Do You Ever Miss The "Old" Internet

I'm sorry, I've just read that back and I sound like a douche.

Oh wait, I have

*spits*

xpost

Yeah, Gopher. At one point, I think that I thought that the entire worldnet was routed through the University of Minnesota.

I have been *ahem* browsing through GTA:SA walkthroughs lately, and let me tell you something: ASCII artwork is alive and well.

Remember when there was a quantifiable amount of web pages such that a "Worst of" page could actually work?

I still remember launching NCSA Mosaic in 1990 or so and seeing "Here's what's new on the Web this week"

*god, just fell into a flashback vortex from hell*

I was a "webmaster" for about 4 months in 1995, queen of the change-all-grey-screens-to-white and table formatting. It felt good. Then the job ended, classes began again, and my html skills became obsolete, quickly. I have a feeling I could still make an awesome straight-up mosaic page from memory though.

hahaha - "new on the web" ! xpost

I recall that a girl that was hitting on me decided to use her feminine wiles and teach me how to make my logout flash some text on the screen until the next person logged in (OOOHHH!). How exactly this was supposed to get me to bed her, I'm not sure, but my choice of "SODOMIZE THE DEAD!" (I was on a big Scraping Foetus Off The Wheel kick at the time) ended her infatuation pretty quickly.

At the time (1993?) we all thought the VAX system was about the coolest thing ever. Apparently, it wasn't.

But I miss the intellectual level of general board discussion. Or maybe I'm just nostalgic and romanticising the past. Most people I know from the 'net were affiliated with universities. I'm such an elitist snob. I suppose many Internet users in '93 were just as childish and prone to flaming as the general user now, but I still harbour a suspicion that Internet discourse was more thoughtful before the time when any ole racist, illiterate b00b with an aohell account could spew on the Internet.

ihttps://web.interchange.ubc.ca/DirCMSSiteContent/main/support/dialup/setup/pc/winsock.gif

And as for usenet, I still pop on there now and again - up until fairly recently aus.culture.gothic was alive and well and reasonably busy but somehow, LJ waylaid most of the posters into LJ communities etc instead. Shame really. We had a newsgroup with no spamming and little trolling (the aus hierarchy never got the reams of spam shit that the alt ones did).

http://www.internetweekly.org/llarrow/images/trumpset.gif

Indeed - instead back then the annoying users were all the hardcore geek math/engineer/compsci wankers at uni (always all guys) who bignoted themselves with arcane knowlegde about terminally dull shit like sci fi programs, and had fights about Emacs vs Vi as if it was life or death, snorting with laughter at anyone who dared to use windows.

I dont miss THOSE assholes at all.

At the time I found it completely embarassing and never told anyone about it, but now i find it pretty funny

I understand the exponential growth in the quantity of useful content, etc., but I think a lot of the graphics, esp. on web sites, are extraneous and just slow things down. Another reason I like ILX.
And Melinda OTM above re: the general level of discourse then vs. now.

I'm still on dialup (at least from home) and my primary e-mail account has been text-only on a unix box since '96.

Yep. 'Cause there's never any superfluous graphics on ILX... Oh wait

:-)

"Could you tell us a little about jPod, the novel you’re currently working on?

It's about people who work in game design, which is a lot of my friends here in Vancouver. It's a sequel to Microserfs but different. Tech is such a different place ten years later."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y0pPfyYtiBc

This has nothing to do with the Internet as is known today (although it did start in 1969); it's about the much older SF prediction of a whole bunch of terminals hooked up to one large central computer.

uh ... thanks 4 the tip

christine green leafy dragon indigo

yeah, the new animal collective's leaked

I remember my buddy having Prodigy back in, I think, 1994 or so. I was blown away when he showed me how he can "chat" with people from around the US. I also remember they charged by the minute, so we couldn't stay on for too long, lol.

Hey, I've been here for ages....

I went to Youtube to find actual '69-early Seventies Internet footage (some exists) and didn't find any, but I did find this:
<object width="480" height="385"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/7duyl0ZZ5BQ&hl=en_US&fs=1&";></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/7duyl0ZZ5BQ&hl=en_US&fs=1&"; type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="480" height="385"></embed></object>

I got in mondo trouble with my parents for running up the Prodigy bill roleplaying on the teen boards. Just after that I remember the Sierra/Leisure Suit Larry online service, playing poker as an 'adult' and having 'women' flirt with me.

Kind of miss the days of hunting for the most awesome free webserver (Geocities vs. the one in Hong Kong vs. etc.) and building shitty webpages with gif backgrounds @ age 12-13.

...I've been here for ages, but I still can manage to screw up while posting. Try this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7duyl0ZZ5BQ

http://www.atarimagazines.com/compute/issue135/96_The_online_games_peo.php

Computers were so much more exciting back then. Every new processor meriting a round of magazine covers, late-night talk shows devoted to how to make the Internet work better, etc.

oh man, dial-upppppppppppppppp

"i tried to call you, but i kept getting a busy signal"
"sorry, i was on the internet"

On a related note, this is all that remains of the wonderful computer oral history list I lurked on for 10+ years. (The link to later archives is dead.)

i miss websites that were readable

Why do you think you are here?

the old-school, uncluttered layout iirc

I miss back when if you googled an obscure album you'd get some geocities dude's page about it instead of six thousand websites that want to sell you a copy. but don't actually have a copy.

^^^^

I don't miss an entire university campus connected to the internet through a pair of 128K ISDN lines.

I miss the old modem dialling up tone (I remember mine PRECISELY because my connection would time out every half hour, hence hearing it like eight times a day), it was weird to hear one recently and feel a kind of nostalgia for something that's actually so recent.

I miss that one shade of grey that seemed to be the default for every amateur website. also miss netscape.

*default background color

also miss the < blink > tag and the < marquee > tag

old modem dialling up tone

schpung schpung

the other day for some reason i really wanted to see nice images of all the toys and vehicles from the mid-1980s care bear line (the small action figure size). did some googling for a few minutes, confident i would quickly find some collector nut's exhaustive resource dedicated to these toys, the different years of the line, how there's a rare version of this one guy with blue hair by mistake, maybe scans of toys r us newspaper circulars..... nothing! or rather, such pages are obviously out there, but unfindable: page after page of search results is e-shopping, mostly for present-day care bear items. it is so, so much harder these days to find sites that are not in some way selling you something, or robotically generated clones of sites trying to sell you something.

oh wait i guess this is the current thread for this: Internet nostalgia

I remember the "old" internet. I worked in high tech around the time that Netscape came out and the majority of pages on the web were the 'personal' pages of software and hardware engineers. The web was a very puny, flat and dull place at first. Now it is a monstrous place, in every sense of that word. But, what can you do? (shrugs)