The Unrecognizable Internet of 1996

This article is looking at the older Internet from one point of view. There was much more to it than the Web. There were thriving communities on Usenet and IRC. People had personal home pages instead of MySpace/Facebook/Bebo/Whatever accounts. You hosted your own scanned photos.

And MUDs!

There were thriving Usenet and IRC communities (I miss Usenet), but you had those things on BBS's too; it wasn't really a breakthrough.

Oh, Usenet is still out there. There are even still communities, although it's mostly just used for binaries now.

Usenet is a crappy P2P file sharing system now, as pretty much everyone who ran a Freenix-rated Usenet server predicted. It was something much cooler than that before the file sharing douchebags wrecked it.

P2P?

IRC is most definitely still there.

Nothing like the puzzle of collecting and putting together UUEncoded-split "warez" (invariably one or two pieces would be missing)

I was on CompuServe back then (95 or 96 anyway), at the time I never even opened the web browser - my time online was spent in the CompuServe app looking at the board/chatroom/portal type things that it used to serve.

Strangely I can still remember the "phone number" style email address I had too...

Articles like these makes me want to strangle the author.

No, Sir, my Indy with Ethernet and Mosaic/Netscape was quite up to the task. In fact, my telnet to the Sun and ftp and gopher pre-web was already immensely useful.

If it sucked for you 1996, maybe it was just you.

I don't take your meaning. You think compared to what we have in 2008, the web of 1996 didn't suck? I was connected directly to the backbone (I ran an ISP), and I agree with him.

The web was awesome in 1996. It sucked in 1993.

By 1996 you had actual webpages you could visit. IQ tests. News sites. Hotmail. But it was still difficult to tell professional content from amateur stuff. Conspiracy theory and Internet trolling were fresh and interesting and the blink tag was in wide use. And port 80 wasn't the only game in town still: there were still lots of independent BBS that had interesting content and where TELNET was king.

So what if you weren't online all the time. The communities that existed expected asynchronous access. You could grab lots of content and download it for use offline. There were brilliant software applications and games ready for the taking: DOOM had left Wolfenstein in it's wake? Online was liberating. Online was brilliant. It still is.

The web in 1993? I don't remember NCSA Mosaic in 1993, I think I first used that app in 1994 in the lab at UW in Seattle. It was installed on a machine running X Windows, I think it was a DEC terminal. Before Mosaic I can remember an ftp site in Sweden that had a lot of photos. Downloading a photo of the space shuttle with Fetch and then opening it up a second later on the Mac IIsi with the 12" monochrome monitor and being pretty blown away by being able to do that so fast. I had a modem at home and could dial in to the UW Switch (via a friends student id number) with my external ViVa 9600 baud modem that I got for $75. That was a big improvement over my first modem, an external ViVa 2400 baud job that I paid $130 for. The early web was sparsely populated, photo.net wasn't born yet and Philip Greenspun had a nice site "Travels with Samantha" and that had some good advice on scanning your slides with Kodak PhotoCD technology, and then how to remove the magenta cast in Photoshop. AOL always sent out free discs, so after the UW access dried up (my friend graduated) I used that free access (17 hours of free access!) and then got a dial up account from Eskimo North in Seattle. Later found out about nocharge.com free dialup. MUD games were cool back in 1991 when all there was was rn and irc and ftp.sumex-aim.stanford.edu for entertainment.

Mosaic was released in 1994, but Lynx was available by 1992. But yeah, in 1992 most of the action was in ftp sites. They were already a lot better than the local BBSes where I lived, though.

The web was awesome in 1996. It sucked in 1993.

By 1996 you had actual webpages you could visit. IQ tests. News sites. Hotmail. But it was still difficult to tell professional content from amateur stuff. Conspiracy theory and Internet trolling were fresh and interesting and the blink tag was in wide use. And port 80 wasn't the only game in town still: there were still lots of independent BBS that had interesting content and where TELNET was king.

So what if you weren't online all the time. The communities that existed expected asynchronous access. You could grab lots of content and download it for use offline. There were brilliant software applications and games ready for the taking: DOOM had left Wolfenstein in it's wake? Online was liberating. Online was brilliant. It still is.

Web pages loaded much faster if I remember correctly. I never really got a chance to use gopher till yesterday and it is a much much faster system for looking through a university library's catalog. Fuck I hate 2009 when everything is moving to the WWW even when it doesn't belong there :(

Trumpet Winsock!

I was on the internet in 89 and found tons of things to do:

Irc, Usenet, Mucks, Muds, Gopher, Ftp.

By 1996 we were complaining about the Aol users ruining the internet.

In 89 you complained once every September about the students ruining the Internet; not a major change.

This is true and by 98 gave up complaining about Internet newbies.

I remember at a young age telling my step dad that he should be buying domain names of big companies and sitting on them. he laughed at me. :(

I'm the sort of kid who was buying candy in bulk and reselling it at school for a hefty markup. I'm pissed I missed out on all the easy money in web 1.0. If only I was born 10 years earlier.

Domain Squatting is illegal and has been for about 10 years.

If you had a time machine and wanted to make decent amounts of money, one way would be to register the generic keyword domains (like creditcards.com which sold for $3m)

10 years would be what? 1998-1999? I'm obviously talking about 1993-1994

Most people these days are lamenting about the death of innovation in the valley. It reminds me of when Arthur Rock said that innovation was dead right before the internet started taking off.

"He predicts few dramatic technological breakthroughs in the next several years, but expects that recent inventions will enable dozens of companies to push electronics into every aspect of life."

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,949965-1,00...

Many people copy success so tons of "me-too" companies get started, but technology just like all industries are dominated by black swans.

In 1996 I was just starting to "code" web sites, so I found lots to do. That doesn't seem like a long time ago until I remember I was 12 at the time, but I digress.

Also, spending all evening on IRC was a common event.

Journalists shouldn't write science- or technology-related articles. Ever.