What was the internet like during the late 90s and early 2000s?

anyone oldfags want to redpill me on the demographics that used the internet during its early days.
What was the dominant political view at the time?

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youtu.be/hWq4DWfrpu8
deuceofclubs.com/moj/mojave.htm
warnerbros.com/archive/spacejam/movie/jam.htm
everything2.com
youtube.com/watch?v=OwTH5sysquk
twitter.com/AnonBabble

I don't really remember too much politics being discussed. Remember the normies didn't start daily use until 05-06 when facebook became widespread.

There were no minorities and hardly any women

We very rarely even squabbled over politics

Truly a paradise of bachelors

If you searched for "Hitler" on eBay you would find 500 auctions for Hitler youth daggers

LAN parties were far more popular than the net.

loud and obnoxious and full with comic sans and midi files

>the normies didn't start daily use until 05-06
Also note, 2007 is when iPhones AND the "Big Bang Theory" show began

Every moron with a "smartphone" now having easy access to spout there idiocy to the public en mass, and thus echo chambers of mutual mental masturbation began popping up more and more.

Use your memories, you dummy.

people hardly ever talked about politics. nobody took bill clinton seriously but he was liked
even though i guess he was terribly

people just weren't aware.

Most people who used the internet were oldfag shutins or teenagers, except the teenagers weren't fucking toxic because cell phones weren't even around. the worst thing was aol chatrooms and IM

things were just way more lowkey and chill believe it

rotten.com and bonsai kitties. And ebaums.

Maybe that was mid 90s.

STICKDEATH

Give the kid a break, he was probably still sucking his moms titty in 2005 m8

Zero politics. It was all ham radio type shit and pedo pic sharing usenet.

youtu.be/hWq4DWfrpu8

Rense.com
Thehun.net

Fun times.

Slower, uglier and websites were for very specific subjects.

Here's an example: deuceofclubs.com/moj/mojave.htm

No social media bullshit

Everquest was hard because half your group would get disconnected

Stickdeath was brilliant, spent weeks on that site

I remember playing Wolfenstein Enemy Territory for hours everyday and then browsing Joe Cartoon and YTMND til I went to bed. Simpler times.

There was no javascript and most websites were static HTML so there wasn't any tracking and you could browse on what was, even at the time, a total toaster.

Christ, the web sucks now. I think half the reason I hang around is because I hold on to a hope that it would be worth being on again.

I might just quit entirely ... Just use e-mail and IRC, maybe some Usenet and BBS on the side ...

>he wasn't on Sup Forums for 9/11

Never forget. There were no memes, only tears. Now aday we have new memes like "Dat boi" and "harambe" but I can promise you nobody here was getting their "dicks out" when "here come dat plane"

Slow as fuck.

Fap sessions were a nightmare back then. You'd try for an hour sometimes to log in, and then just as you got going, you'd get fucking kicked off.

Downloading movies was not even an option realistically. Took way too long.

On the plus side, the world wide web was the wild west back then, so you could find pretty much anything you wanted and easily. Just meant you stumbled across shit you really didn't want to see more often than you wanted too.

I payed 800-1000 shekels per months to play what was basically a shitty browser game with Duke Nukem 3D tier graphics. No amazon, YouTube, Google, Facebook, Twitter. Yahoo was still a thing. ICQ messenger was big.

I think it was A LOT better. All the social media cancer was non existant yet, the demographics were more male and nerdy - less catering to dumb womyn on smart phone demographics in advertisement, design and supply.

I miss these days...With every year, with every decade, times got shittier and shittier and shittier. 80s > 90s > 00s >10s

For mid to late 90's the demographic was overhwelmingly male. Average user intelligence much higher. Early 2000's was the layman entry in to all things internet and not all that different from today's demographic, minus social media.

this was the dominant political view at the time

flash games were king

Internet is divided into pre 2007 and post 2007.

Pre 2007 internet forums were all the rage for a specific topic - and they were super active too.

Especially video game forums were a blast. We rarely discussed politics. We just had fun.

Here's a good way to put it:

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

This
The only politics was anti politics. We were the counterculture, it was libertarian at best anarchist at worst. That mostly came from the cut throat, never help, win by being better nature of early tech being esoteric and difficult to use for casuals.

>Duke Nukem 3D tier graphics
Sounds awesome though.

Connected to first BBS in late 80s - first connected to internet (gopher) in 93.

Don't remember many political arguments ever. Since the assumption was "everyone was a euro male" there was never any real racism, sexism, etc discussed.

You can still see this behavior on specialist forums...the more autistic the more its true. But once the entire internet was like this...

Then women / minorities started connecting in early 2000 and well...you know....

Rarely saw anything about politics on the internet at the time. Also pre 2000 the average intelligence of internet users was much higher, basically 95% "nerds". There wasn't as much to do today but most of you guys would have still loved it.

>phone call incoming

There was no dominant political view because there wasn't much politics. It just wasn't there unless you sought it out - most people were here for nerdy interests groups.

It was only later that the internet became srs bsns and that's when everything (online and irl) went to shit

Techy/nerdy people, academics, and well off people. Like 99% white.

It was fantastic.

The ubiquity of internet access resulting in niggers and white trash get online ruined the internet.

I was about to say the same shit about politics. No one seemed to give that much of a fuck. Wasn't much of a forum for it.

I think most everyone I knew in the 90s were on to get as much free shit as they could.

Spent most of my time in the mid to late 90s on irc and ftp dumps leaching thousands of video games and movies that I would never play or watch just to say I collected every dreamcast game there was.

Don't remember just played flash games on newgrounds, and ERPing on wc3

It was for us, by us. It was a new frontier. I remember prior to search engines. If I wanted to look at something I liked I'd just take a shot in the dark with a URL. Lots of personal shitty websites dedicated to star wars or whatever.

The happier times of rogue rmgroup messages, usenet death penalty votes, late night IRC chats, and MUDs. Then Prodigy and Compuserve came along and it all went to hell.

You just made me remember Guild wars 1.

God that game was beautiful at the time...

This is a dead old forum I found. It peaked around 99-01. One of the most interesting parts is that a popular user apparently an heroed on September 10th, so there were a ton of people on during and after 9/11
everything2.com

...

I can still hear the music.

The Big Bang Theory really was the death of western society or at least the start of it.

I hated dial up but I love how convenient everything is now with speeds I just don't like a lot of content the web has to offer. The one thing I truly detest though is how it has giving everyone a celebrity ego of sorts even though they are mostly boring and the fact that information is spoonfed rather than people actually putting work into things, everyone wants fifteen minutes of internet fame but nobody is really willing to work for anything rewarding. I blame Apple and their products personally, they've tricked retards into thinking they are coders or some bollocks like that when they are very well selling them fisher price toys.

I have a real soft-spot for the sheer simplicity of Gopher. I like that Lynx can still display it and the official client is still in the debian repos.

Tell you what I do miss: when the web browser wasn't a mini-OS in its own right.

Porn was harder to find and mostly in shitty jpg format.

>user, get off the computer I need to use the phone
>b-b-but i'm downloading a song. can it wait three hours?

Trying to pass yourself off as a 21 year old guitarist from Seattle

>be 13 year old from atlanta

>Trying to explain to girl why you are having to disconnect from cybersexing because your parents need to use the phone.
>trying to have cybersex while your parents scream at you to make the phone stop hissing at them when they pick it up.

I haven't heard the song that goes with this in at least ten years and it automatically popped up in my head when I opened this gif
I swear I could hear it as clear as day

Forgot to add, a time when reading "Zen and the Art of Internet" before making a fool of one's self meant something.

Xiao xiao

>All those years spent playing Brood War and Diablo as a child

I dug out my Starcraft discs to spin them back up for another go, see if anybody was online. One of the US servers was completely offline, the other one had two lobbies open.

>You will never play a bound again
>You will never play The Thing again
>You will never play NOTD or another defense map again
>You will never wallow in the cancer that was Starcraft roleplay maps again

Feels bad man.

You used Napster to get music and downloading a low quality MP3 took an entire day and a movie an entire week.

It was fucking great back in the day.
>be me
>roll out of bed at 2pm prepare bowl of nutri grain
>power up the 486 and absorb its welcoming glow
>munch nutri grain while dial up squeels and hums
There was so much individual content, and none of the cancer brought to you by the behemuths of today, it was a free and wonderful thing.

Its will probably sound stupid but people were nice to each other and had 0 politics. Just had fun.

It was beautiful.

The first big normie rush was in 1993 when AOL gained access to the Internets.

That said, the pre-facebook era was still fairly civilized. Starting your own website or business was easy and the whole thing was a mostly benevolent affair.

Oh yeah, surfing without adblockers was like surfing with adblockers today.

Rotten.com and shownomercy.com were cool

Antimtv was a redpilled metal site

You set up 2-3 SONGS to download before bed and hoped at least 1 would be done by the time you got up.

All the porn pics took forever to load, but were stored in temp internet files for offline fapping.

Get a phone call? 5 mins until reconnect to internet

>Shitty cringe personal websites families made
Thanks for reminding me those exist, at least Myspace, Facebook and social media killed those but something more evil arose in their place.

>dead forums

They're immensely depressing when you happen upon them.
>last post was a few years ago
>"Anyone still come here?"
>post before that was a few more years before

Makes you wonder who's still hosting it and paying the bill.

No non-whites except for Japanese and South Koreans in their own communities. Even western non-whites never really went on the internet.

Was really /comfy/ desu

let me drop some things

>RS2
>stick figure animation
>BUT I AM LE TIRED
>Invision free

I remembered that tornado videos introduced me in the web

You could connect to dial up and then go to pokemon.com to see if pikablu was real or not

In the 90s there were no poor people on tbe internet.

I remmeber when they used to make flash games for free then mande another version for Ipad and sold them $5.

>flash games
>early 2000s

Animutation's where it's at.

>always associate Colin Mochrie with Plan 9 From Underpants
>see that shit going on with his son

Sad!

If Sup Forums ever gets shut down, this will be our meet-up site.

Leftist but it wasn't your typical identity politics shit. Edgy shit.

It was awesome. I had my own website as a teenager. Maddox rip off no one but my friends read.

Rotten, Confound were my go tos. I used to post on a place called x forms or sig something. Where people talked shit and trouble shoot Photoshop techniques.

I destroyed two computers with my 56k highway to all the porn my mind could handle.

>tfw seeing the way the internet is portrayed in oldish anime like ghost in the shell, serial experiments lain, cowboy bebop, etc
>vast ocean of information and a million sites and complete freedom where every other person could be some hacker
>everyone was ready to use clunky but utilitarian desktop or laptop computers with interesting setups and lots of hype for virtual reality
>the people who made it actually got the deeper implications of a perpetually connected world

>nowadays people only keep using the same brand of officially approved sites and apps and actual computational knowledge hasn't expanded as people are more technologically illiterate than ever
>technology has regressed to Spyware for computers and mobile devices have taken over, dramatically limiting the scope of what people can actually do in favor of utterly hedonistic creature comforts, and vr is a complete gimmicky disaster
>whenever the internet is discussed in the public it has been so utterly neutered that philosophical discussions about it no longer exist, the media only reports on it as a cute distraction full of memes and other distractions and everyone ignores the kind of shit they warned us about in deus ex and mgs2 like ten years ago

How did this happen
How could the future have become so rotten

Heh

Everyone knew they better call me at work if they wanted to get a hold of me because that phone line was teed up home indefinitely.

650mb on a 56k takes a bit

>get on internet
>"GET OFF THE FUCKING PC I HAVE TO CALL GRANDMA
>get off the internet

It was like the wild west

open and free

Video games, Halo 2 and the new-then Xbox 360/PS3 made a huge rise in ISP customers with online gaming

Don't forget about Dragonball Z AMVs
youtube.com/watch?v=OwTH5sysquk

Stick death dot com

Ahh fond memories

There were no ads.

It was actually pretty fun. Hard to find shit you were looking for, but you had a great time searching for it.

What a lot of people don't realize is that the underbelly of the internet was hidden in plain view back then. In the late 90's Yahoo was like the Google of it's day, and it had user-created forums and chatrooms which would have put Sup Forums to shame. Right-wing racism and pedophilia mainly. Eventually that aspect of Yahoo was shut-down when some journalist wrote about how many of these chatrooms were being used for the exchange of CP and likely worse. I cant believe it lasted as long as it did. I remember being 13 and going there to troll pedos.

The average IQ was about 30 points higher. Mostly white males of high socioeconomic status.

oh gosh yes there was NO BRAZIL

I still make it an appointment to call the police about bonzai kitty. I can't believe those sick fucks really got away with it for so long.

Straight fucking truth

Barely any politics. There wasn't as strong a political shift to the right that you'd see on here. I'd argue that liberalism was subtly dominant(just IMO), but it wasn't obnoxious at all. Back then, internet shit was counter-culture, and very few normies indulged in it.

Flashgames and internet cartoons were king(newgrounds for eg).

Google didn't exist, just shit other shit tier search engines. I remember when google was new.

Ebaums world.

Fucking porkchop sandwiches

Counter-strike was a hotbed of early meme culture(people used their spraypaints for that shit) and trolling. You could really see the precursors for modern shitposting there IMO.

Anyone else wanna correct me/add to what I've said?

And yes, there were very few women.

Yea true. I remember rigging the Xbox up through GameSpy to get online matches back in the days of the LANs

CS1.3 - 1.5 ... we must go back

I cant believe i ever liked that crap.

Wait, why would you still pay a dead forum to exist?

>winamp kicks the llama's ass

Mass shilling against Bush; possibly alphabet agency in retrospect.

>What was the dominant political view at the time?
Libertarianism.
Heaps of poor students online in the 90s.

altavista was my search engine of choice and the only website I was able to read were from germany.
oh and also fapping worked only with magazines and tv

First went on the internet in early 1996 at a friends house at age 10. Of course, the first thing we thought to look for was porn

Back then there was an actual phhysical directory for website, like the yellow pages

Web 1.0 was slow as fuck but it we had infinite patience because we had nothing better to compare it to

A lot of homemade website of people talking about their top 10 Cure songs. Plus lots of glitter effect animation.

Other than AOLers, the net at the time was still mostly free of idiots, as computers were still finicky and often needed service. Everything, was everywhere, the net at the time more or less being it's true nature- a compendium of all human arts and knowledge, before the lawyers sucked the life out of it. All movies, music, books, even emulated forms of all prior computers and software were available. Politics at the time was mainly the original, bloodthirsty Darwinian Libertarianism that would shoot illegal immigrants, unlike today's sabotaged weak imitation. It was easy to discover how monstrous the elite were, as they were rubbing shoulders with everyone else at the time, walled Internet enclaves, while they existed and were hard to gain entrance to, leaked alot more data.

So in short, it was great.

people searching for info that happens to be on those forums, and ads = still able to maintain plus make a small profit

I blame Apple. They're trying to make everything "safe & simple" by restricting information to the absolute minimal (on devices INTENDED for displaying information), and everyone is copying them thinking it's what consumers want.

Deep web used to be the normal web.

Human nature, man.

I miss the old vision of the future as well. Like the 90s OVAs like Cyber City OEDO.

This is a pretty good point too. Phones changed the game.

RIP

no foreigners, hardware doubling in speed every year, everything pirated, no cops

Using hack apps in yahoo chat that spammed infinite windows in whomever opened a private chat with you.

Getting the jock bully king asshole's email address and password with old keylogger on school comp and begging for dick pics in every genre of gay chat under his email