Ask Lemmy

Long answer from an old guy looking through rose tinted glasses.

I’m what would probably be classed as the 2nd era of networking. I wasn’t a pioneer working on protocols in the 1970s, but I was small part of the group of network architects and engineers that rolled it out on a national scale (in the UK).

My first network experience that I can remember was using a service called Prestel which was run by the Post Office. I remember playing a multi user text based game called Shades - first MMO? I was rocking a 300bps (yes 0.3k) modem connected to a computer running an OS called CPM. This must have been around 1983.

Roll the clock forward 8 years, and I’m working at the University of Manchester. There was a national piece of work called Project Shoestring, the remit of which was to roll out the IP protocol across all the universities, encapsulating the data in the X25 serial network which connected them all together at that time.

I do remember the day when we got a TCP/IP stack up and running on a Novell server and I transferred my first piece of email via SMTP. I’m going to guess this was summer 1991.

The first bit of news I remember hearing across the network was Freddy Mercury’s death. Even in 1991, it was fastest means of news propagation, with the news only hitting traditional broadcast media several hours later and print newspapers the next day.

Around that time, a program called “Trumpet Winsock” was released. This was a flakey bit of code that allowed Windows 3.1 to connect to the internet natively (i.e. not across a modem). I cannot convey the excitement of this. Within a few weeks I had “friends” all across the globe. Network techies reaching out to one another via bulletin boards, ftp, mail scheduled file transfers, and Gopher (the precursor to the web developed in Minnesota). All using IP.

1993 and another seismic shift. The WWW arrived with a browser called Mosaic and some very, very unreliable server software that I ran on Windows 3.1. I wrote my first web site and by 1994 was running a site called “The FoxPro I/O Address” that connected programmers working with the FoxPro RDBMS language. “Visitor Books” were common on early websites, and it was so cool seeing comments from the US, Argentina, Eastern Europe etc. One amusing event from that time was the day someone sent me a tech support CD from Microsoft with a post it note telling me to look in a certain directory. Microsoft had only gone and scrapped the whole of the Foxpro I/O Address website (it wasn’t small) and published it on CD! It truly was the wild west.

Another memory is a book which I still have somewhere. “The 1994 Internet White Pages”. A large book (maybe around 1000 pages) which had every active email address in the world at that time. I believe they were mostly scrapped from USENET posts, but it’s bonkers to think that you could publish all the world’s email addresses in a book!

In the late 90s I had the pleasure of having dinner with Vint Cerf (look him up), on the Orient Express, no less. I remember asking him what was his single regret in developing the IP protocol. He’d obviously been asked that before, because he quickly said, “Security, we never put any security (encryption) in the packet headers. It never crossed our minds that anyone would use the internet for nefarious activities”. Man, I miss that time. There were no scammers, no phishing, no viruses (well the Morris Worm, but that was just exciting!).

I was fortunate enough to work in the place where the first programmable computer was built, virtual memory was developed, and early pioneers worked with Linus on Linux. My first distro was the Manchester Computing Centre version running on kernel v0.96. I have a floppy disk with it on somewhere! I learned a lot from some genuine unknown and uncelebrated giants in that building.

The internet is awesome, but I do miss those days. Those early net residents valued what they had and treasured it. We take it for granted today and rarely stop to appreciate how incredible it is, let alone how dangerous it is.

If you got this far… thanks for reading.

I started out with BBSes and then found my local college had an outbound modem bank you could use for free (local calls only) and so I connected to MSU and dialed into Detroit bulletin boards to pay games and find porn.

I explored other things on the college network, but it was mostly boring stuff. I got into IRC a little bit for trivia games. Newsgroups a bit. There wasn't much until the advent of broadband and www.

There was a point of ideal bandwidth with DSL, though it still felt too slow at the time. It was fast enough to download stuff, but slow enough that you couldn't have massive js files to track users or lock down the content of your site.

Cable modems were the beginning and end of internet perfection. Everything wasn't shit yet, but the user base grew and so did the heavy, monolithic webpages. MySpace was half way between social media and individual sites. Once Facebook became the town square, the untamed beauty of the early internet was dead.

The thing i loved most about the old school internet days was that you had to want to be on the internet. So everyone who was on the internet wanted to be there. Every obscure website was a passion project. Forums were mainly for people being enthusiastic about something. It wasn't just a default thing and it was everyone. Now the internet feels like it's a potential career for everyone.

Definitely not early days, but when i was a kid (early 2000's) the Internet was wildly different. I remember watching all of Lost on ABC's website for free. It had an ad at the beginning. That was it. Nobody self censored, and the Internet was widely considered a place only for adults, so most sites didn't even censor. Hell, i remember there was a subreddit of people having sex with corpses. There was definitely a lack of censorship.

There was almost like the wild west in the 2000s. There were rules, and established sites, but if you wandered long enough you would find a small site that just didnt fucking care at all.

Also everything ran on flash and that shit crashed all the time.

Before AOL it was mostly academics and the well educated discussing a wide range of shit on USENET news groups. And email. Then the web hit, AOL connected, and millions of idiots flooded the net with stupidity. We called it AOHELL.

Honestly, better, in many ways. Money ruins everything

"Ba bup ba bup bup bup bup kwwaaaaaaaaaaaaa eeeeeuuuueeuuueeuuuu" "Screeeech . . . hisss . . . squaawk" "Eekbeep. ding ding ding ding dong dong eeeeeeeeeee rrrrrrrrrrrr scrtchchchchchchchchchchchchchchch BONG... BONG brrrrrrrrrrrrRRRRRRRRRR"

it was great. Before faecesbook/shitter/shittok, everyone had their own little space on the net. People would dedicate their pages to whatever interested them. You had to ACTIVELY find shit. I truly miss the old internet. You'd download a film over a week on dialup, and it'd be scat porn (true story haha)! Man, those were the days.

I hope the internet hasn't peaked yet. Early days were cool, although much more cumbersome than what we have today. The biggest positive was people pursuing what they were passionate about instead of just being here because it came with the phone and other people are here as well, I guess.

I can't speak to the early days of the internet, but for the early days of the web at least, the fediverse is the closest thing we have to the "spirit" of the old web. Everyone running their own things, no central portals, web search was diverse (but not that great). Communities existed not so much on social media platforms, but in the form of webrings, mailing lists and usenet (none of which were centralised).

Web pages were less javascript and css, and more straight html. So pages tended to be static. Images loaded line by line, and often the whole web page would jump around as images loaded if the html didn't pre-emptively set the image size, because the browser had no idea what size the image was going to be until it finished loading it.

But importantly, a significant amount of content was generated by people, not companies. Communities and pages were driven more likely to be created by people with an interest in that specific thing than a company trying to make money, because SEO wasn't a thing.

But AOL, yahoo, google, they all got the idea that there was money to be made by making the search page the gateway through which everything else was found and accessed. And that was a sign of what was to come. Centralisation, predatory trapping of users via the network effect, enshittification... All of it... ALL of it, driven by companies chasing the advertising dollar, rather than passionate nerds making content for other passionate nerds.

It's why I say the fediverse is spiritually the closest you will find to that time period. Communities are driven by passionate nerds, shaped by people interested in whatever it is that they're interested in, and building communities without relying on a centralised platform to provide the infrastructure.

Neocities: https://neocities.org/browse!

Webrings: https://www.brisray.com/web/webring-list.htm

Usenet: https://www.spocket.co/blogs/what-is-usenet

Zombo: https://zombo.com/

Chans: https://allchans.org/ but also... here be monsters... lots of unmoderated content, NSFW, NSFL, etc

Also:

The Internet wasn't just in everyone's pocket all the time. Frequently, using a computer network was an activity that you did with other people in the same room, e.g. in the Computer Lab (computers were expensive and complicated and not every room in a school or office would have the necessary power or communications wiring, so all the computers were kept in one special room) or an Internet Cafe (not everyone had Internet-capable wiring at home, so you might go to a business that offered Internet-connected computers as a service just to check your email) or a LAN Party (people used to physically haul their beige boxes, CRT monitors and network devices to a place to meet, connect and play games together - frequently just someone's garage). You went to a specific place to use the Internet, typically with other people around, and then when you left the place you left the Internet also, it didn't just follow you around everywhere all the time.

For anyone missing the old internet, it's still there kind of. There are many personal blogs and indie webpages from people all over the world. Look here for example: https://indieweb.org/

Before webpages, we had electronic bulletin boards (BBS). Do a search on Wikipedia for it.

To start.. it was slow. Your modern gigabit internet can download a 700 megabyte file in 6 seconds; on a good dialup link that would take 30 hours. Videos for porn weren't an option -- just loading a single image could mean waiting for a full minute or two. Sometimes you'd get a JPEG that would load the entire (very fuzzy) image at first and then it would progressively become sharper, other times you'd watch the image load from top to bottom, one line of pixels at a time.

Browsers didn't have tabs, and the more browser windows you had open the slower your computer would go. All it took was one page throwing in a bunch of silly effects (like animated snow falling on the screen while you try to read, or an animated cat that follows your mouse cursor to pounce on it, etc) and it would take down all of the other browser windows you had open.

Uncensored was definitely one way of putting it. There were several "file sharing" systems, all basically completely un-moderated. After two weeks of downloading The Matrix it may turn out to actually be a collection of snuff films of people being decapitated (no joke or exaggeration - the Tukhchar massacre during the war in Dagestan was brutal). You could wait all day on a download of some song only to find it's the Barney theme music but saved with the filename "Metallica - Enter Sandman.mp3"

BUT, that said, there were a lot of forums and those where moderated by the owners who where trying to cultivate their own community. You can still find some of these, SomethingAwful.com and Metafilter.com are still kicking. I haven't looked at SA in ages, but Metafilter remains a lovely little community in the modern era. Metafilter also charges a single $5 fee to sign up (which is required to post), which I think really, really helps keep down the number of trolls and bots.

Search engines didn't really exist for some time. Yahoo was one of the first, but even Yahoo started as a manually cultivated list of sites. So you wouldn't search for "cheesecake recipe" but you'd look at Yahoo's list of recipe sites and browse through them looking for cheesecake. When it first came out Google was a massive game changer.

And if you go to pre-"web" days there wasn't even websites: Usenet / NNTP was basically just one big huge text-only forum. You would load up rec.food.baking or rec.food.cooking to read or discuss. There wasn't any moderation -- if somebody was being a shithead all you could do is block them on your side and ignore them. And the newsgroup naming scheme could be so inconsistent - there was comp.lang.python for Python programming discussion, but C/++ learners had alt.comp.lang.learn.c-c++.

I think that, ultimately, the largest single change has been the consolidation. Nowadays people can spend nearly all of their time just on a handful of sites like Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, etc. You could install the "StumbleUpon" browser extension and just spend all day finding new websites that other people thought interesting enough to submit to the index. We had entire websites/forums dedicated to niche interests like specific models of a car or motorcycle.

It was better in some ways, worse in others. You can still get a feel for it though: I genuinely recommend looking at MetaFilter and trying to explore the parts of the internet that aren't part of the consolidated corporate blob of Facebook / Threads / Twitter / etc.

It was neat. There were a lot of new sort of experimental things going on in the 90s and most of them weren't huge. There were a lot of websites that were independent or owned by small companies that featured their own little communities with chat rooms and forums. Two of my early favorites were Palace and Cybertown/Colony City.

Palace was this 2d avatar chat with different rooms you could hang out in. Each room would be a single screen and people would make an avatar from a 3x3 grid of images called props linked together. You could wear 9 props at a time, and could edit them with this really janky and super basic editor that was part of the program. You could either get props from other people or you could make your own by importing images, but there was this weird 255 color palette so you'd end up with all these greys and pinks for any pixels with incompatible colors that you'd need to fix or your avatar would look bad. There were also scripts in this language called iptscrae, which had backward notation. So like, rather than 5 + 5, you'd do "5" "5" +.

There were a bunch of different servers and you could run your own, though the official South Park server was the biggest. You'd have all these different styles of avatars that became popular and people would edit them to add variety and customize them. The rooms themselves were basically just a bunch of people hanging around, placing their avatars where they want on a background and chatting. When you typed something there would be a speech bubble that would pop up over your avatar like a comic. The scripts made it great for roleplay, because you could make die rolling scripts with little custom messages. I ended up getting really into White Wolf, playing on some small personal servers with friends.

Cybertown or Colony City was a 3d VRML (virtual reality modelling language) chat. Basically you'd have these sometimes reasonably large but very basic 3d spaces you could hang out in with other people with a chat client strapped to the bottom of the page. You could use one of the standard avatars provided by the site, or you could use a custom avatar that you modeled or got from someone else. It was, again, largely just people hanging out. There were a bunch of different areas that were just linked 3d instances, and you could get your own room.

These were all before anything like MMOs or much in the way of online multiplayer that'd come a few years later, so they were some of the first places you could hang out in an actual visually represented virtual space with other people. It was neat.

One of my favorite places to hang out, though, was just a simple little D&D java chat called Kenderchat. It was set in Dragonlance and consisted of 4 rooms: a tavern, the outside of the tavern, an arena, and a cave system. It was just text D&D roleplay, and it was awesome. I spent a huge amount of my time in high school just playing different characters here, and as a medium it honestly couldn't have been simpler.

Most chats on the internet in the early days were more like Kenderchat than they were like the Palace. Even Cybertown also had some just regular text chats. Socializing on the internet was largely between these and the slightly more corporatized but still very loosely controlled chat clients like ICQ, AIM, and YIM. ICQ even had a rudimentary voice chat client, though it wasn't super reliable and the audio quality wasn't great. Of course there was also IRC, which was a little more complex but also completely independent. Anyone could and still can run their own IRCD.

The funny thing is, AOL was trying to do something like modern social media, but it was largely seen as sort of the kiddie pool of the internet. It was contained, centrally controlled, and only available to AOL subscribers.

There were also a lot of independent websites where people would just post their thoughts, their art, or goofy things they came across. I remember spending a lot of time reading Hostess comics on Seanbaby's website.

Things got a little more sophisticated in the early 00s, and you had sites like Newgrounds becoming super popular and the rise of online gaming and voice chat clients like Teamspeak. We also had shoutcast, so you could put out your own radio station that people could listen to using Winamp. All of this stuff was based on privately hosted servers that anyone could put up. There were still a lot of independent websites, chats, and forums.

The thing is, this stuff didn't like go away exactly. There are still loads of IRC chats out there, though most of them aren't as busy as they might once have been. There are still independent websites and weird quirky little communities with an independent vibe, you just have to find them. That's sort of always been the case. The difference now is that most people are on the modern equivalent of a half dozen or so AOLs and aren't really sure how to go beyond that.

Today the thing I see as the closest equivalent to these communities tend to be things like discord servers and independent game servers, though the fediverse is also pretty close. The difference with the fediverse is that they're networked together, so it does sort of feel like a big social media network, and discord has kind of a similar vibe. There are absolutely still smaller communities out there, though, and if you go looking I'm sure you can find some independent communities centered around your interests.

I will say, roleplaying communities seem to me to do a better job of connecting people these days than other general interest-based communities. Maybe that's just down to me and my interests, but they are by nature focused on community and connections between people. No big company cares enough about such a niche audience to really try to capitalize on them, and they seem to be a good way of making lasting and genuine connections.

Basically, if you want to get a feel for the old independent internet, stop using big sites like Facebook and X, and maybe even focus a little less of your time on networked fediverse sites. Find forums with communities that speak to you, or some smallish discord servers, and dig in. Get to know the people so they aren't just names next to posts. If you find a community where everybody knows each other, you'll have a taste for how things used to be. You won't really find a single community with millions of people that feels like that, because the smaller size is what makes it feel more intimate in the first place.

Forums were some of the ways you gather information and become part of communities. IRCs and Chat Rooms provided by Bravenet, MSN, Yahoo! and AOL were more of the real-time ways of communicating with people as well as messenger programs.

The only great nuisances we all came across were pop-up advertisements, dialog windows that'd come onto your screen to just advertise to you. Ad-blocking was just a dream in the early days which is one of the things I absolutely don't like about the period then.

Websites had a lot of character to them, they went by themes, they decorated in kind to where you identified with it. Places like Nickelodeon, Comedy Central and video game websites all have character. These days, everything is too bland and linear.

Social media was present but it was very tolerable, it's not as in your face and everywhere as it is today.

The internet was a thing you could actually take time away from and not feel like you're missing anything, except for what was going on in your circle or community. It was sometimes exciting to come back after a few days to check e-mail and catch up that way. There was a nice balance to it. With everything 24/7 and how many things adapted to it where everyone has an app, it's nauseating and tiring to interact on a constant basis.

As far as the uncensored part? There were places you just had to know access to, to see them. They weren't that out in the open. Plus, this was pre-cyberbullying laws where, everyone could get away with dogpiling on you so that was the wild and uncensored part of it. You just had to have some thick skin or you weren't going to have a fun time online, then again, even that has amplified where even expressing an honest non-offending opinion isn't going to guarantee you from being interacted with some no-life piece of shit at anytime.

It was pretty sweet for the most part unless you accidentally wandered into the wrong spaces and saw someone who'd shot themselves in the face or splitting their own asshole open... But I guess that hasn't changed much.

I mostly just miss playing cartoon network games. And my neopets.

Can you define when "the internet" starts for you? I'll go over my own anecdotal experience and what I can remember being the rough progression and milestones.

So, when I was growing up, we could dial into other computer systems with a basic, text-based bulletin board system and send and read messages. A bit later, Compuserve came along where we lived and there were various areas and activities. We didn't have HTTP yet, but you could connect with other people, check stocks, etc. I think there was some rudimentary shopping, but I might be mis-remembering. There may have been trolls around but I was rather young and don't remember much.

Somewhere in here, we get things like Archie, Veronica, etc. that could find different things on the pre-web internet. NNTP newsgroups came to be (you can think of these as sort of proto-forums, I guess, but that's not an exact thing). These were generally fairly unfiltered and could be wild. Trolls, of course, existed here and I think it's where we get the terms flaming and flame war (which no one seems to use anymore). You could find porn and such with a bunch of message each containing chunks of data you had to stitch together. Downloading a single picture and assembling it could take minutes to hours depending upon what you were working with (rural, slow dial-up in my case).

IRC also comes to be somewhere in here. You would connect to real-time chatrooms. I used this to communicate with coworkers up until ~2013 as we had a work IRC server.

Starting in the early (IIRC) 1990s, we had things like AOL, Prodigy, and other services that kinda built on the Compuserve premise (and indeed AOL would buy Compuserve). AOL would also at least popularize instant messages. Remember at this point, we had no phones to text on still. There were certainly trolls and lots of child predators (and cops trying to catch them, eventually). AOL eventually started adding access to the early web which is mostly how I got there, Universities and such had much better internet and other internal and external systems (when I got into Uni a bit before 2000 we still learnt Archie, Veronica, and the earliest search engines with Yahoo being the best at the time IIRC).

The early web was mostly people posting static pages for other people to load and look at. Amazon would get started as a bookstore in '95 (I think) and there were some other businesses, but a lot of people were a bit scared to try to buy anything online without seeing and handling the product first and over insecure connections. This would change rather rapidly. There were some early forums which could be pretty free-for-all but some were quite moderated. Pages would slowly get comments and guest books.

Commercial interests increased and increased, but we still got things like the iCQ messenger, Friendster, Myspace, etc. as well. Moderation and legal policies evolved. Fan sites were pretty awesome and, as forums evolved, many people could talk about their interests. Myspace blew up into a phenomenon and we start to get web 2.0. You probably grew up with this and as we transitioned into web3. Enshittification really took off in the early 2010s and began getting worse and worse.

Depends on your definition of "early days".

If you go to the 1990s, when it really started to enter public awareness:

• IPv6 wasn't a thing.

• HTTP wasn't as dominant a protocol as it is today. Use of FTP, telnet, gopher, NNTP, IRC, and so forth were more-common relative to the Web compared to today.

• A lot of protocols weren't encrypted.

• If you were accessing the Internet via a dial-up modem (which was probably what you were doing in the 1990s if you were coming from home), you could download maybe 7 kB per second. You had maybe 100 milliseconds of latency

quite substantial compared to most modern network connections

on the first hop. This had a real impact on, say, real-time multiplayer video games.

• Email spam was an increasing problem.

• Personal computers were considerably more costly in real terms than they are today. Additionally, computer speed doubled about every 18 months, which meant that computers became obsolete very quickly. Tended to be wealthier people using it relative to today.

• A higher proportion of technical or academic people due to universities and technical companies being connected.

• Internationalization wasn't great. Today, one can just generally use Unicode and write whatever language one wants wherever. Seeing Web pages displayed using the wrong text encoding wasn't that uncommon. No emojis, either.

• On the Web, lots of small, independent sites. If you want to look at some of them, the Wayback Machine at Archive.org is handy. Animated GIFs and patterened backgrounds weren't uncommon.

• Universities were more prominent as places to obtain free software or the like.

• In the late '90s, for the Web, it wasn't quite worked out how people would actually use the thing. One school of thought is that people would adopt "portal sites" that they'd always go to when opening their Web browser. In practice, this didn't really turn out to be what happened, but trying to win "portal marketshare"

• The '90s had computers that couldn't display 24-bit color. Computers displaying 8-bit color chose a "palette" of colors, and could only show that many at one time. If you had an image on a Web page that contained a color that wasn't on that palette, a "close" color was used. Eventually, the world converged on 216 "safe" colors that one could expect a computer to display, so many images didn't contain all that many colors. Photographic images were often dithered.

• Due in part to bandwidth limitations as well as computational limitations, video over the network was more of a novelty than a practical thing. No YouTube or equivalent. RealPlayer, a browser plugin, was one of the more-prominent ways to stream video.

• Major personal computer OSes

MacOS and Windows 9X

were quite unstable compared to where personal computer OSes were in maybe the mid-2000s on. Web browsers were also quite unstable. Crashes were a thing.

• Much higher expectations for data privacy. I remember when it was considered outright scandalous for software to "phone home" to just indicate, say, a version number. Today, vast amounts of software are harvesting all kinds of data, and there is software whose entire business model is based on doing so.

• Search engines were a lot worse. Google today uses some kind of heuristics to rapidly index things like major news sites. Getting outdated links or limited coverage of the Web was a lot more common (though we didn't have to worry about the current glut of AI-generated spam Websites).

• Many top-level-domains have come into use. One saw far fewer in the 1990s. I'd say mostly .com, .net, and .org, plus the country codes.

• Consumer broadband routers with built-in, enabled firewalls weren't really much of a thing. It was far more common to be able to talk to arbitrary machines. A lot more stuff is firewalled off today.

• Probably not something that the typical person would have noticed, but lots of institutions ran public SNMP on routers and made it accessible to the Internet at large. I remember mapping out entire networks for many different organizations. You could sit there, watch the traffic flow, see the size of all the network links, etc. Places started to tamp down on that, saw exposing that information as being a security risk.

• In the US, some users accessed the Internet via gatewayed access from commercial dial-up services that were essentially giant BBSes, places like Compuserve or American Online. These had originally been aimed more at being stand-alone services and essentially died out as people just became interested in Internet access.

• Some large technology-oriented companies and institutions controlled huge amounts of the IPv4 address space. Apple still has a Class A network (about 1/256ths of the IPv4 Internet's addresses). Ford still does as well. But MIT and Stanford used to have their own as well.

• Websites where one went to interact with other users, like forums, were around, but early, and far fewer people were using them.

• Java was originally intended to be used in Web browsers in applets, something along the way that Javascript is today. It didn't succeed.

• It wasn't yet clear in the late 1990s that Microsoft wouldn't "take over" the Web by providing a dominant Web browser and managing to institutionalize use of proprietary Microsoft technologies like ActiveX.

Even then when it intertwined with the real world it was more of seperate experience. I remember buying kids books from a big publisher that came with a disc. Say dinosaurs or the human body. The disc content aligned with the book and it would have links to special hidden content or quizzes. Look up interactivity with director or flash, it’s clunky and basic but you’ll see how internet design became what it is.

I also like competitions for years they had a somewhat real aspect. You could buy a product and go online play a silly game and maybe win, it was like a bonus to the product. Or you might have to go take a photo of a random thing and email or post it in. The internet was the communication aspect not the all.

It was a compliment to your life. Not a responsibility or chore.

Wild yes. Uncensored yes. Free... nah they just had not figured out how to charge you. Full of popup ads and suspicious links. I gave the family computer aids at least twice.

And forget netflix. You'd spend 6 hours downloading a movie of worse than VHS quality and that was if you were one of the lucky few with a DSL connection.

It was different. I'm not sure it was better.

I was around 5 or 6 when we got dialup. I remember the sound of the modem connecting to the internet. When I had my turn, I would always go to the Lego website to play this 3d downhill skateboarding game, no idea if any record of it exists anymore. I remember with the download speeds back then it took maybe 5-10 minutes to even load, which was almost half of my computer allowance back then 😄