What were the first days of the internet like?

Shaodeus

Shaodeus

Still Mildly Glowing
How did the internet develop for the normal person? I didn't have internet acces until I turned 11 so I have no idea how the internet developed.

So when did you first get internet connection and how did it change over the years?
 
Well, I remember being fairly young when I first went on the internet (I don't remember the exact age, but I'll guess I was around 9.

I guess it was my childhood innocence, but it was a nice place back then, full of peace, illegal music downloads and there was harmony.

Now it's a place to vent my annoyance of the World.
 
2004, 56K dial-up. I got it updated to a modem shortly, but it still took me about 3-4 weeks to download bigger games like WOW (in ways that may, or may not have been legal). Before that i would go to internet caffes. I still remember 500ms~ latency being a normal thing and watching nba clips in 75×64 boxes, most of the time i could make out the head from a pixel. Online porn consisted mostly of images and many pages were still mostly html based. Instead of torrents you had emule, instead of facebook you had mirc, instead of youtube you had... well, newgrounds.com? :lol:

From my point of view internet feels much more restrictive and commercialized (not that that's always bad) than it used to, but now you can find so much more.
 
Ah I remember Newgrounds, I spent my time on either that or Ebaums World (9 year old me was living the life).
 
Well my first encounter with it was in 1999~, can't remember anything interesting about that though.
 
Late 90's my neighbor had the internet, he used to invite me over when his parents weren't home to look at stupid shit like Bert and Ernie gay porn and a mouse game where you hunt Pokemon in the wild and shoot them.
 
I have no idea how the internet developed.
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Think of it as like a spiders web that self heals and self routes. Sort of as if I took part of the internet away, it would re route and send the messages a different way.
The internet was developed by DARPA. It was created so it would re route in the event a city was destroyed by a nuclear strike, it would just re route, unlike point to point systems that involved copper wiring.
 
We got internet access at home sometime before '95. Can't remember exactly when, and I can't remember much about it to be honest. I remember the dial-up tone very well, and I remember downloading some dos games in an interface that looked pretty much like an ftp client. It would be a couple of years until I started using the internet "for real", playing Diablo 1 online for like 20 mins each night (because it was expensive as fuck and that's all my parents would allow - you couldn't use the phone at the same time either). Another couple of years and I started getting into mailing lists and message boards for bands I liked, reading about bands on horribly designed websites, and so on. For a few years I was very active in a couple of communities. It was pretty different back then. No trolls, people used proper spelling and language (for the most part), things were generally nice, but also much more serious. You didn't distance yourself from what happened online in the same way. Back then you shared funny and disgusting videos and pictures by email, mostly. Finding music videos and live performances of bands I liked was a pain (for a while I traded live bootlegs on VHS, casettes and cd's with people all over the world). When Napster came along it got a whole lot easier, but downloading something took forever. I could easily stare at the screen for 20 or so minutes waiting for a song to finish downloading (and that was rather fast, sometimes it could take hours). Downloading entire discographies was no small task.

It's easy to forget how ridiculously spoiled we are with the availability of everything online these days.
 
I remember racking up large phone bills calling up peoples Bulletin Board Systems, would connect with a 56k modem through copper phone line [literally dialling a phone number] and download crappy porno at 2-4 kbs. Frequent disconnects would mean lost data, people calling you from a normal phone would disconnect you also. This was all before I had any knowledge of the "internet" as I know it today. My first taste of it was around early-mid nineties at local college, got an email address, lots of free and open FTP servers with all sorts of random crap on them to sift through - someones life of random collected files, music, photos, videos, shareware games - warez [ooooOOOOoooOOooo!].

No "google" in sight anywhere. That was great. Microsoft was killing it with MS-DOS 6.22 and Windows 3.11 - long nights spent playing DOOM, Duke Nukem, Commander Keen & Fallout & Wasteland of course.

Good times. Now the internet is one huge corporate advertising pit, it infects pretty much every useful internet page with its deadly venom. I hate what it has become.
 
Man I remember one of my GF's had this specific AIM sound every time she used to IM me like a Sheep's baah or something similar sounding. Sigh, kinda bittersweet nes pas?
 
kraag said:
Good times. Now the internet is one huge corporate advertising pit, it infects pretty much every useful internet page with its deadly venom. I hate what it has become.
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Yeah the internet has lost much of its mystique and charm in recent years hasn't it? I was on YouTube when it all started though, in the days when there was no Markiplier or pewdipie, when there was shit like this instead.
 
It's funny but I can't actually remember my first contact with the Internet, which wasn't so long ago. Must have been in 2005 or something like that. It must have been a magic experience for young me to discover that everything could be accessed in only a few seconds/minutes.

Actually, one of the earliest things I remember in this video on Youtube, but I don't think it was the first I ever saw.

 
I got internet around 2001/2002.
From what I recall a lot of the elements we see today were already present back then, but I guess a lot less advertisement.
However as I was unexperienced regarding safety and security I didn't dare go to anything even remotely questionable in general. It took quite some time before I finally played with things like MAME.

I also had one of those shitty 56k modems and as my mom used a fax machine a lot I could only surf on certain times.
Getting cable was so great, the speed was no longer limited so more.

Quite some places from back then that are gone now, I wish I had known about any Fallout forums back then, it would have been interesting to see what the discussion were back then.
I used to help with a Metroid fan site, writing fan articles for it, this was way before we got the various wikis which stuck to the facts depicted in games.

Definitely would have like to have seen what the internet was like in the 90s.
 
Millim said:
Ah I remember Newgrounds, I spent my time on either that or Ebaums World (9 year old me was living the life).
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Stickdeath was the shit!

I first went online when i was in the 4-6th grade i guess wich must have been 18-20 years ago? Don't remember much besides playing WC1 online and not knowing what the hell i was doing.

The first "I know what i'm doing" part was probably 2-3 years later crusing around newgrounds/stickdeath and being a member of some swedish social media crap.

Edit: We did have a modem on our 266hmz pentium way before that but we never got it to work. Can't remeber why.
 
Geeze, you kids make me feel old.... In the mid-90's, I had a 133MHz Pentium PC with a 1.2GB HDD, 16MB of RAM, and a 28.8k modem. You could find people using 14.4k or even 9600 baud modems. Some folks had T-1 lines, but those were pretty expensive. AOL was still king, and AOL had a lot of not-so-savvy people thinking that they were the Internet. There were a lot of sites for setting up personal homepages (Geocities being one of the bigger ones). There were still a lot of ads, but very few were animated. I'm not including flashing or blinking; there was a lot of that. Downloading was difficult; the modem connections would often drop for no apparent reason. It took about an hour to download a 1 MB file on a 28.8 modem. I don't think YouTube (and Flash in general) took off until after the 56k modems were introduced. CSS was a major innovation when it hit. There were a lot of message boards. There was some online gaming; I mostly remember Warcraft, C&C, and Diablo. I know some of the early shooters were network capable, but I never got into those. Ultima Online was the granddaddy MMORPG.

The premier browser was Netscape. Microsoft had to play catch-up with Internet Explorer, and they bundled it with Windows as part of their plan. They got in a fair amount of trouble for that, but they did manage to kill off Netscape eventually. IE was free with Windows, and Netscape was sold separately for around $35. IIRC, the code for Netscape eventually formed the core for Firefox after Netscape (the company) became defunct.
 
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Shaodeus said:
So when did you first get internet connection and how did it change over the years?
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Late nineties, with paid minute telephone pulses and 32K modem.

Since I was sticking with a couple of technical sites, internet seemed to be much more pragmatic and professional to me than nowadays. We've had only a couple of big servers and very few frequently visited sites here, with more quality content and less quantity. Thanks to paid pulses the visitors were mostly grown up and working persons who did tend to read more and comment less, they held netiquette in high regard usualy.
 
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