Internet nostalgia

It did feel endearingly DIY once but, while it's fun to poke your head into a sod house or miner's shack, I don't really want to live there.

― M. White (Miguelito), Thursday, July 14, 2005 10:19 PM (5 years ago) Bookmark

lol

lol at yahoo starting out as "jerry's guide to the world wide web"

tho tbf i guess "jerry's guide" no more unlikely than "craigslist"

does anyone else remember this place?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebChat_Broadcasting_System

mirsky's worst of the web

mirsky's or another "worst" site linking to a mall restaurant that had its own website. how ridiculous!

http://blogs.sfweekly.com/shookdown/hamsterdance.jpg

^^^ in retrospect a pioneer in how people use the internet today

http://i637.photobucket.com/albums/uu92/damien_stone/Ukoad3.jpg

This is my page .......

WELCOME TO MY HOME PAGE !!!!!!!!!

I KISS YOU !!!!!

I have in front of me a copy of 'The Internet Directory', a 700+ page book published in 1994. It has two pages about the WWW.

Also from 1994, 'The Whole Internet - User's Guide & Catalog'. 538 pages, and 35 pages on the WWW.

:30 second mark here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yl8a2RkjRpU

Unlike most of you, I first encountered the internet as an adult, roughly aged 40. I had just been hired as a technical writer for a high tech company and it was early 1994. My wife was a librarian and she had already attended talks about how the internet was the coming thing, and she'd spoken with me about it, but at work I became familiar with it.

I'm not kidding when I say I was exposed to Mosaic within a few months of its introduction. First I'd ever heard of CERN. The software engineers were very excited about it.

I recall being shown some web pages, too. They were mostly the "personal" pages of other techies at work, with long lists of links to their favorite sites, like NOAA and various university computer programs, with maybe a poorly digitized, low res photo of the techie embedded on the page, and a simple HTML text about the page's owner.

My first reaction was, if this is the WWW, I don't see where this is such hot shit stuff. More like a clunky toy for tech heads.

I swear that within months of my first seeing the web, one of the software engineers got in trouble for downloading pr0n to his company workstation and showing it to all the other engineers who came into his office.

As for nostalgia for that version of the web, I have none. I do sometimes hate on how commercialized it all is now, but that's just me bitching and moaning about the world, not really serious.

I was an adult as well, and in the fortuitous position of being at university. Still it took our Communications Networks lecturer saying "You're at university. While you're here, you have a free e-mail address and free Internet access. Use it, because in the outside world people have to pay and right now it's very expensive." before I looked into it seriously. But once I was hooked I became a bit of a missionary about it. This brought up the first real problem of the early WWW - I remember saying to a sceptical housemate "yeah, you can find anything", and him writing out a list of not particularly obscure stuff, and saying "OK then snoball, find this stuff", which I more or less failed to do.

Actually the university even supplied students with a small amount of personal webspace, so I could have been sitting here in a rocking chair on the porch saying "hmmm yes, youngster, before you were even a 1% complete in your papa's progress bar, I had my own personal webpage...". Except I can't because I didn't use it, except for a single assignment where the the text had to be published online. Excuse me... (snoball jumps into time machine and goes back to 1994 to slap some sense into 20yr old snoball)

Anyone remember this thing?

http://macarlo.com/images/hotdog6w2kanim.gif

(I actually worked for them for a little bit in 1999)

When Napster came out, I had this whole contraption set up where I had a cord coming out of the headphone jack on my work computer's keyboard, going into an adaptor and going into my mic input on my Sony portable jambox. With this, I would tape songs off of the Internet It was the only way I could think of to get stuff like the Foo Fighters' version of "Baker Street" or the 12" version of "The Glamorous Life" back to the house.

Later, I figured out how to save them to my office's network drive. I was lucky because my employer had just got a CD burner for one of the studios. We were only supposed to use it to burn CDs for clients, but I would sneak in there after hours to burn the downloads onto a CD in real time. Most of my tracks from that era has about a 1-2 sec. lead time because I'd hit record and then stretch over to the computer to hit the space bar to play.

My dad downloaded and taped a bunch of Harry Potter audio books for his car in that manner as recently as last year.

so awesome

Original video on this thread isn't loading for me, keeps stalling and buffering, just like 1995.

Not v. nostalgic for that time, tbh. You could see how it would eventually be immense in theory, but the practice was dial-up, empty chatrooms with people going "hi!" and "HI!! :-)" to each other and Netscape mail choking on Sinister.

Course now we're here and it's shonky 3G, stupid hashtags and iPhone Mail choking on Amazon receipts.

http://www.phreedom.org/cyberpunk-style-guide/

http://web.archive.org/web/19961017235908/http://www2.yahoo.com/

http://web.archive.org/web/19990117032727/http://www.google.com/

http://web.archive.org/web/19961224025757/http://pitchfork.com/

anybody remember the company that would pay you to surf the web, i.e. you would install their program and watch their ads while surfing and they'd send you a check?

also, FTPs

LOLLLLL @ pitchfork.com

i worked dial-up Internet tech support in 99/00 and got to the point I could troubleshoot connection problems by listening to the modem noise:

"Hold the phone up to the modem"
"skrrrrrrrrch-bing-bong-bing-bong-bing-bong-bing-bong-xxxzsxzxszzzzzzsssxxx"
"OK, go into My Computer / Control Panel...."

by the way, I am very pleased to note that not only have animated gifs lived on in web 2.0, they are undergoing a renaissance of sorts in fact

a world without gifs is a deeply impoverished world

massively impressed by herb albert's modem listening diagnostic skills!

yeah, that's hero-level

Haha I used to do modem-noise diagnostics too. *embarassed*. Also had endless strings of DNS addresses memorised. Ah, helpdesk days. I do not miss you and your PEBKACs.

Haha yes, I totally got to bust out PEBKAC at a wedding luncheon, and no one had ever heard it. (My mom-in-law was trying to claim she could not open an MP3 because her husband's computer "doesn't have enough RAM," which...was...not true. It turns out she'd never tried to open it.)

With her it's mostly just PE
in general
in ever part of life
a problem exists.

ANd, that 'quip' was my most successful moment in Sept. 2010. It was a great month!

remember when browsers supported blinking text? now u gotta do that shit in javascript

wizard jon fucking loves the blinky text

xxxpost yeah, I was hardcore. advanced technical knowledge soon rendered totally worthless. had a massive celebration when I quit that job and moved on to Web Dev

Bloody marquee tag...

Personal home pages with ENORMOUS 3" font!

Every webpage with grey background!

playing Everquest and dinner's on the table. "MOM! i can't just pause it! you don't understand. there are people DEPENDING on me!"

i'm sure that happens all the time even now, but EVERQUEST!

Bondage and leather people outnumbering norms 5 to 1.

Old Man Murray.

Before MP3s took off, amassing MIDIs of popular songs.

Once MP3s took off, Audiogalaxy.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ate_my_balls

http://flamesgif.com/archive/ate_my_balls/img/ba01.jpg

Ate my balls was an early example of an Internet meme. In the late 1990s, some web pages were created to depict a particular celebrity or fictional character's relish for eating testicles. Often, the site would consist of a humorous story or comic featuring edited photos about the titular individual eating testicles. The photo editing was often crude, a reflection of the state of software at the time.

A compendious repository of old internet memes.

Oh god frog in a blender I remember that one from my days on nightshift on an ISP helpdesk.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pvz8cTuleG0

Related:

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

One of the student workers I know regarding this:

http://www2.warnerbros.com/spacejam/movie/jam.htm

"Good god. I didn't know websites were this ugly in 1996."

Oh, poor innocent.

That looks significantly nicer than the ANSI art from my BBS.