How did the internet look like when it was just a new thing?
Asked by
Sneki95 (
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October 11th, 2016
Me being quite young, I basically “grew up” in the internet era.
However, some of you Jellies are way older than me and surely remember when the internet was in the infant stage.
How did it look like back then? What did people think of it back in the 90s?
It surely changed a lot since then, but how did it change in your opinion? Was it better back then, when it was just a novelty, or now, when it is a part of everyday life?
How much did it change your reality and life when you logged in?
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It looked “like this”>http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html
This is literally the first website ever made.
When I first got on using the international University system communication consoles at Lund University, Sweden in about 1984, it was a black screen with a yellow blinking cursor in the upper left hand corner. We were connected via phone modems using dial-up to an international network used by the world’s universities to communicate and share scientific information. You actually had to lay the receiver of a phone upon a cradle on a modem to initiate contact. Then dial the number to whom you wished to communicate with and type in the command to initiate the call in DOS. Comms were in text only. I think we had the ability on some consoles to change the text color from yellow to light blue, Commands were done using DOS.
It was incredibly amazing to be able to communicate freely at anytime for as long as you wanted with an old friend sitting at another university console in California or New York. And it didn’t cost a thing. A three minute station-to-station phone call from Sweden to the US at the time ran about $10 per minute (about $25 in today’s money, or 2,782.38 Serbian Dinars per minute).
All thanks to Tim Berners-Lee
@Espiritus_Corvus , thank you for that flashback of the blinking cursor in the upper left. I could make a cup of tea, smoke a couple of cigarettes while waiting for connections to come through. Fun days.
It would have been around 1997 when I first went online.
There was no Google. There were many competing search engines, and meta-search engines that combined other search engines.
Websites were designed to fit lower resolution monitors—usually 800×640 if I remember right.
Netscape Navigator was the browser of choice.
If there was any video streaming, it was extremely low resolution—and usually just short clips.
Websites were designed with frames—usually one for the menu on the left, and another for the banner.
File sharing was done through Usenet.
IRC was the protocol of choice for online chat.
It was less homogenised, less centralised, and less monopolised by a few big corporations. It felt more like exploring uncharted territory.
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