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.