http://m.gizmodo.com/5784059/this-is-how-we-surfed-the-web-in-1998-slowly Some of you may have been too young to know of most of the stuff going on in the video other than the anime websites, but good viewing for nostalgia. mIRC, Myth, voodoo 2, pci/isa, horrible web design, tacky hit counters, and frames. All I needed was a shot of a java applet crashing his web browser while ghetto superstar song was playing in the background and my life would be complete.
See I only started using and knowing much about the internet when I was 16. Which was nearly 9 years ago so I only know it from back then. Which I think was the Windows 98 era.. When was it that it started getting good like we know now?
IRC is still around.. will probably be forever. But web browsing is 1000% better now. Back then, I remember Java applets having a 50% success rate of crashing my browser, regardless of Netscape Navigator or Internet Explorer usage. Websites with frames were common and, pretty much a pain to navigate. User made geocities and xoom websites were common with terrible web design and annoying ass music playing in the background. Yahoo and Altavista were the search engines of choice. I guess things started to pick up when the giants you see now started to kick it up a notch and broadband became a little more widespread. Google, youtube, myspace, facebook. Also, the blog sites (livejournal, wordpress, tumblr) really helped in horrible web design by joe schmoe.
OH I'm still using IRC. The client I'm using are mIRC (for leeching to my own machine) and irssi 0.8.14 for chatting (it's on my server, so I can access from anywhere including from my Droid). I used to use Lynx as the text-based browser, if any of you remembered... Had anyone used Gopher before? It had all sorts of information. It was fun back in the mid 90s. Now, the web has a face lift.
Yep, Lynx and Gopher, two first applications to plugin into the web. I guess it was around 1994, my very first year at the University. I remember that there were not much WWW pages around so lynx was rather unusable, but Gopher was used at Universities and I was able to connect to US sites and browse for the data. What a breeze of a space technology it was. Then, few months later, Netscape has released its first browser with graphical GUI, few sites emerged and I lost my interest in text-based browsing.
You people make me feel like I'm a baby. You speak of the times when I didn't have complete motor control or fully developed cognitive faculties as it it were yesterday.
Pichu we just can't get rid of you can we?? lol I started expiramenting with Linux in '99, bought a big ole book about it. Still don't understand it it had such a facelift in the early 2000's that the book is pretty much useless :x.
I've been online since the early 90s. So yes, I remember when the internet was that primitive. In fact, I remember when it was more primitive than that. I remember using a 14.4 modem to connect to prodigy in windows 3.1 on a 386. We were on Windows XP 9 years ago. Yes, it really is that old, and people still use it. It got a lot better when people moved off dial-up onto high-speed connections in large numbers. That was a gradual process that started in the late 90s so it's hard to pinpoint a specific year.
My first experience of the interwebs was on my mum's pc in '98 or '99 running Windows 98. Dial up connection lol. Man that shit was loud connecting late at night, and slooow. I remember discovering yahoo chat and spending way too much time on it. That was when I learned of the term lol. Um, lol.
I don't remember the internet being that bad in 1998 and I was quite a heavy user. I think my memory is starting to fail as I get older, it is defiantly getting worse as I get more grey hairs in my beard!
Lol, I remember all that too. Anyone remember BBS? (Bulletin Board Systems). I used to log in to that. Also playing Diablo 1 online through smallband 14.4k modem. Which sucked ass. Dual ISDN for the win!
Yea, I used to mess around on BBS' It was quite horrible on my 2400 baud modem. even colored ansi art (yes, ansi, not ascii) crawled. There was this local bbs with 4 nodes and that was like THE bbs to use for an awesome chat experience. I was more into warez back then. z-modem ftw. oh god it's so sad looking back at it now.