Besides speed, what would actually suck about surfing the internet back in the day compared to now?
My pick would be, dealing with the 'wild west' atmosphere. That being, before cyber bullying laws existed, you had bunches of people getting off scot-free with telling you to off yourself or call you a list of derogatory terms.
Pop up ads. You'd be on a webpage and suddenly you'd be in a completely different browser window and had to x out of that one. And the next one. And the next one. And so on.
"Pop-up blocking" was originally found only in minority web browsers like iCab and Opera. Netscape didn't want to include it at first, because Netscape was dedicated to the commercialization of the web.
Not everybody used to be on it. There was a stigma to socializing online. "Don't give out your address, full name, or credit card info online!!" Shit I don't want to have to give it to a person these days. Online dating, not my thing, but I love that it's bringing people together. It's not as strange to quit your job and move across the country to get married to your internet boyfriend as it used to be.
Most people on the internet are normal people because most people are on the internet.
There also used to be a huge stigma with being infamous online. Like, you were seen as an actual loser if your only claim to fame was online and not anything worthwhile in real life. That's such an interesting turn of events where by the mid to late 2000s, people were getting crazy popular online and actually earning revenue for it through YouTube and it has built up since with the likes of Twitch, OnlyFans .etc
The looks I got trying out online dating back in the day! The dates I got back then were.. interesting. Dating sites were one aspect of the internet that needed a mainstream following.
I miss when google still proclaimed to not be evil, and I didn't need every damn ad and tracker blocker imaginable on Firefox just to kick around.
Online dating? What a weirdo! You should have put some personal ad talking about how you enjoy long walks on the beach in your local newspaper or called one of those party lines where you chat with random people to meet a partner like the normies! /s
Kinda funny to look back on it now and see how opinions have changed so drastically.
But are "most people" on Fedi?
As an autistic person, all of the normal people are weird (to me).
I wonder if Fedi still has that perceived barrier to entry (even thought it's not that hard) so the normies aren't here here, and that it's not "the popular thing that everyone does by default" yet so the people are here because they want to be.
I think Fedi feels kind of like the wild west early days, in a nice way.
needing to disconnect so your parents could make a phone call.
This. Downloading a bunch of songs on Napster on dial up at a max of 3.5 kb/s download speed, each song taking 15-20 minutes on average to finish downloading, and right around 97% on the one you really want it's "GET THE FUCK OFF THAT DAMNED INTERFUCK NOW GODDAMNIT I GOTTA CALL MILDRED!"
2 1/2 hours later you get to go back and restart downloading LimpBizkit-nookie4kbpsmp3.exe like you originally intended.
I had a pager so that my wife could contact me when she was at work.
Remember the time before we had HTML5 or worse, Flash?
Flash is bad enough. But what about Shockwave? Java? Or Java 1.4 (that was a big update IIRC). A whole slew of different ActiveX plugins to download/install/debug each time you wanted to visit a different webpage?
Javascript back then was so primitive you couldn't even do XMLHttpRequests, so that necessitated the use of rich plugins to deliver a better browsing experience. But it was incredibly non-standard and non-consolidated.
First Gmail and then Google Maps were amazing. In a world where webpages looked like ass and any interesting technology required a plugin, those two apps were mind-blowing.
When someone in my lab told me about Gmail, I thought it would be a janky mess. How could a web page be good? But it was. It was great. It felt almost like a native app.
Then Google Maps came around. After MapQuest, I was expecting goofy tiles and weird hot spots to click on. Nope. They hit it out of the park again. Zooming in and out was... fluid.
Those were good days.
XMLHttpRequest had to be invented before GMail could exist.
But yeah, Gmail was the first online webapp that I personally used that extensively used XMLHttpRequest (aka: Javascript's function for "automatically fetch more data from the server")
Before that point, you wore out your F5 key waiting for new emails. Gmail comes out and "magic", the new data just arrives because Javascript is hitting the F5 key in the background for you.
Today, Flash can be played using a browser extension, written in Rust, that translates the Flash code into WebAssembly (Wasm). This can also be embedded in a web site; this is used by e.g. https://homestarrunner.com to play old toons & games.
I remember when XMLHttp first came out, such a game changer.
Remember when downloads could not be paused/resumed. Back in the day if your download was interrupted, you'd have to restart the download. Then apps like Downloadzilla and other programs let you download large files and resume as needed which was critical for large downloads that took hours/days to complete.
When I used to pirate music back in the late '90s/early '00s with dial-up, I'd setup like 3-4 songs to download and then leave them running overnight with our 28.8Kbps dial-up internet. If anyone called in on the phone during that time, it'd kick the computer off the internet and I'd have to start the downloads over again. Browsing porn (or just images in general) was interesting too as you would literally see images load top down, line by line. Video was essentially out of the question back then and the best we got was like 2 second looping gifs.
Lol yeah I was lucky enough to get a dedicated phone line for dialup.
Although even at max download speeds, I think the fastest I ever saw on dialup was around 4.5kbps because our phone signal was so low quality haha.
Damn I'm getting nostalgic for the old internet, pre 2008 when the average person wasn't online. The internet had it's trolls, but it was a far more civil place compared to the modern era of vitriol and hate prevalent in many online communities.
Remember the IRC and downloading files using automated chat rooms with simple queues to request files from hosts. It's crazy to know they're still in existence and still pretty active.
You unlocked some core memories I buried years ago
Browser downloads still have this issue, at least partially. If it fails itself it's fucked, but if you pause it manually it's fine.
Only really applicable in large (200MB+) files and bad internet, but definitely a thing that can still happen and make you start the download from scratch
True, but at least you can pause a download. That wasn't possible twenty years ago with any software that I can think of...... aside from maybe usenet newsgroups where a single file is split into millions of text documents and then uploaded to services ultra compressed and then recompiled into the file after downloading. That tech has been floating around since the 90's but it's still very niche and very few people even knew what a newsgroup was back then.
The wild west part was the best part. It felt real. Now it's all watered down.
It was also a barrier to entry. Especially to advertisers but alas that did not last.
Also a big pro
Many different search engines with many different results. Searching for stuff was not very intuitive.
The wild west atmosphere was rather cool being a teenager, I must say.
The wild west days of using Infoseek for your above-board searches, and Sinfoseek for the below-board ones.
Nowadays, Google just gives you results. Relevance may vary.
DuckDuckGo can give you more accurate results, but feels thin.
And search engines like Bing and Google, try too hard on being swiss army knives that do everything. From calculating to weather to showing movies from local theaters. Anything they do to keep you glued to them.
you had bunches of people getting off scot-free with telling you to off yourself or call you a list of derogatory terms.
Looks at Twitter and Facebook...
Uhhhh... Who's going to tell them that's still a really big issue? lol
Back in the day everything was kind of worse. The tech, the UI, having to use Java and Shockwave before even Flash was a thing let alone HTML5. Having everything spread out and in hard to locate sites. Which was kind of fun at first, but it got old. Mainly for me, it was the speed and the UI. So many things were incredibly unintuitive, we look back and remember the good ones and forget all the shovelware that was absolutely atrocious. OH! And BonziBuddy. That fuckin' BonziBuddy...
File-sharing services for buccaneering purposes in the early 2000s didn't have previews. So if you wanted to, say, buccaneer some video erotica, you'd be going just on filenames, which might not be accurate.
Aaaand you just downloaded some child porn. Oops.
Fun pro life tip for Yarring purposes: Some of Ye Ol' Networks™ are still around and glorious. I still routinely use DC++ for comic books lol.
The worst thing was the cp, for sure.
Yahoo used to have these nsfw "clubs" where people shared porn and bizarrely enough there was even cp in a few of them.
I was there way before "wild west". Back what you could safely assume that anyone you met on the internet either had a degree or was currently on the way to get one.
But what I would miss mostly if transported back in that time is the complete absence of any search engine or centralized knowledge repository. Just imagine a web without google, bing, etc, and with no wikipedia site equivalent.
Our "search engine" was a hand-written notebook in the terminal room, where everyone noted down interesting internet services they had found, including the numerical IP address of the server in case the DNS was flawky.
Siblings or parents picking up the phone causing a disconnect.
mistyping goggle instead of google would fill your pc with malware.
edit - are cyberbullying laws really that strong? plenty of derogatory terms thrown around today.
Ah yes, the good old days of “can you help me, my internet is slow” and you find half a page of Internet Explorer toolbars.
Or "help, I've been hacked!" And all it was is their browser homepage has been changed to something dodgy.
You had me at “Internet Explorer”
They're only as strong as long as there's persistence. But, that doesn't mean that when it is used, it won't have an affect. People have been getting arrested and charged for alluring people to kill themselves online. Whereas, back then, it felt like quite an uphill battle because everyone would've just told you to block the person or close the IM window.
Price. My first ISP had no flat rate option.
$40/month for 10 hr/wk. And that was back when $40 was a significant amount of money.
That logo appearing when the image wouldn't load.
Content.
There is MUCH more stuff of almost any kind on the web now.
Other than jokes, the internet used to be way better for jokes. Or at least, I assume it is. I don't spend as much time these days looking up jokes like I did back then.
Christian and Scott's interactive top ten list was a great one, anyone remember that? I might have even had a few submissions that made it in to the top ten over the years.
And rinkworks, loved the computer stupidities.
No tabbed browsing. At least not until Firebird, IIRC. Also, "110mb download? Shit, I'm going to have to leave the computer on overnight." Then waking up to find the download failed for some reason.
internet explorer sucked then and still sucks now
iE doesn't exist anymore, does it?
For companies that rely on microshit services, internet explorer is actually the duct tape and elmer's glue that holds their intranet together
i think it was replaced by microsoft edge when windows 10 came out IIRC
Microsoft hilariously butchered the introduction of Edge, which showed a logo that was strikingly similar to IE. They've sworn up and down that Edge wasn't like IE. But Edge, behaved similarly to IE. It took Microsoft a few years to finally give Edge it's own identity and more or less, better functionality.
No mention of Mosaic (first web browser)? What sucked was you generally had to compile it yourself. That meant installing all the build tooling, building it, and turning it loose. Oh. Windows? Lol. No go. Gotta get an early version of Linux up and running first. That usually meant 20+ diskettes of Slackware installation.
But then you could surf in all the basic HTTP glory. It was a new world and it was awesome.
The worst thing was the cp, for sure.
Yahoo used to have these nsfw "clubs" where people shared porn and bizarrely enough there was even cp in a few of them.
Maybe not the internet per se but going over to a friend's house and finding out about a game or movie you never heard of and not having the resources we have now made it hard to find out as a kid with limited time online.
I always thought the relative lack of people sucked back then.
Now I kinda wish it didn't have as many.
The vitriol was more or less the same as it is now, though. It really was dependent on the spaces you hung out, and if they were actively moderated and had rules against such crap. All but one of the spaces I would spend online would have dropped the ban hammer on someone telling someone else to kill themselves or for using a slur/spouting hate speech.
But it was also easier to find spaces where that kind of talk was encouraged, too.
Hand-curated categories - lists etc.
Think back to what Yahoo originally was. Drill down through categories, subcats, etc. to find what you're looking for.
Worked for the time, but for a technical query today would be an absolute non-starter