What was web browsing like in 2000?

what was web browsing like in 2000?

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bags of sand

Pretty much like browsing 4chinks today, except with less annoying captcha mechanism and more spam on the purely programmed phpbb boards that existed back then.

Noisy if you're not rich at the time.
Google wasn't full Jew yet

don't you remember?

I think I first browsed the web in 2001. Went to a cyber cafe and wrote down the websites I wanted to visit prior to each visit. There was a lot less content. Don't remember so much about those visits.

I was 2 back then

FUCK THIS, fucking 56k dial-up modems.

there was plenty of content, it was just spread out more
like if you wanted to read an article about something from someone, you would often only find it on that persons' own personal website, not some single place where lots of people have written articles

>ugly websites
>slow
>easy to get any cp
>feeling like a motherfucking Coulomb everytime you found some good website
>viruses, scams and spams everywhere
>ads not annoying like today
>people being a little less retarded and discussions being on a little higher level than nowadays
>almost no memes
>piracy was not even considered a piracy in most cases
>IE browser
That is all I remember.

phone line, very shitty. I remember waiting for what felt like hours to play shitty flash games on lego.com

It was fucking amazing.

Honestly, the internet was less 'curated' back in the day. Which had pros and cons on its own.

Without the meticulous curation of modern internet, things were less organized, but you could really explore and find cool shit all the time. It was essentially a 24/7 ARG.

However, if you went into the wrong direction, you were sure to download some retarded variant of whatever virus was popular at the time.

Of course, the early 2000s was when the curation began, it was really dope during the mid-90s.

free as in freedom

Aside from being slow and noisy, it usually came in two flavors.

Nearly plain-text, akin to a WordPad document with some limited formatting and an image or two inserted, if any.

~or~

Eye-searingly bright colors with wacky fonts and overcompressed images, and usually several animated gifs. Sometimes a MIDI would be inserted in the page.

Sup Forums didn't exist in 2000.
Nice try newfag.

Boring.

>like browsing
>like
you retard
Well, by the looks and occasional lack of log in anyway.

Newfag

If I had to compare getting on the internet for the first time in that time, it would be discovering sex. It felt so strange like discovering completely different world/space traveling on uknown territories that no one else has explored before. Hard to explain. It was one of a hell of experience. Then Sup Forums came and cancer started to spread... I haven't started to browse this site until 2012 even though I was on the internet since 1999. Memes ruined internet. I still remember pedobear and desu shitposting and other websites reposting this shit... ugh.. Then World of Warcraft/Youtube happened and internet became completely mainstream.

>it would be discovering sex
You lost me.

you're just a reading cripple

You had Google. It was the same thing, just HTML 5.0 did not exist. Massive plugins.

>dial-up sound
>computer sounding like it's grinding walnuts while loading the website
>disgusting faux-3D buttons everywhere
It wasn't good

Coulomb was a physicist, not an explorer

Most people were still on dialup. You had Windows 98 and Internet Explorer 5. Netscape still existed but was losing market share fast. Most of the time I was on websites about Catz (the game) and Pokémon.

youtube.com/watch?v=8fvTxv46ano

I was 20 in 2000

That year in college I got my first cable modem. Back then Napster worked and you could get any song you wanted for free without worry, everyone used email for everything. There was no facebook or myspace. There was just less shit and info in general. There was no real way to cyber stalk girls or anyone.

It was basically free music and email, that's the way I would describe it

even with broadband it would take an hour to download an episode of south park. I had every episode of the simpsons and I was happy with that back then but the quality was so bad I cant even watch them now, don't know how we lived like that

Slow and websites were easily exploited. There was a website called gametalk that me and a group of other children would proxy post, spam, and avoid swear filters using dumb shit like fuvk and custom javascript spamming apps. Was fun, you cant do that stuff so easily now. Felt like the wild west of the internet compared to now

>I cant even watch them now
it's a lot easier to accept something when there is no better option available
even buying the releases on VHS wasn't really a big jump in quality, dvd was still pretty expensive in 2000, laserdisc wasn't really much of a thing where i live, so i can't speak for that

Type in a product, and different outlets popped up where it was available. Not just Newegg, Amazon, or eBay. If you were looking for information appropriate websites with that information was included in the results instead of retail links.

That looks dangerous..

Welp. This is embarassing. Yeah, I meant Columbus.

I spent half of my dad's salary by downloading counter strike in 1999.

>dial-up sound
You couldn't figure how to disable it?

I liked the dial-up sound.

>took a while to try and get a stable connection
>would still drop out all the time
>good luck anyone trying to use the phone while you were online unless you had two phone lines
>people would still pick up the phone and disconnect you
>went to do something else every time you clicked on anything because it took so long to load pages. you never clicked on any link unless you were sure you wanted to go there.
>midis were popular for music because a your average MP3 would take 3 hours to download, and only if you didn't disconnect in the process
>download management or pause/resume didn't exist, so any failed transmission meant staring anew.
>java applets were the main method of playing games online, macromedia flash was just getting started and most browsers had poor support or ran very slow
>streaming video basically didn't exist
>you could find literally anything on the internet, it was the wild west. stuff considered illegal or dubious by today's standards we just out there for people to click on and download or watch
>naturally there were a lot of popular shock sites like goatse and rotten dot com, popular for the photo of an autopsy baby
>big title PC games were many hundreds of megabytes, so no chance of pirating one simply on account of internet being so slow, had to rely on friends with an expensive CD/DVD writer.
>no tabs or data caching or just about anything else we take for granted today, what you saw what what you got

Me too. I also liked the chuk-chuk-chuk-whirrrr the computer made when it was loading something.
Sometimes I feel like I'm more nostalgic for old computers than I am the old internet.

hero

shit in general
as much as it pains me to say it everything's better now on the whole

>I liked the dial-up sound
Wasn't that more of a mid 90's thing? Cable was out way before the 2000's.

Oh yeah, I almost forgot to mention that all of this was freaking expensive, on top of the phone line you had to pay a ton of cash for internet. whether hourly or by data, it was big bucks, and even more if you wanted to play any online game, there was no such thing as FtP, at best you got a week or two free when you bought the game CD, but otherwise every game had a big monthly fee attached.

I still had dial up through the early 2000s.

>dialup
>loading flash animation of stick figures being violently slaughtered
>go finish homework
>finish homework
>yell "done loading" to get my brothers attention
>3 minutes of intense giggling
>repeat
Until 2girls1cup ruined the internet for everybody forever

Cable, adsl and other alternative connections still had limited availability or, believe it or not, weren't as reliable as dial-up, which was a mature technology by that time.

>tfw flash is going to die soon

Consider how many people today are still using connections slower than 10Mbps.

>big title PC games were many hundreds of megabytes, so no chance of pirating one simply on account of internet being so slow, had to rely on friends with an expensive CD/DVD writer.
Reminds me of those twilight discs.

Aren't there some Javascript replacements for the Flash virtual machine, though?

>Wasn't that more of a mid 90's thing? Cable was out way before the 2000's.

not really, you had to live in certain places to get cable in the year 2000, most people did not have it then. I moved to a new town that year and out of 4 apartments I looked at only one could get broadband cable so that's the one i picked

i only moved away from dialup in 2006

>>big title PC games were many hundreds of megabytes, so no chance of pirating one simply on account of internet being so slow, had to rely on friends with an expensive CD/DVD writer.

>tfw you didn't download anything big but instead waited for the next lan party

There was a strong sense that IRL and the internet were to be kept seperate. It was a lot less common to reveal identifying information like your real name or where you live. Sometimes forum members would be on a first name basis but I only saw that in small and tight knit communities. Outside of dating sites it was unusual for people to post pictures of themselves publicly. It was much more about living through your alias and persona unless you got to know someone on a more personal level and spoke privately.
Kids especially were taught to protect their identities and take it very seriously. There were public service announcements about it everywhere, and many schools taught it as a component of "computer class" which I'm not sure even exists anymore. It got really serious around the mid 2000's when To Catch a Predator was popular. Nowadays I don't think shit like that is in the zeitgeist at all. 12 year olds have facebook accounts and tell the internet everything about themselves. Normalfags don't seem to find it weird but I do.

>download management or pause/resume didn't exist
not true, though some servers didn't allow/support resume
>java applets were the main method of playing games online, macromedia flash was just getting started
flash and shockwave were quite popular already, java applets were used for bigger/more complex things
>data caching
i used cache way more back then than i do now, probably a good 70% of my browser usage was done in "offline mode", browsing just my own cache
i don't think it was uncommon to do, we had a 50 /hour/ limit (not bandwidth), so to make the most of it, i would connect, load up what i wanted, then disconnect, viewing the cache

>Outside of dating sites it was unusual for people to post pictures of themselves publicly.

reminder that in 2000 to get a photo of yourself online you had to take the photo with a film camera, have i developed, take the physical paper photo someplace, scan it in with a flat bed scanner and post that

there were some digital cameras about that time but they were all $1500 and shitty and nobody had one

someone i knew had a (family) digital camera in 1999, first time i'd ever used one
it was a sony mavica (of course), that used 3.5" floppies
iirc it took XGA resolution jpeg's at around 120KB each
not film-tier quality, but the convenience was huge

yeah they were out there but not every teenager on earth carried a digital camera in his/her pocket 24/7 like now

I used film cameras till 2005ish

>It was basically free music and email, that's the way I would describe it

java/flash games. I think newgrounds was around back then. Also Yahoo/ICQ/AOL messenger were really big.

yea, they were still uncommon. expensive and lower quality, but it was clear by that point that they were the future

webcams were a thing at that point as well, though, and were another way to get a profile picture

pic related was my first digital camera
i don't recall exactly when or how i got it, i think a friend stole it and traded with it. 2005 model, it was pretty new at the time i got it, so around then

...

...

I used AOL messenger a lot and ICQ sometimes

The only game i found worthwhile that could be played online was Command & Conquer which I played all the time

Also reminder that if you were under age about 22 in the year 2000 you probably did not have a laptop. In college (I graduated in 2001) I only knew 2 people that had laptops and both of them were hand me downs from parents.

All of us had computers and CRT monitors we put together. I had a 900mhz processor and 16mb of ram running win 98 and that was considered good at the time. I had a 10gb hard drive.

Literally never saw a laptop in any classroom the 4 years I was in college

pen and paper notes only outside the computer labs

...

This is not how progressive loading has ever worked

oh fuck that brings back memories

someone should make a program that cripples your computer down to dialup speed just so kids today can see how it was

>This is not how progressive loading has ever worked

?

that's exactly how it looked

kek

>Literally never saw a laptop in any classroom the 4 years I was in college
>pen and paper notes only outside the computer labs
another world

...

Yeah I know. Maybe the makers a troll. Top to bottom. Was fun though spending a minute waiting for something to cap too. Don't think I'd even go back if that was the only option
Probably best, it'll deter them away from the degeneracy/decadence we've created/turned the internet into

Pretty much gaining root and exploiting any website online running php or mysql when ever you fucking pleased. Defacing websites was done as a laugh not destructive while trying to black mail.

Used to be amazing digging through so many documents and what ever else you could get your hands onto.

>Remembers Zone-h is a thing
>Oh its still a website
>Try searching old group from 10+ years ago.
>Gateway timeout.

Thanks anyway I guess.

>No bloated multi-mb JS websites
>Pirate material (mostly mp3) available in the open
>Only tech-literate users from the most developed countries
>No censorship
>No surveillance other than NSA's
>No hate laws
It was noice.
You can still visit some websites:
web.archive.org/

No, it's not. There are two ways to load a jpeg. Normal, and progressive.
Normal loads the full resolution from top to bottom, slowly loading line after line. When it gets to the bottom line, the image is loaded.
Progressive loads the image in complete passes. It loads the entire span of the image in low quality, then does another complete pass to make the entire image higher quality, and continues doing that until the image is complete.

That image posted above is taking a full sized low quality base, then increasing the quality of just a chunk of it over and over until it's full quality, then moving on to the next chunk. This has never been how images have loaded, and you betray your actual age by trying to pretend that it was.

>Progressive loads the image in complete passes.
hmmm I guess you may be right about that, it sure reminded me of seeing images load that way though

any way I am almost 40 and have had computers since I was 15

srs

Fuck, I completely forgot Amazon used to be about books, how times have changed huh?

it was the future.
Geocities and angelfire was still around.
Gifs were being slowly replaced by this new thing called flash and you could game with the shockwave machine.
A flash website was heavy as fuck so many sites had the no flash full html front.
56kbps was superseded by lan cards intead of the 112 or 128kbps dialups that year was the last good year for making dialups.
Porn was pretty much only jpg's with some gif banners.
Coolmail was bought by hotmail and by that date i think hotmail was already being bought by microsoft.
Windows 2k and windows millenium edition were out of the box ready to BROWSE and they were a pile of shit.
ICQ was DEAD, messenger was the new king of the block.
Bearshare, limewire, were the place to get aids for your pc and this was the only place to steal porn movies.
Napster was dead already.
ftp and download managers were common ONLY for the initiated.
FUCKING CHAT clients, those were still around and in a big way, the only place were young wizards could had some female (WE HOPED) interaction.

And it was the fucking future.

Ya, first they were a book store, then the everything store and now they just are everything.

>it was the future.
How did we lose sight?

the search was crap, but not SEOd to death yet
google wasn't the only search
baidu wasn't censored to death and was actually useful for an english speaking person, can you imagine that
most of the time you've had to know where to go because finding something was really hard
no social networks, blogging was new and big
98% of memes weren't born yet
most sites were eyebleach
something awful as a cesspool, not 4chinks
MP3 and file sharing was on the rise
no streaming video, no divx even
cp was everywhere in the open
opera wasn't free (or was it freeware already?)

aside from the web, irc was alive and well, icq was hot, some people were using usenet and bbs unironically (i've been using fidonet till 2000, it was great), also ultima online

Back when shockwave was for games and flash was for movies.

>No coherent thoughts
Who the fuck are you quoting?

>shitty games on lego.com

lego.com had the some of the best games on the internet in the early 2000s, junkbot and the nightfall incident were both pretty good games.

In the year 2000 every guy I knew age 18+ had or had access to an N64 and Goldeneye

we played that shit for hundreds of hours

SHIT how i forgot about winamp?!
web browsing while listening to you 20 stolen songs cycling in the background.
Altavista, askjeeves and yahoo were respected search engines.
SHIT. babel fish was THE ABSOLUTE SHIT, it was insane getting text translated.
Quake 2 specially the lithium mod still had a good player base on a daily basis.
Q3A and UT were the big mp back then.
FUCKING SHIT, aliens vs predator was the greatest even thou it was released in 1999.
3dfx wasnt dead, by months.
My mouse still had a steel rubber ball.
gamepower.com was THE place to read reviews. HOLLY FUCK, gamespy was huge back then.

>Junkbot
I remember that one being bretty gud
>nightfall incident
That was my fucking shit, that's the one I'd wait an hour+ to play (at least it felt that long to young me)
I wish I could find a site hosting it. The alpha team game was also really good

>My mouse still had a steel rubber ball.
forgot about that

fuck those mice

More of a novelty than the way of life it is now.

I moved from dialup to cable in 2K.

> What is NetLimiter

youtube.com/watch?v=GSRG0TqxLWc

This shit right here. Had some great games on it including some Japanese weeb shit.

>My mouse still had a steel rubber ball.
>steel rubber

u wot m8

It's a steel ball coated in rubber.

i guess you are too young to have ever seen one

they were shit

slow
>install XP
>connect to internet
>[tooot...tootootootototoot...reee...reee.reee....reee]
>Windows XP is shutting down in 30 seconds
good times

This thread is triggering my nostalgia.

youtube.com/watch?v=mfMrVKnGzwg

>that wizard just made a underage filter

That was a cool game.
The two most popular flash game sites here (at my elementary school at least) were spele.nl and funnygames.nl. I think the latter haven't even changed their layout much except more ads.

rubber-coated steel ball, used in pre-optical mice to roll around, moving wheels whose motion is tracked
be glad you didn't have to use them

youtube.com/watch?v=up863eQKGUI

Surreee...

Moving mouse made a ball spin via friction, the ball in turn spun a pair of rollers inside the mouse that registered X/Y movement.
It had to be steel so it was heavy enough to stay planted to the surface you were moving it over, but also rubber coated so that it actually tracked stuff.
Ball mice cost like $5 so of course everyone had them, optical mice were 5x the price and were buggy, laser mice were science fiction and a talking point if you had one, but also shit compared to today.