> 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.
> "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.
> 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.
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...
> Even still, people were producing "My Favorite Links" and home pages, not apps.
I first went online in 1991 (so that my friends and I could keep playing Shadowrun all winter) and got into the web in 1993 (I was 16, pictures were a big deal). Back then, there was this sense that the web could be really great, but I don't think many people grasped what it could be used for. Search technology wasn't great, so starting on someone's home page and surfing was how most people explored the web.
The first thing I ever built on the web was a homepage for a Shadowrun character. It was basically walls of text in which I talked about his complete history, and a whole lot of links to gaming resources. Needless to say, I got all the girls in high school....:)
Thanks for taking me down memory lane - sometimes I forget just how incredibly excited I was when I first discovered the online world. Without a hint of hyperbole, I wouldn't be who I am (in fact, I might not even be alive) if not for the web. :)
“Internet” here is appropriate too. Although he’s reminiscing about mid ‘90s websites, most of that was still an extension of the amateur, interest-driven culture (and counter culture) that was prevalent across Usenet, gopher, and ftp sites prior to the web’s domination and conflation with “Internet”
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.
> my young children continually wobbling my screen during chats.
Nudging! I loved this so much as a kid! I'd spam my dad constantly. I miss this so much, thank you for bringing back the memory. I wish I could travel back in time and experience that time again, I miss it so much. I had so much fun, everything was new and fresh.
> Yahoo chat room "Down the pub". pure fun.
Yahoo also had a bunch of games, some of which had chat rooms. It was always fun to hang out, play some games, and chat with random people. The only experience that comes close today for me are the free-to-play worlds in old school runescape where a lot of people are goofing off in chat.
I didn't experience this, but have a related anecdote. I'd learned the default user and password to a variety of different routers so that whenever I went to a friend's house I could quickly get into the admin panel and port forward so we could let outside players join our game servers.
"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.
We didn't need half those things, because we had email, usenet, and IRC. Those were actually pretty good. I certainly had far better discussions on usenet back then than i've ever had on the web since.
I really wish I’d been around at this time of the net finding its feet.
The 90’s kind of feel like the glory days in retrospect to me, but I get how I was one of the Eternal September arrivals for a whole bunch of people that felt that was the end of the heyday.
Reading through the thread it’s a real shame to see the decline in our ability (willingness?) to have civil and thoughtful discourse. I honestly might just spend the evening crawling through 30+ year old usenet threads just to see what conversations people were having casually back then.
I got my first modem in 1985. I racked up a $300 phone bill my first month calling bulletin boards exchanging messages and software with people all over the world. My parents took my modem from me until I paid off the debt.
I’ve been on dozens of forums with topics I’m interested in over the last 3.5 decades. I’ve used every kind of internet communication including Usenet, irc, web, etc.
There’s no reason to miss the early days. Those special interest forums are still out there with lots of activity. Just look for them! I’ll take today’s ease of communication any day over having to dial up with a 300 baud modem to a single-person-at-a-time BBS.
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.
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