I’ve been exploring the fediverse and subbing and posting all over the damn place. Realizing lemmy can federate with kbin blew my mind. Not to mention the possibility of turning my old laptop into a personal server to host my own instance. Is this what it felt like to discover how the internet worked in the 90s?
Discovering the internet in the '90s was… different. Let me see if I can paint a picture for you.
Initially, many people used dial-up BBSes to get their fix of “Usenet” groups… which I think may be the best analog to the “federated” communities on Lemmy/kbin and such. If you looked hard enough, you could find groups for just about anything surprisingly easily… and I do mean anything. ISPs like Prodigy, CompuServe and AOL, along with some of the more sophisticated BBSes, would all connect to each other periodically – in some cases, not necessarily by way of live continuous connections – and the groups that the service provider had chosen to subscribe to would be mirrored to their server.
Those dial-up modems eventually topped out at 56Kbps – long before blazing fast 384Kbps DSL became a thing – and you had to disconnect if Mom or Dad needed to make a phone call. Worse, if they were expecting a phone call, you just had to stay off until they gave you leave to get back on… but really, the “addiction” phase of the internet hadn’t even kicked in yet, so that just meant you went and did something non-internet related, like ride a bike or watch a VHS video tape – or just whatever happened to be on TV. (Uh-huh… I can already feel you shuddering at the very thought of actually disconnecting for a while…)
The entire concept of a “web browser” was brand spanking new; my first exposure to a web browser was the AOL browser. It… wasn’t great. Discovering Netscape Navigator (the predecessor to Firefox) was a night-and-day difference… way better at pretty much everything. Geocities, Ask Jeeves, Yahoo… all the things were at your fingertips, at that point.
But really, once TCP/IP and “web browsing” became a thing, the nature of the internet has remained relatively static in some very significant ways, since. The speeds cranked up periodically, and the websites have changed from time to time, JavaScript and stylesheets were added to the mix, and the most popular web browser has changed several times… but the fundamentals are still much the same. If you dropped late-'90s-me in front of any web browser today, I’d have to learn which websites have replaced the ones I used to know… but that would essentially be the full extent of the browser learning curve. I suppose it might also take me a moment to grok that all of my favorite newsgroups have been entirely replaced by web-browser-accessible systems at this point… but in the end, I’m pretty sure that I’d quickly get how that makes far more sense from an end-user usability standpoint.
So yes… many things have changed. And a few things haven’t.
Good summary, but I would add the history of BBS in the beginning :) I “grew up online” with a 2400 Baud (I know I know, luxury vs. the self-built 90 Baud acoustic couplers some had) internal Express slot modem, Telix as a first terminal program and a print-out (9-needle printer of course) of all local BBSes numbers, which I then proceeded to test out. I found a bunch of home-installed BBSes which had only a single port (probably the parent’s phone line) to dial in, and where you would instantly be greeted by “The Sysop wants to chat with you”, because there was an enthusiastic kid sitting at the computer, being super happy that someone had finally dialed in to “their BBS” :D
Then eventually I ended up using the three popular BBSes (which we also called mailboxes) of my hometown, we had real life meetings in pubs for beer and sweet baguettes or Schnitzels, made a bunch of nerd friends and enjoyed life. We had email & usenet, and eventually, the first time I dialed into the WWW, it was through a routing by one of those mailboxes, using Netscape and it was a “wow” to open the colourful http://www.altavista.com :D But I used up my quota on that day and didn’t return until I entered university and ended up having only to pay for the telephone calls, but without a quota.
I hear you… but imho, you can usually only go back so far before you lose your audience. ;-)
I think my first modem was either a 1200 or a 2400 baud as well, and if we’re going back that far… I can remember logging into BBSes that turned out to be outside of my “billing exchange” or something. That meant that they weren’t technically long distance calls – so you didn’t have to add 1 and the area code when dialing – but they were nonetheless an extra charge. My dad was very annoyed with me when he got those bills. He finally made me dig into the phone book to find out which exchanges were an extra charge for our area, and I printed a list of those exchanges and posted it on the frame of my monitor. Henceforth, I was no longer allowed to call any of those exchanges. (There were still dozens of BBSes that I could call within my area.)
And of course, at some point after that, Dad went ahead and subscribed to a second phone line to the house, so that I no longer monopolized the main house line.
And yeah… Altavista, Yahoo, Ask Jeeves… I had almost forgotten how many search engines we had, back then. Your mentioning that reminds me of one of my first experiments in writing my own html files: I created a miniature bar that had a select box listing a bunch of different search engines. I could select one, type in my search term next to it and hit the Search button to immediately be redirected in the frame below the bar to that engine’s results.
Good times.
ohhh… frames in web pages, now THAT brings back memories! I had almost forgotten that on today’s framework-built websites those are no longer a thing
I lived in the sticks, when we first got the internet around 99 I never saw it go past 14k download haha. The stupid shit my friends and I did instead to entertain ourselves would probably make us youtube famous nowadays.
deleted by creator