The Internet 1997–2021 | Hacker News Reader

The Internet 1997–2021

opte.org

80 pointssmusamashah27 comments

Internet in 1997. That is when the web was small enough that you did not need Google, you just used a 1200 page "internet yellow pages" book [1]

Around that time the book form became untennable so they started switching to CDROM versions [2]

[1] https://archive.org/details/luckmansworldwid0000unse_1997ed/... [2] https://archive.org/details/new-riders-www-yellow-pages-1997

True!

Another surprising format:

I was starting my 'career' in 1999, in a Spanish TV production company. I remember a guy that had a business selling a 'curated' Netscape bookmarks collection. Can't remember the price, but the company paid for it, and he sent it in some physical format (diskettes?), and we imported it to our writers computers.

Globomedia?

No, it was a super small company tied to a school textbook publisher. They did a bunch of documentaries for TV and some multimedia content that was used to support some of the textbooks in classes. They (the production company) hasn't existed for almost 20 years, the publisher outsourced most of that work.

Anaya Multimedia? Santillana? One of those maybe.

With Macromedia Director or similar, I'd guess.

It was Anaya TV, but I think they only existed for 3 or 4 years, 98 to 00 or something like that. They did full regular video, some of it for TV, and I think they put some of the video on CDs that came with the teacher's edition of some textbooks.

Also they had programming books, even translated ones, if I recall it well.

Picking 1997 as a start date is interesting because that's when ISP's had started serving Internet access to general public in Turkey. The state had subsidized this by waiving phone-call costs when dialing an ISP. That had caused sudden increase in Internet's popularity. I remember staying online until morning chatting on IRC, downloading stuff, browsing the web, playing MUD. Great times.

MUDs were awesome. Usenet too, IRC, then IM like ICQ and AIM.

I first heard about ICQ in 1997 too (UINs were still 6 digits at the time), but dismissed it because I thought it was ridiculous to make yourself always available for messaging. It didn't make any sense to me at all. But, the world had other plans. The next year, when all of my friends were using it, I could only get a 8-digit UIN.

Today, I can relate even more so than ever to my ICQ-skeptic self from 1997 though.

My girlfriend and I pounced on ICQ in that year. I wound up with UIN# 279866.

And then ICQ was invaded and subverted by Russia. I mean pervasively. Just like LiveJournal was, later on.

I have come to believe that these were simply psyops that were a bit less anticipated than TikTok was.

Imagine the power of Russian threat actors knowing when and where every kid was online and wanting to chat, and who all their friends were.

> And then ICQ was invaded and subverted by Russia. I mean pervasively.

...not... really...? I mean, it's the 9th-most-populated country in the world, so when it comes online, it's something people notice. Just like when Nigeria did a decade or so later.

What happened with ICQ is that AIM became available separately from AOL dialup, and AIM was a lot more "instant". Remember, circa late-90s, the default ICQ message flow was to double-click a flashing tray icon, click "reply", type your message, and click "send". Or tab-space if you were a badass keyboard warrior.

AIM - by default - had a persistent window, where sending messages was accomplished with the enter key. Simple as.

You could tinker with ICQ and get it to be a bit more AIM'y (though you still had to tab-space to send), but tinkering was required.

So despite the fact that ICQ had a lot more features than AIM, a better and more reliable file transfer, a far more robust and better-granulated status system*, if you wanted to talk to non-nerds in your high school, you had to use AIM.

* AIM was just "online" and "away" combined with active/idle; ICQ had - from memory, so I may be forgetting one - online, away, not available, DND, free-for-chat, and "private", where only users you chose could see your online status. Plus, you could also show as offline to certain other users without actually blocking their messages!

> Just like LiveJournal was, later on.

LiveJournal was bought by a Russian company in 2007. ICQ was bought by a Russian company in 2010.

> I have come to believe that these were simply psyops that were a bit less anticipated than TikTok was.

I enjoy yelling at clouds as much as the next old man, but come on.

> Imagine the power of Russian threat actors knowing when and where every kid was online and wanting to chat, and who all their friends were.

I'm... imagining it. It's not really that impressive, but I'm imagining it. I mean, "between 3pm local time and bedtime, all-day on weekends and holidays; less than this as the nerd-factor diminishes" is pretty much the answer. I'm hard-pressed to decide what a scary scary Russian bogeymen could really do with the information that I was friends with Jake and Mike, on uneasy mutual detente terms with Ramon, trying to get a smooch from, in sequential order, Jessica, Jaime, Jo, Becky, and Helen; and wouldn't talk to anyone who listed N*SYNC or that British "Spice Girls" psyop as a Favorite Band.

But if any creepy-crawly super-scary Russian threat actor bogeymen are reading this, by all means let me know - my curiosity is officially piqued. Just make sure you don't have any Di$ney movies in the Favorite Movies of the profile of whichever account you contact me from. You'll be auto-blocked >: |

You weren't available all the time then. It was perfectly natural to assume someone wasn't at their computer and that was perfectly ok. It wasn't necessary to give status updates that you would in fact be on time to meet like you said you'd be, things were a little more planned, and you'd call or SMS if really needed but mainly don't want to intrude.

> You weren't available all the time then. It was perfectly natural to assume someone wasn't at their computer and that was perfectly ok.

Someone made the observation back then that 'the less you talk about "being online", the more important it will be'. Nowadays, because of IP-over-radio (smartphones) we're all basically online all the time (which has been true to a certain extent for a while with (dumb) phones and SMS/texting).

But it goes further now with many more ways of interaction.

I read the title as an epitaph.

Same

Peacock Maps published a poster titled "The Whole Internet" with data collected in 1999. I think they had a second one in the early 2000s. This was the best I could find: https://www.davidrumsey.com/luna/servlet/detail/RUMSEY~8~1~3...

So cool! I didn’t realize there was an earlier version. I still have “The Internet: 01.01.00” (from Jan 1, 2000) with black background hanging on my wall.

They did at least 4… 1999 - 2002. In the 2002 one, they changed the color scheme which made it visually jarring when put next to the previous 3, so I didn’t keep that one.

The other 3 I had framed, and they have followed me everywhere I have lived ever since. Even non-technical people stop and enjoy them for a moment and say “wow, the Internet is huge” or something to that effect… and then they notice that they’re only seeing what it was a quarter century ago.

I helped start a pretty big ISP in 1994 (2nd biggest in America for a while), and it was a wild and woolly time.

Our first week of operation, signing up users at a rate of 1000 - 2000 a day, I decided to check in on the servers I'd spent days getting ready for launch - USENET, DNS, Email, etc. Just for grins (because those were woolly days), I launched a network scope to see what the traffic was all about .. my naive enthusiasm for this "new era of knowledge and access to information" literally leaking out of my eyeballs .. only to discover, 90% of the traffic that our over-heating modem banks and under-provisioned 56k T-1 line, was all .. porn.

That was my first big reality adjustment with the Internet, and the beginning of my disinterest in the subject, as a commercial activity. I just didn't feel like it was worth it to do all that fuss and nonsense, only so that 90% of the traffic was boobs.

Well, I left that scene. If I'd stayed, I'd have raked in the cash, at least 3-figure millions (the guy I started it all with made something along those figures) .. but I definitely am glad I didn't have to spend years, afterwards, scaling to masturbation.

I know, I know, there's nothing wrong with it and we need to grant people the respect to exercise their rights (and lefts) whichever way they want. I just didn't personally want to be involved, and left to do other more productive things, like start one of Californias very first full-service web development agencies, and get Prime Sports Network their first live-sports event streaming on the Internet happening ..

As a fellow purpose-seeker: what did you end up doing instead that brought you more sense of utility?

Are you talking about the job or the porn?

I shifted to the creative/music-making technology industry and have been involved in synthesizer, pro audio and other product development ever since. Very rewarding to know your customers are doing creative and interesting things with the products you make for them.

Sounds about right. I worked at couple of regional ISPs (maybe 20K users max), then in network engineering at an IT dept of a large local company. The local corp had offices all over the world. There, I managed the central firewalls, proxy servers, etc. We had 3 T1 lines for about 10K employees. Out of boredom, I'd regularly tail the proxy access logs and much of the traffic was porn or "adult dating." haha

The title made me think it's a type of eulogy to the pre-AI, pre-ChatGPT Internet, but I was pleasantly surprised by pretty colours instead!

(2021) Really needs an update, as IPv6 in China picks up.

Also, can this data collection see enough of internal China traffic?

I've reused the LGL (Large Graph Layout) algorithm used by The Opte Project [1,2] with more recent and comprehensive (multipath) traceroutes in 2022 [3].

I've also played a bit with an interactive visualization of the graph by using map tiles [4].

[1] https://github.com/TheOpteProject/LGL

[2] https://github.com/maxmouchet/minilgl (cleaned-up version of the code)

[3] https://www.maxmouchet.com/internet-viz/

[4] https://github.com/maxmouchet/internet-visualization

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