What was the internet like in the 90s?

[silverpig]

realplayer
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geocities
3dfx vs nvidia flamewars
the matrox g400 max

 

[PeeluckyDuckee]

I remember hogging up the phone line and my dad couldn't get through the line to call home. Boy was he ever pissed, until there was a software on the PC that would indicate an incoming call even when the PC was connected to the internet.

Downloading pictures and videos were a luxury. 56k hardware modem was in the range of $250, and that was the iPhone equivalent back in the days. $50-$80 monthly dialup internet bill was the norm. Leaving computers on all day and night for download was also the norm.

 

[zanejohnson]

oh man the days of 56k gaming, with games like CC red alert, on voodoo 2's SLI, or a Voodoo 3 3000, OpenGL glory, i think i had those cards in a P3 Coppermine machine... then later i got a microwave net connection that was like 768kbps... way better than the dial up.. went through the various AMD variants that were on top then (i use to updgrade like every few months...

then i signed up to be a beta tester with the local cable co...had 10/10 ever since, for 30 bucks a month..

i've had that connection through the last Intel goodness... from a overclocked northwood 2.4b @ 3.7, to a Pentium D 930 3.0 @ 3.6, to a Core 2 Duo 6320 @ 2.4, and now to an I7 in the next few days...

not to mention my network at home, core 2 duo /media/file/virtual server, Intel Core HTPC, house completely wired for 10/100/1000, cisco routers and a netgear switch

just used by me my bro, and our new roomate... i'm the interweb wizard, they are just gamers, but they like how they can just plug into a cat 5 port anywhere, or use wifi and everything works peachy

 

[yhelothar]

I remember searching for people on ICQ white pages to chat with. You can search for ASL and interests. Met a few girls off of there.

 

[CZroe]

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

56k was never "blazing fast." Even if you had it, you knew good and well that it still sucked.

Online gaming, you had frequent disconnects, especially when people called if you had call-waiting. The beeps from the call waiting would screw up the connection, if they rung it for more than 4 times.

I remember playing candystand arcade a lot as a kid back in the 90s.

LOTS OF POPUPS. There would be random sites you could go to that would flood your screen with popups, especially warez/gamez sites

Lots of Top 100 ranking sites for various things.

A 20MB download felt like a massive burden, and/or an incredible download.

You mean people would tolerate other players who didn't disable call waiting? I think you had to dial something like *74 before the ISP number here and it would disable call waiting. I wouldn't play anyone who didn't use that.

 

[Craig234]

http://bbslist.textfiles.com/408/oldschool.html

 

[renz20003]

See for yourself

http://archive.org/web/web.php

 

[_Rick_]

I remember using direct modem connections for gaming "on-line" with a friend...
But that was in the 2000s.

The 90s I only remember my father bringing home a 2400 baud serial modem from work, which apparently was flipping bits for some reason, and never really worked, beyond a garbled log-in to the university dial-in points.

 

[Michael]

I started on a 300 baud modem and learned the language of Vaxen, Archie, Veronica and Gopher. I was one of the developers of the Applenet BBS program and wrote a shareware game for it. This is back in the era of tradewars on dial-up BBS. I can find me on the Internet in 1991 with some directed searches (on the GEnie service) but I was on Usenet before that.

Michael

 

[james1701]

I can remember my first modem, a 300 baud unit on my Color Computer 2. It took 30 minutes just to download a 20k picture from a bbs.

I can remember one guy that worked at Sears around 89, opened a bbs and put every piece of software on there Sears sold, and charged a $15 membership at the time for you have access to anything you wanted.

Also, at the time, the phone company was charging extra for touch tone service, and I was stuck using pulse dialing for everything.

 

[Michael]

When I started, porn pictures on usenet were all in text. You needed to cut and paste into another program that converted the text into the actual picture.

Pictures of naked women drove technology more than anything else at that point.

Michael

 

[Cuda1447]

Playing counterstrike on dial up was fun. Sometimes I would get 'lag spikes' where everything would just freeze for me for a few seconds. The game was still going though. I learned the maps so well that whenever that happened I would navigate myself to a safe area, essentially blind. I would use the keys and navigate but my screen wouldn't update where I was at for 5-10 seconds. Those are skills son!

 

[keird]

I remember playing Zork in the early 80's.

What pissed me off more than anything else about the 90's was all the MIDI files that would blast from your speakers when you didn't remember to turn down the volume after a game.

Mechwarrior was innovative. TIE Fighter was the most amazing game evar and the flight sims had volumeous user manuals.

 

[_Rick_]

 

[Genx87]

I found some demo of a Vietnam game. It was 1.8 MBs in size. Took me all day to download it at .1-.3KB\sec.

Yesterday I installed my brand new DOCSIS 3 modem to take advantage of Comcrap moving me up a tier. Speed tests this morning put me at 92mbps. I don't miss those days.

 

[sdifox]

I remember hogging up the phone line and my dad couldn't get through the line to call home. Boy was he ever pissed, until there was a software on the PC that would indicate an incoming call even when the PC was connected to the internet.

Downloading pictures and videos were a luxury. 56k hardware modem was in the range of $250, and that was the iPhone equivalent back in the days. $50-$80 monthly dialup internet bill was the norm. Leaving computers on all day and night for download was also the norm.

Noob. I had a dedicated phone line. And chatted on the house line! Dad was not amused. :biggrin:

 

[james1701]

I remember playing Zork in the early 80's.

What pissed me off more than anything else about the 90's was all the MIDI files that would blast from your speakers when you didn't remember to turn down the volume after a game.

Mechwarrior was innovative. TIE Fighter was the most amazing game evar and the flight sims had volumeous user manuals.

Oh manuals, I miss that so much. There is nothing like having a bookcase dedicated to flight sim manuals, and maps, and actually looking something up on paper pages.

 

[nageov3t]

Oh manuals, I miss that so much. There is nothing like having a bookcase dedicated to flight sim manuals, and maps, and actually looking something up on paper pages.

I horde manuals at work like gold... haven't opened any in years (because wtf, why would I when I have searchable PDF's?) but they totally make my desk look more productive.

 

[DAPUNISHER]

I used to buy just about every computer magazine on the rack. My favorites were the ones with game demo discs in them. Downloading them was impractical since it took forever. Computer Shopper was a must have, and bigger than the phone book. People were paying ridiculous money for multiple phone lines, shotgunning USR modems, and ISDN. We fantasized about T1 speed at home. *70, to keep from getting booted off every time someone called. Friends knew what I was doing if the phone was busy more than 10 minutes.

I remember shareware stores and getting stuff on 5.25 and 3.5. My ISP was a little local place by the railroad tracks on US.1 here in Rockledge that my friend worked at. All these things existed because the intertubes were very time intensive if you wanted anything.

I played my first "online MP game" (Descent) over the modem with a couple of friends. It was a wondrous time, but again, time intensive to do anything. That was the internet of the 90's for me. A bit player in a what was still a very physical computer culture.

 

[Craig234]

Oh the costs were amazing using BBSs. I know people would spend over $1000 a month they didn't have because the BBS numbers were not local.

Then when services like Prodigy added really basic online gaming it would cost up to dollars per hour and people would spend $1000 on that.

 

[TheSlamma]

AOL and Prodigy lol man those were awful

 

[GodisanAtheist]

I'm gonna have to update the "uphill both ways in the snow" routine for my kids.

Back in my day there was only one beige desktop in the house and it had to be plugged in through the phone line to the internet, at 56K IF YOU WERE LUCKY, and you had to dial out to get an internet connection EVERYTIME and it would take you to the AOL PORTAL, NOT EVEN THE ACTUAL WEB and when you did get to the web EVERY DAMN WEBPAGE WAS IN FRAMES, often times with horrible rendering errors and god aweful tiled backgrounds and it took forever to load or download everything and if the connection dropped half way through a download or mom picks up the phone YOU HAD TO DO EVERYTHING ALL OVER AGAIN FROM THE START so quit bitching about the 15 pico-second lagtime of your mind-machine interface K?

 

[edro]

GetRight!

 

[Ichinisan]

I'm gonna have to update the "uphill both ways in the snow" routine for my kids.

Back in my day there was only one beige desktop in the house and it had to be plugged in through the phone line to the internet, at 56K IF YOU WERE LUCKY, and you had to dial out to get an internet connection EVERYTIME and it would take you to the AOL PORTAL, NOT EVEN THE ACTUAL WEB and when you did get to the web EVERY DAMN WEBPAGE WAS IN FRAMES, often times with horrible rendering errors and god aweful tiled backgrounds and it took forever to load or download everything and if the connection dropped half way through a download or mom picks up the phone YOU HAD TO DO EVERYTHING ALL OVER AGAIN FROM THE START so quit bitching about the 15 pico-second lagtime of your mind-machine interface K?

You forgot the part about the local access numbers being busy and requiring multiple repeated attempts to get connected.

 

[WHAMPOM]

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?

All text with no graphics to slow it down. Getting charged long distance rates for connection really sucked.