Ask HN: What do you fondly recall about the early days of the Internet? |
Ask HN: What do you fondly recall about the early days of the Internet? |
When the internet and web were more about data than commerce, specifically surveillance capitalism.
Maybe it's my age, but there was a sense of shared exploration of the unknown that I don't feel anymore.
https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/jess-kimball-leslie...
What I loved about the old internet is that private people had their little corners on the internet where they shared their excitement for whatever niche topics they were interested in.
It was a "hobby" and research internet, not a commercialized one. So many geocities and funpic blogs were so awesome because you randomly discovered new areas of research and interests.
People were sharing the URLs on post-it notes, I still have the first note from my uncle when he was super excited about the all new MIT OpenCourseWare, and we coordinated our downloads of those courses to save bandwidth.
All the file sharing communities were also more of "what do you want to learn", and that's why there were also chat rooms where people were asking about some niche book nobody had in stores anymore or that was too unpopular to be found.
Pretty much everything I know about electronics, computers, IT, development, computer science, physics, chemistry, biology etc I learned on the internet because at the time it was full of open research.
Now, 25 years later, it feels like we are being taught to be click monkeys that have to be kept dumb because if we would get too smart, nobody would make money off us.
It's the complete opposite :(
My favorite era of AI was GPT-3, pre-ChatGPT, but it seems like we've long blown past that. The RAG tools community is still quite fun though.
It was an incredibly unique dynamic- access to incredibly diverse people from all over the world, but simultaneously tilted towards the intellectually curious and tech-savvy. It was maybe a little bit like the vibe of being on a college campus, even if you were talking about sports or the weather, the default level of knowledge, intelligence, openness and curiosity were far higher than the default in "real life".
There was this unique culture of "the internet" as a place separate from "the real world" that was heavily skewed by the demographics. It was a world where nerds were 50% of the population instead of 1%.
- Accessing web pages (specifically www.idsoftware.com) using listservs that responded with HTML contents, when I had a free email account with Juno and no WWW yet
- Using various free web providers that were ad-based (I remember Freewwweb), and using various hacks to not see their ads
- Making a couple hundred bucks through AllAdvantage, which would pay to display an ad on your computer while browsing - more hacks
- Playing an online trivia game (Cosmo's Conundrum) with live chat, so many hours spent on it, very strong community there that is still connected via Facebook
- Getting excited about VRML and quickly getting over it
- Building pages in Frontpage/HoTMeTaL/others, then with Flash
- Finding pages primarily through Yahoo (+ web rings), then random search engines (Dogpile, HotBot, Excite, Infoseek), then standardizing on Altavista, then being blown away by Google
- AOL CDs everywhere and also AOL keywords in commercials before .com addresses became commonplace
- Early memes such as the dancing baby, the hampster dance, Mahir's "I kiss you" page, etc
- Listening to RealAudio radio stations online
- Downloading my first movie online - Mortal Kombat Annihilation in all its 32MB glory, in the now-defunct VIV format
- Being there when the DivX format started spreading like wildfire on IRC via movie trailers, the Matrix trailer blew me away
- Early p2p file sharing - first with Hotline (which nobody remembers about these days, it seems), then with Napster (finding someone with a song you're looking for, then checking out their whole library was amazing)
There's much, much more that I'm forgetting. It was a magical time when the Internet felt both huge and small at the same time.
Even with a lowly ISP like AOL, in addition to web access you were encouraged to create a personal web page on their domain so you could upload things to share with the world.
This is what you were paying them monthly for.
Most people weren't actually using it since it's not all that easy to build a web page, then along came Myspace who made it easier to put a page on their network.
I guess ISPs silently withdrew one of the main things in their bundle which millions of people once had and no longer do.
I feel like ISPs really dropped the ball, I could see a parallel reality where ISPs ended up continuing this but developing into being a federated (at the ISP level) social network where you'd have an account with your ISP and they'd in turn work with other ISPs behind the scenes to connect everything. It'd have the benefits that come with cebtralization along with a few of the benefits of decentralization.
You would telnet to a server : port, usually 3000 by default and sign in to this multi-user chat system. It was divided into rooms or places, with a sort of map system. Meaning you couldn’t just join any room/channel, you’d have to “travel” along and get a glimpse of other users and their chats, mimicking real life in a way.
I don’t know how popular it was around the world, but a major local radio station caught on to it and the hosts mentioned it frequently so it was basically always busy, always a group in it chatting.
This is ca. mid-90s before web browsers were decent, dialup was the norm, and low-bandwidth activities ruled.
Well, considering places like reddit ban you for having a different opinion then everyone else. That you're basically not allowed to be even mildly conservative on reddit. Thusly they have a tremendous echo chamber problem. Guess what, now we have polarization and hatred.
Oh and firing up Navigator for the first time, after using Lynx.
The worst part is that the number of assholes, relative to the number of users, has increased. And many of them are corporate employed and represent the corporation.
1997: you could make a web page about a subject you were interested in, list it in Yahoo etc, and people would come visit it
early 2000s: micro communities of friends and strangers visiting and commenting on each other's blogs
MS messenger, my young children continually wobbling my screen during chats.
The dial-up connection sounds.
provided default Wifi password: surname + postcode.
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.
> provided default Wifi password: surname + postcode
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.
Using msn chat - this was amazing
Telling everyone I was eating a sandwich on twitter. That’s what it was like back then
Get off my lawn
Now that's mostly gone away. Wikis have some of this spirit left, but most other sites seem to be corporate affairs designed to make a buck first and foremost and teach people anything second. Everything's now seemingly about the 'hustle' and trying to become rich as quickly as possible.
It's one of the reasons I still have an interest in fan games and video game mods. Because they're some of the only communities where just about everyone makes what they do for fun, and where the untested legal situation means monetisation is basically impossible.