What was the internet like in the 90s?

[Hugo Drax]

hehe old.






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[Blintok]

Took me too long to realize what TV chat was.

lol. i didnt even get it until i read this post.

as for modems. i remember using a 300baud Atari modem on my 600xl

i recall a usenet program that let you download a bunch of messages so you could then reply offline for later posting.

taking hours and hours painstakingly typing in pages of code from magazines to see what the program did.

 

[monk3y]

I still remember having one phone line and having my mother disconnect me from the internet by picking up the phone, only to have me scream bloody murder then take another 10 minutes to reconnect.

 

[randomrogue]

Lets not forget when AOL went from like 1,000,000 users to 30,000,000 in two days so that we all had to wait a year to get online again. I remember spending a disproportional amount of time calling AOL and complaining. Each time I got comped with a few free months. I paid almost nothing for all those years using their service.

Busy signals to get online. Those were great.

 

[slag]

"Hey baby, want to go back to my place?"
"Sorry honey, I only put out for men with a /. UID <= 1000"

*stares sadly at 5-digit /. UID*

HA, mine was like 4357 or something like that.

 

[slag]

The internet as in WWW was the mid-late 1990's. Before that you had AOL and BBS boards. It wasn't much different. I don't think many really thought of it as slow but the annoying modem sound was something that I don't miss. If anything the biggest thing that's different is things like Wikipedia. Before the WWW you had programs that you updated each year with the encyclopedia. Now you can get instantly updated information online within moments of it happening.

I was online in 1994-1995 hitting websites.

 

[Crow550]

AT&T was aiming to be the service that would have offered many of the services we have now. Some of these 90s predictions are eerily surprising in how accurate they were: http://youtu.be/5MnQ8EkwXJ0

 

[IndyColtsFan]

you were a baller if you could afford a US robotics modem.

I had a couple of USR modems, including the vaunted V.Everything modem. U JELLY BRAH?

 

[Ns1]

I had a couple of USR modems, including the vaunted V.Everything modem. U JELLY BRAH?

I bet you had the shotgun setup too.

 

[Crow550]

LOL! What is this Internet? What is the @ symbol? Today Show from 1994: http://youtu.be/JUs7iG1mNjI

 

[Crow550]

Portable Computing for businesses from 1994: http://youtu.be/aEkCI7Og9bk

 

[Fritzo]

I bet you had the shotgun setup too.

I had ISDN...so TRUMPED!!!!

 

[HeXen]

I hated when it dialed the ISP number, then stall and drop. I remember only having a couple numbers to choose from, the rest were long distance. I got dropped a lot when online, thank god for download managers. My friends would complain cause my line was always busy. Initially the only reason i ever got online was cause i watched TechTV and ended up buying a video card which needed updated drivers only available online. Then i went to AOL's chatroom, met some girls and got laid without having to go out and try, it was like the convenience of online ordering lol.

I also liked the Napster days, not cause it was free, just the access to so much music was quite new and different to what i was used to buying CD's for $14-$18 a piece with limited selection and without any way to demo it.
Then i'd drop some LSD and watch the music player's visualizer mode.

 

[HamburgerBoy]

I loved playing the game Realmz back then.

Did Realmz have an online component? I loved the hell out of the shareware version.

 

[tboo]

Did Realmz have an online component? I loved the hell out of the shareware version.

Good question. Not sure.

 

[CZroe]

AT&T was aiming to be the service that would have offered many of the services we have now. Some of these 90s predictions are eerily surprising in how accurate they were: http://youtu.be/5MnQ8EkwXJ0

But when they get it wrong, it's dead wrong. Like the "phone booth for video calls." It's like: In the age of the Sharp Handicam, why wouldn't you expect cameras to computerize and mobilize along with every other communication technology?

 

[Wreckem]

I remember I spent a good chunk of money on one of those so I could play GTA 3 when it came out. I think it was a Ti-4200 or something like that. I felt so guilty spending all of my money on one of those. It was worth it, though. GTA 3 was amazing.

My first video card was the Riva 128. I bought it to play Dark Reign. I am not sure why but my PC didn't work with Dark Reign but adding a Riva 128 fixed the problem. Shortly there after was the first time I built a PC based on K6-2. Then if I remember correctly, I upgraded as follows TNT2, GeForce 2, 5, 8/9(EVGA upgrade program from 8800GT to 9800GTX+). Then jumped to AMD/ATI with the latestet gen. CPUs it seem like I flipped back and forth until AMD was no longer competitive.

 

[*kjm]

I had a couple of USR modems, including the vaunted V.Everything modem. U JELLY BRAH?

I still have mine:twisted:

 

[CZroe]

My first video card was the Riva 128. I bought it to play Dark Reign. I am not sure why but my PC didn't work with Dark Reign but adding a Riva 128 fixed the problem. Shortly there after was the first time I built a PC based on K6-2. Then if I remember correctly, I upgraded as follows TNT2, GeForce 2, 5, 8/9(EVGA upgrade program from 8800GT to 9800GTX+). Then jumped to AMD/ATI with the latestet gen. CPUs it seem like I flipped back and forth until AMD was no longer competitive.

This got me thinking about my first video card. I was a kid and didn't know what I was doing when I bought some "GraphicsBlaster" from Creative (the SoundBlaster guys) that I saw at Wal-Mart. I noticed a new filtered graphics option in Microsoft Monster Truck Madness but it was even slower than software-only 3D. The disc that came with it had MPEG software and an advertisement for a "3D Blaster." The 3D Blaster was what I really wanted in the first place (probably a 3dfx Voodoo), so I tried to return the GraphicsBlaster to Wal-Mart and ran into a know-nothing clerk who used the "can't take back software and this has software" excuse to refuse it. I argued that the rule applied to software-only products so that people would not treat a return policy as a 30-day rental period and pointed out that the drivers and MPEG software were useless without the card but they still refused. My mother tried successfully on a different day, so I'm surprised I bothered remembering that drama.

My next card was a 4MB ATI All-in-Wonder (upgraded 2MB card) with the ATI Rage II. It was also barely if at all any better than my PC's integrated graphics, but I put the TV tuner and video capture board to great use. I was the first person I knew with a webcam.

My first real gaming card ended up being a Diamond Monster Fusion Z100 (3dfx Voodoo Banshee) that I bought as a stop-gap hold-over for my 3dfx Voodoo3 3000 AGP on my purchased-at-launch Pentium III 500MHz system. Both cards AMAZED me, especially with Unreal and Quake II, but I was more interested in UltraHLE's N64 emulation despite having a way to play all ROMs perfectly on a real N64 (Bung Dr. V64 development/back-up hardware).

After that it was a Visiontek GeForce 3 (at launch), GeForce 2 GTS-V, etc. I do remember needing to borrow my friend's ATI All-In-Wonder Radeon for a month or two when I built my Pentium 4 system in 2001 because the Voodoo3 didn't work with the new 1.5v AGP slot in my Intel D850GB RDRAM motherboard and the GeForce 3 wasn't released yet. His fake Alienware system got all the good comments at @LANta.con 2001 because he had my video card in it.

 

[douglasb]

Prodigy

 

[Rifter]

Just like ATOT is now just a lot slower.

 

[bononos]

Yeah I remember that too but I don't remember why. What was so special about them?

.....

I think they were faster because they were the market leaders with their proprietary modem protocols.

 

[BoberFett]

back in like 97 there was a website called download.net and it had about 100 of the most popular windows apps... it was awesome at the time because there really wasn't more then 100 windows apps, so it was like an all in one stop shop

then download.com came around and ruined everything

I preferred tucows.

 

[BoberFett]

Back in the 90's Yahoo was the search engine to use. But it wasn't like the search engines of today. Yahoo had a directory listing of websites and you searched that directory.

Not for everyone. I always hated Yahoo. For me it was Webcrawler then Excite then MSN, then Google.

I thought everyone used Altavista back then.

Edit: Should have kept reading the next post...

I remember using AltaVista back then lol

 

[BoberFett]

The thought of being able to download a full length movie was unheard of. The thought of downloading ANY file that is in the GB's was unheard of. Even 50MB was considered a very large file.

Downloading GBs? Hell, I seem to remember the Acer I bought in '95 still having a hard drive still measured in MB.