The early days of the internet (1995-2001)

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I miss the early Internet years like there ain't no tomorrow.

My story relates to some here. I began using a computer (computer games and productivity tools) in the mid-'90s. My family set our internet up in maybe '98 or '99. I still have my first-and-only AOL address. I developed an early affinity for message boards, and I enjoyed chatting and playing chatroom games. I was certainly blown away at the ability to find information so quickly online.

It was a fun time, new to myself and everybody around me.

Personally, I don’t remember much about the early days of the internet besides the sound of dial-up. I think one of my recent “special interests” is early internet trivia, so I thought I’d include some of my knowledge in this post. (I apologize in advance, because some of these things came from before 1995.)

Internet spam was first invented in 1978 (although spam itself dates back to 1864.)

In 1990, the website imdb.com was launched.

Emoticons have an interesting pre-internet history, but it is generally agreed that ONLINE emoticons first appeared in 1982.

What was the first .com-domain in the world? The answer is “symbolics.com”, which was originally registered in 1985.

A picture of Les Horribles Cernettes (a pop group founded by employees of CERN) was the first photographic image of a band to be published on the World Wide Web in 1992.

Here’s a link to one of the first video game reviews posted on Usenet in 1982: http://www.handheldmuseum.com/Nintendo/Octopus.htm

TV Tropes has a (rather incomplete) list of things put on the internet before the “Eternal September” of 1993: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/M ... lSeptember

Wikipedia has a list of 1990’s webcomics (that is not very thorough): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:1990s_webcomics

Speaking of webcomics, I found two websites that discuss the history of the medium in varying degrees of detail. Did you know that technically, the first webcomic came into being in 1985? http://comixtalk.com/first_comic_intern ... ics_part_1, http://www.tcj.com/the-history-of-webcomics/

The first time I got on the internet was in 1990. Although it was called arpnet at the time. It was a dial-up connection out at the local university. I would mostly use it to call bulletin board Services (BBS's) that where out of town so I could avoid long distance phone charges(Which where very expensive at the time.). It wasn't a TCP/IP type connection but a telnet(shell text base) prompt at the time. I had a Commodore Amiga computer at that time.

In 1995, The first commercial/publicly available ISP went on-line in my home town. It wasn't cheap at the time ether. It cost about 50 cents an hour but it was the first time I was introduced to a TCP/IP connection and web browsing. I was running a Pentium I PC with windows 3.11 at the time which did not have it's own TCP/IP stack built in. To bring TCP/IP in to my PC, we had to use this program called Trumpet Winsock to dial the modem and connect to the ISP. The web browser we use was Netscape and we use programs like Archie and Gopher for search engines, FTP for file transfer(still do to this day.), IRC for live chat(still do to this day.) and the chat forums where the Usenet newsgroups(They too are still around).

In 1999. I got my first DSL connection. The cool thing about DSL for me wasn't so much the speed but the fact that I could be connected to the internet all the time and not tie-up the phone. the funny thing about DSL back then was that People back then did not have firewalls on there computers and since my DSL connection only had 512 nodes in it's subnet. It wasn't very hard to go scan other peoples computers using a linux bash script and nmap. It was funny (and scary.) to see how easy it was to get access to other people personal information.

Its amazing how much the internet has come in the last 20 years.

I first surfed the web around 1995-1996 using Prodigy over a 9600 modem (keyword "Web"). Later we got a proper ISP and I later put up my first webpage. It was all about DOOM and I posted screenshots, tips, and downloads of my (rather lousy) home-made levels.

As typical of any website of the era (and especially since it was hosted on a little site called GeoCities), it eventually included:
-Tiled background graphics (thus making the text difficult to read)
-Hit counter
-Guestbook (by lpage.com)
-Animated "Get Internet Explorer" button (before that it had a "Best viewed with Netscape" icon). It was later joined by a "Created with Microsoft Frontpage" button.
-Midi background music and sounds
-Scrolling marquees (because IE did not support the <blink> tag like Netscape did)
-Animated icons
-"Click here to enter" splash page (fortunately I did not have a Shockwave/Flash animation - when that trend came along, I had already moved on)
-Internet Link Exchange banner.
-A webring or two
I left Geocities for Tripod in the late 1990s when they started plastering pop-up ads on every page and I later took it down sometime after that. Unfortunately it was not picked up by the Wayback Machine, nor do I have the original files.

Along the way there were other great uses for the Internet. Usenet, IRC (and Comic Chat), Internet Gaming Zone, ICQ (still got my six digit account number), and AIM bring back memories. I also remember postage stamp sized video - you had to use RealPlayer to view them, and that is one thing I do not miss.

I made a page back in 1997 when I first had a computer and internet. The things I put in where the exact same things you mentioned. I stopped working on it once I moved in 1998. I had the scrolling marquees and the like which I created on front page. I was such an easy program to use, no code knowlege, except of course it wouldn't always display correctly or work on all browsers and machines.

Well back in that time that was about just the beginning of the internet, but it was referred as the ARPANET and was awfully slow you would have to wait a while for a webpage to load. Also it was kinda hard for a programmer to host a successful webpage on it. Now it is a lot faster, but yet I agree with you there is a lot of crap on the internet that just takes up a whole lot of bandwidth.

I wouldn't consider anything after 1990 to be the "early days" of the Internet.

If I had to determine a cutoff date for the end of the "early days" of the Internet, it would be the development and widespread adaption of TCP/IP.

I started on the net in 96. I had a computer before then but no internet (no modern OS for that matter).

Oh god, just the mention of the dial up modem sound reproduces it in my head, as if I am listening to it now


krrsssshhhht sshhht khrrrrrrrrrrr shhhttttt shtttttt

Blerk

It was around 96 I think for me and online chatrooms claimed the time I should have been spending on learning the finer details about the dinosaurs and taxonomy of plants

The thing is though, once you finally connected, your connection would be solid (lol I can't believe I typed that with a straight face) until you disconnected (which you did as often as possible to save money). Now, I pay a monthly fee to have connection constantly dropping in and out of existence and when I try to watch a video, sometimes it will sit there, buffering as if it is effing 97 all over again.

Then I got hooked on janet and my fate was sealed; have taken jobs just so I can have access to the decent internet speed. Life shouldn't be this way *shakes head*

I well remember sitting in a meeting in 1993 or 1994 to design an online document management application that was to be mainframe based. A lady came in and announced that the project was being put on hold pending re-architecture to use this thing called HTML, and that the old ARPANET was being essentially being expanded for public use. Public access was to be via new enterprises called "Internet Service Providers".

I was bummed out that while PC's had progressed to graphical user interfaces, with HTML we were essentially being thrown back into the dark ages of character-based terminals. I was not at all impressed with this new term coined for the glorified terminal emulators used for this: browsers.

Imagine my chagrin.

In the late '80s & early '90s my wife had a university account and we could use it at home.

Before the world wide web we used good old Archie and Veronica.

Anyone remember those?

denny