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How do you guys remember the early days of the internet? What do you miss about it?
(tim.kicker.dev)
this post was submitted on 25 Jul 2023
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I've been around long enough to have witnessed the internet go through many stages of development. From the early days of dialup internet (back then AOL Online was essentially a walled-off version of the internet - it was a big deal when the AOL software actually let people visit other websites). We had a different local dialup service so I had the full unadulterated internet.
Back in the mid 90's, nearly everything on the internet was paywalled - without a credit card there was very little you could do. Even Encyclopedia sites (like Microsoft's Encyclopedia Britanica) was behind a paywall. I don't miss the slow speeds of dialup and I don't miss the slow downloads (back in the day there was no way to pause and resume a download so if you lost connection, you had to restart!).
Of course real geeks know about newsgroups and how they fileshare so this was a moot point going back a very long time, but for the average internet user this wasn't a thing for quite a while.
I spent a lot of time on the IRC (internet relay chat) which I used to fileshare. It was where I learned to download calculator games for my Texas Instruments graphing calculator that ultimately introduced me into programming my own games which gave me a foundation that I've used ever since in various careers over the decades.
What I miss is the civility of the internet pre-2008. When it was harder to get on the internet. Not everyone had a PC or knew how to use it to get online. Now with iPhones any troll could get online. That's when I noticed a big shift in online communities.
I really don't recall paywalls in the mid 90s beside porn. Back then nobody trusted using credit cards online. It wasn't really until Amazon came along that people started really considering the idea.
I remember getting Encyclopedias on disk/disc. It took a long time for encyclopedias to realize their days were numbered and to even embrace the Web. They were so used to the model of selling book sets that were immediately outdated once you bought them.
Most of the good information I remember getting was just on random Web sites that subject matter experts put up.
This was really early on - pre-1999. The paywall thing was part of a lot of companies ploy to get paid for the content on their site - it lead up to the Dot-Com bubble burst.
Back in the early days, online encyclopedia websites were basically media-less versions of the same content as on the disc - but videos were rare because the bandwidth required.
Funny thing is my previous employer actually got into business by selling load-balancing devices to the porn industry in the early days of the internet - back then you needed fancy equipment to balance site visitors between multiple servers to handle the demand because hosting video was quite resource intensive over 20 years ago lol. Then after load balancing, data storage became their next big venture - targeting the same clients haha
Damn, you just reminded me I downloaded some sick games onto my TI-84 back in high school. I gotta find that thing, I can't quite remember most of the games besides Tetris.
Agree 1000%. In the early 2000s the internet was a sanctuary from mainstream society, and more cohesive in many ways. Now, all of the real world's problems have become manifest online. Not in the fediverse yet though 🤞