.

Not a thing here in Italy - in 1998+ at least, where there were plenty of "Free ISPs" where you only paid for the call (usually at standard local rate, which here was never really free though you could get semi-flat plans, but in the main the country had just recently switched from unsynchronized tick based billing to actual seconds of connection), ours was called Interfree and was part of the CDC group which was also famous for being the biggest national computer company, from factory (Micronica) to stores (Computer Discount)

Before that it was indeed normal to pay your ISP directly, but the better ones had toll free numbers to compensate; so there was a bit of national sport to find toll free numbers connecting to modems and trying to break in/out to the wider Internet - and these would end up in one of the largest "cybercrime" busts against 200 common persons!
Funnily enough this http://www.interlex.it/tlc/dinosaur.htm is the only article I can still find about that, and the researcher who replicated the experiment was totally in panic after confirming it, not because it was a scam at the expense of some corporation, but because it allowed real Anonymous internet access!!

I also remember the dialer scare, usually in the form of ActiveX - well I never fell for one 😀 - but they were around...

user33331 wrote on 2025-05-30, 07:41:

I think that Internet's golden age feeling went out around 2000-2002 when internet flat out mainstreamed and low cost broad brands started to pop up.

Low cost in 2002! Nah, for us it would be HIGH cost (2€/hour) 640k ADSL in 2005-2006 until we switched to medium-ish cost flat rate (30? 35?€/month)

Jo22 wrote on 2025-05-30, 08:35:

[...] That's about when I saw the last traditional websites, personal homepages being updated.
Some may also say 2005 or 2002, not sure. But if I had to choose, then I would go for 2007.

From my POV that would be 2006, when independent-ish websites by common people who knew how to use Frontpage were replaced by Blogger/Wordpress/Splindr - or, for most people in my middle school, MSN Spaces (that was a sad closure)

kickarse wrote on 2025-05-31, 20:14:

Google used to help you find the obscure stuff - now it buries it under SEO garbage, AI-generated filler, and Wikipedia clones. The actual useful or interesting results still exist likely, but you just have to dig for them, and might not even find anything, because the website you need is out of google's index after sharing some warez piece or whatever.

Probably not even that, multiple times I have found (from some link, or old bookmark backups) some classic website that's a wonder it's still up, then tried to search for it using "a very exactly copy-pasted quote between quotes" and found nothing!
I don't remember if I posted that on this forum, but a few years ago I found an article/post/whatever that basically said their mission was no more to index the whole Web...