> It was a world of IRC, newsgroups, independent forums, personal websites, DC++ hubs, LAN parties etc. that was nearly totally unrelated to big companies and websites.
I think you just described one of the "sub periods" covered in the article. That phase happened but it wasn't dominant for the whole 15 year era.
> What had I missed from the 90s that didn't make it into the 00s?
IRC was a big one. Back when you hopped on a server, typed in #cityname, and joined a lively realtime conversation with folks in your area. That was cool.
I’m too young for usenet, but I’ve been hearing about how cool and amazing it was for like 25 years now. Apparently the web never quite managed to capture that magic.
Can you expand on that? I have a weird case of internet nostalgia where IRC, niche forums and a little Usenet were perfect. But I think they were perfect because they were small and most people had a common ground based in tech. Lots of diverse people together in the same space, I don’t think, has ever worked in the history of man.
I missed the BBS phase. I vaguely remember sitting on the floor in my parents room playing with some sort of IBM-Compatible computer, but my real days were the DOS and Windows 3.1 days.
I'm fairly certain I didn't hit the Internet at large until the Windows 95 days. However, I have very fond memories of Usenet and IRC. I am glad IRC is still around, but I still miss Usenet. Even after Eternal September, Usenet was just amazing.
Anytime I'm forced to use literally any website forum, I'm reminded just how far back we've fallen. Usenet clients were amazing. I could quickly and easily catch up on posts in groups I was paying attention to. I could quickly and easily find new groups for literally any interest. Access to a fast server was included in almost any ISP subscription.
Web forums are just so painful to use these days. Especially since there are 400 forums for a particular topic that are all very disjointed.
Certainly. Forums, IRC and personal websites made the 90s Internet more fun to explore than anything else we have today.
I had a group of 14 year old friends on a public IRC channel, before cat-fishing, bots and nonces became the norm. Met my first (real life) girlfriend there. I learned about the magic world of OSDev browsing webrings. So many personal websites of people talking about their micro OS. Countless forums for all the interests a teenage boy could ever desire.
The internet felt HUGE. No one could possibly see a thousandths of it in their lifetime. And then it started to shrink and shrink...
I remember those days fondly as well. Compounded with growing up in a fairly rural area, the BBS world was an escape and exposure to people and ideas that would have never been considered where I grew up.
There was also this feeling at the time that I'm finding hard to express or even really understand. There was of course the corporate tech world, exemplified very nicely by various magazines and shows like Computer Chronicles. But there was this other world of real techno-culture that seemed to be growing and compounding on itself. There was literature like the Cyberpunk genre, music like early techno and what we now call IDM, BBSs, periodicals like 2600 and Mondo and countless zines. Wired launched sometime in that era. Linux was the work of a single disaffected hacker. The early piracy and demoscenes seemed to give other artistic voices to this counterculture. Technomages were concepts on popular tv. Early ftp and gopher sites (pre-WWW) felt like the work of super l33t nerds. The USSR had just fallen, information wanted to be free, and communicating with people across the planet became something we could do daily, helping us find more of us. It felt like we were building towards something -- billions of minds were about to be unlocked by the commoditized availability of information, computation, and communication and making money was a secondary thought.
And then there was a shift. I don't know when it was, but it felt like the shift onto the WWW allowed the Computer Chronicle watching corporate world to buy up, buy out, co-opt, and extinguish all of it. That nascent tech-culture of the BBS era wholly was unable to truly pivot to Web. Instead of connecting and growing us, it stole, fractured, and repositioned us away from those passions. The corporatists realized that we would never pay for things at the revenue they wanted, and slowly raised the temperature like frogs being boiled, with free services for advertising and entire generations of possible techno-culturalists were diverted from counter culture into optimizing ad placement. Instead of challenging people with new information and ideas, the populace was encouraged to build information echo chambers through which propaganda could be injected and money extracted. What we're becoming was not Hiro Protagonist, Y.T., or Case, but the cautionary "Fitless Humans" from Wall-E.
I'm writing this on a site called "Hacker News" which uses the word "hacker" in a way that I would not recognize back in the 80s and 90s, to drive discussion about hyper growth startups.
> "Twenty five years ago, it didn't exist. Today [1998], twenty million people worldwide are surfing the Net."
The scale of the web today is truly staggering. The entirety of Yahoo era internet users would be a single celebrity's Twitter followers now. It's no wonder things felt so much more intimate and real back then. It really was a qualitatively different time and place.
"For many of us in the early 2000s, the web was magical. You connected a phone line to your computer, let it make a funny noise and suddenly you had access to a seemingly-unending repository of thoughts and ideas from people around the world.
"It might not seem like much now, but what that noise represented was the stuff of science fiction at the time: near-instantaneous communication at a planetary scale. It was a big deal."
I kind of yearn for the pre-web days... when the primary means of communication was mailing lists and newsgroups, without any commercial
interest.
The creation of the web was when it all started to go wrong. Corporations started to flock to it like flies and tried their best to turn it in
to an ad-laden, spyware-laden, dumbed-down, one-way broadcasting medium not too far from television.
As someone who came of age in the era the OC waxes nostalgic about, I can't find a lot to recommend about this post, nor do I think it's accurate. From where I sit, the internet today is richer, more diverse, and more accessible than it was in the 90's, the 00's, or the 10's.
Consider that one of the top links on HN is the OpenMW project. What a great project. If I want to go deep on that, there's a forum with a wiki, a discord and an IRC and a public gitlab.
I don't want to go deep on that. But there are literally hundreds of thousands of communities into which I could dive deep, some of which I do. I've been involved in home hydroponics groups, poker forums, online chess study groups, an Everquest emulation community, community-run RTS and fighting game tournaments.
I've dug into sites hosting side-by-side translations of the Tao Te Ching, Soto Zen communities, forums for recovering from addiction.
I've found music and books and events that I never otherwise would have found.
I've learned to read rudimentary Japanese using web apps. I've vastly improved my classical guitar form using YouTube channels.
... and on and on and on. I'm on this wonderful internet every day for much of my day, co-creating communities with other people.
There are deep, rich, giving communities everywhere on the internet today, not gated behind walled gardens. I wouldn't describe these as "shit" (or the homophobic slur the author seems think constitutes peak internet diction).
I'm glad these communities also existed in the 90's. Personally I grew up into things like the Quake 2 modding community and MUDs. Great stuff. I'm glad the internet has continued to grow and thrive and has evolved into what it is today.
edit: correction, by "more accessible" I meant "discoverable." I genuinely don't know whether or not the internet is more or less supportive of visually impaired users, for example (I can imagine it being far worse).
It... pretty much did. 1994 through 1995 I recall as being the big turning point from where usage went primary on BBS' to primarily on the Internet by around 1996.
At least in terms of people who I wanted to talk to were doing. By mid 1995 I was pretty much Internet only other than to dial-in a few times a week to check a few local boards I participated in.
I remember when I first encountered BBSes (mid to late 80s). Dialing into a slew of local systems and enlarging my social circle. Then there was the Internet and many of my former BBS social circle were deriding it, saying it didn't have that community feel.
I remember when I first encountered USENET (early 90s). Reading scores of USENET groups and enlarging my social circle, even going to far as to go to a yearly meeting one group held for several years. Then there was the World Wide Web that everything was being funneled in to. Most of the USENET crowd I was with were deriding it, saying it didn't have that community feel.
I remember when I first encountered Slashdot (late 90s). Reading score of comments on trending topics and again, enlarging my social circle. Then there was Digg and many on Slashdot were deriding that, saying it didn't have that community feel ...
That world lived on for quite a while through different mediums. I remember joining the webkit IRC channel in the early days and being full of wonder that folks like Hyatt were just hanging out willing to chat with me and answer questions.
There's something really special about the community and openness of folks who work on web browsers. Maybe it traces it's way back to the newsgroups.
Everything in my comment is 100% historically accurate.
Yes, there was a BBS scene, but it was a fading retro thing.
That's besides the point; the blog describes technology that existed in the middle 1980's, and claims that was the state of the art in the middle 1990's. Nobody had Internet, chat was for two people, one of whom was the sysop and so on. While those systems still existed, they were just retro holdovers from the 80's.
I contracted for a pay-per-click subscription website running on Linux, in 1994. This had customers. I know because I wrote the billing system to charge authenticated users for the mining/prospecting-related info they accessed. This business still exists today in some shape: http://infomine.com In 1994 it employed some half dozen full-time staff to do the research and keep the database updated.
I knew many people who were Internet connected. I communicated via e-mail.
In 1995, Windows 95 came out. It came with a TCP/IP stack: no more bolted-on networking. And, in a follow up release, it bundled Internet Explorer. Those pieces were there for a reason.
True but we could do what nobody else in the world could do. We had chat, file sharing, forums, multiplayer games and more before everybody else. BBSers felt like the elite and nobody else understood it.
There was a low barrier to entry. Anyone could start a BBS. Since there were so few, any new BBS would have a flood of new users, making them successfully very quickly.
I was a BBS kid in the 90s. At the pre-Internet cusp, as a lonely, alienated teen I found community through online message forums. Even now, I'm very much drawn to the back-and-forth of debate, conversation, sharing of ideas and so forth. I made friends like this in those days.
This a) prevented me from becoming a degenerate / criminal / dropout as I was pretty alienated and angry as a teen; b) motivated me to learn how to be a sysadmin out of hobby, and not because I ever thought there was a job in it but because my BBS Server required connectivity to FIDONet or whatever, I was fiddling with OS/2 Warp, Linux, and Windows NT out of curiosity and broke stuff I had to fix myself; c) made me friends I have to this day, as an old guy; and of course d) set me on a path to a high paying tech profession today.
When the Internet became commercialized (as in, available to the masses) in the middle-late 90's, I remember the BBS software got ported to web apps. There was a mix of desktop clients that connected to the BBS servers (complete with VGA online games instead of ANSI now), and these new Web interfaces to the message forums. It just didn't last.
It only took a year or two for it to be apparent to all of us that the Internet sucked for this. I'm going to put my elitist hat on here. The popularity dilutes things. You sic a bunch of randos on a message board or forum, you'll often get the dumbest of the dumb rising to the surface, mean stuff (although there was plenty of mean stuff on BBSes too, complete with death threats, police calls on users and subpoenas, other drama), and most importantly a mediocrity that surfaces.
How HN manages to avoid this is quite impressive. It's not completely immune. Sometimes I see really intelligent and rational comments being greyed out for reasons that I believe are ideological. And sometimes top comments are mundane. But overall there's an extremely high level of competency, intelligence and literacy on HN. You forget that most people don't have anything close to these writing and reasoning skills.
One aspect of the history of the era is that it was also a collision of the PC world and the Internet world which were largely isolated until the Web era. One was hobbyists with BBSs and then (disconnected) PCs in business. (Although the latter was uneven. I worked at a computer company and we used terminals until probably the early 90s.) And the Internet was largely academic until the Web.
I think you just described one of the "sub periods" covered in the article. That phase happened but it wasn't dominant for the whole 15 year era.
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