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Ask HN: What do you fondly recall about the early days of the Internet?

by johndavid9991 on 5/30/24, 5:55 AM with 42 comments

  • by toast0 on 5/30/24, 6:22 AM

    Early internet felt more like a community. A few years ago, I came across a book that is on the same wavelength. It used to be that being connected meant you were in an alternate world from the rest of everyone; now it's kind of the opposite.

    Maybe it's my age, but there was a sense of shared exploration of the unknown that I don't feel anymore.

    https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/jess-kimball-leslie...

  • by bodiekane on 5/30/24, 11:56 AM

    The best thing was that the internet was made by and for smart people.

    It was an incredibly unique dynamic- access to incredibly diverse people from all over the world, but simultaneously tilted towards the intellectually curious and tech-savvy. It was maybe a little bit like the vibe of being on a college campus, even if you were talking about sports or the weather, the default level of knowledge, intelligence, openness and curiosity were far higher than the default in "real life".

    There was this unique culture of "the internet" as a place separate from "the real world" that was heavily skewed by the demographics. It was a world where nerds were 50% of the population instead of 1%.

  • by Turboblack on 5/30/24, 11:17 AM

    I found the Internet already at the Polytechnic at the turn of the millennium, but it was the IRC, there were web chats, a lot of interesting independent resources from enthusiasts. Now I’m doing this, but I see that those who are nostalgic for those times mostly only talk about them, few people make pages in HTML3.2 and use clean code. I recently created a CMS that integrates both modern computers and those that existed then, you can administer the site even from an 8086 computer running DOS (I tried to do this, I can even show screenshots, but here answers with a link seem to be prohibited). I published CMS on various platforms, about a hundred platforms, on Github the HamsterCMS has already collected 35 stars, and I continue to develop it. A friend and I set up hosting where you can place such pages, the system is already pre-installed, you go to the admin panel and just create pages by choosing a template, and there are already half a hundred different templates. There is an imitation for retro, and simply adapted for Internet Explorer 5, and the Links browser for DOS. we are doing a lot to revive that Internet, and we want it to coexist with the modern one, and not go down in history as just screenshots on Wikipedia

  • by romanhn on 5/30/24, 6:49 AM

    Not the earliest by any means, I joined the Internet (or, "surfed the information superhighway" as it were) in early '96. A few things come to mind:

    - Accessing web pages (specifically www.idsoftware.com) using listservs that responded with HTML contents, when I had a free email account with Juno and no WWW yet

    - Using various free web providers that were ad-based (I remember Freewwweb), and using various hacks to not see their ads

    - Making a couple hundred bucks through AllAdvantage, which would pay to display an ad on your computer while browsing - more hacks

    - Playing an online trivia game (Cosmo's Conundrum) with live chat, so many hours spent on it, very strong community there that is still connected via Facebook

    - Getting excited about VRML and quickly getting over it

    - Building pages in Frontpage/HoTMeTaL/others, then with Flash

    - Finding pages primarily through Yahoo (+ web rings), then random search engines (Dogpile, HotBot, Excite, Infoseek), then standardizing on Altavista, then being blown away by Google

    - AOL CDs everywhere and also AOL keywords in commercials before .com addresses became commonplace

    - Early memes such as the dancing baby, the hampster dance, Mahir's "I kiss you" page, etc

    - Listening to RealAudio radio stations online

    - Downloading my first movie online - Mortal Kombat Annihilation in all its 32MB glory, in the now-defunct VIV format

    - Being there when the DivX format started spreading like wildfire on IRC via movie trailers, the Matrix trailer blew me away

    - Early p2p file sharing - first with Hotline (which nobody remembers about these days, it seems), then with Napster (finding someone with a song you're looking for, then checking out their whole library was amazing)

    There's much, much more that I'm forgetting. It was a magical time when the Internet felt both huge and small at the same time.

  • by fuzzfactor on 5/30/24, 7:01 AM

    Probably one of the forgotten things missing today is the personal home page.

    Even with a lowly ISP like AOL, in addition to web access you were encouraged to create a personal web page on their domain so you could upload things to share with the world.

    This is what you were paying them monthly for.

    Most people weren't actually using it since it's not all that easy to build a web page, then along came Myspace who made it easier to put a page on their network.

    I guess ISPs silently withdrew one of the main things in their bundle which millions of people once had and no longer do.

  • by adamomada on 5/30/24, 10:03 PM

    Something probably lost to time now but there was this sort of MUD that didn’t really have a game attached, called a Talker

    You would telnet to a server : port, usually 3000 by default and sign in to this multi-user chat system. It was divided into rooms or places, with a sort of map system. Meaning you couldn’t just join any room/channel, you’d have to “travel” along and get a glimpse of other users and their chats, mimicking real life in a way.

    I don’t know how popular it was around the world, but a major local radio station caught on to it and the hosts mentioned it frequently so it was basically always busy, always a group in it chatting.

    This is ca. mid-90s before web browsers were decent, dialup was the norm, and low-bandwidth activities ruled.

  • by incomingpain on 5/30/24, 11:56 AM

    For a democracy to be healthy, everyone should talk to one another about politics. Without this you will gain polarization and hatred.

    Well, considering places like reddit ban you for having a different opinion then everyone else. That you're basically not allowed to be even mildly conservative on reddit. Thusly they have a tremendous echo chamber problem. Guess what, now we have polarization and hatred.

  • by jaggs on 5/30/24, 8:26 AM

    Commander Keen and that crazy good Star Trek type battleship game I can never remember the name of.

    Oh and firing up Navigator for the first time, after using Lynx.

  • by innagadadavida on 5/30/24, 6:02 AM

    1. My 33.6Kbps modem dialing my local ISP making those sounds 2. Me using Lynx, Pine and restricted shell on my ISP to browse the internet on a terminal. 3. Me finding a Pine exploit to breakout of the restricted shell to run Slirp to get full TCP/IP access to the internet to browse with Netscape Navigator. 4. Visiting Yahoo and Geocities in full 640x480 VGA color! 5. ICQ

  • by cranberryturkey on 5/30/24, 7:09 AM

    Icq web rings. Matts script archive and Winamp. Post g your resume on craigslist and have ten job offers the next day

  • by smarri on 5/31/24, 6:58 AM

    Personal home pages for individuals and families, they were always warm and friendly. Also, internet cafes, the first time I used the internet I went to one and looked up the X-Files homepage. I also remember chat rooms where you could use a telephone handset to talk to people.

  • by hulitu on 5/30/24, 6:22 PM

    The Internet was browsable and searchable. Now the browsing part (ftp, http) has almost dissapeared. Search is a shitshow.

    The worst part is that the number of assholes, relative to the number of users, has increased. And many of them are corporate employed and represent the corporation.

  • by caseyf on 5/30/24, 11:17 AM

    1990s: just exploring, finding something cool on an FTP server

    1997: you could make a web page about a subject you were interested in, list it in Yahoo etc, and people would come visit it

    early 2000s: micro communities of friends and strangers visiting and commenting on each other's blogs

  • by Ekaros on 5/30/24, 7:18 AM

    I'm not sure if it is exactly fondly, but access to Internet itself being treat made it lot more special. This was before family had ADSL. And there was still cost involved over going online. As such limited time made it more special.

  • by gregw2 on 5/30/24, 10:45 AM

    Usenet news- global chat about shared interests with other experts or afficionados

  • by blinded on 5/30/24, 6:04 AM

    The old school windows 98 file transfer video / icon. https://images.app.goo.gl/ZnBSqWrdd9iMi9Mv7

  • by dr_kiszonka on 5/30/24, 6:53 AM

    I am not sure if it was the early Internet or my young age, but I fondly remember discovering random websites and spending hours reading them. (The first one I visited was about the X-Files.)

  • by reify on 5/30/24, 6:40 AM

    Yahoo chat room "Down the pub". pure fun.

    MS messenger, my young children continually wobbling my screen during chats.

    The dial-up connection sounds.

    provided default Wifi password: surname + postcode.

  • by orionblastar on 5/30/24, 7:11 AM

    Line Noise from my dial-up USR Modem. Got knocked off the Internet because my mother wanted to use the phone. Having slow GIF downloads, before JPG and PNG.

  • by quintes on 5/30/24, 6:51 AM

    Waiting for someone to give me a google mail invite

    Using msn chat - this was amazing

    Telling everyone I was eating a sandwich on twitter. That’s what it was like back then

    Get off my lawn

  • by CM30 on 5/30/24, 12:52 PM

    I guess for me it was how people developed sites because they were passionate about the topic, not because there was a chance to become a millionaire off of it. You had lots of fan sites and technical resources about every random subject under the sun, often without any ads or begging at all. Just random people sharing what they were interested in with the rest of the world.

    Now that's mostly gone away. Wikis have some of this spirit left, but most other sites seem to be corporate affairs designed to make a buck first and foremost and teach people anything second. Everything's now seemingly about the 'hustle' and trying to become rich as quickly as possible.

    It's one of the reasons I still have an interest in fan games and video game mods. Because they're some of the only communities where just about everyone makes what they do for fun, and where the untested legal situation means monetisation is basically impossible.

  • by 082349872349872 on 5/30/24, 8:01 AM

    A majority who (had decent displays and) read (inter alia, TFM) and wrote (having had real keyboards, even multiple paragraphs).

  • by ivorbuk on 5/30/24, 10:42 PM

    Guestbooks, where people left nice comments.

  • by pr07ecH70r on 5/30/24, 7:38 AM

    The sound of my modem connecting. :D

  • by zem on 5/30/24, 7:07 AM

    usenet! probably coloured with a lot of nostalgia, but it was a fun period of social networking

  • by tamaharbor on 5/30/24, 7:09 AM

    I met my wife on excite.com

  • by marziply on 5/30/24, 8:13 AM

    Runescape

  • by dajtxx on 5/30/24, 8:50 AM

    The lack of tracking, ads, saas, spa, etc.

    When the internet and web were more about data than commerce, specifically surveillance capitalism.

  • by warpspin on 5/30/24, 6:46 AM

    Netsurfer Digest