[ashneer]

I really wish I could experience the web back then at 1993 (I'm 25). I imagine much faster, and intuitive websites than nowadays. Beautiful UX is one thing but making a website feels natural, that's what I think the internet is missing today.

[cookiengineer]

You had to wait 30 minutes to wait for all those unicorn gifs to load, so I'd say it wasn't as fast as it could've been :D

The amazing part was that everyone had a homepage at some point, where they put content online about topics that they thought was worth sharing.

Even girls in school had a website with sparkling rainbow gifs and a guestbook, and some pages about topics they liked... like smallville series character details, some cake recipes or games that they played. Oh boi have I read way too many things about dragons or vampires in historic literature.

Those websites were usually hosted at all those ad driven freehosters like geocities or funpic, so they sometimes injected their own ads to fund the hosting costs.

But honestly, I'd take the old version of the internet any time again over the dumpster fire that is social media propaganda and coordinated/incinerated defamatory shitstorms these days.

The internet was a welcoming place for everyone, where people shared what they loved with others. The internet was a nice place. And then, the facebook and the chans happened, and everything kinda went to shit.

[marginalia_nu]

Eh, 30 seconds maybe if it was a lot of images?

I remember it took about 20-30 minutes to download an mp3 in the dialup days. Most websites were in the kilobytes because everyone was on dialup. Also keep in mind most screens would have been 640x480, so it's not like you were getting high res images.

[Accacin]

I remember waiting like a whole night to download an MP3. When I tried to play it the next day, my laptop was so old and slow that it couldn't play the MP3 without stuttering :D

[dijit]

Small reminder that the PS1 was so weak it couldn't even play 128kbit (IE; quite poor quality) MP3s in real time

[cookiengineer]

> Eh, 30 seconds maybe if it was a lot of images?

Depends on the amount of gifs people were placing on their website :D We only had a 56k modem at the time. The Browser was provided by the ISP at first due to lack of dial-up software that supported the German ISPs, so it was loading all kinds of injected stuff from the ISP, too.

But yeah, I agree with the general sentiment that websites usually loaded way faster if you were using e.g. IE3 on purpose because it didn't load all the stylesheets and images.

[marginalia_nu]

I think it depends on when we are speaking. 56k became increasingly miserable as higher speeds became the norm.

[ChrisMarshallNY]

This was my favorite ("I Kiss You"): https://methodshop.com/mahir-cagri-i-kiss-you-internet-celeb...

[OJFord]

Interesting there's a section on Borat at the bottom there - I'm pretty sure I've never heard of this (let alone the lawsuit) and I was reading about it, seeing the photos, thinking he was surely an influence on the character. Not sure what to make of that.

[accarrino]

i remember sending out the "i kiss you" XOOM page to my entire AOL address book. that's how things went "viral" back then.

[nprateem]

Yeah but to be fair you knew when a website was under construction. Now it's a health and safety nightmare, with no warning gifs anywhere

[dijit]

I'm only 32, so 1993 was a bit early, from what I remember "the internet" didn't become truly mainstream until 1996~.

Now that I think back the computers "acted" really differently from what we use today.

Things felt much more "immediate" (as in the computer responded to you very quickly) but also much slower; imagine that your keystrokes occurred immediately but opening a window took 50ms.

If the CPU was being hit with any kind of load though, the input would buffer and your keystrokes would stop being presented until the GUI got some CPU time again and all your keystrokes just poured into the active window.

The web itself was a lot of slowly rendering webpages, the sites themselves would actually start loading much quicker than modern sites, and the content would progressively load over some amount of time, there was usually a progress bar at the bottom of the Web Browser.

I know I'm only a few years older than you, but I wonder if you remember all this.

From what I recall the most annoying thing was slowly rendering images.

[mkr-hn]

Nowadays browsers intentionally delay painting to load stuff.

[tiborsaas]

It was quite the opposite. Transfer speed was slow, it sometimes took minutes to load a page and I only had access to internet at school or conferences. The machines were also slow, browsers were taxing on the hardware too in the old times as well.

Pages were anything but intuitive, there were no design standards. Most marketing pages looked like their art director imagined a futuristic movie prop.

There's still a ton of interesting pages out there, check out this collection: https://www.hoverstat.es/

[fuzzy2]

Faster? Not really. Even with ISDN, stuff was slow af. 8000 bytes per second just isn't a lot. Latency was often high as well.

[marginalia_nu]

Page loads were slow, but you don't get that weird thing you get today when a page is slow even after it's loaded, or stuff keeps loading in and changing the layout so you need to sit and wait for an unknown period before you can interact with it.

It feels like websites are a lot jankier today. The old web was slow, but it was predictable. Like I know a site where if you don't wait for it to finish to load (and it's javascript loading, so you get no browser indication that it's actually loading), then the all the links will be wrong. That is, you get the wrong content if you click a link. It's quietly kind of amazing how they've managed to break hyperlinks, given they're a part of HTML itself and work well out of the box.

[Cthulhu_]

this is true, but it's because developers, designers and marketeers add loads of stuff onto it. Pages that show animated ads, CSS animations and (sometimes multiple) autoplaying videos are slow.

But there's plenty of websites out there still - including HN - that do without all of those extras. And it's up to web developers of today to resist using the fanciest technologies to build websites.

At some point there was the concept of (iirc) progressive web apps, where the basis was all HTML - fully functional, you could turn off JS and CSS and it'd still work - and then use CSS and JS to add functionality on top, but that would be purely embellishment.

[interactivecode]

hahaha just no, I remember my crappy hand me down computer was so slow it would chug and struggle to display a nice looking full screen image. You see the old web on your modern lap sized super computer. Go to the thriftstore and pickup a beige windows 95 computer setup and try navigating the web. it was slow, very very slow.

[marginalia_nu]

I was around back then. You don't need to tell me how it was like.

Full screen bing.com-backgrounds weren't really a thing in web design, though. Except in porn, I guess.

[mrblampo]

Can you imagine how fast those websites would be today, though, compared to modern websites?

[pizza234]

One can easily test this. This is the performance of two semi-randomly picked websites:

- Peter Ferrie's homepage (http://pferrie.epizy.com/?i=1), old school: approx. 900ms

- Netflix landing page (https://www.netflix.com/de-en), modern: approx. 1.8s

Measured via Firefox "load time". Peter Ferrie is a famous security researcher.

The Netlix page is clearly 2x as slow, but the load time is far from proportional to the overall data transfer.

The HN front page, right now, takes approx. 1.7s. :)

[christophilus]

Netflix is a bad example of modern websites, as they’ve hired really good developers to optimize the snot out of it.

I’d say, compare it to Reddit or Pinterest or something like that.

[DocTomoe]

Images would load forever. Good websites had images twice, a low-resolution variant to load fast, to be replaced by the high-resolution one that eventually loaded. Other websites had images that loaded interlaced - separated in 4 strata that you could watch being built up.

I remember when some supergenius sent the first email as a word document with a 2 mb company logo embedded, and loading that took some 20 minutes - each minute being metered indivdually, only to then contain two lines of text that ought have been the mail body...

The internet was better back in the day - but it was not faster.

[Tao332]

> Other websites had images that loaded interlaced - separated in 4 strata that you could watch being built up.

That's called progressive JPEG, and it's still around.

[Cthulhu_]

> I imagine much faster, and intuitive websites than nowadays.

Oh no; they weren't faster because computers and browsers weren't nearly as fast as they are today (iirc it was Chrome that emphasized performance, especially JS performance because it saw how much more that was going to be used (for ads lmao)), and not intuitive because there weren't as much guidelines or awareness of UX as there are today.

There should be plenty of websites from the 90's on archive.org

[sph]

My dad got an internet connection when I was 15; 1999 or something. One summer I got bored, got on my ISP's "portal" website, there was a chatroom feature (powered by IRC), I entered a channel about Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I didn't care for the show, but the ratio of guys/girls was great. All were teenagers like me, made some friends and chatted with my first girlfriend which I met some time later.

It was an easier time back then.

[layer8]

I remember you could often watch images being slowly rendered line-by-line in the browser due to slow connections or slow servers back in 1994/1995.

In the meantime computers and the internet became so fast that websites could be very fast by default, but the front-end tech stack and adtech still makes it slow most of the time.

[Ekaros]

Reading articles of time the backbone connections in around that time were also heavily taxed. So you had slow connections, and those we connected also to over congested connections. Not exactly greatest user experience.

[gherkinnn]

It was fun and wild. In some ways simpler. But it was neither fast nor intuitive.