What was 90s/early 2000s Internet like?

>>34055345
The same except less memes and less normies

>>34055345
Wild west featuring pedophiles instead of cowboys. Also Everquest and Yahoo! Pool.

>>34055345
http://www.james-l-drush.com/jd/normies.htm

Dancing baby gif instead of funny banana

>>34055376
Memes didn't even exist.. Believe me, people who were online in the 90s were fucking weird and not normal at all. It was pretty much a haven for serial killers and pedophiles.

>>34055376
No memes & wayyyyy less normies.

>>34055417
What's, that dicker used to scare me.

Any of you guys remember purple talking monkey?

>>34055345
Pretty shit

>>34055385
Except for Yahoo! Pool
I fucking loved that game

Lots of personal sites on angelfire and geocities

>>34055436
I'm thinking real hard on what I actually did on the internet in the 90's. It was mostly text based with few images on HTML pages to keep bandwidth low. Things didn't exactly go fast with 3.3 k/sec.

Shit but being too young to be prosecuted you could at least download cp

It was boring as fuck,

>>34055539
You go to rotten.com and use Napster to listen to Nelly. You end the day with 12 hours of Yahoo! Pool.

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it was a fucking golden age. its a shame we didnt have faster modems to enjoy it more

>>34055569
Ah yea but even before those I was on the internet. BBS's were actually more useful, connection speeds were just too slow for internet besides email and maybe looking up game walkthroughs.

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A glorious fucking Wonderland of nerds with awesome communities and exciting new video games. Atheism edgy as fuck. No normies. Ultima online. Kesmai. AOL free trials.

It was a mythical age my friends. A dream remembered. I am eternally grateful to have known it.

>>34055637
I don't even remember game walkthroughs being around, maybe I was too stupid to look them up. I played pretty much everything blind.

I also remember having an email address through a BBS so you didn't have to connect to the internet itself for that. This really was the start of it all.

>>34055466
What he said.

Before mega sites like Facebook, YouTube and the like there were a lot more personal sites like pages dedicated to someone's favorite band or someone's personal interests like say Photography. A. O. L. was big which had instant messaging and A. O. L. keywords which had a small page for things like company pages. Flash was popular, and I'm not talking about videos but mini-games like what you'd find on Newgrounds. There were also directories like the Yahoo directory which had thousands of small personal sites like I mentioned all organized into categories in outline format.

An example of one such personal site is A. J. Goldsby's Chess site which was actually on Geocities. http://www.ajschess.com/lifemasteraj/index.html There was a lot of one color or tiled backgrounds, horizonal lines, links which were just underlined text, basic large and centered heading text at the top and ofcourse the ads which were either pop-ups (pop-up blockers weren't common back then) or banners.

>>34055345
there weren't as many shitposts so you could use the archive

>>34055345

government websites provided tech entertainment by way of reporting on Mars probes and other stuff.

Information was still disparate and scattershot and you still had to actually apply a modicum of effort to dig up something or some type of thing that you were trying to find. And if you did, it was fucking great. other search engines included lycos I think and something called webcrawler. They sorta gave you an idea of what was going on, but not quite.

Wiki and other centralized repositories of basic information did not exist. Youtube was not a thing. If you wanted to play a video you had to negotiate some stupid and inefficient process. Realplayer was always bullshit. Buffering was hell.

Technical skill of at least some kind, was still required to get what you wanted.

Anime shrines were all over. Weeaboos were early adopters alongside trekkies etc. I can remember searching for shrines about Magic Knight Rayearth, Eva and other weeb shit. Eva was such a strong meme circa 2000-on that it directly influenced 4chan culture. That particular meme runs extremely deep here, so that 4chan users argue about rei vs asuka today.

AOL was a thing but I personally didn't have much experience with that solution. Netscape was a commonly used internet browser during my public school days, which is where I got most of my internet up until about 2001 when dad finally caved and allowed an internet-connected computer into the house. He'd been skeptical and resistant for years but once he actually started using it, he realized that it was a very useful tool that he himself could put to whatever ends he wanted. (And the schmucks first installed the thing in my fucking bedroom, not wanting to put it anywhere else in the house, so it was FAPFAPFAPFAPFAPFAPFAP on my private time).

The place is infested with normies now which is too bad but I really like being able to find any music I could ever want, on demand. Also the porn today is fifty times better, FWIW.

Popups you couldn't stop and porn cycles that literally crashed your computer.

A normie and regulation free wasteland full of exploring and fun

And no big social media sites like kikebook, it was the fucking best

fake gore image everywhere.

>>34055458
his name was banzai buddy

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for $200 a month.
Id say not much different then today

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>>34056360
lol
80 bucks per month

>>34056360
Hello fellow kansasbro
>tfw went from having the fastest internet in the country a week ago to 10mb down

>>34055345
Pokemon and DBZ fan pages on geocities and angelfire.

Looking for game cheats/walkthoughs. Finally find a site, go to site, limp bizkit is playing at full volume. Infinite pop up loops. Have to improper shutdown.

Download stand up comedy audio and nirvana off napster.

Share homework answers with classmates on aol instant messenger.

Play really really laggy game of Quake.

Take 39 minutes to buffer a 2 minute long video in 96p.

Click the monkey win a prize.

Nigerian prince needs you to send him money emails.

Lots of Area 51 conspiracy sites.

Lots of animal abuse and cp sites.

Lots of kkk sites.

Lots of occult sites.

>>34055345
An untouched terrain in which authority figures held no power

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Everything you guys have described in this thread still exists on the internet. It just isn't "the internet" anymore, because a tremendous flood of normies has made it impossible to find these things. And of course because they are so niche, it's nearly impossible to search for them.

Sadly it will only get worse. A simple hand coded HTML website has no chance of getting into the top 10 pagerank in google for any cursory search because of how many spammy normalfag websites there are.

You now can't have original content coded in HTML go viral. You must 'publish' on reddit, medium, facebook, etc.

Oh and also: it's impossible to not be monitored.

>>34055345
I have been on the internet since 1994. Back then, the only normies were college students, but there were still the type that watched anime or played D&D. My access was text only for a couple of years. I had to dial into a local bbs that had a serial connection to the local university. I could telent to a unix slip account. From there I had access to gopher (look ip up.. it was hierarchical by directory) and to that new world wide web thing via lynx (a text console based browser).

Back then, pages were basically all text with a lot of links. There were images, but you usually downloaded them as a 2400 baud modem would download a little more than 2KB per second.

There were no search engines back in my early years. I remember when yahoo was still a giant page of categorized links. Then webcrawler came along.

You didn't interact with other people in real time. You had to dial into a BBS for that. I really miss the BBS days. It was kind of like normiebook, but there were no normies. We had chat rooms, message boards, door games, warez downloads, etc.

One of the coolest days was when I was in spring 1996 when I found out about mp3s. We would spend a lot of time trying to search for FTP servers that would have songs to download. I had just gotten a 75mhz pentium that could decode mp3s in real time so long as I was not doing anything else on the computer (multitasking operating systems were a new thing. You used to only have one task at a time). We hat to hook the output of the sound card (a separate card. There were not built into the motherboard back then) to a tape recorder so that we could play the songs in our cars.

I'm having a great time remembering this while having a couple of drinks. If anyone has any questions, please feel free to ask.

>>34056792
How were girls on the internet back then?

>>34056792
Did you feel like you were part of a secret brotherhood? What did you mainly do online. Nowadays most people take it for granted, but when you discovered the full scope of all that was out there, what were the first few things you tried to find? Did you make online friends?

>>34056886
There were no girls on the internet. That's where it stems from, there really weren't.

>>34056886
There were very few. I would say 20 guys to each grill. Most of the grills were college aged and were on MUDs (multi-user domains... look it up) that supported a political aim (usually gay rights back then). They didn't really contribute to the content of the web. You were more likely to meet grills on the chat rooms of a bbs or on the new fangled AOL instant messenger.

>>34055644
Nice. My grandfather had that picture on his laptop and I saved it to some floppy discs somewhere.

>>34056792
Please dump more, your insight is fascinating

>>34056936
>Did you feel like you were part of a secret brotherhood? What did you mainly do online. Nowadays most people take it for granted, but when you discovered the full scope of all that was out there, what were the first few things you tried to find? Did you make online friends?

No, I didn't feel like I was in a brotherhood. I ger more of that feeling now for being an original oldfag on the internet.

I spent most of my time trying to find content I liked. It wasn't like you could just hit ctrl+k and type something in the search bar. Search engines did not exist. You had to find site and follow their links. Bookmarks were huge. I liked trying to find guitar tabliture and porn images. Yes images. Our computers were not fast enough to show "video"
.
No one had an idea of the full scope of the internet. It was new desu.

"Online" friends were made on BBSs not the internet.

>>34055569
Replace Nelly with Linkin Park, Limp Bizkit, and Blink 182. Then we're good.

>>34057110

What would you like to know? Writing about the early days of the web are hard as we spent all of our time trying to find links. The BBS days were actually a lot more interesting.

>>34057186
Share some BBS stories, Internet Development History from a User's Perspective, and Share with us the Grand 2004 Era of the Internet, I myself didn't start using it until 2007, around the time when Youtube became Big, but was just full of Ametuar porn, Parodies, and weeb shit.

>>34057239
BBS access was always a pain in the ass. We didn't have "high speed" internet. Fuck you and your 1 gig fiber access. Fuck you and your 100 mbs downloads. Fuck you and your DOCSIS II download. Fuck your 56K modem too. That shit didn't exist. We had to have a $50 a month analog phone line and then dial a local number or pay fucking $0.35 a minute to dial a long distance number. If someone else picked up the phone to call someone, you shit got dropped. You might have been downloading a 300KB semi-nude GIF (actual N00DEZ were illegal on BBSes as they had to comply with FCC obsenity regulations that the internet was never subject to). That took over 20 minutes to download assuming your software was zmodem compatible. God help you if you had to rely on a kermit download.

Once you had your GIFs, you had two option. Go to the chatroom to find grills or go to the door game section. time was precious (you were limited in how long you could be connected as you tied up the phone line. Other people had to be able to dial in at some point. You usually had between 30 minutes and 1 hour per bbs). You would play games such as Legend Of the Red Dragon (LORD), Solar Realms Elite, Exitilus, etc. Then you would head to the chatroom of a multi-user bbs. There you would try to type to grills. Back then, the grills on a bbs were the sisters of nerdy guys that were desperate to meet guys. Ergo they were DTF. I lost my virginity at a movie theatre to a girl named Rebecca Bunch. She was on the BBS because her brother was on BBSes. Great times.

Sorry it took so long to write this. I would like to write more per message, but it takes a while to write this out.

>>34057638
When was the best era/year for the Internet?

>>34057673

It actually keeps getting better except for the advertisements. Ads were not common until the mid 2000s. Until the early 2000s, ads didn't really exist. Then they were just a banner ad at the top of websites. No one had any concept of pervasive tracking cookies that coorelated to embedded ad videos that tracked you across multiple domains / sessions.

It is a matter of trade offs. There are a lot of problems with the internet, but most of you have never spent three weeks trying to find a song on the internet to no avail.

Thriving self-contained message board communities with endless drama; the concept of IRL and Internet personas being the same thing hadn't been invented yet. The old Internet ways are dead now. I miss them.

>>34057812
I will post something this weeked so that newfags cans ask questions. I would like really like to build up a new BBS culture.

>>34057638
So what were the Golden Age of 4chan like that 2007 - 2011 Era

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>>34055345
typical arch user

>ywn get to play 90s era online games

Free...
The internet was free. :,I

wwwtxt.org
If anyone wants to read BBS posts

>>34058211
Fuck off tripfag. origami cement

reposting the newground pasta because its too good
FACT: NEWGROUNDS WAS FUNNY WHEN WE WERE ALL 12 LIVING IN THE SUBURBS LISTENING TO LINKIN PARK WATCHING DRAGONBALL Z DRINKING PEPSI WHILE PLAYING HALO CO-OP ON THE EASIEST SETTING DURING WHICH WE CONSUMED DORITOS AND LOOKED AT PAINTBALL GUNS ON EBAY IN INTERNET EXPLORER CONNECTED THROUGH AOL ON A 56K MODEM BEFORE HOPPING INTO OUR BALDING FATHERS' LATEST MIDLIFE-CRISIS-IMPULSE-SPONSORED JAPANESE-BUILT SUV TO HEAD TO THE MALL AND GET MORE SKATEBOARDING SHOES AND THIRD-RATE IRREGULAR LEVIS AND MOUNTAIN BIKE PARTS BEFORE HEADING HOME, VOTING DEMOCRAT AND MASTURBATING TO THE LATEST SEARS CATALOG WHILE HUFFING PAINT IN YOUR GARAGE BEFORE TALKING TO PEDOPHILES ON AIM PRETENDING TO BE WHATEVER CAMWHORE THEY'RE RANTING ABOUT ON MYSPACE WITH A MATRIX QUOTE/ANIME CHARACTER NAME/TRIPLE SIX-ASTERISK-PARENTHESES-SURROUNDED SCREENNAME BEFORE HEADING TO YOUR SUPPOSED "GOOD SCHOOL" IN THE MORNING TO BUY MORE POT TO SMOKE DURING YOUR COUNTER-STRIKE LAN PARTY WITH JIMMY AND THE REST OF HIS FRIENDS TAKING RITALIN AND ADDERALL AND PROZAC EIGHT TIMES A DAY BEFORE TAKING A CASUAL PASS AT LOCAL, STATE OR NATIONAL GOVERNMENTAL FIGURES, LEGISLATURE, OR STRUCTURE TO APPEAR EDGY AND INTELLIGENT IN FRONT OF YOUR BUDWEISER-SNEAKING, LIMP-WRISTED, NEAR-TO-COLUMBINE SOCIOPATHIC "DEEP" FRIENDS WHO PLAY THE VICTIM WHEN THEY START LOSING ARGUMENTS SIX DAYS BEFORE THEIR BOTCHED SUICIDE ATTEMPT SIMPLY BECAUSE SCHOOL TRAMP NUMBER TWELVE WOULDN'T GO UNDER THE BLEACHERS WITH THEM TO LET THEM GET TO SECOND BASE BEFORE THEIR THIRTEENTH BIRTHDAY.

>>34058241
that's a namefag moron

>>34057812
What are you talking about? Ads were once so intense that you could not stop them from popping up in your face.

You would try to watch porn and part of it was fighting off pop ups until eventually you forcefully turned off your computer.

>>34058130


I was not on 4chan then. I have only been here since 2012 I wish I could be of more help.

Oregano - wtf? 3x I was blocked.

>>34058276

HA!!! Ads of that type did not exist for the longest time. I did not have problems with ads back then. Only same fags had to deal with that.

>>34055622

Is hacking cameras on computers still this easy? That's creepy d00d.

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>mfw coming across a random web page that hasn't been updated since the early 2000s

It's so depressing. It's like finding a homeless man who froze to death.

It was pretty mediocre, runescape was way more fun though

>>34059626
>degradation of a jpeg

>>34059640
RS1 or RS2?

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>>34055345
It did not leak into our daily life and it was like a total different universe when it just started. Most of the internet were composed of IRC and forums and people used to be creative and create some beautiful (Or often terrible) thing. It might have been slower but at least what was on the internet most of the part stayed on the internet. Now today everything leak in normieland and every thing who used to be quite enjoyable was misused by lot of normalfag that it became utterly disgusting and uncomfortable to watch.

Also there was no such thing as Facebook which was a good thing. Because now every then. This culture of social networking has promote an unhealthy view of the self including a rise in materialism, narcissistic tendencies and a generation of fucktard who live on by getting the new latest Iphone whether it has flaw or has bug issues.

The actual day the internet got terrible is when the smartphone came up and the social media became even more mainstream (Thank to Facebook). Before this happened even when MySpace was a thing. There was fewer normalfag on the internet. So people actually enjoyed thing and discussed great stuff. Since now, It is just the social aspect of internet with the 12 years old being ironic about some decades old memes. Go to any websites and you see some annoying emoticons crap and stupid comment. There always was stupidity on the internet but even it was a minority compared to today standards.

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>>34055376
>>34055436
>Memes didn't even exist
Not in the same way they do now, but come on.

dont remember 90s, but early 2000s was

ebaums world
newgrounds
shockwave flash player
anime fan pages on geocities
very ugly webpages
porn clips(no such thing as streaming)
anime music videos
kazaa/limewire/winmx
winamp

>>34059668
Rs2 was absolutely GOAT before it blew up, although even after it did it was still fantastic. Before rs2 it was an extremely comfy game full of people that were just as autistic as I was, so I have some fond memories of that as well.

Such a shame the game took the direction it did.

>>34059702

>flash games era

Flash was great. It was easy to make games back then, so any edge lord or memer could just pop out some game which led to a lot of shitty but interesting games to play.

i played ragnarok online from 2003 to 2012
pretty much my entire childhood

i remember in 6th grade i cyber'd with this girl in ragnarok online. i screenshoted us making a love emoticon and printed it out. showed a picture of it to my friend and said it was my girlfriend

damn that was autistic.

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>>34059761
>this girl
>girl
>"girl"

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>>34059761
You were 11
"She" was 43

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>>34055698

What this guy said.

People would make websites like this

http://www.amandab.com/

And people would network and shit, through signing up in webcircles (basically, a group of similar websites and everyone would have a hyperlink for it somewhere on their site).
Find more weird ass sites people made for their dead kids (who died when you were bein born) at http://www.dmoz.org/Society/Death/In_Memoriam/Children/

>>34055658
that's what gamefaqs was for.

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>>34059911
>Those sites

I don't know how to describe the feel I have right now.

>>34056391
google fiber is the best

enjoy them knowing everything you on internet tough

Whenever I see these threads I wish I saved a newsgroup post dated 1995 about some guy complaining that anime was getting popular at his school.

>>34055345
slow af fuck

empty white space/full on color palette

2 min long porn

its better now, thanks to normies

>>34059437
its even easier now with dragnet approaches to exploiting vulns

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>>34059989
dude check out this shit
http://angelsforlauren.com/

You have to scroll to the SITE MAP to see everything on the site (and this person, the kid's nanny, was incredibly proud to have made this POS, bless her soul).

Lauren's story is fucking sad, man, as much for the cadence as for the tragedy.

>>34058242
that copypasta perfectly describes growing up in the early '00s

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>>34060088

Fuck. That hit me.

I remember going through Resident Evil fanpages and emulation forums back in like 2003. Possibilities seemed endless.

>>34059702
tfw played exclusively flash games/runescape for years

>>34057812
>most of you have never spent three weeks trying to find a song on the internet to no avail.

This still happens to me in 2017.

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I was on Prodigy from 1992-1995.

Do I win the prize?

>tfw net zero

>>34055345
A larger percentage of internet users used newsgroups. I guess they're still around, but I stopped using them in the 56K days. I had a geocities, angelfire, and ICQ website, which were very simplistic. <marquee> was extremely common on personal sites, as well as guestbooks and midi background music that would auto play.

>>34061058
>>34061081
>tfw AOL for most of my childhood

Fuck that service, getting games to work online was such a huge pain in the ass, if I could get it to work at all.

My earliest memories of the internet were in like 2002 when I would visit all kinds of dragon ball z fansites and read all of the fanfiction. By around 2004-6 I remember always visiting newgrounds and ebaumsworld. I would also think I hit a goldmine when I would come across a lesbian porn video that was a full 50 seconds long.

There was nothing to do except go outside, and talk to your friends face to face.
None of this social media bullshit or internet. And it made life more fulfilling. This new shit sucks.

>>34059599
I hate that as well. Think the person is interesting only to find they're dead.

With the millions of Facebook users now, there will be a flood of dead users. I wonder how the future generation is going to deal with the morality of seeing so many dead people personally.

>>34056556
>Lots of Area 51 conspiracy sites.
fucking this, all I remember was conspiracy shit

life is so complicated already, if you give me more nostalgia I'll get lost in the past and I won't be able to express what I'm feeling and it'll burn me up. so please don't remind me of that stuff, there was too much of it and it's all disappeared now, so move on and get over it

>>34061058
i was on AOL for a month around 1993-4, until my grandmother found out i was dialing long distance to connect

Much more decentralised. Forums and message boards were far more prolific. Everybody seemed more polite. Exclamation marks! And sometimes bizarre emoticons :-)

What I miss most is finding random tiny websites from searching keywords. There are lots that I'd find until about the mid 2000s when Google's algorithms got more advanced. Oh, and for a long time, you had to use different search engines to get comprehensive results.

Wikipedia used to be a lot less professional than it is now. It was maybe a little bit more like how tvtropes is. There used to be trivia sections on every page (and these still exist on pages that haven't been updated in years).

Until about 2005 or so pretty much everyone on the internet was slightly geeky/strange, or had very niche hobbies.

Real-time player and Java were utter horseshit. Especially real-time player.

Before the YouTube days the equivalent media sites were sort of large image and gif repositories. Like FunnyJunk.

These are my memories of early 2000s internet.

It was fucking weird, man. Didn't start to truly enjoy the internet until the second half of the 2000s. My nostalgia is for that and not anything before.

>>34062167
Oh yeah, humour back then was a lot more lel so random.

There was a distinct lack of irony

I was too young and uninterested to really enjoy it. Played a lot of learning and typing games mostly. Floppy discs and shieeet. I remember getting really impatient waiting after double clicking things and downloading some unholy things by accident. That couldve been a little later in my kazaa days tho

>>34055345
Better until they let non-academia on it. I remember when AOL people started showing up on the news boards. That sucked. rec.arts.babylon5 all the way.

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>>34055345
WAITING TEN LITTERAL MINUTES TO DOWNLOAD ONE NUDE PIC