The unrecognizable Internet of 1996

So you could have dramatically better speeds than the vast majority of users.

That way, pages which nominally took 20 slow seconds to load over a phone modem, would appear instantly for you if you were privileged enough to have broadband.

Nowadays, "everybody" has broadband. But instead of the rapid browsing experience which everyone was looking forward to, we now have a slower user experience with broadband on most web sites than there was in 1996 with dial-up modems.

Back in 1996, most people did not yet have 56Kbaud modems, so the wise webmasters made sure their sites were optimized enough for mainstream consumers having 28.8K or at most 33.6K which would guarantee outstanding performance to the widest variety of visitors. When they were really serious about engaging users who did not have brand new computers, a site would need to perform decently at 9600 baud which was what the majority of installed modems still ran at, originally purchased for faxing.

When you occasionally went went to a slow, bloated page from a major technology company you knew right away it was "privileged idiots" on broadband without a clue as to how slow their "masterpiece" website behaved compared to what was expected from modem users.

Downloading files was expected to be slow, but web sites were not. Actually lots of MP3's were downloaded over modems, that's what MP3 was developed for. If you posted something, copyright was not a problem since you were not sharing it with the public, only those few who were online.

Almost 20years later, technology has progressed but it's clear that PEOPLE used to be more advanced than they are now.

There are probably engineers who are making sure their sites perform at 2G speeds without sinking below 1996 performance experiences, but from what I've been reading about interviewing & hiring trends it looks like they are excluded as extreme minorities within their percentiles.

Oh, well, I don't make the rules, just observing their disfunction.

Impossible to search until things like DejaNews came along

Even going back a few months was a huge PITA on slower connections

Your ISP might not have carried every newsgroup, or it might update very slowly

I never cared much for mailing lists either, but at least many of them had a search interface that worked well.

For all the problems that web-based bulletin boards had, they were a huge improvement over Usenet. Much easier to use and faster to browse through. You can argue that if you want to, but they were adopted so much faster.

Because it relied on third party clients, which have more or less been replaced by everything being done in the browser and the closed black box that is a "website".

Although I suppose you could still do that with a site which provides an API, or some kind of official set of browser plugins but the experience probably wouldn't be the same.

And Quake/QuakeWorld.