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Comment by chongli | Hacker News Reader

applications :(

Does anyone else feel nostalgia for the pre-"web app" days of the internet? I'm talking about personal sites on Geocities and web rings built on communities of shared interest.

The browser was an application for navigating hyperlinked information. Other applications include email clients, news readers, FTP clients, and IRC clients. You never had to download a megabyte of minified JavaScript just to read a 500-word article; you never would, since it took about ten minutes to download a megabyte on a blazingly fast 14.4 modem.

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I don't. For me to get a nostalgia rush I need to go down to the Computer History Museum and see yet older stuff. Nostalgia isn't a function of quality, but of age.

Douglas Adams expressed this well:

“I've come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies:

1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.

2. Anything that's invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.

3. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things.”

For me the stage that came after this is, "Well, change is going to happen, so either I need to get off the merry-go-round or I need to learn to like it." Geocities and FTP clients are as dead as fan-fold, green-and-white line printer paper, and for the same reason: we found better ways to serve the same needs.

Justifying one's nostalgia by pining for the days of 14.4 kbps modems doesn't make a lot of sense. If they were good, then surely my first modem, a 300-baud acoustic coupler was better. Although I feel a tug of nostalgia when I see one, it wasn't better. Optimizing to save a resource we have in abundance makes as much sense as depression-era grandparents saving bits of string for possible reuse. It wastes that most precious of non-renewable resources: your time.

Except that a lot of things was instantaneous just 20 years ago. I can't believe how slow even new smartphones are when I'm trying to make a phonecall... Every press of a button feels slow, there have to be animations scrolling screens left and right instead of instantly activating something. Every time I'm using something new and flashy, I feel like I'm stuck in sirup.

The closest thing dialup ever got to instantaneous was text-based terminal interfaces. And I remember agonizingly slow load times in Lynx just as often as agonizingly slow load times in Mosaic, NN and IE. Our expectations change, however, and as tech speeds up, we ask “why aren’t people optimizing for what we care about, performance?” But there’s a multitude of answers, many of which are sadly non-technical. Speed and responsiveness often take a backseat, but improvements do happen. (AMP, CDNs like CloudFlare, use of native apps, etc.)

Yeah, didn't mean old modems, more like applications. My 300 baud modem was pretty slow. But applications were always very fast compared to most new stuff.

Yes, exactly. So while today on a slow connection you can find yourself waiting a long time for Gmail to load up and let you read your email, in the days of 300 baud your email would be downloaded in batch and your mail reader would come up instantly, letting you peruse and read your email at leisure.

Use a rotary phone for a couple weeks.

You were using a rotary phone 20 years ago?

A rotary phone was at least instant physical feedback...

I don't recall anything on the internet being instantaneous 20 years ago. Surely you're misremembering?

I also don't find that new smartphones have much touch-based interface latency; but even so, that kind of latency doesn't have anything to do with the internet, nor the halcyon days of late 1998. To my recollection browsing the web in the late 90s was far more exciting but also far less useful than today.

The modern internet has a lot of inefficiency, but I don't see how you could seriously claim it's slower than what we had 20 years ago. Sometimes heavy web applications are relatively slow because they're underoptimized, but that's less of a technology failing and more of a developer failing. Most websites load spectacularly faster, and perform better, than all but completely static HTML websites from two decades ago despite having much larger byte footprints.

I find exactly the opposite.

Some websites overloaded the 98 web by being an entire page of diced and sliced graphics that assembled the page. Most were mainly text and appeared pretty much instantaneously. Images came slower than the article you could be already reading if you were on dial up.

One of the things I dislike about the current web, is how slow most sites have become - mostly thanks to an absurd overhead of JS and third party SaaS just to display a text article with a few pictures. The number of sites that will unreadbly bounce the content around as various web fonts, icon fonts and other trivia load is pretty ridiculous. It's the main reason I now browse with JS off and white list JS for a tiny few.

Yep - I remember very carefully planning which mp3s I wanted so that I could dedicate my small window of modem time each day to download them because each one took 10-30 minutes. Sometimes I was able to get through a full game of Age of Empires before disconnecting due to lag or because my dad needed to make a phone call. I find long page loads due to excessive javascript as annoying as the next person, but I'm much happier with the internet in 2018 than 1998.

Ok, maybe I was spoiled with 100 Mbps connection at the time but I was mainly talking about Apps. They were not web-based, all written in C, some form of BASIC or Assembler.

My computer from 20 years ago was a lot snappier than anything I've used today. And this is not just nostalgia, there is data to back it up:

https://danluu.com/input-lag/

That's interface latency, not internet speed.

And it's due to bloat; the same kind of bloat that leads people to add megabytes of javascript and other resources to simple articles.

Nostalgia isn't a function of quality, but of age.

It's not just age, it's a sense of loss. I can still go down to the store and buy milk in bag form, just as I could when I was a kid, so I don't feel nostalgic about it even though it's old. I feel nostalgic about the web of my youth because that place is gone now and it'll likely never come back.

In tech circles we like to obsess over new technologies and all of the amazing new possibilities they've brought. We don't spend nearly as much time talking about all we've lost.

Like a lot of people on HN, you appear to be conflating "download a megabyte of minified JavaScript just to read a 500-word article" with the concept of a web application, and implying that embedded applications are somehow a violation of the web's intended purpose.

But hypertext is an application, and the web was always about hyperlinked text as well as embedded content. The <script> and <applet> tags and now defunct concepts like VRML demonstrate that the "only static, only hypertext" version of the web you miss were more due to the primitive nature of an undeveloped platform than a state of grace and purity which has since been defiled by the ability to do computation on the web... the intent for the web to host both static and interactive content was there practically from the beginning.

>Does anyone else feel nostalgia for the pre-"web app" days of the internet? I'm talking about personal sites on Geocities and web rings built on communities of shared interest.

I don't. I like being able to watch videos and play games on the web, and buy things, and so on.

And webrings were fun, but modern social media offers a much bigger and more varied set of communities than the old web ever had. I know that's an unpopular sentiment to voice on HN, but as far as most end users are concerned, Reddit and Twitter and even Facebook are useful in ways that IRC and web chatrooms never were.

> And webrings were fun, but modern social media offers a much bigger and more varied set of communities than the old web ever had

Most of it is undiscoverable, private, or short form. There are very few people putting up public multi page tutorials or project summaries in the way that they used to.

I feel like that's not all that rare—you just do it as a series of blog posts these days. You could make a strong case that a set of independent pages that freely interlink is a better format, but still, the impulse is there, so people have found a way to make that kind of content.

I don't see many independent bloggers these days. Especially outside of the tech community. Most of it feels like it's becoming hidden behind monetized walled gardens.

I don't know, the older days also had IRC, messaging apps, internet forums and BBS systems too, and my experience is that the people on the last two tended to be more... mature than the kinds on social media sites. Even today the slower and more thoughtful pace of a traditional forum is more conductive to decent discussions than the obsessively upvote/view focused world of social media sites.

How much of that is the eternal September of going from something where a tiny niche of the population using a thing to the vast majority?

I don't think there's much structural about Yahoo Answers being what it is. I think it's mostly the population.

>I don't know, the older days also had IRC, messaging apps, internet forums and BBS systems too, and my experience is that the people on the last two tended to be more... mature than the kinds on social media sites.

Social media is just about as mainstream as the telephone now. Everyone who was on those forums and BBS systems and IRC is probably also on social media.. along with their parents and kids. The web long ago got too big to draw narrow demographic conclusions about. And everything you mentioned apart from BBS is still around.

I mean, my elderly mother uses Facebook and I wouldn't call her "obsessively upvote/view focused." She is obsessed with sharing pictures of her grandkids doing everything, though...

irc still exists and I usei t every day. The same jerks that you see on "social media" exist all over IRC as well.

It’s not so much the web apps, but the professionalization of content that makes me nostalgic. The charming thing about the early web is that almost all of it looked equally terrible- even the sites made by paid experts looked only marginally better than what junior high schoolers would crank out in computer class (ask me how I know.)

This created space for passionate amateurs to create content for their niche. You got wonderfully personalized, quirky sites that didn’t look weird or suspicious and, importantly, actually got traffic (or what passed for a decent amount of traffic at the time.)

The rise of Google, security issues, “walled gardens”, blogging platforms, and YouTube have basically ended the ability of a new amateur site to get a significant amount of new traffic. Internet stardom has moved to YouTube, Twitter or more specialized communities like Reddit, StackExhange, or Wikipedia. The Wikia networks have driven out most need for fan sites. Social networks are a better sharing mechanism than personal blogs meant for keeping friends and family up to date.

This all has had the effect that the internet “feels” far more structured and professionalized than its early days, and IMO is much more a “winner take all” environment for content. I miss the amateur web the same reason I go to high school sports and watch low ranked college football teams- the play may not be as good, but passion is the same, the games feel more human and occasionally you see unexpected flashes of brilliance, beauty, and serendipity that you’ll never see in the professional world.

As follow up- there still is space within some of the walled gardens, primarily YouTube and Twitter, and I’m sure some emerging media will support amateurs early as well. I certainly don’t want to go purely back to webrings, marginal search engines, hand crafted directories, and printed “internet phone books” (yes, this was a thing) as it made it far more difficult to accomplish tasks, but TBL and others fighting against the Balkanization and centralization of the web content as a whole is not a bad thing.

I do not. Geocities was a miserable collection of weird text that was almost completely unusable. FTP and IRC were great for the people who used them, but the community was small and still exists.

For all the people lamenting the loss of the old internet, most of it is still there(irc,ftp,rss,ncurses email clients) -- you can still use it. You should probably ask yourself why you aren't.

I use it. And people keep working hard to replace the standards it is built on with unimplementable complex, insecure, poorly thought out crap.

You should probably ask yourself why you aren't.

Because there's no gopher client for macOS.

I bet if Google indexed Gopher sites at the outset, Gopher would still be a thing.

Plenty of terminal-based options (e.g. Lynx) for Gopher.

Gopher pretty much died long before Google was a thing. Here's a good article: https://www.minnpost.com/business/2016/08/rise-and-fall-goph... (lots of interesting comments below the article from many of the people involved)

There are browser plugins: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/overbitewx/

They have very little use. There's also a web proxy:

http://gopher.floodgap.com/gopher/gw

Browsing it makes clear why Gopher would not still be a thing, except in the same sense that there are hobbyists who maintain Model Ts and steam engines and whatnot. For a time, Gopher was a miracle and a wonder. That time lasted about a year. The web does all it does and infinitely more.

Use lynx in your terminal emulator...

There is a vibrant international community of people still on gopher, and a lot of us run our own servers. Check out gopher://gopherproject.org

There you'll find a getting started file, and other useful things such as a curated site listing (think DMOZ for gopher) called the Gopher Lawn.

Why do people still run gopher servers? To keep some content/discussion open to only a self-selected community?

> Does anyone else feel nostalgia for the pre-"web app" days of the internet? I'm talking about personal sites on Geocities and web rings built on communities of shared interest.

Definitely! There's a lot of that sentiment over at Micro.blog [1], which has built a community of writers & indie software developers (especially developers from the RSS era, if you've heard of MarsEdit or NetNewsWire). There's an emphasis on personal blogging, keeping things simple, and using dedicated desktop/mobile apps (usually made by solo/indie developers) for each task, instead of the website. And as part of the IndieWebCamp [2] projects, there's even people making web rings again [3] as well.

There was also a search engine someone showed on HN recently, that didn't have a crawler - the only pages listed were the specific pages (not domains!) that people submitted to the index. That gave the searches some serendipity, you never found what you searched for but stumbled on something that someone else thought was interesting anyway.

[1] https://micro.blog

[2] https://indieweb.org/

[3] http://th3core.com/talk/traffic/i-made-a-web-ring-5-days-ago...

Sort of.

90% of the web apps that are useful to me would be equally useful as native local apps with local data. As a native MacOS or iOS program they would be hugely faster, without latency, and just as useful out of signal area (still common enough that it happens daily for me).

That would leave me to choose which I wanted to sync either internally or via something like dropbox.

Most of the innovations in the browser that enable apps also promote and enable tracking, auto start videos, and JS loaded ads, and use of the browser as surrogate OS. Mostly I find this a serious misstep. I don't miss bad design and sites that were cut up bits of image etc.

Nostalgic yeah, but that doesn't mean very much... After all, those discovering the web today will feel nostalgia for the current version in N years.

As exciting as those days were, I wouldn't want to go back to dial-up, CRT monitors, no-broadband, no-wi-fi, no-wikipedia, no-dropbox, no-stackoverflow, no-git, no-digital-distribution, etc.

No spam. No tracking. No monetization. No clickbait.* No Zuckerberg. No profiling. No selling surfing habits. No social credit score. No tying insurance rates to activity monitors. No bosses firing people for expressing their personal opinions on private time. No HR minions making hiring decisions based on personal web spaces.

And yes there was broadband in the old days. It just wasn't widely distributed. It was mostly at businesses and universities. As broadband became more common, web sites got needlessly heavier.

On the plus side, future generations will never know the horrors of a RealPlayer "Buffering..." message.

* Unless you really needed punch that monkey.

"As broadband became more common, web sites got needlessly heavier."

100% this. About 8 years ago, I had LIGHTNING fast loading times on every page I visited. 800-1000ms was average, on a connection that is slower than mine is today... Now 4-8 seconds is average, and the new Gmail takes 10-12 seconds to load.

I'm nostalgic for the days when the web was faster and more functional than it is today.

Even in the very early days of the web, technologists were talking about the browser as a potential platform for applications. This was pretty much always the vision for browsers, it just took a while to figure out exactly how to do it.

But that was where Netscape, a commercial company, and others wanted to take the web. The original idea of the web was to share simple marked up documents, not applications. The image tag was even hotly debated when it was first introduced.

As for figuring out how to turn the web into an app platform, Netscape and Sun might have gotten farther in the 90s if it wasn't for Microsoft. There used to be a saying in the 2000s that MS held back technology for a decade.

>Does anyone else feel nostalgia for the pre-"web app" days of the internet? I'm talking about personal sites on Geocities and web rings built on communities of shared interest.

http://wiby.me is a search engine that indexes pages like the ones you miss. Full disclosure though, I made it.

> Does anyone else feel nostalgia for the pre-"web app" days of the internet? I'm talking about personal sites on Geocities and web rings built on communities of shared interest.

I don't understand the premise. Tumblr is / was over ten times larger than Geocities. It did what you're describing. It was still wildly popular with young people just as recently as a few years ago.

Tumblr wasn't personal in the way that Geocities was.

With Geocities you could see millions of high school art students demonstrating for the entire world that they don't know the first thing about design or color.

Tumblr is the epitome of a walled garden. The flowers look pretty, but you still have to plant them in neat, orderly rows. Even Facebook's Pieces of Flair offered more of a creative outlet.

You can still make oversized blinking purple Comic Sans text on a black background above an animated "Under Construction" GIF. But you have to do it in CSS.

> With Geocities you could see millions of high school art students demonstrating for the entire world that they don't know the first thing about design or color.

They've moved to DeviantArt now.

You're both talking about Tumblr like it's dead. Tumblr will never die.

While I agree with the sentiment (it's become more cumbersome to create and access content on the web), it goes without saying that the vast majority of users find value in web apps and the platform-agnostic functionality they provide.

I miss aspects of it, for sure. What I think you're getting at here is that we used to have a cleaner separation of protocol, data format, and client application - enabling us to have multiple ways of combining the above. Tons of email clients, tons of formats, but ultimately just one email namespace - the DNS. That's much more idiomatically Internet than webapps are, which rely on my browser very carefully executing instructions provided by a site with very little control on my part as to what they do with the chunk of screen real-estate they've been afforded.

There's also something about the snappiness of desktop apps on hardware 1/100th the speed of what we're running now that I dearly miss.

Yes. There should be room for both.

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