| "I'm also curious because I remember that the first time I used the Internet (not internet, as it is nowadays), I had to buy a paper book with categorized links to websites." I was looking at one of these books the other day called "The Internet Yellow Pages" In the early 90s McGraw Hill published a book with this title I found a version published by Que (Pearson Education) from 2007 (I suspect there may even be later editions) That's 14 years into the public www This was right before the iPhone I never used these books. The best resources I remember were lists of sites published via FTP Some of the nostalgia is still easily accessible via textfiles.com I still use the internet in much the same way I did when I was first connected through a university. UNIX-like OS, no graphics, 100% command line The main difference between then and now for me is the hardware and bandwidth Everything is so much faster IME, generally any slowness today is due (directly or indirectly) to the commercialisation ("monetisation") of _traffic_, e.g., ads, tracking, or having to use Tor to avoid all the nonsense Originally the idea of commercial use of the internet was to sell products and services (excluding "advertising services"), not to sell and "monetise" _traffic_ Internet subscriber bandwidth is now used by companies for free to perform data collection, surveillance, telemetry, mostly undetected by the subscriber For example, the majority of "Big Tech" revenues do not come from selling products and (non-advertising) services but from performing data collection, surveillance and "ad services". Even popular subscription software that predated the web, e.g., MS Windows, is engaged in data collection, surveillance and ads/tracking as a "business". Apple, once a traditional hardware company, is engaged in this activity as well 1. I have been doing some information retrieval experiments and the speed can be mind-blowing |