Hacker News Reader

Comment by tokai | Hacker News Reader

Am I getting old? 09-14 is not even close to the old web for me. The old web, to me, was back when people still published physical 'phone' books for websites.

View on HN

Seriously. 2009 is several years after everyone was already saying “web 2.0”! That is nowhere near the “old web”.

The old web doesn't necessarily mean the oldest web. 12-17 years ago was very much an older fairly different era of the web that's worth analyzing even if it's on the younger side of the old web. I can definitively sympathize with your reaction though, it doesn't feel like that era was that long ago yet.

I vaguely recall those, but they were more for normies trying to get online. For me the old web is what I saw when I logged into my university gopher server and saw the advertisement for something called the World Wide Web which I could browse via lynx. Soon enough I got a PPP connection and then Mosaic/Netscape 1.0. However everything after javascript shipped (let alone CSS) is new new new. I'd almost go as far as saying if it doesn't have a tilde in the URL it's not old web... almost...

I’m vaguely remembering tilde username for our public html folders. Was that old Apache behavior?

And now I wonder if Apache is even still common. I spent so much time fiddling with apache configs.

It was at least an option with Apache. I read about it while setting up Apache on Windows XP and thought, who would possibly want that feature?

That’s the prehistoric web or maybe that’s BBSs…

Correct. Don't get me started on Fidonet, as a young computer nerd in the 80s before even dial-up internet was available, that was a portal to the global internet that my adolescent shit-posting self definitely didn't deserve.

Someone called that the Cretaceous web. The old web was the era before social media sucked everything up (so 2009 wasn't it).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com