Internet History Lesson

Okay, so I find myself in a situation where I require copious amounts of information about the state of the internet around the turn of the century. The problem is, despite my best efforts, there seems to be a huge black box surrounding the state of the internet around the 1995-2001 area. I'm serious, every source I've read seems to lead up to Mosiac, followed by a big blank spot with some smatterings of Google being founded and IE being created before continuing at Napster and Bittorent, and since I was eight years old at the time, my personal knowledge of the state of the internet at that time is limited at best and non-existant at worst.

If anyone can shed any light on this, it would be most appreciated, especially of the available resources and popular websites at the time.

ALL HAIL THE WARGERBIL!

What I remember was being consistently blinded by poor color choices and cursing everyone who had to put cutesy animated gifs EVERYWHERE when everyone at the time still had dial-up and it would take five minutes to load. ...grr grr grr.

But a big thing (economically) to remember to put in is the "Dot-com Bubble"

i. hear. a. sound.

I think AOL was the big deal at the time. I remember that TV Commercials used to advertise what AOL keyword they were as well as the URL of their website. And AOL free trials came with practically everything.

Of course, I'm roughly the same age as you, so I won't be able to help much.

edited 6th Dec '10 8:58:16 PM by storyyeller

Blind Final Fantasy 6 Let's Play

It was a wild, wild place. Long before 4chan and back when Usenet reigned supreme, and multiplayer games maxed out at 4 players.

Seriously though, most gamers and folks on the internet were much older. They were folks like my dad, people in their late 30's who dabbled in computers as a personal side hobby. There was no internet culture yet, and to be honest, things were kind of better that way. You didn't have a bunch of retards who had grown up on the internet running around and shitting everything up.

Ahh.. The days of Team Fortress Quake on a dialup modem...

^

Yeah, AOL was pretty big then. I had earthlink or somesuch for my dialup, because AOL was what all the wankers used and I didn't want to use the same ISP as them.

I remember when Cable and DSL first started happening on private computers.. We always considered them cheaters in Quake and Duke Nukem because everybody else was lagging except them.. With their super fast 300-something ping..

edited 6th Dec '10 8:59:57 PM by Barkey

I also remember there being email role-playing. I was such a fantard when I was a kid and belonged to one for Pern stuff. The really unimportant adventures of Vera and her green dragon Yarmudath as told by a thirteen year old who has also just discovered what hardcore porn is.

We used AOL because it had those discs with 100 free hours and both my Dad and I were absolutely computer illiterate at the time. You should have seen our faces when we discovered that bastion of unused space called the D drive.

edited 6th Dec '10 9:05:17 PM by Bur

i. hear. a. sound.

I was among those who used AOL, though I didn't really get into Internet culture until I was 15 and joined my first forum. I did know of Fanfiction.net and Game FAQS before that though.

edited 6th Dec '10 9:52:10 PM by rmctagg09

Eating a Vanilluxe will give you frostbite.

I remember in school all my friends would always call me to find videogame cheats and walkthroughs for them because they weren't in any way widespread yet and your only option was to buy the Prima strategy guide..

Good ol Game FA Qs in its infancy.

Oh, God, I remember all the free sites on Angelfire  ^*

and Geocities with their crappy HTML- there was almost always snow falling, or a banner flashing away, or something. Anyone who knew Javascript was considered "cool".

edited 7th Dec '10 8:14:45 AM by Mamanerd

"An empty stomach is not a good political advisor" - Albert Einstein Anime list

Well, you could upload all sorts of illegal shit and copyrighted stuff on websites and get away with it as there was a relatively-weak government force on the internet - e.g. sites full of videos/movies a la ebaumsworld formatting (e.g. it used WMV or realplayer to play, not a dedicated Youtube esque site. It's pre-youtube. There were chatrooms where you could get away with all sorts of shit better than you can now (i.e. you felt 'safer' doing that stuff with relative strangets you just met on the chat, not people you knew for months off forums etc - and you could search for it a lot easier on the 'regular' internet as it wasnt driven underground yet)

WHASSUP....... ....with lolis!

That continued until like 2004-2005 I think lol.

Someone link the youtube video of homer simpson's webpage lol

WHASSUP....... ....with lolis!

I remember Netscape Navigator in school. I was a bit young for this era but amateur Geocities-style sites were all the rage. Every other site had a rotating globe to signify the World Wide Web.

It Just Bugs Me

I was in the military '97-'00, so I remember a few things. AOL, E-Machines and all the bloatware, and stuff like that. Trying to find good Star Wars fanfics on the Net right when The Phantom Menace came out - some were very good (Something Borrowed, Something Blue was a nice one). Compaq quality went into the toilet. HP was okay. Packard Bell made computers. I mostly remember the hardware, though - 128MB sticks of RAM was pretty good, and a processor over 700MHz was fast. Stringing wires all over my apartment right when I got out of the military, as we couldn't afford to buy a Wireless B router. When we finally got one, it was A Big Deal. Networked Master of Orion 2 games (still play it with my old Army buddy, but he will always kick my butt).

Before that, it was AOL 3.0 and 4.0, text based RPG's, and networked Marathon 2 games in the schools Apple computer lab.

Happiness is zero-gee with a sinus cold.

Ahh, the the days before I even realised the internet existed, let alone that it could be useful for anything. Yes. Despite being generation Y, I didn't have home internet until we decided to buy dial-up in 2003. SRSLY. (Then upgraded to broadband promptly after)

The internet wasn't so much of a necessity of life back in 1999 I suppose.

edited 7th Dec '10 11:21:24 AM by Shichibukai

Requiem ~ September 2010 - October 2011 [Banned 4 Life]

It definitely wasn't when the damn modem went "WEEE-ERRRRCCCHHHHZZZZZ—OOO EEE OOO EEE OOO EEE" and gave you away when you were trying to get some quality alone time with the computer at midnight. No matter how hard you tried to muffle it.

edited 7th Dec '10 12:51:38 PM by Bur

i. hear. a. sound.

And for those of you who never heard a dial-up modem connecting, this is what it sounded like (or close to it.)

...if you don’t love you’re dead, and if you do, they’ll kill you for it.

^ Don't. Remind. Me.

"Allah may guide their bullets, but Jesus helps those who aim down the sights."

Hell Is That Noise.

The main things I remember are AOL keywords everywhere, though that might be later.

[1] This facsimile operated in part by synAC.

Oh god, that noise.

Being in a backwater rural village, myself, my father and one of my friends went round leafleting everybody to petition BT to give us broadband. Somehow it worked, thankfully.

With cannon shot and gun blast smash the alien. With laser beam and searing plasma scatter the alien to the stars.

Fun with Modems: use it to prankcall your friends. You can hear their teeny little "Hello? Hello? Who is this?" out of the modem speaker.

Got my parents with it a few times while visiting my friend's house.

Happiness is zero-gee with a sinus cold.

I was on the Internet from '91 and worked for a brief period for Geocities in 1998. So please feel free to ask any questions you need to.

A brighter future for a darker age.

So, here's a story about my first experience with the internet:

I was maybe... 8-9? Anyway, my dad just got a new Dell (I know, I know...) and we hooked it on up to the internet. At the behest of my dad's friend, he visited the search engine Altavista and installed ICQ. All very cool. So, dad asked if there was anything I wanted to try. I was really into adventure games back then, so I asked if he could look up Sierra games because it was just what I could think of off the top of my head. So, excitedly, we punch in our search, and we excitedly await our returns...

Porn.

Porn everywhere.

tl;dr — Nothing about the internet has really changed that much.

Thanks for the input, everyone. I was stuck using the school computers around this time, so apart from Neopets being very popular at the time, I'm really don't know all that much.

@Morven: If possible, can you tell me about the types of sites that are popular back then? I know Wikipedia isn't made back then, but is there a similar encyclopedia or Encyclopedias online at the time? What about specific Niche sites, like special interest group[s and the like? Also, how popular are forums back then.

Oh, yeah, I'll need some information about BBS system, since, you know, apart from the basics, I don't really know what they are used for or the kind of things discussed on them.

ALL HAIL THE WARGERBIL!

Oh yes, I remember that noise. I think I may have actually liked it, though I didn't like being unable to use a phone while using the Internet.

Eating a Vanilluxe will give you frostbite.

Clifford Stoll wrote a book called "The Cuckoo's Egg" about tracking a catching one of the first identified internet spies back in the 1980's. It has a good description of the technology in use at the time, esp. Unix.

Some key technologies in use back then: Usenet- which was the place to access bulletin boards, telnet- which was the "real time" communication tool, functionally similar to chat today. Don't forget the Netscape vs. Explorer war, in which both companies went to offering free copies of their browser, and Explorer won. Dial up services like Compuserve, and the death of AOL. Lots of info here

Back then I used an email account at the Cleveland Freenet (an email account for free! How amazing!). Before search engines became well known and practical, there was no easy way to navigate, and the freenet provided links to a wide range of usenet and telnet destinations.

Ah, porn. Anyone remember "Bluebird Scans"? "Blackcat Scans"? "Alt.binaries"?

"We learn from history that we do not learn from history."

BBS type systems were in eclipse during a lot of that period; basically, Usenet was where it was at. This lasted until spam effectively killed Usenet during the late 90s.

Yahoo was BIG during that period. The Yahoo internet directory component, now completely gone I think, was more useful for finding sites than any search engine of the time. Not that there weren't search engines — Altavista was the big one during the late 90s — but they were really poor at ranking sites by importance/relevance.

A brighter future for a darker age.