What the Internet Was Like in 1998

I worked for an ISP (Telinco/Northwest Net), that was a whitelabeller - two weeks before Freeserve launched in 1998 with no monthly fee and was paid for through 0845 chargeback, we launched Connect Free on the same premise, and then whitelabelled it - Totalise, Currant Bun (which was from the Sun newspaper - a newspaper had its own ISP!), and others. Eventually that firm became World Online and then Tiscali and today it's all TalkTalk.

The Summer before we did that, we had like, 2000 customers. Couple of small modem banks. A few racks of servers, which provided SMTP, POP3 (we weren't at IMAP yet), DNS, some webspace. We had a Usenet feed which was basically a cache from upstream, but those days were starting to look numbered. We also offered some gaming servers - Quake and the like.

I built the signup scripts which would also provision email addresses and webspace, and also get you hooked up on the RADIUS servers so you could dial in.

When the decision was made to go 0845, most of the team quit. There was basically like 3 of us left. And we needed to buy £500k of server parts and build them, get BSD installed and provisioned to do everything it needed, rebuild the RADIUS stack, provision a load of new bandwidth (we once diagnosed a rising packet error rate on a microwave link by noting the tree over the road had come into leaf, which we then fixed with a stepladder and a saw to deal with the specific problematic branch), all while just living Summer vibes.

We ended up buying a repossessed DMS100 switch to handle the phone lines, a ton of Nortel CVX1800s, figure out how to become a proper AS and get a BGP router sorted, and all while working from a portacabin in a car park next to the Cheshire farmhouse which acted as our data centre, which had such poor air con, at the start the ambient temperature regularly hit 45C.

Exhilarating. Genuinely, one of the best times of my professional life.

We worked so hard. We wouldn't get in until about 10am, but would then work to about 6-7pm, then head into the nearest major city where most of us lived (Manchester), go to the pub for a few hours and figure out what we were going to do the next day, and then go back and do it all again.

Being part of that movement where we went from ~2000 people paying £10/month to around 750,000 people dialling in whenever they felt like accessing the internet and providing exemplary service (our callout/support structure was based on us being benchmarked against Demon, Pipex, Freeserve, and so on, and we had to beat them on everything from modem negotiation time, DNS response, bandwidth, everything), and kind of seeing the start of the Internet becoming a popular thing in the UK was wonderful.

I met up with one of my ex-colleagues from that Summer this Spring, and we were talking about how much we would love to have that feeling once more.

It'll never happen, but wow, what a time.

Also no Metacrawler: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MetaCrawler

Given the link rot and that this page still have thousand of visitors per day (according to Wikipedia) it's amazing that he never added a resell service. Maybe the original pixels owners are hard to track though.

I still remember all the useless copycats (especially in other languages) cropping up after the success of the Million Dollar Home Page.

I wonder how the guy that created it managed to make it so viral that he sold out all of the pixels in a short time.

To me this was such a weird time, because I was too young to experience the Usenet groups before that. To me, all those "get usenet downloads access" premium upsales always looked very phishy and like a scam to begin with, and all the tools available for Windows were also commercially sold. You saw them everywhere, next to serials generators, illegal warez sites, even next to fetish porn ads. That's why I subconsciously associated it with "must be a scam like online casinos".

I only realized what usenet and IRC were when I first installed/booted a Knoppix CD that came with a computer magazine. Little did I know that it would brick the bootloader of Windows 98 at the time. But by then most usenet groups were already either flooded with spam, or dead. Most groups were lurking in IRC via bouncers all day long to not miss a message.

Mine was this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H2YhXQaNiY4

Of course this device didn't actually exist in the consumer market. Half of my aunts and uncles worked for IBM and none of them knew anything about it. From cruising the YouTube comments it looks like a simpler version of the system had a few industrial applications but nothing remotely like the commercial. With AR glasses I think we're pretty much there nowadays but most people would rather use Robinhood and AirPods on an iPhone to do the same without bothering pigeons or looking like a weirdo on public transit.

The instant I saw the first frame I remembered having seen it... but I don't remember any of the content with the boy!

What does the search engine prompt say? I couldn't read it.

You could play MUDs at least.

I used a couple others too but, yeah, pre-Google mostly Altavista. Funnily enough, the product guy on Altavista was the person most responsible for hiring me into my kast job.

Yeah, I remember that. The first search engine that wasn't absolute trash. Metafind/Dogpile only helped because they merged all the terrible results onto one page so you could be frustrated by them with one click. Access to information (and the quantity of available information, including about topics from the 90s) now is SO MUCH BETTER than it was in the 90s.

Or Qemu without virtualization (or DOSBOX-X) with W98SE (or the libre floss way with Damn Small Linux, Dillo and setting up the proxy as you said to the ones of protoweb).

In the early days the portals were great and you could find most anything by browsing them; click on topic, go through the subtopics and get a list of websites on that topic, if those did not have the information you needed you went to the links pages/web rings on those sites and you would get what you needed soon enough. It was quicker than scrolling through pages and pages of modern day google results and trying to game the search terms. These were all personal pages you would be browsing and one of the things you would do in those days to get your page noticed is register it on Yahoo and the like. You were able to explore the internet in a way you can't anymore.

I did at times, but they are more fun now, browsed through the Wayback Machine.

Not only for the nostalgia, but for some topics, like som games or game genres, it can lead into amazing old internet clusters of sites full of fun/useful content (i.e. not just the ad/clickbate stuff everything turned into later, but real people just sharing because they wanted to share).

Many ISPs set a portal as your browsers homepage with their installers. Most people didn't know how to manually set up dial-up networking and would just run an installer their ISP provided. Since they didn't know how/why a portal was set they just assumed it was how things were.

I used the SBC global one as a homepage. It was cool, you could customize it quite a lot which was its own sort of fun. I was a kid then too.

Enough people used them to make them worth billions, in 1998 $.

Yeah, bit hard for me to remember. I switched to Linux in 1995 around the time Windows 95 came out, because my 486/DX33 computer, with 4MB of RAM, wouldn't run it so I was going to be left behind anyway. 16MB of RAM (the only sensible upgrade due to stick sizes) would have been a colossal $400 ($840 today).

Plus, on Windows 3.1, SLiRP/PPP + Trumpet Winsock was only barely usable for timelines and reasons I can't quite remember, so much of my internet life was through a shell account anyway; it made more sense to run Linux locally and have a native experience, rather than living on the internet through some piece of dialup modem terminal emulation software.

Though, after installing Linux, with only 4MB of RAM, rebuilding the kernel took 8 hours. I didn't actually realize this was abnormal, or that the drive thrashing I heard at the time was swapping rather than just normal code compilation.

It could start X, but only very, very slowly

At some point later I got a Cyrix 5x86/133 (o/c'd to 160) with 16MB. Probably around 97-98. At that point, the graphical web became a reality for me as well.

Otherwise, it was interactive stuff via telnet/ftp/usenet, and plenty of lynx for web.

Seriously, I miss the reliable blue underlined links like you wouldn't believe.

Ironically people at the time were not discounting Y2K going awry. Parents told me years later that new years was spent a bit more tense with the cellar stocked with cans and booze. We make fun of it now but people had concerns about the supply chain and what might result from that if everything borked at once. I guess the guys in Office Space managed to save the world in time (initech in that movie was patching fintech software for y2k).

Never stopped.