That wasn't the Internet I had in 1996. I'd had unlimited free dialup to a UNIX system since 1992 or so, and by 1996 was at MIT with 10 or 100Mbps connections to ~3x45Mbps backbone.
Big UNIX systems with either black and white huge monitors (the ones which were already outdated, and thus free), or in some cases (on the oldest systems), or huge color trinitrons (Indy, Crimson, Suns, and my P90-based Linux workstation in my dorm).
Pervasive IM from 1992 onward (IRC + screen), and then Zephyr at MIT. Great filesharing via AFS (huge overhead to run, but once set up, better than even Dropbox is today). USENET.
So you could have dramatically better speeds than the vast majority of users.
That way, pages which nominally took 20 slow seconds to load
over a phone modem, would appear instantly for you if you were privileged enough to have broadband.
Nowadays, "everybody" has broadband.
But instead of the rapid browsing experience which everyone was looking forward to, we now have a slower user experience
with broadband on most web sites than there was in 1996
with dial-up modems.
Back in 1996, most people did not yet have 56Kbaud modems,
so the wise webmasters made sure their sites were optimized
enough for mainstream consumers having 28.8K or at most 33.6K which would guarantee outstanding performance to the widest variety of visitors.
When they were really serious about engaging users who did not have brand new computers, a site would need to perform decently at 9600 baud which was what the majority of installed modems still ran at, originally purchased for faxing.
When you occasionally went went to a slow, bloated page from
a major technology company you knew right away it was
"privileged idiots" on broadband without a clue as to how
slow their "masterpiece" website behaved compared to what
was expected from modem users.
Downloading files was expected to be slow, but web sites were not.
Actually lots of MP3's were downloaded over modems, that's what MP3 was developed for.
If you posted something, copyright was not a problem since you were not sharing it with the public, only those few who
were online.
Almost 20years later, technology has progressed but it's clear that PEOPLE used to be more advanced than they are now.
There are probably engineers who are making sure their
sites perform at 2G speeds without sinking below 1996 performance experiences, but from what I've been reading about interviewing & hiring trends it looks like they are excluded as extreme minorities within their percentiles.
Oh, well, I don't make the rules, just observing their disfunction.
We had something really great back then: Usenet. We used it much like most people use social media nowadays I guess, talking about stuff, sharing images, etc
Usenet even allows noting threads, blacklisting users, etc. But not controlled by any single company... I miss Usenet.
I'm going to get down-voted into oblivion, but I never saw the love for Usenet. Sure, every topic under the sun was covered and anyone could access it, but it was far from perfect.
Impossible to search until things like DejaNews came along
Even going back a few months was a huge PITA on slower connections
Your ISP might not have carried every newsgroup, or it might update very slowly
I never cared much for mailing lists either, but at least many of them had a search interface that worked well.
For all the problems that web-based bulletin boards had, they were a huge improvement over Usenet. Much easier to use and faster to browse through. You can argue that if you want to, but they were adopted so much faster.
Dejanews was a mistake. Searchability is a mistake. Social stuff should be a message-space, not an archive. It should be ephemeral; if you want persistence, build a webpage or store the messages off locally.
I've only used Netscape/Seamonkey, and it was much faster on Usenet than any Web interface.
Usenet was a vast improvement over everything that followed.
> Much easier to use and faster to browse through. You can argue that if you want to, but they were adopted so much faster.
I guess it comes down to tree vs flat structures for a thread.
> Your ISP might not have carried every newsgroup, or it might update very slowly.
They're great in non-public/academic settings. Back in 2001 most of the CompSci classes had their TA - student interactions on a newsgroup.
Thing is, this is a 200 people at the most working on the same thing. There is no casual 'shooting the shit' on these groups.
> Impossible to search until things like DejaNews came along
I'll admit, centralized Search as a feature is something that was sorely missing.
FAQs were created to try and mitigate common questions, but you're still depending on one person to maintain all of it, and this is before Wiki software.
I think you're right, but the point is that before web forums ever existed, Usenet was a very popular application on the Internet. To leave it out of a snapshot of 1996 is a big omission.
>Usenet even allows noting threads, blacklisting users, etc. But not controlled by any single company...
Because it relied on third party clients, which have more or less been replaced by everything being done in the browser and the closed black box that is a "website".
Although I suppose you could still do that with a site which provides an API, or some kind of official set of browser plugins but the experience probably wouldn't be the same.
I had a routine. I would go online and start or continue a big download using some downloader tool. I don't recall when continuing a download over ftp and http became a thing, but it was a big improvement when your connection dropped out once an hour and you couldn't download more than a few megabytes in that time. The download could be a game or a new netscape or mcafee version (mcafee had a backdoor on their ftp that let me download the full version). I also remember downloading 3ds max 1.0 some time in 1996 or 1997, all 100 mb of it, at 5 kb per second. Then while the download was running i would surf the web, with images disabled ofcourse. Start from yahoo's directory and follow new links, which led to more links, which led to more links. I didn't really visit the same sites all that often, it was the newness that interested. Surfing wasn't visiting the same 5 sites in a round robin pattern, it was like tracing a path through wikipedia, but without wikipedia. There were a lot more webpages with wikipedia-like content, or so it seems in retrospect.
The first site i recall visiting on a daily basis was slashdot, to which i immediately developed an addiction. But that was 1997, not 1996. I also started university in 1997, and would hang out in the computer class to surf at megabit speeds, which felt like what happened when picard said 'engage'. Ofcourse, webpages were measured in kilobytes, not megabytes, so at the network speeds of the university I was typically gated by the speed of the web server on the other end.
I frequented usenet a lot, but just to read, not to post. Irc didn't interest me. I only started chatting when icq showed up, which led to my first online friend, a very kind south african girl, who I ended up visiting in the late 90's. I have a hard time imagining that scenario on the modern web.
I miss the old internet, but I would miss the new internet as well. If only we could have both.
I was the same but rather than 3ds Max I downloaded Bryce 3D. I spent so much time planning out and rendering what seemed like amazing landscapes. Oh those were the days.
I found quite a bit to do on the web in 1996, I was getting online with a UNIX machine and a modem. No mention of USENET or IRC in this article? You could check webcams like the coffee pot webcam [1], finger the coke machine [2], and telnet into your university's CS lab.
I don't even know how much time I spent on IRC (dalnet) and when I discovered my local ISP had a Quake server it was huge!
We used to play Duke Nukem or Doom 1 vs 1 via a direct dialup connection, but playing agains 20 other guys on a Quakeworld server was just something else. The server was so badly run that every now and then something would happen to it that we used to be able to outrun our own rockets. I shot myself in the back with my own rockets many, many times.
I don't know how I even managed to graduate from high school really.
Hah, this. I thought it was pure magic being able to play Doom with a person not the the same room/house (we had a LAN setup for playing against people in different rooms), but it was so laggy.
I remember getting lost on hornet.org somewhere around this time frame, impressed by so much free music (if a bit cheesy by today's standards). There was plenty to do, if you knew where to look, and like others have said: IRC/Usenet were helpful to that end. Local BBSs were still around but starting to fade, but some (WorldGroup) had the capability to serve as Usenet readers or IRC clients for machines that didn't have their own installed.
Gosh, I think I still have an archive of MODs, S3Ms, and others somewhere on a backup drive.
This article does offer a window into the life of the average person who saw little use in the Internet, either by lack of curiosity or the walled gardens of AOL. I think it should also serve as a warning to us to keep the Internet open.
The first startup I joined, in 1995, was GolfWeb[1] which was an online magazine about Golf. It was a bit early :-). Although earlier that year I had shown my inlaws the "Internet" using HotJava and they were amazed that I could get data from Brazil in real time like that. Like others here though the "internet" for me was largely email, ftp, and netnews (aka usenet). That net still exists, sort of like cosmic background radiation, but its there.
I always think about all the time I wasted on IRC or playing Doom/Quake/Duke Nukem back then or building crappy sites on Geocities.
I always think if only 15 year old me had looked instead in to trying to make money off the internet back then...
I remember reading back then that you could put up an adult website with 20 images, add Adultcheck (some of you have to remember that) to it and just lay back and count the money. Of course, I was much more innocent back then...
Big UNIX systems with either black and white huge monitors (the ones which were already outdated, and thus free), or in some cases (on the oldest systems), or huge color trinitrons (Indy, Crimson, Suns, and my P90-based Linux workstation in my dorm).
Pervasive IM from 1992 onward (IRC + screen), and then Zephyr at MIT. Great filesharing via AFS (huge overhead to run, but once set up, better than even Dropbox is today). USENET.