What made the 90s so great in terms of technology?

What made the 90s so great in terms of technology?

is it truly rose colored glasses or were computers/internet socially superior to what we have now?

>also thinly veiled nostalgia thread

green pcb and beige plastics

Nostalgia. The only thing that I miss is the sense of adventure on the internet, before everything was so consolidated.

>90s
>great
They weren't. It was that awkward in between stage where computers became casual in every household, but not internet. The games were very creative and spawned many franchises that still go on today, but it was overall just a super nerd hobby and you had to tinker with a lot of shit to make games run.

>you had to tinker with a lot of shit to make games run.
probably the best normie filter in existence.


ISPs really should have kept the AOL style walled garden. a daycare for the casuals while the rest of us go play.

The 90s sucked as a consumer as hardware would become obsolete within a week of it being released.

what do you think facebook or mobile apps are?

this

It was that great middle ground between mature and boring technology and the technology being brand new.

This. The 90s were their own kind of mess. Dotcom bubble was the culmination of all the retarded shit from the 90s, may VB6 be limited to all but ancient FinTech companies and the cowboy coder be locked in his grave.
>muh gaymes

massive bilboards that announce non-normie shit to normies, worded in a way that attracts their attention, causing them to flock en-masse to the non-normie thing, resulting in the destruction of said thing. Whereupon thing's destruction, the normies flock back to their FB hideout to await the announcement of the next thing they know nothing about.

>ads
that's one thing I don't miss for sure

>ads

so yea.. wtf!?

late 90s early 2000s ads were a HUGE FUCKING PROBLEM

but they died down and the mid-2000s there seemed to be a kind of cease-fire between users and advertisers.
And here we are today. ads pulling the same exact shit they pulled more than 15 years ago.

Abundance of alternatives
Even more so in the 80s
You had dozens of manufacturers producing very similar things
Nowadays you are stuck with a handful

They were white when new

Only white aryan men were allowed. Once shitskin subhumans were in, everything goes down.

browsing the web, chatting, and games were fringe technology in the 90's. everything felt fresh and new. When you found a cool website you felt like you actually found something. scowering the net for some shitty nes game and finally finding it 15 pages deep into altavista. You're talking about a time when giving out your first name meant you were going to be tracked down and raped.

It wasn't great but it had an entirely different feel. Like a new weird frontier. People were excited to have cyber sex in microsoft comic chat.

This is not true. Although the vast majority were white men there was plenty of diversity. The one element that was missing was rural white trash attitude which your post displays. Anyone in an urban environment has good friends and associates of all types. Improve your life user and you won't be so afraid.

Lots of things were deeply terrible about 90s tech, but the community and the excitement and sense of adventure were great. The limitations also had their advantages. Dialup meant that the wires were already strung and just dependent on modem speed, and that one guy with a cable modem or a fiber run could run an entire ISP from his mom's basement. Bandwidth scarcity meant that most of today's Orwellian bullshit was impossible, so even proprietary software left you alone to get shit done. People who couldn't or wouldn't read technical documentation were completely unable to mess with your computing experience.

Nothing.

May be grass was greener and sky was bluer in the past for you.

I'm actually not very excited recalling dial-up connections and my tinkering with a i286 in comparison to the modern unlimited prices and lightweight ultrabooks.

I agree. I also like that gays were prosecuted and not welcome in the society, the society was healthier.

Niggers are more or less bearable. Pajeets, pakis and similar are not because of their accent, their skin colour, their ubiquity in the IT it's disgusting. The IT is infested with these subhumans.

There was a higher barrier for entry and arguably more innovation due to the conventions of computing not being anywhere near as set in stone. Computing in 1990 and 2000 were wildly different. Computing in 2007 and 2017 are basically identical, aside from sites hogging more resources.

>I agree. I also like that gays were prosecuted and not welcome in the society, the society was healthier.

wording this

>aside from sites hogging more resources
this bothers the fuck out of me.

you have an entire generation of programmers and future programmers that think computer resources are limitless and therefore they have permission to be sloppy with their work because the end-user's rig will just do the heavy lifting allowing them to write shit code.

web pages today are knocking on the door of 3MB. By comparison, 20 years ago they averaged 15KB

im not asking people should program only in machine language (although you would end up with GTA V sized games clocking in at several hundred MB instead of 60+ GB), but this whole though process of
>well the user is going to have several TB of storage space and likely 8+ GB of RAM so we can go ahead and abuse the shit out of their system and just do a shit job on the project
needs to end.

But it wont.

You would've thought that the rise of smartphones would've forced people to be more conservative with their web design but no, now mobile sites are possibly the worst for bloat.

How do you even have a website load just 15KB? You can't accomplish this if you had just one jpg and compressed the shit out of it. Not even a conservative custom font can manage 15KB.

Holy shit it was so fucking fun playing MM2 back then. Shame they shut it down.

What? There is no chance of something like GTA V being reduced to a few hundred megabytes. Most of the game size is high resolution textures.

90s were alright but I feel like 2001-2006 was the real golden age of the Internet. It still had "wild west" elements to it like in the 90s, but had become more fleshed-out and expansive at this point, as well as easier to use due to Broadband Internet, and this was right before shit like smartphones and Facebook ruined it.

90s were shit in Russia, you were lucky to have a computer at all (my first computer in 99 was on 486).

Early 00s were much better: first IPCs, cheap regional networks with fast DC hubs, local Lineage2, Quake3 and CS1.6 servers, pirated CDs with movies and games in radio markets, which you could exchange for $1.

>You can't accomplish this if you had just one jpg and compressed the shit out of it.


You seem to have forgotten that CRT monitors existed, and that popular resolutions of the time were 640x480 and 800x600. meaning much smaller pictures in terms of pixel size.

pic related. the size of a "small" image you might find on a website. (and its not even compressed that much)

No matter how much time passes, I still feel the win98 gray on cyan is the absolute pinnacle of UI design. Nothing has topped it yet

Except that Pepe is just line art with like 5 colors

Windows had a more entertaining built in Defragger

>zone.com
>FUCKING ZONE DOT COM
>MOTO FUCKING MADNESS

Fun and function over form

this post remind me of old Sup Forums

>the internet will never be a wild west of information that can be freely obtained

This.

>buy a top of the line computer
>literally 6 months later it's mediocre
>1 year later you can't even run the newest games on it

No, they were not.

Websites used less resources because internet speeds were slower. The average website today on the average broadband internet connection loads far faster than the average website in 1997 on the average internet connection of the time. The internet is faster than ever, yet you seem to be suggesting that the web should have stopped evolving in the late 90s. This is one of the most retarded viewpoints people have on this board.

>although you would end up with GTA V sized games clocking in at several hundred MB instead of 60+ GB
Videogames are big because of high resolution textures and big audio files, I'm not sure if anyone has done it for GTA V but back in the day you could find modified versions of GTA III/VC/SA that had unnecessary audio like the radio stations removed, and it would make the game several times smaller. The game code itself (the binaries) are very small, writing it in assembly directly would not change the size of the game much, if at all. Modern compilers are excellent at producing very efficient assembly.

>By comparison, 20 years ago they averaged 15KB
Not with all those flashing banner ads and animated gifs plastered across the website, not to mention all the additional JavaScript, Flash (You will remember all those shitty full flash sites from the late 90s/early 2000s), ActiveX, Java, and so on. Websites took fucking forever to load and the general design philosophy of the time was god awful. Please remove your rose-tinted goggles (if you were even alive at the time)