What was the Internet like in the 90's, before Facebook, Google and the rest?

What was the Internet like in the 90's, before Facebook, Google and the rest?

Other urls found in this thread:

youtube.com/watch?v=gsNaR6FRuO0
web.archive.org/web/19990125093146/http://www.altavista.com:80/
hamsterdance.org/hamsterdance/
tweak.nl/glasvezel/productoverzicht.html
zombo.com/
twitter.com/SFWRedditGifs

Webrings my boy

lots of super slow ugly ass forums loading for a minute on your dialup and also BBS

Very slow, pretty boring. Nothing really worth doing aside from looking up cheat codes.

Couldn't find anything because Google didn't exist. Hotbot was the first engine that seemed to do ok.

portals. lots of portals

there was more midi autostart

before google the best all around search was Alta Vista, though honorable mentions go to Hotbot and Northern Light (which hardly gets a mention anymore despite it's huge size).

ICQ was a real game changer before all the cool kids made everyone switch to AIM just to talk to them.

in 1995 I didn't know about search engines (webcrawler was the only decent one at the time) so I would just type whatever i was looking for in the address bar and add .com to the end of it.

it's an interesting way to live.

My parents used dogpile.

>Funny flash animations from albinoblacksheep.com and newgrounds
>Ironic shitposting wasn't invented yet
>People were either obviously fake as shit or were decent people. Conversations used to be more in-depth.
>Peer-to-peer download clients were how you downloaded all your porn and music

It was a great experience we can never go back to.

I'm remembering the time I did this for the white house.

That was interesting to do when I was at school.

>not being one of the first people to have broadband

We were taught in school that AskJeeves was top tier

I don't think those were available until the late 90s. Roadrunner was nice when it finally came to town, though. Then I could watch Celebrity Jeopardy on College Humor.

>What was the Internet like in the 90's,
Fun chatrooms, irc, newsgroups, proxies was a thing
>before Facebook,
Angelfire, and yahoo games I think
> Google
Alta Vista
>and the rest?
Boolean search for porn iirc

Chatrooms full of people with nicks like "Super_GogetrunksSSJ4" and not enough knowledge to mock em for being dragon ball GT characters.

I think it was 1995ish for some homes. Was actually cheap too back then, and worth it.

>We were taught in school that AskJeeves was top tier

*shivers*

that just reminded me of the teacher who thought html stood for hotmail. He would announce a web address for everyone to visit in class and at the end he would say "dot hotmail"

I just randomly typed in words and ended them with common toplevel domains.

Eventually, I typed in "xxx.com". Little did little user know what the naked women were doing and why.

Years later, my dad showed me this cool website called "google" and the exploratory adventures ended.

Compared to paying by the minute? Fuck, yeah, it was cheap. That said, there's plenty of cheap "high speed" internet today. I got 20 mb/sec for 45 per month (no data cap), which is still dirt cheap in comparison to paying by the kb or by the minute.

Most people did that with Yahoo back in the day.

>Before facebook
Don't forget MSN Groups. I think Yahoo had them too? I was more prone to MSN.

it was shit

Cybersex on IRC was awesome

it was shit
www = complete trash
usenet = turned to shit
other bbs = dying
irc = same shit as today

youtube.com/watch?v=gsNaR6FRuO0
web.archive.org/web/19990125093146/http://www.altavista.com:80/
Webrings
hamsterdance.org/hamsterdance/
stileproject
mIRC
And I remember the main porn site I used was called easythumbnails or something similar

Oh and of course, Encarta because the internet had little to offer otherwise.

>Compared to paying by the minute?
Damn by the minute was before my time. I remember paying $20 a month for aol, earthlink, msn, or netzero, but never by the minute.
>Fuck, yeah, it was cheap. That said, there's plenty of cheap "high speed" internet today.
Yea, but it doesn't seem as cgeap as it was, but that's probably my house just kept getting grandfathered in to the highest tier for the same price. That shit was cash.
>I got 20 mb/sec for 45 per month (no data cap), which is still dirt cheap in comparison to paying by the kb or by the minute.
That's pretty cheap, data caps kill most deals these days. A while back I almost switched to gigabit, but data caps was @250gbs. Noped out when I found that out.

Elderfag here, early 90s slav shithole.

Readily available hardcore pedo stuff over usenet that your local isp even mirrored for your convenience.

Gore on the other hand was much harder to find and mostly had only pics from police crime reports and medical books.

Download tor, and browse onion sites. Shy of the address bar, that's the speed and look of what you could expect. There wasn't much in the early days of the internet.

*250Gb/m

To my knowledge, my family went from by the minute to Roadrunner, which was like 3mb/sec for 30 bucks. No data limit then, either.

It was slow and didn't have 10% of the current content.
Only retarded "born in the wrong generation" idiots will tell you otherwise.

Video games were better back then, though. You picked up a game, and didn't need to wait for a gigabyte patch to download.

There were perks to not having high speed internet, although they are few and far between.

You can still play those videogames.

Yahoo games was the fucking shit. They had card, and dominos with top notch shit talkers.

blank piece of paper, no teacher, no homework due, you can make it up too.

Indeed, but you can't get new games like that anymore. All sorts of patches and DLC. Both of which, in theory, can be beneficial, but can also demonstrably be a detriment.

>top notch shit talkers

And to think we're heading into an age were shit talking will have your game taken away from you by the developers.

How the fuck did everyone become so brittle?

My first internet experience was talking in aol chat rooms and learning about asl.
>people spammed 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 etc.

>he thinks being a 13 year old endlessly screaming "I fucked your mom," into chat is "top tier shit talking."

>inb4 the same underage faggots come in and try to claim websites were """lightweight""" and didn't have the most obnoxious designs filled with bullshit non-standard HTML/javascript/ActiveX which would only work on a specific browser
The web sucked in the late 90s/early 2000s from a technical standpoint. It was fun though.

I fucked your mom, asshole

The same minus Google, Facebook and the rest

i fucked your mom

>Copying information from the internet and handing it in as homework as teachers were clueless about it then
>Being amazed at online multiplayer games like Subspace
>Going on to Teenchat and believing you were engaging in cybersex with a real girl
>FTP servers started to become available with pirated stuff if you knew where to look
>Pictures of naked women were exciting, the fucked up fetishists of the world hadn't got on to the internet yet
It was a magical time, especially if you were used to life before the internet where you had to go outside

Since dial-up way payable by the minute, you had to ration your online time very carefully between checking your inbox on Netscape Messenger, downloading up to 10 images of naked ladies, or uploading whatever monstrosity you created in Frontpage to your "user's First Website!" on Geocities.

I love those websites with insanely clashing color schemes. Especially those with red background and green text. Can't remember what kinda fansite that was though.

>Red backgrounds

I forgot all about those horrors

what exists in that 3d image? i've never been able to see anything in any

Most amateur sites where black but you would have red or green text.

Combine that with all kinds of animations and shit, and you've got the most 90's website fucking ever.

I had trouble with number of available dial in lines so you had to redial for hundreds of times to get online (shitty slav country).

Friend had a dad that worked at local telco so I got tone dialing and some other things enabled on my line through him. That allowed me to redial much faster than the rest of kids and get higher chance of hitting empty line.

There where also tricks like you could shorted dtmf tone duration to something like 50ms if I remember correctly and then use just ## for redial which also significantly reduced time wasted on redialing. Made my own super fast dial/login scripts for winsock.

Better.

Fucking awesome. I learned to hunt spammers and troll properly on Usenet

OP is gay

millenials wont get this

>marquee
>not blink master race

I remember the website of a friends father that had a circular clock that followed your mouse cursor

I rode the wave of new internet users when my family got a PC in '95 and signed up with AOL for some good old 28.8 dialup. AOL had its own self-contained web browser and through the initial log in screen you could get to your email, chatrooms, a kids only section where there were supposedly some games that you basically could never have time to download, as well as news articles and that kind of stuff.

We didn't have a separate phone line or anything and my parents didn't want to block calls from coming in so any incoming phone call would kick you off. *modem click* "Goodbye."

There wasn't a hell of a lot to do on the internet as a kid back then. The internet, to me anyway, wasn't the constant stream of information that it is now. It was an occasionally useful utility if you needed to look something up but it wasn't really something you'd want to spend a lot of time with.

Page hit counters before google analytics

Remember when websites used to hide text by using the same color fonts, and backgrounds to get front page in search results?

Emailing friends you made in MMOs because you were too afraid to drop your messenger details

Flash everywhere

Log in. Hear the sound of 50 doors closing.

>looking for porn
>sex.com
>It works!
>feel like a computer hacker

>feel like a computer hacker
Paid porn site needs a paid sub.
>"/image", /directory after .com, and see sex happening

>20Mbit 50 dollars
> Absence of datacap is not a given
Holy shit, what shithole do you live in? I can literally get 1000Mbit up/down (without a datacap obviously) for 50 euros where I live. Source: tweak.nl/glasvezel/productoverzicht.html

>that glowing feel you got when somebody messaged you on AIM
>multiplied if it was a girl.

>having an online gf
Good times.

Hotgirl13 was always a 12 year old boy

Haha, I forgot about this.

This. Everything was chatrooms and forums.

>northern light

An unmitigated pile of shit.

Peak Internet was 2001-2010. An actual landscape where not everything was aggregated into massive sites like Facebook, Reddit and Tumblr. You actually went exploring and found little pockets of community.

It wasn't perfect though. Ads were still more cancerous than the ones we have today. Today's ads are like TV commercials, but there used to be times when your sister would click flashing red and cyan "YOU WON A MILLION DOLLARS!" banners and run .exe's she found on Limewire.

>>Ironic shitposting wasn't invented yet
Not even on dank parts of usenet?

My online gf used to share pics with me all the time, and we'd call each other to talk on the phone.

I had a girlfriend on Counter-Strike in a knife-only server. The only time I ever felt true butterflies in my stomach.

I don't understand the goodtime meme, is it supposed to be bait where you think it's porn?

Speeds were so slow, the phone companies metered usage in hours rather than in megabytes

If someone tried to call your house phone while you were on the internet, it killed your connection

The very first thing I did after we upgraded to DSL in 2002 was download a crummy-resolution clip of one of the "Celebrity Jeopardy" skits from Saturday Night Live. The download finished in less than two minutes, and I almost cried tears of joy

youtube.com/watch?v=gsNaR6FRuO0

...

It had a much higher percentage of freaks.

I remember when I was a kid my best friend would use AIM and my mom would use MSN Messenger and I would use neither because instead of IM'ing people I knew in real life, I actually talked to them in real life.

Hell for a huge chunk of my life the only ways I'd usually communicate with people I know IRL electronically was phone calls and sometimes email.

Geocities
Angelfire
Obnoxious, impossible to read web pages because the text was the same color as the background an small pictures of glittery dancing dolphins are distracting you from the adds blaring into your speakers that you may already be a winner

>tfw no online gf

>2004: "Why would I text someone when I can just CALL them"
>2017: "Why would I call someone when I can just TEXT them

2127: Why would I text someone when I can just download my mind into a virtual Paradise and do my part to lower the population and curb resource consumption globally?

>Not even on dank parts of usenet?
Ironic shitposting, bait posts, and trolling always existed user. The universal names for them weren't coined yet though.

In the 90's, we used to call it the "Information Superhighway"

spam. and you couldn't find stuff. the melissa virus and variants. kids could DDoS amazon and ebay.

usenet
alt.devilbunnies

gud tiemz

zombo.com/

>a/s/l

>gud tiemz
For being a loser.

I've forgotten more amazing boards than I have halfway decent bookmarks in my browser today.

rec.beer

Pretty much exactly like the danknet. 90% fakery and bullshit. Terrible amateur web design. No real search engine just directories and web rings. Vast amounts of weird text files, "how to make a banana bomb" "how to seduce a chicken" "the cia is poisoning my milk".
Basically a bit of a laugh that only criminals, weirdos and hackers actually used.

>16/F/Cali

the internet was just a hoax perpetrated by the liberal media until Al Gore single-handedly invented it in 1997

>me, age 14
>using Limewire
>downloading what I thought was fairly standard porn
>open it
>turns out to be child porn
>stare slack-jawed at computer screen for entirely too long
>close file, delete file, unplug computer all in a matter of seconds
>went and hid under the covers in my bedroom for the entire rest of the night, 120% sure the police were on their way to arrest me

Lel
Tfw I used to believe it because I saw him say it.

Would you say this was the tipping point that made you the rapist you are today, user?

I was going to find out before I saw the watermark.