What was the internet like in the 90s?

[manimal]

In the old days we didnt have any legs. We would walk on two bloody stumps over to the dial up modem.

 

[Rakehellion]

56k was blazing fast. 12k was the fastest modem my IBM XT would support (8 bit port).

And I remember when broadband came out and a guy told me he could download a 1 megabyte file in ten seconds!

 

[MomentsofSanity]

Bout sums it up trying to download anything... At all...

 

[Ichinisan]

*nt*

 

[dighn]

slow, but I didn't take it for granted like I do now. everything was amazing.

 

[QueBert]

was uber nerds who sat on IRC chatting about D&D and their pet Ferrets. If it's possible the men were worse than the ones here. 95% acted like virgins who has no social skills when it came to females. Was a few cool females I met who learned about IRC from a nerd in the computer lab at their college. Contrary to what people will say, dialup wasn't slow. But when I got online there was no web all I did was use talk and IRC so 56k was perfect.

 

[HamburgerBoy]

It was awesome. I'd spend all day downloading pictures of license plates and Dragonball Z and just admire their sub-640x480 glory. And animated gifs were the bomb, fuck anyone that tells you otherwise.

 

[tcsenter]

Two words:

Download Manager

FTFY

 

[sdifox]

192cps.

 

[waggy]

was uber nerds who sat on IRC chatting about D&D and their pet Ferrets. If it's possible the men were worse than the ones here. 95% acted like virgins who has no social skills when it came to females. Was a few cool females I met who learned about IRC from a nerd in the computer lab at their college. Contrary to what people will say, dialup wasn't slow. But when I got online there was no web all I did was use talk and IRC so 56k was perfect.

lol IRC. i used to spend far far to much time on a few channels. I got bored one time and fired up my IRCchat thing and logged back into the channels i used to sit in.

Same fucking people talking about the same fucking shit. comon guys its fucking 20 years. ugh.

 

[homebrew2ny]

Interesting story....

Back when I built my first pc and started to get on-line I was having download issues with my 56k modem so I searched out modem help and was swamped with link after link for a site called 'toms hardware'. I clicked on all of them, one after another, after another, and none of them offered a viable solution. On like the 15'th page of search results I saw a link to a place called 'mad onion' and gave it a shot. That link led to the answer I needed....

AT+MS=K56

Needless to say I am now a long standing member of Futuremark, however now that those boards are all but dead, here I am.

 

[Brovane]

I recently discovered the interesting world of internet message boards and forums. Ever since I've started to find things like Facebook and twitter boring and restrictive. I want to ask some of the computer veterans, what was the internet like in the 90s, with those 56k lines, large computers and IRC.

What were those days like. Do you miss them? Why/why not?

Well it was interesting. The first thing I had was AOL and you had a limited amount of hours per month. It was first about just what was on AOL. Eventually I got on a local ISP. It was interesting back then because sometimes you had these smaller local ISP instead of these big ISP's that exist know. You also had hopefully a couple of local phone numbers to connect to. The hearing of the modem sound as the 56k modem would first connect up at 9600 and then switch over to 56k(well actually 53k or something like that). Overall lack of graphics and just lack of content. Most companies didn't have a presence on the Internet. When they did the websites where walls of txts. I remember back in 1999 I had a contract job for several months going around and setting up ISDN lines at people houses. You also really didn't have to worry about SPAM back then. If someone sent you a e-mail it was usually a legitimate e-mail that. Using good old Netscape to browse the Internet. I remember back in 1996 when one of my friends got a cable Modem and being amazed that he could browse the Internet with dialing into something and how fast it was. The internet back then was you would log on with your Modem maybe check e-mail etc, some bulletin boards and then log off because you didn't want to use up to many hours and tie up the phone line. There wasn't that always on assumption that we have now. Now the Internet is just there and it is always on.

 

[nageov3t]

this was considered an acceptable website for a blockbuster film from a major studio:

http://www2.warnerbros.com/spacejam/movie/jam.htm

otoh, anyone who could string together two lines of HTML could call themselves a "web developer."

 

[Thebobo]

Quantum link -

 

[Crow550]

Well if the show 24 was set in the 90s: http://youtu.be/JMLH_QyPTYM

 

[tcsenter]

GetRight was the must-have app (or other download manager, there were a few). Spend a couple hours sifting through USENET or other sources, collecting links and configuring the download options. A few days later, you has warez apps, games, and pron.

 

[TwiceOver]

I remember the day when our BBS got a domain name and could handle email. It would check for email once every 24 hours.

 

[Wreckem]

I've been online since 1993 and online gaming since 1995.

IMHO the best the best thing about the internet in the early to mid 1990s was there were less dumb-asses on it.

Other than that it was painfully slow.

 

[Crow550]

I first started on a Commodore 64 then a 128 in the 90s connecting to BBSes. 94 or 95 I think? Yeah....

Got 486 PC later used that Evergreen chip that made it a Pentium 1 and got AOL in 97 or 98. Then later upgraded to a Pentium 2 or 3....

Used one of the first video conferencing programs by Vocaltec. Called Internet Phone. Yup on dial up too.

Memories....

 

[chalmers]

lol IRC. i used to spend far far to much time on a few channels. I got bored one time and fired up my IRCchat thing and logged back into the channels i used to sit in.

Same fucking people talking about the same fucking shit. comon guys its fucking 20 years. ugh.

You've been on anandtech for 13 years, probably posting every day, probably about the same recycled shit too.

 

[IronWing]

You actually had internet on an XT? I had CompuServe but no internet until the mid 90's. Had much better than an XT by then.

Yep. A friend gave us her old XT in 1995. It had the 10meg hard drive! I had to track down a 8-bit external modem to connect. I eventually found one at Computerland (I was shocked to discover Computerland still existed at the time). Once I had the modem I used kermit to connect to the university's mainframe (I was working for UK at the time) and was able to use the Charlotte text-based browser to surf the web. It was limited but we could still get around pretty well. HTML as practiced in the wild was much simpler then.

 

[chalmers]

I joined AOL and Prodigy in 1994 and had that until 97 when I got a local dialup service. Painfully slow downloads. Spent years on mIRC in an action wrestling league...was srs bzns as a kid.

http://www.reocities.com/Colosseum/7969/arena.html

Wow I found one of our old sites...that's crazy.

 

[zanejohnson]

44,5Kbps was the best KFLEX dial up connection i ever achieved....

the internet has changed so much since then.. especially the "deep web,"

nowdays i browse around on a 10/10 connection, have no need for pay telivision service, etc, that wasn't available as easy as it is today...

 

[IronWing]

Usenet was big. I spent quite a bit of time on Talk Origins back then. I used to put some effort into my discussions with creationists but now I realize that life is too short to suffer such fools. I remember downloading porn. It was awesome. One would go to one of the alt.porn.whatever boards and open a thread. There one would find:

BEGIN....

Ooh, la, la!

followed by 5 billion lines of uuencoded text. The text was usually too long to fit a single post so you'd have to download and save a whole series of posts (this was later automated). Then you would string the posts together to form a single text block and run a uudecoder on the block and pipe it to an image file. Then one could view the file in LView. It was probably easier to get laid than it was to surf porn back then.

 

[DrPizza]

I've been online since 1993 and online gaming since 1995.

IMHO the best the best thing about the internet in the early to mid 1990s was there were less dumb-asses on it.

Other than that it was painfully slow.

It wasn't painfully slow, because we didn't have anything faster to compare it to. By the future's standards, today's broadband will probably be considered "painfully slow." I remember the discovery of MP3s. Back then, you could download a 3.5Mb song in about 30 seconds.

But, you're right about the biggest difference - the early adopters tended to be more of your science/technology geeks. The typical person online was more intelligent.