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Comment by bluGill | Hacker News Reader

I remember using the web on 25mhz computers. It ran about as fast as it does today with a couple ghz. Our internet was a lot slower than as well.

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> I remember using the web on 25mhz computers. It ran about as fast as it does today with a couple ghz.

I know it’s a meme on HN to complain that modern websites are slow, but this is a perfect example of how completely distorted views of the past can get.

No, browsing the web in the early 90s was slooow. Even simple web pages took a long time to load. As you said, internet connections were very slow too. I remember visiting pages with photos that would come with a warning about the size of the page, at which point I’d get up and go get a drink or take a break while it loaded. Then scrolling pages with images would feel like the computer was working hard.

It’s silly to claim that 90s web browsers ran about as fast as they do today.

> No, browsing the web in the early 90s was slooow. Even simple web pages took a long time to load. As you said, internet connections were very slow too. I remember visiting pages with photos that would come with a warning about the size of the page, at which point I’d get up and go get a drink or take a break while it loaded.

At home, when I was on dialup, certainly.

At work I did not experience this. Most pages loaded in Netscape navigator in about the same time that most pages load now - a few seconds.

> Then scrolling pages with images would feel like the computer was working hard.

Well, yes, single-core, single-socket and single-processor meant that the computer could literally only do a single thing at a time, and yet the scrolling experience on most sites was still good enough to be better than the scrolling experience on some current React sites.

Browsing the web was slow, because the network was slow. It wasn't really because the desktop computers were slow. I remember our company having just a 64 kbit/s connection to the 'net, even as late as in 1997.. well, that was pretty good compared to the place where I was contracted to at the time, in Italy.. they had 19.2 kbit/s. Really big sites could have something much better, and browsing the internet at their sites was a different experience then, using the same computers.

Ya, what is crazy is that we were “serving” web pages over those kinds of lines.

This is probably me experiencing a simulacra but with that slow loading getting up to go get a drink workflow, each page load was more special. It was magical discovering new websites just like trying out new software by picking something up from those "pegboards" at computer stores.

It also was a simpler time, the technology was in peoples lives but as a small side quest to their main lives. It took the form of a bulky desktop in the den or something like that. When you walked away from that beige box, it didn't follow or know about the rest of your life.

A life where a Big Mac meal was only $2.99, a toyota corolla was $9-15k, houses were ~100k, and when average dev salaries were ~50k. That was a different life. I don't know why but I picture this music video that was included on the Windows 95 cd bonus folder when I think of this simulacra: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iqL1BLzn3qc

> music video that was included on the Windows 95 cd bonus folder when I think of this simulacra: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iqL1BLzn3qc

When I saw that video in 1995, I understood something we now know as Youtube would be inevitable as the connection speeds improve. Although I thought it'd be like MTV, a way to watch the newest music videos.

No, I think he’s right. I don’t recall the web being any faster today than it was thirty years ago, download speed excepted. The overall experience is about the same, if not worse, IMO.

Why would you make an exception for download speed? It was the reason why the internet was slow back then.

This is like saying Victorian Britain wasn't polluted, except for all the coal burning.

Cars have much more power today but generally don’t go much faster because they’re much heavier. Just because downloads are faster doesn’t mean the user experience is faster or more snappy. In fact, it might be worse. Quality doesn’t follow from quantity.

It's not an accurate recollection at all. In 1990 a couple of us 12 year olds snuck into the university library to use the web to look at the Marathon website. It took 5 minutes to load some trivially-sized gifs and a tiny amount of HTML. They had a pretty decent connection for the day.

Web pages took a minute to load, now we're optimising them for instant response.

That's really cool you visited in 1990, three years before the first graphical web browser, a website with image about a game released in 1994.

My clim is that the modern web is bloated.

I had t3 connections for most of my browsing which was faster than ethernet of the day - even by todays standards that isn't too bad. I avoided dialup if I could because it was slow. Even isdn was okay speeds.

> My clim is that the modern web is bloated.

Your claim that I responded to was that web browsers were just as fast on 25MHz CPUs.

> I had t3 connections for most of my browsing which was faster than ethernet of the day - even by todays standards that isn't too bad.

T3 speeds are very slow in today's terms. Even my cell phone does a couple orders of magnitude better from where I'm sitting.

There are a lot of weird claims going on in your posts. I think it's a lot of nostalgia coloring your views of how fast things were in the past.

the modern web is very bloted and to the actual experinece isn't much different. Of course some of that bloat does more, but much of it isn't

If you want to complain about the state of modern web, you can just do it. You don't need to spin up a story about how the old internet was faster than it actually was.

This is the same pattern you see in politics when people on all sides (even the nominally progressive ones) lie to each other about how great the olden days were, when in reality it's all about their dissatisfaction with the present day.

The subject here is what if computers hadn't advanced from the 1990s. Complaining about modern web bloat would be off topic. Commenting about how things weren't much slower fits the topic though.

what a glorious time that was! now it's too easy to get stuck looking at the stream of (usually AI generated) crap. I long for the time when the regular screen break was built-in.

Yeah slow?

Try using a 2400baud modem, that was slow

I started on 300baud - but never accessed the internet from that so I won't count it in this discussion.

Those things always confuse me. I think 2400 baud modems were like 9600 bps? At least 56k modems were 8000 baud.

no, the other way

2400 were 300 bytes per second

(though it might be that 9600bps worked at the 'official definition' of 2400 baud but nobody advertised it like that)

You seem to be confusing baud and bits per second. Baud is symbols per second. Usually one symbol represents multiple bits. AFAIK in 56k modems one symbol corresponds up to 7 bits.

I am not confusing anything, it was the marketing that was confusing

Of course you're correct and a 56k modem is something like 8k Baud, but in marketing the bigger number usually wins

And up until the 2400bps modems IIRC bauds and bps were interchangeable

Wirths law in effect.

It crashed a lot more, the fonts (and screens) were uglier, and Javascript was a lot slower. The good thing was that there was very little Javascript.

> The good thing was that there was very little Javascript.

Because all of the complicated client side stuff was in Java applets or Shockwave :( Pepperidge Farm remembers having to wait 10 minutes for a GameBoy emulator to load to play Pokémon Yellow on school computers…

I cannot recall crashes being a problem.

I remember Netscape Navigator crashing, taking Solaris down with it. I could only imagine what it was like on Windows 9x. I don't want to imagine what Windows 3.x users endured. Windows 3.x was the OS where people saved early and saved often, since the lack of proper memory protection meant that a bad application (or worse, a bad driver) could BSOD the system at any time.

I once did an April Fool's spoof of netscape that displayed a wait cursor for 2 minutes then a bomb alert. For classic Mac, it was 90% accurate with only 1% the disk footprint.

With Windows 9x, I recall the crashes being manageable, but it was advisable to give the system 15 minutes to settle down after rebooting. Windows would start multiple things at once on startup and it was a bit risky to overstress it.

Windows NT 4 seemed OK, but a lot of software didn't run.

By the time of Windows 2000 the tradeoff was much better.

(Allowing a settle down time remained a good idea, in my experience. Even if Windows 2000 and later were very unlikely to actually crash, the response time would still be dogshit until everything had been given time to settle into a steady state. This problem didn't get properly fixed until pervasive use of SSDs - some time between Windows 7 and Windows 8, maybe? - and even then the fix was just that there was no longer any pressing need to actually fix it.)

In 1997-8 I met the first person I knew to have a CD-R burner.

He dual-booted 98 and NT 4. He joked that NT was his 100+ MB CD burning software. He used 98 for almost everything else, but it couldn't keep that steady stream of data going.

I remember using the web in the 90s. I often left to make a sandwich while pages loaded.

Try opening Gmail on one of those. Won’t be fun.

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