people forget how the older generation - people sentient in the 90s - mostly didn't even know what the internet was, and that those who did and sought to profit from it were rapacious scoundrels. People who made awesome websites and appreciated other ones were always in a tiny subculture minority.
Exactly. People seems to forget that the social landscape of people using Internet in 90/2000s was totally different. As far as I remember, internet was then populated by idealist early adopters, gamers / tech savvy hobbyists. Part of this pool translated to conservative boomers and now Internet is considered as a serious thing.
Well said. For me the 90s and early 2000s internet was completely magical. My fondest memories of my teens was finally having a computer in my room and the freedom to stay up late and explore the online universe. I met a lot of people and saw the advent of a lot of new things.
I wonder if that's going to happen for my kids. Today's internet feels so highly commercialized. All the new exciting discoveries are in the form of profit-driven silicon valley products with no humanity or soul.
I may very well be wrong. This is all emotion based and I really don't have concrete evidence. I'm probably falling into a fit of nostalgia.
I seem to recall reading articles like this in 1997 about the internet.
“What’s there to do really?” they asked. Whatever annoyance somebody had with the state of the early web was magnified into a portrait of decline.
It was only for nerds. Or maybe too shallow with ugly amateur content. Or too commercialized already. Or maybe it was never going to be a successful platform for business because nobody is crazy enough to put their credit card number in an online form. Etc.
These contradictory complaints were all present back in the day, but in retrospect there was so much room for both technical and social growth that they just seem quaint now.
One answer to “What happened to the old internet?”
We did. I’m 35; a little older than you, and (maybe pertinent?) close in age to Mark Zuckerberg (though I’m neither wealthy nor successful). I have a lot of the same fond memories of the 90s internet that you do. The online walled-gardens that are now displacing the web, were in many cases founded by _our_ generation. The firestorms currently ravaging culture and politics? In many cases _we_ started them.
I feel I’m just verbalising the zeitgeist here, but we could’ve done better. We should’ve done better. There’s a solid argument that we weren’t to know, that nothing like the connection enabled by the internet has ever happened before, but as arguably the first “digital natives”, this happened on our watch.
If the egalitarian ethos of the early web was indeed born of the values of the 60s and 70s, then what values from the 90s created the web of today?
I see what you mean. Back then, the internet was an exciting place with rules you had to learn to be accepted at all in certain communities. The internet was smaller then and required a certain level of technical knowledge to properly navigate it. This level acted as a filter against the most mundane most of the internet has become now. I remember sites like hell.com that were basically web experiments meets digital art installation. There used to be lots of trashy little pages and everything felt like the whole web was trying to find its identity.
The feeling of meeting real people went away for me after my FidoNet days. You had to wait up to two days for a message from Canada to Germany to arrive. It was frustrating but it was great. Dial-up BBS' were all the rage before a regular geek could access it from home. Even FidoNet-Email-Gateways existed.
So I guess every generation has its own frontier stories. For you, it was the internet, for me, it was dial-up BBS', for others it was disk swapping, building a simple computer from scratch or feeding paper strips to a warehouse-sized monstrosity.
Still, it's pretty obvious that we as a whole of humanity are not prepared to converse civilly on a global scale.
I’m not sure if it is a matter of perspective or what. But I definitely wouldn’t look back at 90’s internet too nostalgically. It was legitimately hard to find things. People made these quirky collections of websites because that was the only way to find interesting stuff. I didn’t know about websites until I heard about them IRL. I was a kid, and scared of all the weirdos on the internet, so maybe it felt harder to explore for me, but I think that was not so uncommon.
Decades tend to smear forward a bit, I think. I wonder if people are remembering, like, 200X-201X internet when they think of the 90’s? Google was really good before SEO fully figured it out (or maybe somebody really good at SEO in 200X was actually probably clever enough that you wanted to go to their site anyway).
The everyone-knows-the-same-stuff thing was every bit as strong in the 90s as the 80s. Remember, the Internet was just mostly-text message boards and low-media websites until the very end of that decade, and most people, even in the US, didn’t use the Web much until the 2000s.
I remember the internet in 90s being full of spam, popups that would crash your computer and viruses everywhere. Even before mass adoption it was still a cesspool. I am envious of anyone who got to experience the internet in its infancy
I got on the internet in the mid-90s. The early internet was used for:
- E-mail
- Personal websites
- Porn
- Instant messaging via ICQ
- Chat via IRC
- Multiplayer video gaming
- Communities via Messageboards
- Downloading software and music
- Searching for aliens (SETI)
It all felt very wholesome. Although there was a movie about hacking for fun and profit (Hackers), so I'm sure there was some of that too - but eCommerce and social networking didn't become a thing until the mid-2000s, which gradually brought the real masses and along with them, scams galore.
Feel free to tell me I'm wrong as well because I too was born in 1989, but to the best of my knowledge of the times before I was born, the internet was not a ubiquitous part of society and culture. The reason I believe that is I saw it myself go from a peripheral part of a society to taking a central role during the 90s and become mainstream. My dad had an internet-connected credit card terminal in his store, but the internet wasn’t a mainstream cultural phenomenon.
I was playing StarCraft online in 1998 and even then most of my friends (middle and upper class in Chicago) didn't do much online, or only used the internet for schoolwork which was a pretty new thing for us at that point. Even at that time I was still using our Britannica Encyclopedia CDs for school projects.
So, paraphrasing and specifying a bit more, I do agree with the author. I too feel like I was part of the last generation who remembers a time before the internet, and the World Wide Web, completely proliferated society.
Again, I was a child while all this was happening in the 90s, so perhaps my perspective is skewed, so I'm interested to hear if anyone older thinks that's completely off-base.
People keep panicking about huge internet portals but the thing is that if you compare the number of internet users 20 years ago with now there is a MASSIVE difference.
That was us back then, 20 years ago, the nerds, the sub-culture, the people who found this new internet thing fascinating.
Today it's EVERYBODY. And they're really not that fascinated with the internet but rather the content that they're consuming from the internet. In their view this content could come from anywhere, it just happens to come from the internet.
So all of us old nerds, and new nerds, will continue using the internet, but we'll be a miniscule minority.
I'm 33, young-ish but I still have some nostalgia for the early days of the internet. I miss the lightness and innocence, when viruses had silly graphics and at worst screwed up one computer. When the biggest internet companies were still frivolous and playful and inconsequential.
Today tech has gotten heavy. Hackers work for organized crime and espionage, ruin lives, and cost the world countless billions. Tor and Bitcoin would have felt badass back in the day. Now they are used to dodge totalitarian regimes and to run black markets that are spreading untraceable opiates throughout middle America. And the iconic internet companies now shape the world, for better or worse.
Tech has arrived and I wouldn't roll back the clock, but I am sad that there's so little lightness left.
I have to say, I miss the internet of the 90s and early 2000, just before it got all "too" popular and "regular people" started widely using it. Them using it is not a bad thing at all, maybe it is just nostalgia on my part but there was something cool and new about it back then, even though the 90s was sort-of late already anyway when considering how old the internet was back then. But you had mostly techs and geeks using it and that made for a certain interesting atmosphere and most people were trying to learn and/or do something new and had a lot of new things to discover... nowadays it feels like finally the masses are catching up to what every self-respecting "geek" was already doing back then and it has become this huge opiate to kill time with idle leisure. There were "social networks" even before the term was coined, even before "friendster" and you had "cloud storage" and streaming but typically it was some old pc you had a friend of a friend setup in some ISP's dark server room because getting a T1 or T3 was out of question, at least here in Europe.
Sorry to be ranting incoherently, I just miss those days and feel a tiny bit jealous at how unbelievably easy, fast and accepted to the point of taken for granted things have become. I think it is really a lot harder now to come up with something completely new and revolutionary, most things have been done and done so well, you have an abundance of libraries and services to build on and to me it feels like there are hardly any areas left that have not been covered very or extremely well yet. It has all changed to this huge pool of entertainment and "background noise", millions and millions of totally unimportant borderline-conspicuous-consumption tweets, posts, blog entries...
While you have a point there since certain aspects of the internet experienced by each generation were different, I think a shared part of it is just the sheer sanitization of the 'open' internet that has happened since the mid/late-2000s. That aspect is not coming back in any way for the generation growing up on the current internet, unless they go deep into techie circles to 'frontier' places like certain corners of the fediverse or matrix, the only internet they'll know is the heavily sanitized corporate-run advertiser friendly side where everyone's walking on eggshells because a power-tripping moderator or AI has complete power over you.
This was something that turned out to trigger nostalgia of the 'old internet' between both me and decade older friends when exploring the fediverse, we realized that to us, the old internet was mainly defined by a stronger sense of connection/genuineness with other people's content because even if deplorable, it was mostly unfiltered. A similar feeling was evoked for me by Kagi's 'small internet' option.
So, I think the current generation might miss their 'old internet' only in the sense that by the time they're adults it'll probably have gotten even more sanitized.
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