Can someone tell me what Internet was like before social media and smartphones? 90s-mid 2000s Internet I guess...

Can someone tell me what Internet was like before social media and smartphones? 90s-mid 2000s Internet I guess? I was too young at the time to really remember anything and I didn't really start using Internet until about 2008.

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youtube.com/watch?v=z3XvsqLVqSA
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Porn had fewer ads

You are like little baby

Watch this

From the 90s to the mid aughts it changed drastically. 90s social stuff was irc, usenet, email. late 90s/Aughts started to become about aim, messenger, icq, then blogs, website forums and then myspace, etc.

It was a lot harder to get anime porn than it is these days.

gaming was amazing and the only people "really" on the internet where people that belonged there.

Who /totse here? I want to kick spectral in the face.

Porn was the add.
>he has never been in a pornado

porn was basically photoshoots or very short clips

something awful was relevant and still had funny posters

everyone was on irc and icq trying to bang ugly goth nerds

Tons of shitty MMOs. I mean like hundreds.

Sure. At first the Internet was thought of some fad or craze. Then email started hitting same with the world changing AIM (aol instant messenger). Chat rooms popped up and people went nuts. People were seriously worried about "internet addiction" or being online for 4 or 5 hours a day. Then news sites mainly crazy ones started popping up. Eventually the main stream guys all followed. We still had chat rooms and, Facebook or MySpace, chat boards, but we weren't in the stuff as much. Then came smart phones and social media took off
Bill gates said back in 1999 he foresaw social media slowly spreading out into everything like it is now. We laughed at him. Twitter, Instagram etc is what he was talking about

But anyways people are way more connected now and way way more aware of each other's world, the average teenager now is way way less than the average teen pre 1995

Prrr shhh prrrr shhhhhh kklll
Dial up bitch
Metallica Napster Cop

m.youtube.com/watch?v=5mtvlUDn6iE

Knowing a good warez ftp or website was actually important, you couldn't just find torrents on google first page.

>People were seriously worried about "internet addiction" or being online for 4 or 5 hours a day.

Hahaha, only 4 or 5 hours a day? Wow.
Do you think the Internet was better pre-social media/phones?

It was slower

2 inches deep and 5 miles wide. Basically very shallow. If you looked up something, you'd find 10 copies of the most introductory crap on a subject, none of it useful. It was good for political discussions, where for the first time in your life, the jewsmedia's narrative got scrutinized.

Choppy video
Phone line tied up
Chatting for days

That's basically it

Yes. because the people who used the Internet then generally used it for research and reading than posting pictures of their dogs and looking for instant gratification, because it was almost anything but instant.

Slow. Really fucking slow.

I can remember downloading porn clips from IRC channels using mIRC and they would take around 4 hours: 4 hours where you had to hope no-one called your house otherwise it would disconnect the internet connection. Ditto for playing Red Alert online - my buddy and I would take turns hosting and you had to basically call the other person's house using the modem for it to connect.

Sup Forums didn't exist; people used stileproject.com instead.

>Can someone tell me what Internet was like before social media and smartphones? 90s-mid 2000s Internet I guess?
Here's the answer to your question:

youtube.com/watch?v=hWq4DWfrpu8

It looked slightly different in the 80's and early 90's but in general there was no fast, always on internet. You had to make the internet fun.

It was fun "surfing the web"

There really isn't a comparable experience now. People would make small, shitty hompages, fanpages, places to stick small art clips, fan fiction, .midi files, guestbooks, chat rooms, and blogs. You could spend hours jumping from one shitty-made Angelfire page to other shitty-made Geocities pages. It was a special time. Not many normies on the net at all, so if you met a person from the internet, you knew they were a certain type of person.

There were popular websites that were just writing on a black screen.

The internet in the late-90s/early-00s was pretty cool.

Angelfire, Geocities; every site seemed to have its own flavor that was distinctive. It felt like actual exploration of the web.

Let us not forget CHATROOMS. God, chatrooms were the shit. Yahoo!, MSN, AOL -- lots of memories.

The only downside was the connection-speed, but the content made up for it.

>tfw will never relive 1999

omg stileproject

It was full of cancerous mods.

Do you think modern Internet has changed people? Did people behave differently before stuff like iPhones and Facebook?

This is all you need to know:

Women ruined the internet.

everyone played either Warcraft, Everquest or Runescape. Girls didn't start using the internet till social media

Falling down the rabbit hole on youtube is a little like surfing the web, but yeah, it was a time that will never come back. It was magical.

Neopets was a ruthless trading site with traffic that you wouldn't believe.

NetZero actually cost zero....my phone line was $9.99 a month so I got phone service and internet for that amount...slow but resonable

Only people that belonged on the internet were on it

Great image file and name K E K

>tfw you realise there are entire generations out there now who have never heard this noise first hand:

youtube.com/watch?v=vvr9AMWEU-c

AOL had private chat rooms, and we used "mail servers".

We also used IRC.

We would ask eachother things like "A/S/L/P"

We would use member directories to find people to chat with.

Yahoo had a member directory too.

We could play games like Monster Truck Madness using dialup internet.

We would get into Yahoo chatrooms and livestream ourselves playing guitar and gay shit like that.

AIM (AOL INSTANT MESSENGER) also had a member directory where you could creep for people to chat with.

Basically, you searched manually for people to chat with.

Basically it was like trying to run through waist high water until broadband hit in around 2002.

Fewer people were Internet savvy back then so it spawned a subculture for the nerds and social rejects. Now just about everyone is on the Internet due to the ubiquitous nature of Facebook and smartphones. It's no longer a Haven for the weird ones.

Did you know some computers like Commodore 64 or 128 didn't have a modem to connect to the interwebz. You had to buy the modem separately.

Dear, god, the torment of waiting for an image to load.

Or, worse: waiting for a video file to load -- and we all know EVERY FUCKING VIDEO FILE WAS REALPLAYER OR QUICKTIME.

FUCK REALPLAYER.

How?

Cyber sex

Absolutely.
When being on the Internet was "for nerds" and file sharing became a thing, the whole Internet was closer to early Sup Forums. Usenet and BBS was used for strictly hobbies and interest, general chats were strictly enforced and all sites were hosted off someone who had a PC that was connected 24/7 with a tied up phoneline so it took a lot more than just putting a file on googledocs to host something and meant more.

Exactly.. the medium was limited and shitty, but the people were great and the content was sincere.

Now the medium is on steroids, but it's full of retards and the content is as vapid as the mainstream culture we were going online to escape.

It was peaceful. If today's internet is Mumbai or Shanghai, internet then was like Zurich.

>AOL instant messenger
>Something Awful
>Counter Strike
>Everquest
>Napster/Morpheus/Kazaa
>Trojan Horses still worked and it was easy and fun to hack people with them

They were the best times of the internet imo. Now I'm fucking sad.

LADS...

youtube.com/watch?v=z3XvsqLVqSA

LIMEWIRE
>CANCER

>Let us not forget CHATROOMS
this. the thought of tapping into an anonymous place where people chatted was great. i was hitting up aol chat rooms in 1997 and continued with chatrooms and forums up until now. i was on sa in 2000 and here in 2003 i will never go without internet i'm stuck here this is my only social interaction and the only one i want

people used the term "cyber" a lot more and in an unironic manner

Fuckin' Kazaa.

>wait 2 hours for a 5-minute video clip
>it's a virus

LMAO yes this.

This was literally what the internet was like in 1997.

>tfw your first time on the internet was in your buddy's house downloading Jenny McCarthy Playboy pics to 3.5 inch floppy discs.

>little becky

Realplayer was such shit.
>that feel when you work on Point of sales systems and some still run on xp and have realplayer on it.
I get so mad....

>tfw i didn't know u could turn that noise off by changing a setting on your pc until years later

Someone help me start dumping old internet memes

youtube.com/watch?v=7E0ot9iJm_k

oh, god. I completely forgot about realplayer.

unless you were working on some sort of assignment you only went on computers for maybe an hour or so at a time.

anything besides that you were fucking disgusting nerd virgin playing Diablo 1,2 or Jezzball...

then MSN came out and computers got cool

Old internet: Use Soulseek to download music
2016 internet: Still use Soulseek to download music

not even, do you remember Ares?

The quality sucked, it was slow as molasses, but at the same time it was filled mostly with people like us.

Social media brought normies to the internet and a lot of the more inane shit.

I for one, don't miss having to have phone line tied up and a 56K internet connection.

Compuserve message boards. It was like text messaging.

we did fun stuff without smartphones.

it was great.

if you wanted to get hold of your mate, you had to physically go round their house or call the home phone.

fucking icq....

That looks comfy. I wish I was old enough back then to appreciate it.

Do you think the modern Internet is just a fad? Will it ever become non-mainstream ever again?

>Tfw you knew, but never wanted to turn it off.

>play against bots all day cuz our internet was such shit to play mp

It was a combination of babby vomit and neckbeard sweat.

It sucked. Nostalgia doesn't make it good. That doesn't mean the web now is good though.

I'd be happy if social media died and we just had a pure RSS style aggregator that you'd subscribe to sites through. That way you wouldn't see what other people liked, shared, subscribed to or replied to, nor would you see their shit unless you subscribed to their blog.

Alas, it's a Recommendations-fueled market right now.

It's not uncommon to repress traumatic memories.

People used AIM, ICQ, MSN to instant message chat. Usually people would exchange AIM screen names and then chat online. This is basically facebook now.

People would actually meet in chat rooms, then connect in private messaging or through email.

BBS communities were huge and full of colorful characters.

Biggest problem with Web 2.0 is social media took real life and put it on the internet. Before it was its own space, where you could be someone else.

I think this internet as we know it will undergo a huge censorship campaign, but a smaller circle of nerdy freedom-loving people will make a 2nd internet, that will not be mainstream. Something like the deepweb/darknet but not infected with drugs, cp, and shady shit.

flash videos

>opening Battlefield Vietnam just to sit on the main menu and jam the music

youtube.com/watch?v=T0acN2v6aIc

Really sucked when Yahoo ended Chat -- well, it sucked more when they killed off User Rooms.

That old layout brings back memories.

ares was the shit

Didn't realize that was a 2006 screenshot. Anyway, it didn't change much. I remember using the site when I was a young kid in the 90's.

that's what Sup Forums image loading time is like now ever since g00k switched servers

...

Internet Explorer is still just as evil toastytech.com/evil/

I started going on the internet in 1998 when my friends showed me cartoon network games and AOL instant messenger. Anyone here remember that one website called candy something whers you could play pool or bowling with your aim friends? Or bad ass buddy dot com for AIM icons lol

This thread is bringing back terrible things, like my Packard Bell computer.

No, facebook ruined it.
Social media will never fade.
FB in 2010 is the closest normies will ever get to early Internet. It will never go back unless meshnet becomes a thing.

Kid, if you don't remember the old internet then you can't remember what life was like prior to it.

People said the internet was a fad in 1993. Now it's embedded in every aspect of society. It's like asking if cars are going to become non-mainstream because the greaser "motorhead" subculture peaked.

Boy, do I.

Nice.

Jesus this thread is the best thing to happen all day.

Kudos, OP.

sub7

...

youtube.com/watch?v=nA1tLxfdif4

feels bad man :(

>my Packard Bell computer
That crunchy HDD reading sound tho...

I hate how facebook effectively killed off chatrooms and messengers and consolidated it all onto that one site.

I suppose it was bound to happen, but I don't hate it any less.

when Apple essentially started monopolizing the online music market, here was the silver bullet, although, it did give you computer aids too often lol, back when viruses were a 'danger'

God, I would give anything to be able to go back.

Do you fuckers remember all the free AOL install disks you'd get in the mail???

I would take them to school and sell them to faggots for their milk money.

If you made a search on Yahoo or AskJeeves or AltaVista, you'd get maybe 5 relevant websites and 2,000,000,000,000 other results

Search engines were shit back then but could lead you on wild adventures.

Streaming porn didn't exist. There was no Youtube for porn. Porn initially was just pics and then short clips that you could download and watch with Windows Media Player in 10 second segments. Usually those segments would come 3-4 at a time.

>limp_bizkit_-_nookie.exe

>tfw compac presario

That is something I actually do miss. The old internet was a wild west atmosphere of almost complete anonymity.

Of course autistic fucks like Zuckerberg are now trying to obliterate it. You couldn't really dox somebody in the 90s.

When newgrounds was fun.

At first it was just the BBS crowd and everything was super cool, then the normies came and ruined eerything like they always do.

warnerbros.com/archive/spacejam/movie/jam.htm