90's internet vs modern internet

You missed one other type of internet - The conversion :p

I enjoyed the build up of the modern age of internet. When I was a teen I would buy, sell, manage and create websites. Stuff like Proxies, image hosts, forums etc. These were all up and coming, and it was really good to make some easy cash back then. Now it's been flooded, and you really need to get creative to make some money. I guess that's both a good and bad thing :p
 
Number_25 said:
There were trolls on GeoCities Chat.
Click to expand...

Yeah this. There are 2 types of trolls. The old fashioned type were the ones who would annoy people en masse by posting controversial topics on a bulletin board just to get attention. Nothing personal. These people normally got banned after a few posts. The nowaday troll appears on the likes of Facebook, Youtube and deviantART, and they attack individuals. so it's taken a lot more personally.

God I hated pop-up ads back then, although I became a Mozilla user from 2002, so I saw the early demise of pop-ups, where Internet Exploder users were 4 years late. Love tabbed browsing too.

The 2 things I don't like about the net nowadays is the high system requirements to view Flash/HTML5 sites and the fact that everything is heading towards Facebook.
 
I'm going to stick my neck out with this one but something else I miss is to do with meeting women off the internet. Even 10 years ago if you got chatting to a girl who was local, it was on the cards straight away for you to meet up just because of the novelty that you had got chatting to someone who lived near to you. Whereas now, people will sit at home chatting on facebook to people that they work with. It's just another form of communication
 
The old days were fun but I have no rose tinted specs about how bad things were.

Bought a product with dodgy drivers? Tough
Got a problem with some software? Good luck finding any help with it.
Disconnected in the middle of a game because someone picked up the phone? Ha-ha.
Want to download a file bigger than 40MB but your ISP chucks you off after 2 hours? Better download GetRight!

The old days were fun because things were so bad. The lengths you would go to for a lower ping (DiamondMax 56e modem anyone?) without giving in and buying ISDN to become an LPB...
 
I think the pros of the modern internet far outweigh the cons.

I think most of us would have a seizure if our PCs were suddenly back on 56k and we were all back on mIRC or ICQ.

I know i would.
 
Yamahahahahaha said:
Want to download a file bigger than 40MB but your ISP chucks you off after 2 hours? Better download GetRight!
Click to expand...

Used to play Everquest on BTs service that cut you off after 90mins forcing you to reconnect. We had to time raids to allow people time to log off and on again to avoid disconnects. Was quite amusing at the time but I certainly don't miss it!
 
Efour2 said:
I think the pros of the modern internet far outweigh the cons.

I think most of us would have a seizure if our PCs were suddenly back on 56k and we were all back on mIRC or ICQ.

I know i would.
Click to expand...


The thought of 56k is just too much for me. I remember there would be all kinds of tricks like changing MTU values or using internet accelerators to try and gain about 0.1 of a Kb/s or so and you would be totally delighted if a file took 59min to download instead of 60min. ISDN was the holy grail.
 
Rich_L said:
Old internet was rubbish, in the same way that you go back and play old retro games and realise that once the novelty value wears off, that they are often a bit rubbish too.
Click to expand...

By that you of course mean that older classic games were better, as they had playability etc.

Sorry old games were awesome, I was playing cannon fodder on my Amiga 1200 yesterday, amazeballs
 
I miss the 90's internet. Obviously, some of the modern internet is very handy, but I miss the old days, IRC especially. I know IRC is still around, but it doesn't feel the same any more. Used to love having scripts set up to log me out about 15 seconds before my modem dropped my connection because I'd been online for 2 hours, then a script to get everything back up an running again.

Or as mentioned, using download accelerators to try and increase your download speed by a few hundred bps. Everything was just that little bit more challenging to get things done, which was annoying at the time, but it was so much more fun than it is now.

ISDN was a godsend when I got that installed. God knows how I convinced my parents to pay for it as I was only around 14 at the time we got it installed I think, and my parents have no idea about that sort of thing, and still don't.
 
A time when a Jpeg wallpaper took 10 seconds to load and I didn't get £70~ every quarter from adsense?

I choose the modern web!
 
I can't say I miss it, but do have plenty of memories...

I was first using Compuserve for internet access which my Dad bought. I remember it costed a fortune to use because you got charged a hefty telephone charge and then you were also charged per minute of usage by Compuserve too. It was a good few years before flat rate access and freephone dial up numbers were introduced, so shows what a long way its come.

There was a lot more reliance on chat based services, probably because aside from forums and newsgroups & irc, they were really the only communication. I remember that ICQ was massive and you would always get people from around the world who just wanted to chat with you because you were from a different country... can't say that happens these days!

Most websites were absolute pants!
There were so many poor quality HTML websites which everybody made, complete with every animated .gif under the sun. Then along came frames and everything had frames all over it. More professional websites tended to be in Flash and I'm still not a huge fan of it to this day.
 
Late 90's internet was great, i spent 90% of my college time abusing the internet connection and filling Zip disks with stuff from the web.
 
I miss noisy modems.

And I hate modern 'Social Networking' sites.

But today's internet is far better, and much more useful. The internet now is just an extension of the OS, it's all so seamless.
 
cyberchat and noisy modems were awesome!

also downloading a porn picture that took a minute to get and a 1mb low quality porno in about 30 minutes!!
 
Last edited:
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom