It was a different place for sure. Can't say that I miss all those ghastly animated gifs though. Haha.

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

This is probably old man's talk but back in 1990s internet felt like a limited private club. Majority of users online back then […]
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This is probably old man's talk but back in 1990s internet felt like a limited private club.
Majority of users online back then were computer enthusiasts and user base was more involved with PC culture.
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.

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. Since then every one in good and bad had access and started using internet.

I wish that there would be similar closed internet for enthusiasts.
Using Vogons is the closest thing to that 90s feeling.

I could have sworn that internet in 1990s was night and day better than today.
There were much less corporate manipulation and more freedom. People seemed generally happier then.
Seem like so many things online now is manipulated with marketing and money first.
( Be it: tampered reviews, A.I.robots' messages and heavy subconscious advertising influences. You literally can not trust anymore who is real and who is an automated A.I.robot. )

I think you're about right on each point

the masses slowly joined during the 90's but it still felt like a pioneering endeavour

it wasn't all good, there were less controls on thing like forums so anyone could post anything - but somehow most stayed well behaved. forums, usenet and some chat were about it. Having a web page (geocities 😀 ) was cool. Garish colours, endless frames and divs were all over, everything was "under construction" for ever and it was all fine - it felt like something new because it was

i remember downloadng articles to read later too 😀

from around 2000 i also noticed the corporate takeover, more and more "professional" sites appearing. Things like geocities slowly losing ground to blog providors and so on. Things got 'better' and more 'efficient' in some ways, and felt worse and more 'businessy' in others. The dotcom crash may have been expensive but it hardly slowed the conversion of the web into a largely commercial place.

search engines were more varied and knowing how to search was relevant, now search engines will slowly fade as generative ai summarises what it found in response to natural language. it's all moving on, in the future we can descibe an internet that isnt recognised by new generations even as the essentials still exist, underneath the 'interface'

Let me repeat myself...

Grzyb wrote on 2023-10-20, 04:29:

Basically, the history of Internet can be divided into three periods: […]
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Basically, the history of Internet can be divided into three periods:

Pre-commercialization (until 1995) - little content, but it was all precious, very hard to find outside the net.

Commercialization-in-progress (1995..2000) - plenty of companies investing in the Internet, even if they had no idea how to make profit out of this. In effect, content was rapidly growing, and still very valuable. Ads and other annoyances were also appearing, but not yet dominating.

Commercialized (since 2000) - the dot-com crash has ruined it all. Investors became cautious, and realized that putting quality content on the Internet doesn't make sense - the only way to make a profit is by providing the cheapest garbage, and using any means possible to extract money out of it: ads, lobbying, tracking, and so on. Of course, the cheapest stuff is the one provided by the users themselves - and that's exactly how the net got dominated by that "social media" cesspool...

.. if I'd have to pick one year for the end of the old www, then it would be 2007.
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.
That was the time that I remember realizing the change, at least.

90s was more civilized.
There usually was a clear reason for a person to be online.
A lot less scamming also on sales platforms.

Maybe online phones with low cost internet have caused unwanted loitering behavior.
So many vulgar language on different channels.
I don't think people swear as much in 1990s.

Ever since some recent social media site tectonic shifts (cohost, and the shite formerly known as twitter), there's been some renewal to make personal websites (neocities etc) so there's that at least.

If you want a big entity to blame though, there's Alphabet/Google. TLS, gratuitous browser breakages and extensions, webp, blanket blocking every exe and zip file, AI bullshit useless searches etc. and the whole corporate eating of also-corporate gaming hubs that made some communities relatively short term and not survive the 2000s (thanks theGlobe, glu mobile, CBS, Fandom, etc)

Yes! I caught the tail end starting around 1998 but had a similar experience. The dotcom crash was bad, but I agree that things really seemed to fall apart in 2007ish.

Maybe it was just the momentum from the 90s that finally faded?

I also feel that it coincided with the loss of Geocities etc, and the rise of facebook and other forms of monetized social media, aka, the rise of selling our attention and user data as the product.

There are more than a few videos on the subject on YouTube right now that are very recent as well. Maybe its just the Hawthorne effect or something but it seems like there is a common thread of people awakening to this in the last few years and choosing the slower, intentional consumption and connection route. It's an interesting time as so many reject corporate monetization of our attention and seek to intentionally connect again, and I see a bright future for curated consumption and active creation again, rejecting social media, supporting things like bluesky, and seeking real humans and human generated content. No one forced us to stop before and they can't prevent us from coming back to these ways of true human connection again. That is one of the major roots here and what was so fascinating about the early internet, human connection!

And yes Vogons is truly a treasure.

Further reading(or watching): https://youtu.be/QEJpZjg8GuA?si=ll9I0bDzH6HN12lJ

https://youtu.be/oYlcUbLAFmw?si=Bmn3gZLoMKHb0E6n

1990’s internet was a TERRIBLE Nightmare Experience.
SLOW Dialup connections 14.4 modems
Telephone lines
Unreliable

Cable Modems Helped make things better but was unreliable in beginning.
Its much better today
Gigabit down load speeds

Optical Fiber lines is better
Metaverse
A.I.
10 Gigabit connections

I remember that web browsers constantly started to need extensions to function like it used to:

• 1st I had to download antivirus starting around 1999-2000 before that I did not need any.
• 2nd I needed a pop-up filter this was around 2002-.
• 3rd I needed an advertisement blocker it was later maybe 2006-07.
• 4th a VPN because this would protect me from harmful behavior of online. This was later too maybe 2012-.

Is there any software or plugin now to identify A.I.robots and warn me if I encounter one during my online use ?
A software to notice artificially generated texts and images ?

Intel486dx33 wrote on 2025-05-30, 13:42:

1990’s internet was a TERRIBLE Nightmare Experience.
SLOW Dialup connections 14.4 modems

Uh, no? By late 90s when most people started getting online 56k dialup was the standard.

Intel486dx33 wrote on 2025-05-30, 13:42:

1990’s internet was a TERRIBLE Nightmare Experience. SLOW Dialup connections 14.4 modems Telephone lines Unreliable […]
Show full quote

1990’s internet was a TERRIBLE Nightmare Experience.
SLOW Dialup connections 14.4 modems
Telephone lines
Unreliable

Hi, I started in ca. 1996 when 33k6 modems were new.
However, this doesn't mean a lot when most logins had a 2400 Baud and 9600 Baud port, still. CompuServe, for example.
Except for then-new ISDN, maybe, which was a digital connection at 64000 Baud.

Previously, 1200 Baud were still common.
Our national, Minitel-like online service used to use 1200/75 Baud since early 80s.
That's what the infamous DBT-03 postal modem from the 1980s had used.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Modem_DBT-03.jpg

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:ANT_Nachri … DBT-03-9966.jpg

Of course, there also were real ISPs, as well, without proprietary online service.
1&1 comes to mind, which used to be a small ISP in the early 90s, still.
Now it's a big player.

Intel486dx33 wrote on 2025-05-30, 13:42:

Cable Modems Helped make things better but was unreliable in beginning.
Its much better today
Gigabit down load speeds

I had no idea such thing existed in the 90s.
Where I live, things like DSL and cable internet weren’t common until 2004 or so.

Previously, an ISDN and a permanent connection (T1 equivalent) was the best there was.

There also were switched broadband connections that physically had been wired together remotely, on-demand.
The connection type was more "analogue" by nature, it wasn't a predefined digital connection type. Not sure how to word.

It's also notable that where I live, ISDN wasn't "just" an internet line, such as DSL or cable, but a digital landline/digital telephone exchange network.
A lot of services, such as FAX, X.25 network access, mailbox/BBS connections and video telephony were possible directly, without using internet.

Overview (1992):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1lYFr-C_SKg

In the 90s, ISDN started out as a replacement for the old analogue telephone network.
It's development went in parallel to the internet infrastructure, it was a network on its own.
It wasn't until mid-late 90s, that our national telco, Telekom/T-Online, had realized that the internet was going to stay.

Previously, it was all about X.25 services such as CompuServe, AOL, T-Online (Datex-P and ex BTX/Datex-J; our Minitel equivalent)..

This video from 1994 gives a good impression - though the humor is, um, let's say a memento of the 90s. 😅

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WajeFKcbnQ8

Here's a pair of videos from 1995, they show the "vision" of the future (from our telco's point of view).
The term "internet" isn't named once, even.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=On1iwXzV7-I
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ldiz-2WUIA

Intel486dx33 wrote on 2025-05-30, 13:42:

Optical Fiber lines is better Metaverse A.I. 10 Gigabit connections […]
Show full quote

Optical Fiber lines is better
Metaverse
A.I.
10 Gigabit connections

On the bright side, back in the 90s, plain HTML sites were very small and easy to use.
So 9600 Baud were more than enough, strictly speaking.
Www browsers could be configured to not load pictures in advance, also.

Though PBM/XBM monochrome bitmap graphics from Unix/early 90s weren't very big in size.
LZW compressed GIF was not that big, either. If colour depth and resolution were low, I mean.

What's also notable, proprietary online services such as Prodigy, Genie, CompuServe or AOL had their own commercial services.
The internet wasn't needed for business, thus.
Online banking, searching telephone numbers, online shopping, travel booking etc. were possible directly by using the online services.

ATi_Loyalist wrote on 2025-05-30, 09:26:

There are more than a few videos on the subject on YouTube right now that are very recent as well. Maybe its just the Hawthorne effect or something but it seems like there is a common thread of people awakening to this in the last few years and choosing the slower, intentional consumption and connection route. It's an interesting time as so many reject corporate monetization of our attention and seek to intentionally connect again, and I see a bright future for curated consumption and active creation again, rejecting social media, supporting things like bluesky, and seeking real humans and human generated content. No one forced us to stop before and they can't prevent us from coming back to these ways of true human connection again. That is one of the major roots here and what was so fascinating about the early internet, human connection!

I do hope its a big movement, but suspect that all the back to slow/analogue/physical media/dumb phone etc trends are just tiny eddy's in a massive river that is flowing inexorably in one direction only

gerry wrote on 2025-05-30, 17:02:

ATi_Loyalist wrote on 2025-05-30, 09:26:

There are more than a few videos on the subject on YouTube right now that are very recent as well. Maybe its just the Hawthorne effect or something but it seems like there is a common thread of people awakening to this in the last few years and choosing the slower, intentional consumption and connection route. It's an interesting time as so many reject corporate monetization of our attention and seek to intentionally connect again, and I see a bright future for curated consumption and active creation again, rejecting social media, supporting things like bluesky, and seeking real humans and human generated content. No one forced us to stop before and they can't prevent us from coming back to these ways of true human connection again. That is one of the major roots here and what was so fascinating about the early internet, human connection!

I do hope its a big movement, but suspect that all the back to slow/analogue/physical media/dumb phone etc trends are just tiny eddy's in a massive river that is flowing inexorably in one direction only

Yeah. I know which way I'm going but I fear you are right.

user33331 wrote on 2025-05-30, 14:13:

Is there any software or plugin now to identify A.I.robots and warn me if I encounter one during my online use ?
A software to notice artificially generated texts and images ?

Per Dead Internet Theory, that would be unnecessary as it's all AI slop.

gerry wrote on 2025-05-30, 08:01:

the masses slowly joined during the 90's but it still felt like a pioneering endeavour

It likely wouldn't be hard to have an extension that can do that, problem is it may be an arms race but maybe it would force them to be less shitty. The goal would be posts indistinguishable from a honest sane human with factual, non-redundant and non-bloated posts and a disclaimer. That's rare even for humans and sadly the training set encompasses all.

I would worry about privacy using such an extension.

Remember Microsoft’s WebTV

I predict it will Return.
Amazon Echo Show is already a BIG Hit.

Link:
https://youtu.be/NjteQv6oYgA?si=gzAKcKtwaQz2VjBU

Does anyone remember "WebWasher"?
(One might think that ads are a 2000s phenomenon.)

https://web.archive.org/web/20000916185421/ht … wwash/press.htm

My first experience was ftp://ftp.microsoft.com in the mid 1990's at school.
Our school had a /22 since then because it had a big IT specialized department.
It had a 19200 leased line to the University.
~1995 We also used IRC. Since the connection broke down when a class of IT nerds got online we watched that everyone is using no more than one IRC channel at the same time.
~1997 the modem line was replaced by 128000 dual ISDN.
~1998 At home I had a cable modem. The upstream of the whole provider was at 1 MBps and I do not remember that our cable modems were throtteled. So I could transfer to a classmate on same provider with high speed I do not remember. After cable modems were changed from Terayon to Motorola we had a limit of 256 kbps uplink and 320 kbps downlink (Other cable providers in Austria had 64/320 kbps). I remember it was no problem to transfer files from school to home while the downlink of our school suffered on congestion.

My first web experiences were on a 486 with OS/2 at a friend.

As it's been said before....

Nostalgia is the most beautiful form of pain.

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

I wish that there would be similar closed internet for enthusiasts.

Sir Tim Berners-Lee would probably agree with you to some extent.