What was the Internet like before social media and smartphones?

What was the Internet like before social media and smartphones?

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washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/projects/yrreview/year.htm
youtube.com/watch?v=87xyRVHvSmw
youtube.com/watch?v=hWq4DWfrpu8
Sup
youtube.com
youtube.com/watch?v=LHLvaQV3d04
youtube.com/watch?v=eWEjvCRPrCo
home.mcom.com/home/welcome.html
everything2.com
youtube.com/watch?v=ge7mozA-ptI
oocities.org/
timecube.2enp.com/
twitter.com/AnonBabble

better

hardly even saw any leaves

poorly animated gay shit

Lots of good cheese pizza on LimeWire

whiter.

This. Normalfags were at a bare minimum

THIS!

the wild west

it was glorious and mysterious. No one new what secrets were held in its depths.

This X 10000

World of Warcraft and getting viruses from Kazaa

washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/projects/yrreview/year.htm

Altavista. Hamster Dance.

Fatchicksinpartyhats.

Usenet. Vicky.

We played Tonka Truck games.


youtube.com/watch?v=87xyRVHvSmw

Back when I was wiring up T1's for fledgling ISP's in the mid 90's, I had a debate with another network engineer over whether or not the internet would make people smarter or if the people would make the internet dumber.

I correctly chose the latter.

Back when you needed to know how to configure WINSOCK and set your static IP, the internet was almost exclusively smart white people.

As always, the illiterati migrated in once it got easy enough and ruined it.

youtube.com/watch?v=hWq4DWfrpu8

Like this, less normalfags and more low quality images, music and stuff. And did I say already less normalfags? That was a pretty good selling point to be honest.

Better by 1000x percent

I miss the good old Youtube Videos most tbqh, no clickbait, no cancer, no google bullshit. Sigh.

Kazaa, iMesh, LimeWire, FrostWire, virus train was endless.

God wasn't Usenet the best

SOOOOO much porn

We were always here.
Your autism just hadn't been in contact with Reddit yet to shitpost groupthink faggotry.

Shitty and slow.

I REMEMBER THAT GAME

It was a lot more fun back then. Every single thing people did or said wasn't some kind of political statement.

It was more social in the sense that people were part of small groups on boards and chat rooms and got to know each other fairly well.

>you will never experience Iron Forge again like you did the first time you saw it.
>you will never experience the fun and the multiple deaths playing Vanilla WoW.

Now everything is easy. You don't die unless you fall off a cliff.

I don't get to hear the political views of friends and family on Facebook and the anonymous people on image message boards

white male safe space

it was nice

If you wanted to find something, you would type into your url bar "thingyouarelookingfor".com

Wanted to find out about Star Trek?

>Startrek.com

Wanted to find out about Coca-cola?

>coke.com

Wanted to find out about the US Presidency and the white house?

>Whitehouse.com

It was a more innocent time.

This times a million. I was young when computers became a thing, needed to know how to speak in DOS to run any program. There was no YouTube to help you figure shit out. It was a glorious time

This

Play Nostalrius.

Pretty much like Germany in the 1930s. White, rich, and amazing.

Then the Jews came and ruined everything.

Oh shit user I played the fuck out of this game as a kid.

Thanks for the memories.

white house . com was a porn site, brah

rotten.com
somethingawful

kek i remember downloading some by accident when i was like 13.

idk feels the same to me. i don't use social media or a smartphone.

Porn and chat rooms

Nigger those gifs were great.

...

I'm still on an irc channel with some lads that I've known solely online for years. It's comfy as fuck, like a shared digital living room whenever you turn on your computer.

irc is still pretty free from casuals

Awesome

It was magical

Lots of pop ups that fucked with your ability to load webpages, shitty low res images, ridiculously long load/buffer times on extremely pixilated videos, forums/boards not controlled by SJW's and lots of reading. Oh, and almost zero normies.
It was amazing, truth be told.

ABS
YTMND
Newgrounds
and......

Sup Forums

Back in the day there was no quick reply and if you didn't post with noko you got sent back to page 1.... also we had frames:

Sup Forums.org/frames

This shit takes me back

Some pre-Sup Forums Sup Forums humor. Made right after 9-11.

youtube.com

Damn I suck. Here it is.

youtube.com/watch?v=LHLvaQV3d04

Morpheus haha

Oh man, I remember watching this on madblast

Fucking retards

>wild west

Long time ago I read an article saying IRCs were like the wild west of the internet since people might use curse words or make racist comments.

Neko The Kitty was the best stupid thing I downloaded. Bonzai Buddy for weaboos.

HOLY FUCK BLOWING MY FUCKING MIND RIGHT NOW

I WAS LIKE 12 WHEN I HEARD THIS SHIT

there were no women

no minorities as well.

lots and lots and lots and lots of libertarians though.

youtube.com/watch?v=eWEjvCRPrCo

home.mcom.com/home/welcome.html

Slow

What's Vicky?

rekt.
Also correct.

better

Usenet captivation for me was, in this order,

Anime - had never even heard of it.

Gore - lasted about six minutes, the time it took to download via dialup two images that demonstrated the difference between being hit by a car vs. being run over by one. That was it for me.

Porn - penultimate jackpot. I wasn't much of a fan of stills though, and 52KB/s wouldn't cut it even for the vids that were available. Compelling but no holding power.

Alt.binaries.warez.old - Valhalla; gateway to a.b.w.ibm-pc and others.

Then I found a second phone line in the house I was renting that evidently the landlord was paying for. Back to porn, though time split about 60/40 with warez, downloading practically 24/7.

It was slow, the networking was terrible (everyone had hubs) and Windows was wide open too all kinda of crazy vulnerabilities.

Also, the internet was for losers and weird people, so it was mostly full of Jap culture shit you couldn't find here (at the time), music, memes, stick men death and other random shit.

It was good because it wasn't cool.

I was tempted to make the assumption that you're a fat, Autistic, virgin, middle-aged, social outcast who drew that conclusion from utter despair and jealousy over normally functioning people, however -

This "rosy introspection" is common through most of the human race, from everything - music right through to the weather.

Fact is, the internet has made people insanely more "smart". You can do shit with the internet that people couldn't dream of even in the early days of the 90s.

You can learn endless things without having to go to a college or enroll on a course. You can research and read about things that would have required years of searching through books and ordering them in. You can travel the world and see things that previously only existed in newspaper print. You can interact with people who are thousands of miles away, as if they're in the same room.

The sprawl of utter mindless shit on the internet is more than worth the insane knowledge it's provided.

And remember, the sort of annoying fucktard who posts about their life on Youtube or abuses people via Facebook always existed. These people aren't dumber, they just have more of a chance to spread their idiocy.

WoW was babbys MMO, even when it came out. UO, EQ, DAOC, SWO were all hardcore. Until you've died, lost a days worth of exp, had your shit stolen by a pk, then hunted them down and stolen it back you can't talk about any MMO being hardcore.

Haha, Faces of Death
Half was fake, half was real.

>Nostalrius
>play
Thats not a funny joke man
>looks at country
Why am I even replying

Don't ask.

That's the best answer you're gonna get.

This, it really was a white utopia that the ignorant and poor couldn't reach. Such fond memories of presmartphone internet.

Didn't really get into the internet until 2001, when I was 9, and my dad bought EverQuest.

Before then it was a lot of GameSpy Arcade for me.

Downloaded La Blue Girl and Bible Black on Kazaa when I was 10.

Other than that I spent a majority of my time on Newgrounds watching LegendaryFrog and shit.

kek i remember using 52KB/s, fuck that sucked. And if your mother picked up the phone you would just lose internet.

expensive

Mah nigga.

Mostly just people trying to link you to lemonparty and goatse

Anybody down for a round of Castleblood?

My team has rolled Turkey and England. Prepare your anus.

WoW was for faggots who couldn't handle a real MMO. Dying in EQ sucked; only getting a 96% rez and loosing 3-4 hours of grinding was a real MMO

I liked this.

>The sprawl of utter mindless shit on the internet is more than worth the insane knowledge it's provided.

Not sure I agree with this anymore. You can't tell the difference between the two, and it's about 90/10 mindless shit to knowledge.

I'd say the only actual, relevant knowledge on the Internet is IT knowledge. I wouldn't trust much else.

>He thinks I'm talking about Sup Forums when I say "boards".
>what's a bulletin board?

I found the discussions in the gore group as troubling as the images. Evidently, goremongers are not unaffected by these images in the normal sense. They get sick - literally - just like everyone else.

Difference is, after puking, they go right back to a.b.p.gore for more. That is fucking weird.

Cozy and Comfy

I wanna go back.......

In actual FACT, the Internet went to absolute SHIT the day AOL connected the Internet to their hordes of mouth-breathing burgers. Just sayin'

It was better because normie retards would only use it for shit like email.
Social media (including Sup Forums) did not exist
It was much better that way, SJW and the modern millennial only exist because of how easy Google and Apple have made it to use the internet all the time

Weird chatrooms, websites with animated gifs, all the memes were related to horrible 90's sitcoms

and flash cartoons/games like Newgrounds

A good girl.

I think people here take for granted the fact that Sup Forums is still around.

You should see Something Awful. It's a hollow shell of its former great self. Even FYAD is shit

Fuck I'm about to show my age to you newfags.

Those were the best of days - connecting to Prodigy, this was before AOL, drinking Sunny Delight on a 2800 bps modem 33MHZ 4MB RAM Packard Bell (turbo button and all).
It was a strange place where the best search engine wasn't Google (it didn't exist) but fuckin some bullshit one of my teachers in school showed me - AV / Altavista.com. I remember being amazed when my dad got a CD ROM upgrade kit for our PC and we could look up stuff in the Encyclopedia without having to open the physical books. Couldn’t even stay keep your IMs on AOL cause motherfuckers would punt you or my mom would randomly pick up the phone like a cunt.
Now the internet is over saturated like Mexicans in California.

Why don't you take a look?
everything2.com

youtube.com/watch?v=ge7mozA-ptI

Really fucking slow. Half a minute to connect and reap 5 kb/s.

Nothing like bashing the top of the computer because the modem cut out and killed your Starcraft connection at 3:00 AM.

>You will never raid Barrens or TM for shits and giggles before honour was even in the game
>You will never be fucking amazed at Stratholme or UBRS
>You will never experience an AV pop for the first time

Slooooow

Took forever to find anything good

Most websites were shit

Lots of 90's try hard edgy goth kids sharing pictures of dead cats

Area 51 conspiracy sites

Crappy iso downloads that would ruin your dreamcast and ps1

Owning noobs in Quake and Unreal Tournament

Bogus dead celebrity rumors

So, there ya go there's the old net for ya.

I liked Pokemon Crater.

>Russian wikipedia was full of science freak articles
>hacker press was at every corner
>CP was literally everywhere
>tfw CP was on VK until 2011

oocities.org/

timecube.2enp.com/

USENET back in the day was amazing. Like Sup Forums without images and 10,000 boards. Any subject you can imagine with experts to discuss science, nerds for computer stuff and the freaks on alt.pave.the.earth. Good times.

> t. oldfag.

THIS WHOLE THREAD IS MAKING ME SO FUCKING SAD

WHY GOD WHY

Another newgrounds classic.

Hmm.
Different.
It was rarely used for much. Seen as esoteric and niche.
Then the early 2000s roll around. There was suddenly a whole bunch of stuff on the internet, including games like Runescape as early as 2001.
Also google, ask jeeves... but nothing like wikipedia. It was dead. In its inchoate stages.
Just different, somehow.
And people didn't have it as a huge chunk of their lives. It was something to use when you needed it, not something to be on all day nonstop.

>hey guys *holds up spork* check out my geocities website

Icq, mirc, kazaa, geocities, myspace

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