The internet right now

[Sentientprism]

I'm completely unfamiliar with pre-corporation internet, and honestly hearing about it with the independent smaller fan sites sounds way better then YouTube/Twitter/Tik-Tok land. Is anyone here familiar with the older internet? If so, do you think it'll come back? I believe its possible, but unlikely to happen any time soon.

[UglyJoe]

Well it certainly had a lot more personality.  But you ultimately had access to much less information.  It's a bit of a trade-off.

As far as it "coming back", I guess it depends on what part of it you expect to come back?

My best experiences came from people who would create their own websites and host their own forums and such (sometimes called "everything/nothing" or "e/n" sites).  Hung out on a few of those, but they were always kinda destined to burn out since it's usually just one person coding it and maintaining it and paying for it and once they get a real job they can't take care of it anymore. I created my own E/N site when I was in college (circa 2003) and had a blast building and operating in a space where me and my friends could goof off online.  Only lasted a couple of years, though

I think there's just a general lack of interest nowadays.  It's much lower effort to just spin up a Discord channel for your friends to hang out in than it is to create your own mini blog/social-media site.

[Epic_Lotus]

I was there for the old internet.  It isn't coming back, sadly.  Maybe something new will happen one day that is like the early internet days.  That would be nice. 

[P]

First time a friend showed me "the internet" was in 1995, 1996 or so I think, a time when enthusiasm was high, it was always on the news as the coolest thing ever and every company started to have a website. But my family didn't have internet at home until 1998 I think (which is still quite early in Sweden). At that time you had basically only dial-up modems and you had to pay the telephone bill based on how long you were connected so it was very expensive to use besides being slow. Downloading a Famicom ROM took about 10 min and an SFC game took about an hour. I really don't miss that part.

I had my first experience with an MMORPG at this time, but due to the high costs of being connected to the internet (which I had to pay myself by putting money into a specefic internet piggy bank next to the computer) you could only play for a short time, and subscribing to the game would be even more expensive so you only played on trial mode which lasted until level 10. The game was Nexus TK (AKA Baramue Nara in Korean) which is probably the first Korean MMORPG and the game that established the Korean/Asian MMORPG genre (Lineage, Ragnarök Online etc), and is still active today. It was definitely not the first MMORPG but it predates Ultima Online by a few months.

My school also started getting internet in 1998 for pupils to use (they had it earlier for the staff though), and since they didn't have to pay for the time being connected (as they were always connected) it was less stressful to use, but on the other hand you could normally only use the computers when doing schoolwork.

Sometime in 2000 people could get ADSL which was much faster than dial-up, and you could stay connected forever without it affecting cost, which finally opened up internet for real for me.


Like UglyJoe said, the early internet (that I experienced) had more character as there where a lot of homemade homepages where people wrote about their interests, put up a few Famicom ROMs for download and stuff like that. No Wikipedia and much harder to find information, but it felt like it was quite easy to find information as we had nothing else to compare with except for going to the library. Due to limited bandwidth and HDD space, sound files were large and video was usually of the lowest quality. When downloading music, you would often go for midi files as they were small enough to download. Also no Youtube and videos wasn't that common on websites (but eventually became quite common in file sharing circles using special programs). There where a lot of crappy video players like Quicktime and Realplayer which seemed to be made to annoy the user as much as possible while having proprietary formats and couldn't be replaced for a long time. Java was also often required to be installed for many things and also did its best to annoy the user as often as it could.

AltaVista (later also Eureka and Yahoo!) was the commonly used search engine, and wasn't as effective as modern search engines like Google and DuckDuckGo are now. AltaVista's Babelfish was also much worse than Google Translate at translating Japanese to English. Later the Japanese Excite Translate came which was much better, but required you to navigate the excite.co.jp website which was (and still is) in Japanese.

So there are a lot of things that I don't miss. What I do miss is that you didn't have this constant threat of spyware and tracking cookies. Viruses were rare, but you did occasionally stumble on a website that just barfed popups on you. Sometimes totally empty popups that seemed to serve no purpose other than forcing you to restart the webbrowser because they couldn't always be closed (sometimes locking it up so a CTRL+ALT+DELETE was needed). Other times you randomly got some really disturbing porn adds as popups out of nowhere when browsing the internet (on non-pornographic websites, honest ). I'm just glad I was old enough to not get traumatized from those, but I remember some girls mentioning that those appeared for them and they got really shocked.

The homemade websites people made often had a "with frames" and "without frames" options. The "frames" was normally a navigation bar on the left side which scrolled independently from the rest of the website. Tom Sloper's mahjong site is one of few homepages that still uses this kind of layout even today. I don't miss this, but it is a bit nostalgic to see.
One thing that I do miss is that people didn't make blogs to put up their stuff on. Blogs are very hard to navigate and not really suitable for anything but blogging.


Some EU politicians have been pressing to destroy internet as much as possible, but they have been unsuccessful so far (because most people don't like internet to be destroyed). They recently got through with a suggestion to filter the internet though. I'm not sure what this means as there is almost no talk about it nowadays.

[Sentientprism]

First time a friend showed me "the internet" was in 1995, 1996 or so I think, a time when enthusiasm was high, it was always on the news as the coolest thing ever and every company started to have a website. But my family didn't have internet at home until 1998 I think (which is still quite early in Sweden). At that time you had basically only dial-up modems and you had to pay the telephone bill based on how long you were connected so it was very expensive to use besides being slow. Downloading a Famicom ROM took about 10 min and an SFC game took about an hour. I really don't miss that part.

I had my first experience with an MMORPG at this time, but due to the high costs of being connected to the internet (which I had to pay myself by putting money into a specefic internet piggy bank next to the computer) you could only play for a short time, and subscribing to the game would be even more expensive so you only played on trial mode which lasted until level 10. The game was Nexus TK (AKA Baramue Nara in Korean) which is probably the first Korean MMORPG and the game that established the Korean/Asian MMORPG genre (Lineage, Ragnarök Online etc), and is still active today. It was definitely not the first MMORPG but it predates Ultima Online by a few months.

My school also started getting internet in 1998 for pupils to use (they had it earlier for the staff though), and since they didn't have to pay for the time being connected (as they were always connected) it was less stressful to use, but on the other hand you could normally only use the computers when doing schoolwork.

Sometime in 2000 people could get ADSL which was much faster than dial-up, and you could stay connected forever without it affecting cost, which finally opened up internet for real for me.


Like UglyJoe said, the early internet (that I experienced) had more character as there where a lot of homemade homepages where people wrote about their interests, put up a few Famicom ROMs for download and stuff like that. No Wikipedia and much harder to find information, but it felt like it was quite easy to find information as we had nothing else to compare with except for going to the library. Due to limited bandwidth and HDD space, sound files were large and video was usually of the lowest quality. When downloading music, you would often go for midi files as they were small enough to download. Also no Youtube and videos wasn't that common on websites (but eventually became quite common in file sharing circles using special programs). There where a lot of crappy video players like Quicktime and Realplayer which seemed to be made to annoy the user as much as possible while having proprietary formats and couldn't be replaced for a long time. Java was also often required to be installed for many things and also did its best to annoy the user as often as it could.

AltaVista (later also Eureka and Yahoo!) was the commonly used search engine, and wasn't as effective as modern search engines like Google and DuckDuckGo are now. AltaVista's Babelfish was also much worse than Google Translate at translating Japanese to English. Later the Japanese Excite Translate came which was much better, but required you to navigate the excite.co.jp website which was (and still is) in Japanese.

So there are a lot of things that I don't miss. What I do miss is that you didn't have this constant threat of spyware and tracking cookies. Viruses were rare, but you did occasionally stumble on a website that just barfed popups on you. Sometimes totally empty popups that seemed to serve no purpose other than forcing you to restart the webbrowser because they couldn't always be closed (sometimes locking it up so a CTRL+ALT+DELETE was needed). Other times you randomly got some really disturbing porn adds as popups out of nowhere when browsing the internet (on non-pornographic websites, honest ). I'm just glad I was old enough to not get traumatized from those, but I remember some girls mentioning that those appeared for them and they got really shocked.

The homemade websites people made often had a "with frames" and "without frames" options. The "frames" was normally a navigation bar on the left side which scrolled independently from the rest of the website. Tom Sloper's mahjong site is one of few homepages that still uses this kind of layout even today. I don't miss this, but it is a bit nostalgic to see.
One thing that I do miss is that people didn't make blogs to put up their stuff on. Blogs are very hard to navigate and not really suitable for anything but blogging.


Some EU politicians have been pressing to destroy internet as much as possible, but they have been unsuccessful so far (because most people don't like internet to be destroyed). They recently got through with a suggestion to filter the internet though. I'm not sure what this means as there is almost no talk about it nowadays.

Yeah while modern internet may be more convenient, I think I appreciate the independence and tight knitted community of the old internet (and the EU didn't have their fingers in it).