Was the Internet better in the 90s/early 2000s?

Was the Internet better in the 90s/early 2000s?

yes

I do miss all the fanboy wars from those days.

Yes, infinitely better.

Yes, because it was less accessible so fewer niggers and stupid people were using it.

You have no idea.

This

The 90s internet was too PC, SRS, boring.

Internet today is like FOX News & AM talk radio.

Things that were much, much worse:

- Speed
- Websites
- Search Engines
- Operating Systems

Things that were better:

- Pretty much everything else


It had this raw, new feel to it. It was so unpolished. But that's when everything was forming and before Big Brother had his eyes and ears on every fucking thing you did. I used to run sploits back then without any regard to being tracked. Broke into mail servers, etc and was never even contacted by any agencies.

Now the most dangerous thing I do online is browse Sup Forums.

In the really early days, early 80's, it was awesome. Everyone online was a researcher or a government employee or a college student. There were very few idiots as the masses had no access. You actually needed a bit of computer knowledge even to get online.

The AOL came and shitted the place up for eternity.

It made Terry Davis seem sane an normal.

So, yes. Because after all CIA niggers glow in the dark and you CAN talk to God with an operating system AND IT'S NOT REAL MODE MIT NIGGERS.

anybody else use windows classic theme?

Yes
Mid-2000s were pretty good too.

Winblows sucked even then.

Yes, I think so. I was watching that documentary about the skater magazine Big Brother, and near the end of they were heavily implying and then later outright stating that the internet came and changed the way people consumed media.

But there was something they didn't seem to mention or even touch on, which I guess was because it wasn't what they were making a documentary about. The internet use to be like that. I remember the later 90's and early 00's as being very wry, zine-like and easily "over the line" of acceptability.

Now, though, the internet is like an ATM interface.

It was aight. I was famous on halo2spy for a little while

The median IQ of people online was well above 100 then.

Now it's well below that

>not touting the era of the acoustic modem and bulletin board

It was. Back then social media was just a bunch of alt. forums.

If you got rid of almost all social media right now, you bet your ass the internet would be better. A lot less loud niggers too.

Better? I don't know. There was less content but the people online were all smarter than who's on now (because it actually took some work to get on). Today everyone with a smart phone is online

terry IS cia

No streaming. No Youtube. Terrible porn. 10 minutes to download a single mp3. Had to go to lan parties or borrow a friends computer to get a decent video/game collection

No you retarded luddite

post what your face was like when you dialed back in after international mail hour

OMFG stuff was way more fun back then. Shit was way hackable. You could write scripts to kick people out of chat rooms send them viruses just for fun. Joke programs were everywhere. AOL sucked but gave you some cool chatrooms. IRC was beginning. Netscape was the shit and FFS stickdeath.com. hahah. The net now is boring and sterile. You have to go deep and proxy up for any real fun anymore and even then its just to try and pop kiddie diddlers.

OH shit and net send was a thing. LMAO the ASCII porn.

I remember going to the grocery store and grabbing like 20 of those AOL trial discs at a time. Had to wait until it was late to use them so I wouldn't hold up the phone line.

I remember when I didn't have taste.

ever since connecting to the Internet and accessing your hard disk stopped making mechanical sounds, it's all been downhill, tbqh

message boards were way better in the early 2000s. Everybody wanted to stay anonymous and say what was really on their mind. Today it's just cucks virtue signalling under their real name on social media.

In the 80's you were rocking out BBS and you could find some really awesome ones. HAM radio used to be a thing back then too. That's how you found the best BBS.

Undoubtedly it was. Social Media gave access to all the normies and ruined everything. Now the internet is full of self-entitled, super-sensitive narcissistic adult children who just can't stfu about the endless stream of banality that is their life.

If you are even asking that question, you have obviously never had to wait 5 minutes for a single .jpg to load, only to have someone in your home pick up the phone right before the nipples load and you blow your load.

yeah I used to be super into it

It sucked. I was on Drudge the first day. Didn't even have Boolean logic to search. You could search for shit like blacksmithing and find one web page...Most used their computers for games or chat rooms that scrolled so slow you just wouldn't believe it...I started with punch cards and had the first Apple II in elementary school...Dig It...

Well, I wouldn't want to go back there, but I had way more fun on it back then. If you aren't used to getting endless content online, you appreciate the stuff you can get.

Plus, it was full of white men, so everyone you interacted with was serious, courteous, and helpful.

funnier, more free, but definetly not better
God I still remember the cable dialing humms, it haunts me like a nightmare

there's still cool shit you can get up to online, cowboy, you just have to know where to look.

start by running ZeroNet with Tor, there's even a 0chan imageboard waiting for you (they have a Sup Forums too)

Yeah but back when 2400 baud was hot shit even if your mom picked up it wouldn't drop the connection as much as spill crap across the screen, so there was that...

Try browsing porn sites on a 33.6kbs modem.

The web was impossibly slow.

I used it for IRC and Usenet, mostly.

Yes.
And I can never get it back.

Objectively, yes. I don't care if the internet crashes and burns at this point because it's gotten smaller, more corporate, and has generally become shit because of the fact that every idiot and their grandmother is shitposting on it.

Yes.
>Technical barrier to entry; 100+ IQ required to make your internetz work.
>Financial barrier to entry; spare $70 per month, $150 modem & $1000 computer needed for internetz.
It keept the shit out. If you think on-boarding every 70IQ nigger with a smartphone was a positive development you're mad.

This.

1999 was Peak Western Civilization

Yes, for the simple fact that while information was easier to access, it still involved a lot of skill and effort on your part in order to find what you were looking for.

People these days take it for granted when they can just type in the first three words of a vague thought and get 400 million results for exactly what they were thinking of. Back in the 90s if you wanted to look up sources for a paper, you had to already have a very clear idea of what you were looking for and what resources to use in order to find them.

I remember when I was in high school, our comp lit class we had to do a 30 page research paper for our final project. I did a whole thing on the technology of warfare in the 19th/20th century, really great piece on the development of firearms and artillery, the transition from battlefield combat to trench warfare to total war in the early 20th century, etc. Before I even went near a computer I spent days in the library combing through books, and it was only when I wanted to start looking for more modern news and information that I started researching military resources online.

Before search engines were really overhauled in at the turn of the century, sites still spread largely through word of mouth, the spread of memes was slower, but more deliberate. You'd burn through an AOL disk going deeper and deeper down the rabbit hole, never knowing what you'd stumble across next... maybe dancing hamsters, maybe grainy gifs and midis, maybe ultra low res porn, or maybe tips for being an evil overlord - no one knew what tomorrow would bring, but we were all waiting anxiously to see who would find the next big thing first.

There also wasn't any social media bullshit bogging down the whole net. People weren't posting journals or posting selfies. People who hosted sites were focused on what they could do for you, not how much attention you could give them. It was all about being the best source for whatever niche thing you were trying to do.

ITT: Internet grandpas

>get off my damn lawn

Glorious times. I remember downloading my first porn clip around 1998. It took like an hour to download 5mb but I was like "This is so awesome!" back then. Nowadays there's so much porn. It has become boring. I basically stopped fapping. My 3 times a week now. Back then it was on like donkey kong. I think my record was 12 orgasms in a day. Well, fuck. Now I'm 20 years old heading straight into my midlife crisis. Thanks Obama!

I'm a spoiled young whippersnapper who never had to deal with anything more primitive than a 9600, but I probably would have preferred some smudging over having to waste another call and starting over.

Or downloading a progressive scan image and using your imagination to get off to the first pass, because you can't wait for the fine passes.

This

fuk u I bet you don't even know how about MacPlaymate.

>uhhh uhhh uhhh
>mmm mmm mmm
then you switch from "deep plunger" and click on "mighty mo throbber"
>oh yeah oh yeah oh yeah

You probably don't even know how to tell if a girl has had an orgam

> sites still spread largely through word of mouth,

I remember when shops sold internet directories listing websites and their subjects.

In the 90s normies paid for porn, in jpg form

The Good Internet era die in 2010-2011-2012

1/2
>be 15yo
>on a cybercafé near home
>download my music from ares
>encounter a file called "10yo.mp4"
>open it
>realize what it means
>oh vey
>buy a 1gb usb
>start downloading shit (mostly 10mb 320x240 clips)
>keep doing this for weeks
>oh god i cant get enough of this gold
>always forget to delete the videos before leaving
>one day see cops at the place
>idk whats the issue, keep doing my shit in front of them
>next day there are cameras installed and ares is forbidden
>well shit

Jesus christ don't listen to any of these idiots.

Oldfag here who's been using computers to connect to other computers since the 80s. Other than the comfy feeling of a local BBS, the internet has never been better. It's so fast, there's so much information, there's so much interconnectivity, there's so much software, there's so much pocket-sized hardware to use it from, it's just a fucking incredibly transition.

I miss calling up the local board and chatting with my local bros and doing the meet-ups without worrying about trolling and murdering and perverts, but that's about it. That aspect was replaced by the fact that all of my NORMAL friends and my NORMAL family can also now use the internet and communicate with me, something that was never possible back then.

In a class learning Windows 2007 stuff feels pretty weird

>message boards were way better in the early 2000s. Everybody wanted to stay anonymous and say what was really on their mind. Today it's just cucks virtue signalling under their real name on social media.

what the fuck triggered this so hard. it's as if, overnight, everyone was ok with putting their name on the internet, when it was bad form/opsec/just a terrible fucking idea the night before

fucking jews had something to do with this in some way, that much can be sure about

It was Absolutely Terrible and slow as fuck.

The technology is obviously better now, but the culture was better back then. The internet back then was literally 100% normie-free.

This thread is retro Internet approved

Lel sometimes you just wanna jack off to people your own age

Anyone have any good strategies for Legend of the Red Dragon? Should I facefuck the decapitated woman or not?

MP4?

I think you mean "MPEG".

I remember my dad yelling at me in the 90s cos you were charged by the time you were on the internet and sometimes we had really high phone bills. lol

Children, teenagers, and women began using the internet.

That's not funny one of my childhood friends got picked up for torrentting CP because that's technically distribution of CP and he went to prison and nobody has heard from him since :(

The internet wasn't better back then.

It's just nostalgic nonsense. In 10-20 years kids gonna be nostalgic for the wicked retro youtube days and talking about how raw and unfiltered Reddit was.

Things are better and in 10 years they will be better than they are now.

Are you having a giggle?

>mfw I remember thinking this was 'the sound of the future' in 1995
www.youtube.com/watch?v=gsNaR6FRuO0

Chicks used the internet back then. They were obviously completely outnumbered, but everywhere you go there was fat easy goth sluts.

Who here?

I'm already nostalgic for old Youtube

>fucking jews had something to do with this in some way, that much can be sure about
nevermind, it was LITERALLY KIKEBOOK

fucking lizard kike spook

yep, you're right m8

>buy a 1gb usb
You must be at least 18 years old to use this site.

Even game chatlogs were infinitely better.
C&C, doom, total annihilation, because the people online had functional brains.
RTS games golden era.

>midnight
>dial local BBS so can get first dibs on BRE
>busy signal
Fuck, looks like i'm going to get nuked to shit today.
Kids these days honestly have no idea just how good they have it.

>Get aol floppy disk in mail.
>flip write protection switch
>free floppy disk

Internet was a new thing. Almost nobody used it, so most people thought killers were lurking on the internet waiting to get your information.

People are comfortable with it now so they feel free to behave like they do.

Also it's partially like a little spotlight for all the normies who've always dreamed of being a celebrity. It's the same reason criminals would allow their faces to be shown on the show cops even though they were portrayed in a horrible light. Idiots want to be famous, even if it's for bad things

yes

MP4 (MPEG-4) dates from 2001.

member downloading a shitload of shareware?
member getting a code to unlock all its features forever because some guy posted his key on a forum and everyone used it?
member never using them after you got the shareware unlocked?
member 160x160 256color gifs?
member hentai webrings and rotating counters?

member when your friend rocked a razor t-shirt because he wasn't a lam3r?

No, the internet was objectively less restricted back then.

Email conformation didn't exist, personal information didn't exist, you were simply left alone.

It was considered a prank to label child porn as something else, and have people download it.

member downloading 5 fps real media anime off of irc fileservers?

Man I wish I could remember the names of a lot of those shareware games I downloaded. Some of them were ace.

I miss Newgrounds too...

I lost my virginity to a girl I met on ICQ.

Yes

Some of my best friends, still to this day, came from a MajorMUD meetup.

>first porn clip in 1998
>now I'm 20
>1998 was 19 years ago
wot

Any anons of this classic era remember all the porn sites having a header about 9/11 when it happened? That's how I found out about it that day.

BTW, anyone also notice porn sites have had an amazingly stable membership price? It's been $29.99 for a months access since like 1999.

Yes. Apart from the shitty speed, it was (and still is) my favourite pastime.

OP said early 2000s

2002, 7 hours for downloading a single song, best feeling ever, I miss that so much, by now everything is so simple, worthless, internet seems a giant SJW toilet, back then was like an hidden place, now is a mainstream highway full of whores

2/2


>later learn that this shit is illegal
>bring my usb everywhere with me because i dont trust my home
>one day at school
>backpack is getting old and usb slips through a hole
>next day cops show up and school is nuts
>they end up at my class because i left a work there
>shit myself
>luckily my name wasnt on it and didnt lead to me because i used a different version
>fortunately nothing happened
>but the other dude was never seen again

bought it on 2007 retard

downloaded ares for giggles but its all dead now ;_;

I remember my first job they bought this super expensive computer with a whole motherfucking 32MB of RAM and it could actually get FPS for a postage stamp sized video. I think it was like a 60MHz Pentium or something dank like that.

I got paid to write some demo software to show it off, so I hand pixel edited an image of a black lady looking stupid and combined it with a funny "WHOOOP!" sound. It was MMC compliant.

My boss thought it was hilarious. Good times.

Member winamp?

Congrats. Bet it was a good story.

IT REALLY KICKS THE LAMA'S ASS

for me, there was a period between our slightly early adoption of broadband (my town is slightly wealthy, and i had educators in the family and was generally into computers) and the social media era (i think livejournal was available, but not much else), and more importantly, the standardization of everything, that was very comfy, maybe two or three years in the early to mid 2000s, think i found Sup Forums a little after the end of that period. everything now is just woman and cucks complaining, for the most part, this place has changed a lot less, which i enjoy, as an autist who copes poorly with change.

Can confirm.