for all you kiddies who think the 90s were "teh best evar"

[brianmanahan]

Originally Posted by Ricochet

We have this thing call ads. I absolutely hated when webpages wouldn't load because it's scripted in such a way that if the ads don't load first the page wouldn't come up.

we have this thing call adblock...

[Farang]

Originally Posted by Train

Beleive it or not I actually think the internet was at its fastest in the 90's.

I had a T1 in the dorms back when the internet was in it's infancy. Colleges had way more bandwidth to usage than they do now, and the internet was a lot less cluttered with always on devices and before "streaming" was a thing. My first coding job also had T1 connection and a mind blowing Pentium 2 with 300 MHZ (top of the line shit back then) I remember getting sub 10 ms ping times to Unreal Tournament servers that were two states over on a regular basis. That kind of latency doesn't happen today.

Web pages were very light on JavaScript, today they are like full blown apps that have to be compiled client side. Back then a lot of major sites even opted not to use JS at all for fear of not being compatible with older browsers, or for people who had JS turned off.

So you clicked on a link... and boom, the page you clicked was 100% loaded. It was nuts. Somehow the web simply isn't as responsive today. It got too cluttered, too crowded, too high resolution.

Oh and don't get me started on how awesome the original Napster was... no download service (legal or ilegal) has matched the speed and selection since. Any song you could think of, any time day or night, even old obscure stuff, boom you had it in like 10 seconds. Maybe my view was skewed because all the college campuses had direct links to eachother, and Napster was mostly used by college kids, so thats why it worked so great.

Well you were the exception I think. These days on my desktop things are pretty much instant. I remember seeing some commercial back in the day with streaming video on a website and was like "ooooooooo!!!" because it used to be an overnight thing for me to download episodes of The Simpsons from warez sites.

But yea the simplicity was great, I built some really popular websites without much knowledge at all. I've got into web development a bit lately and realize I've totally been left behind. It has become so complicated and for a layperson to make a decent site they have to go through intermediaries like WordPress. Any good internet idea you can come up with has already been created or absorbed into Amazon/Google/Microsoft with millions of dollars in funding for engineers to do it really polished.

[Hugo Drax]

Originally Posted by HeXen

90's was kinda bland really compared to the 80's. 2000's are even blander..especially with Hollywood and their constant remakes of 80's movies, wtf? Tech is always more awesome of course, i don't miss those rotary dial telephones by any means, but at least everyone didn't walk around with their cell phone shoved into their face, i see entire families doing that while eating out for dinner.
So it's all a mix of goods and bads. However you can definitely see the effects today's technology has on everyday peoples attitudes, ideologies and even how they lazily raise their bratty kids compared to the 80's.

50's and 60's looked like it was a good time too



Any decade that you're a kid in, is going to always seem like a good decade cause being a kid is fun, things amaze you more and capture your imagination.

I do find it quite funny to see people walking around head crooked, staring into smartphones totally oblivious to the world around them. I feel bad for the 21st century children growing up and missing on all the socialization and human interaction. Now they practically live online and walk around like characters out of the movie "Invasion of the body snatchers"

[Thump553]

Originally Posted by TastesLikeChicken

The 70s were the best. Can't remember exactly why, which is the reason they were so great.

Now THAT'S an authentic answer. Especially after Vietnam and the draft went away. Certainly the best music was then.

[brianmanahan]

Originally Posted by Thump553

Now THAT'S an authentic answer. Especially after Vietnam and the draft went away. Certainly the best music was then.

but the clothes and styles were certainly the most laughable

[DAPUNISHER]

Originally Posted by shortylickens

I asked my dad. He said the 70's sucked but thats why people went out of their way to have fun.
The shit since is mostly nostalgia.

Multimedia entertainment wise, as a child, the 70's did suck. There were very few channels, and even less of that content was for kids.

But we played every sport we could think of, and made up more. We jumped in on skateboarding and BMX as technology greatly improved them. Twin fin surfboards came along. Our dad yelled if we played our pong style game system too long because he did not want burn in on his TV. We had trackball and frisbee. We pumped quarters into pinball. We played darts and pool while we listened to the new George Carlin album. We played electric football, and air hockey.

And you read the TV guide even when you were 5, because if you missed programming, you were SOL.

[Train]

Originally Posted by Ricochet

We have this thing call ads. I absolutely hated when webpages wouldn't load because it's scripted in such a way that if the ads don't load first the page wouldn't come up.

There were ads back then too, but the worst you could get was a 7k animated GIF. Flash and JS based ads are just another pile that have added bloat to the web.

[HeXen]

Originally Posted by Train

There were ads back then too, but the worst you could get was a 7k animated GIF. Flash and JS based ads are just another pile that have added bloat to the web.

No, the worst you could get was multiples of pop ups that you had little control over, i've seen some pretty bad cases, some where so many pop ups took control that it crashed the computer. Clicking on some executed malicious downloads.



And of course the scare tactic ads were a problem initially as most average users had little PC knowledge

[Train]

Originally Posted by HeXen

No, the worst you could get was multiples of pop ups that you had little control over, i've seen some pretty bad cases, some where so many pop ups took control that it crashed the computer. Clicking on some executed malicious downloads.



And of course the scare tactic ads were a problem initially as most average users had little PC knowledge

Those required JS.

IIRC, popup blockers weren't really needed until the 2000's.

[brianmanahan]

if you disable JS, you arent using the internet imho

[Paratus]

Originally Posted by HeXen

No, the worst you could get was multiples of pop ups that you had little control over, i've seen some pretty bad cases, some where so many pop ups took control that it crashed the computer. Clicking on some executed malicious downloads.



And of course the scare tactic ads were a problem initially as most average users had little PC knowledge

Alt-F4 as fast as you can baby!