What do you guys remember about 90s Internet?

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My faves about late 90s-early 2000's internet were the instant messengers. Predecessors to modern day texting?
 
I was a co-sysop on a friend's BBS before the internet started taking off. When I first got the internet I had a 14.4baud NON-error correcting modem which was a major pain to use! Dialup cost about $24.99 for 20 hours of time. I started the "online" gaming with Doom 2 and dialing my friends computer to link them up. Great memories!
 
We had Internet at work, the university where I work again now. The browser was Netscape, and the best way to communicate with people was by mailing lists -- most of which became Yahoo! Groups, or have gone to LiveJournal and things like that.

The first thing I ever typed into a search engine, which probably was Yahoo! Search (or maybe it was Excite or AltaVista), was "Man from U.N.C.L.E." (Again, I was at work and didn't want to type in anything racier.)
 
I remember a digital terminal I think VT-100 but not positive back in 1990.

The internet for me was some called lynx basically a text only browser. I used a instant chat type program I cannot recall that basically allowed you and friend(for me attractive female at NYU) to basically type in a split screen and see others text.

Email for me was pine and the text editor was vi which I still rock at in 2014 when working with AIX.
 
Oh, and in 1993 or so my dad had compuserve and wouldn't let any of us on it. He'd disappear into the den for hours "to get the weather in pennsylvania" and we'd forget about him, then tick him off by lifting a phone off the hook.

And he wasn't up to anything dirty, he's not that savvy. Still isn't.
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Originally Posted By: Benzadmiral
...and the best way to communicate with people was by mailing lists -- most of which became Yahoo! Groups...


Don't forget Yahoo Clubs. I think they eventually folded Clubs into Groups though.

Sadly, most Yahoo Groups I used to follow started to die when forums really took off in the 2000s, and now a lot of forums are dying thanks to Facebook and Twitter.
 
Intenet?
The 90's was the time of the BBS. E-mail and newsgroups were through FidoNet, 2400 Baud was fast and 9600 Baud was things you dreamed about. You could send an e-mail form NY to CA but it could take days to make the trip as BBS's dialed each other to pass it along. Graphics were done over ANSI sequences. Downloading the hot new GIF took forever. Apps were measured in Kilobytes and took forever to download!

I'll never forget the modem sounds and the mesmerizing of the blinking external lights. Or the ANSI color graphics!

Mid-late 90's blew our minds with 14.4k/28k/"56k" modems. Then came the Internet.
 
Watching the screen saver and thinking it was Cool.

I think I work with people that still do that.
 
I couldn't even search the web with a 56k modem. I spent all my time chatting on instant messenger
 
Originally Posted By: aquariuscsm
My faves about late 90s-early 2000's internet were the instant messengers. Predecessors to modern day texting?


Dude, I made so many 'friends' on MSN messenger and I have about 1 gig of chat logs from back then. It's almost like a secret diary into my life as a teenager/early 20s. I wish people were back to using MSN messenger. It was all so easy... And sharing bootlegs over the instant file share was awesome. It's all Facebook now.
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My HS had a linux machine (P-133) that students could telnet or dial into, so we used PINE for email and lynx for text mode browsing. I still use lynx today, but mainly to set up scripts that will call wget.

I remember the first email I sent, to an Uncle who was living in Europe at the time. I mentioned it to my parents, who freaked out about "how much would it cost to send that internationally". I explained that the school provided the email, but then they got bogged down trying to figure out how the school could afford that. My dad's down w/ email and the internet now, but mom never learned.

Originally Posted By: rjundi
I remember a digital terminal I think VT-100 but not positive back in 1990.

The internet for me was some called lynx basically a text only browser. I used a instant chat type program I cannot recall that basically allowed you and friend(for me attractive female at NYU) to basically type in a split screen and see others text.

Email for me was pine and the text editor was vi which I still rock at in 2014 when working with AIX.

That chat program was probably ytalk or one of the similar programs that built off 'write' to chat between TTYs
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Originally Posted By: zerosoma
Originally Posted By: aquariuscsm
My faves about late 90s-early 2000's internet were the instant messengers. Predecessors to modern day texting?


Dude, I made so many 'friends' on MSN messenger and I have about 1 gig of chat logs from back then. It's almost like a secret diary into my life as a teenager/early 20s. I wish people were back to using MSN messenger. It was all so easy... And sharing bootlegs over the instant file share was awesome. It's all Facebook now.
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Haha, I used ICQ. Offline messaging was neat! I should have sold my low-digit UIN number back when suckers were buying them for status...
 
Originally Posted By: expat
Watching the screen saver and thinking it was Cool.

I think I work with people that still do that.


Yeah. And Windows Media Player's interactive sound waves and pulse visuals were something you could not take your eyes off of. Now they're boring. How things have changed...
 
Originally Posted By: itguy08
Intenet?
The 90's was the time of the BBS. E-mail and newsgroups were through FidoNet, 2400 Baud was fast and 9600 Baud was things you dreamed about. You could send an e-mail form NY to CA but it could take days to make the trip as BBS's dialed each other to pass it along. Graphics were done over ANSI sequences. Downloading the hot new GIF took forever. Apps were measured in Kilobytes and took forever to download!

I'll never forget the modem sounds and the mesmerizing of the blinking external lights. Or the ANSI color graphics!

Mid-late 90's blew our minds with 14.4k/28k/"56k" modems. Then came the Internet.

Remember BBS Door games? L.O.R.D., that one with space trading... The DC area had a great collection of BBSs. I found a free C compiler on one, and ended up teaching myself C one summer. Pretty much started my programming career because of freeware BBSs. If I hadn't convinced my dad to splurge on a 14.4 back when, who knows what I'd be doing today.

Another first was my first flame war, over FidoNet w/ some Aussie. It took like 4 days for replies to get posted, which allowed ample time to come up with withering come-backs
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my posting level has not improved in the intervening 18 years...
 
What do you guys remember about 90s Internet?

When webpages actually worked, instead of being so debilitated with useless content and code that doesn't help the end user but instead facilitates advertising, cookie storage and tracking

When web browsers weren't giant sopping code monsters and actually worked with the web code so that future quad core processors weren't pegged trying to parse all the [censored] bloatcode from the bloatsite

it seems that the more bandwidth and processor speed we come up with, is already dedicated to handling bulky overcontented [censored] sites via overcoded [censored] browsers

/rant
 
Originally Posted By: zerosoma

Dude, I made so many 'friends' on MSN messenger and I have about 1 gig of chat logs from back then. It's almost like a secret diary into my life as a teenager/early 20s. I wish people were back to using MSN messenger. It was all so easy... And sharing bootlegs over the instant file share was awesome. It's all Facebook now.
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Same here bro, same here
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I remember a bunch of search engines that have long since faded into oblivion as well as a really primitive email system at work called TeamLinks.
Connections seemed really slow, even though most sites were text based.
 
I owned one of these, IBM PS/1 286 10mhz, 2.5MB RAM, 30MB fixed disk, built in modem, mono VGA. Got it for around $500, a super deal, back then. (Which begs the question, do two PS/1's equal one PS/2?
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Installed Windows 3.1 and DOS 6.2 (or was it PC-DOS 6.3?)

Anything but DOS 4, it sucked.



But it ran Prodigy just fine!
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And the original AOL, based on the Geoworks GUI, which ran better than AOL on Windows3.1.
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I spent absolutely no time whatsoever on the internet in the 90's. I was too busy going places,doing things,livin life.
Now I sit on bitog obsessing about oil and thinking about the next mod for my mustangs.
 
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