The early days of the internet (1995-2001)

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Hey, remember the days of the internet where everything was much more simpler, there were no pop-up ads, no spyware, and the video quality of videos, was well, a bit crappy by modern standards? I'm here to talk about that.
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I can remember the first few years that I used the internet. My parents had AOL, and that was my first exposure to the net. Things were simpler back then and more cleanly organized; there were quite a few channels on AOL to choose from, and I would browse sites about Sonic the Hedgehog, the NES, Pokemon, and MLB and the NFL. It was a great time for me back then. I still love the internet, but sometimes I can't help but feel jaded by certain things I see on there.

I get nostalgic about those old sites, they were mostly texty, geocities crappy websites. BUT THEY WERE GOOD CRAPPY CAUSE WE DIDN'T KNOW ANY BETTER

WEB 1.0 FTW!

Yip! I remember those days.

First time we used the net was in about 1999.

There are still a certain amount of those early sites still working today, I stumble on the occasionally.
If you had a tool that downloaded music, (Napster) you'd be seen as a legend amoung your circle of friends.

Was safer to use the net back there too.

Nowdays, every Nigerian on the planet, is running port scanners, trying every method under the sun, to get your banking details.

When I worked for Naval Research and Development as a contractor in the early 1990, the best way no navigate the internet was through a gopher hole. Gopher, for those of you too young to remember was an internet application developed at the University of Minnesota (The Golden Gophers, hence the name of the protocol.) That and lynx were the only two applications that worked in a character cell interactive environment, such as a DEC VAX 4000 model 50 being accessed by dec VT100 terminals unver OpenVMS 6.

Speaking of OpenVMS, has anyone succeeded in getting it to run on Intel or AMD CPU's?

To be honest, I don't miss it.
Sites we're static and boring. It took forever to download anything.
Postage stamp video was a waste of time.
Manually updating large, static html sites. (I was a web designer from 97-01)
Getting sites to look right on all browsers. There was a lot more variation of how a page would render on different browsers.

@Meistersinger:
I remember Gopher. I had a friend who would get on that with his Amiga.

You mean the wonderful experience of downloading the Star Wars trailer overnight, because it had about 40MB? ^^

The only thing I miss, that people were more personal, even when meeting online. You cared for the persons you exchanged informations in game forums, or knew most of the people, playing a certain online game. The anonymity of internet, has become much more anonym, according to my experience. People are much faster with not caring for someone else, only because of them posting something you dont like or whatever. You easier founded communities or guilds, simply because of most games not automatically giving you gaming partners. So there was more personal contact,

I remember back when everyone had those awful web counters, how everyone had guestbooks and how professional sites always had frames. Lastly, applets were the pinnacle of online technology. Come to think of it, 1990's web-sites were hideous. Thank God for HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript.

I guess....... what I was trying to say that the videos on the internet then look kinda grainy by today's standards (and somewhat garbled).

Those......were..... the days, my friend, we thought they'd never end...

ruveyn

Looking back, yeah. And remember Napster? I sure do.

Wrote my first website using Adobe PageMill and HTML 1.0 in 1995. There were very few images as most people with internet connections in the UK were still on 9200, or 56k if they'd flashed their modems... What images I did use were tweaked as much as they could be, with the number of colours reduced etc to reduce load time. And then HTML 1.1 came out, with tables and frames - what a godsend! Roll on image based nav bars, images split out into tables...

I worked for an online gaming company in 1997 (before it lost its funding), and we had an online game called "Twilight Lands". We used to get complaints that people had to leave the downloads running overnight as some of the map updates were up to 12 Mb!

Ah, those were the days...

Who still remember "Online games" that you played via E-mail, where you could one a week give your armies or heroes new commands and such stuff? ^^

Played e-mail chess a bit, but it was soooooo boring...

I meant more the early forms of MMORPG. So you could see on the homepage a map that was splitted into Hexagons, and you got an hero with a little army, that you could move along the hexagons, and so find dungeons, meet other players.... Once a week, you sended to the sever owners new commands via E-mail, about where to go and so on. ^^

It was sooooooo cool... ^^ You have to imagine you played with hundreds of other players.... ^^ (everyone beyond 25 will now call for the psychiatric ambulance I think ^^)

If you really want to get historical , the world was first wired in 1866 with the laying of the transatlantic cable.

The data rates were about 10 baud which is about as fast as an electric typewriter could do computer type outs in 1965.

ruveyn

Copper too, wasn't amplified, and no repaters. Just one high voltage copper cable.