90's internet vs modern internet

JGStonedRaider said:
This ^^^

I remember leaving my PC untouched for 2.5 days just so i could download a Tool Music video....which was unfortunate as 2 days in we had a power cut :(

My parents line was so bad, that when my friends had a solid50-56k I was getting anywhere between 18-33k....1.15 hrs to download a single Mp3...

Happy happy memories...:)
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You obviously didn't use Download Accelerator Plus!
 
bazaarboy said:
People are nostalgic of the old Internet??
A case of selective amnesia maybe lol
Modern web technology is a true technological achievement and if you're disillusioned with it, you're doing it wrong
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It is different though.

Back then, the web was a hobby more than anything else, now it is an essential tool. Back then if I wanted to read up on something I'd hit up my encyclopaedia, now it's much quicker to ask Wikipedia or Google. When you wanted to contact a friend or relative, you'd send a letter instead of loading up email or Facebook.
 
I started on a 486 with Win 3.1 and CompuServe on a 2400 baud modem.

I'm now running a Quad Core CPU, a 64-bit Windows 7 and 60Mbps Cable.

NetScape was great and all, but I'm happier now :p
 
Van Hellseek said:
So which do you prefer?

- The days of angelfire websites, guestbooks, HTML chatrooms, Lycos/altavista, noisey modems

or

- Troll-culture, commercial websites, awesome web software, blogs, facebook etc...


I miss the old days tbh. Despite the limitations it was just basically more fun.
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trolling on the internet was already occurring before even the invention of the web...
 
ubersonic said:
Ubersonic slaps Sharingan_sasuk around a bit with a large trout




I think the most dramatic/rapid change to the internet over the years was the switch from BBS to the WWW as the method of navigating the internet.
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Never used BBS to access the net, was a shell account and command line unix to start with then WinSock and Mosaic on Windows for Workgroups 3.11 :)
 
Fusion said:
Aye, hoping you avoided the dreaded "buffer under run" and created a coaster.

Then came the ultimate enhancement, burnproof writers with 8mb of cache- never a dud again!
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Memories!!!

Adaptec EZ CD Creator on my Yamaha CDR400t SCSI 4x writer - the SPEEEEEEED!!!

Yesterday I was copying files to my 32GB USB 3.0 flash drive at about 60MB/sec - that would be the equiv of writing a 650MB CD in under 11 seconds :O
 
I actually worry for trolls. They fascinate me, how desperate and crap must your life be that the only way for you to get kicks and entertain yourself is to annoy people on the internet. It's pure cowardice.
 
Nah, the internet in the mid 90s was naff. It took ages to load things, content was dodgy home-made sites with vile colour schemes and animated GIFs, costs were high and it tied up your telephone line.

The worst thing was if you did try and use a corporate site, it would be the product of some hyper-nerd's ego trip and take forever to load his e-peen stroking exercise.

70 meg connection, Firefox and Adblock anytime...
 
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I am nostalgic for how the internet used to be, but there is little doubt that it's 'better' today.

How about Splatterball? Does anyone remember that? ;)
 
Generally the internet is far superior than it used to be. The only saving graces I can think of for 90s internet are as follows:

-People were mostly paying by the minute so online time wasn't wasted. You'd arrange to meet up to play games online at x o'clock rather than everyone just idling. Games would start within minutes rather than endless prewar.
-Heightened sense of elitism from using dodgy 0800s (or even legal ones like xstream coupled with custom dialling software to hammer it multiple times a second over ISDN) and non-mainstream methods of software acquisition
-The UK still had its own scene for the game Quakeworld
-It promoted more face-to-face contact due to the poor technology. i.e. you'd get to know people online and then meet up because it made trading files much easier, better gaming etc. Nowadays every tom, dick and harriet has broadband so the benefits of meeting in person are reduced (especially with video streaming / VOIP etc).
-Everything was new so you got a sense of wonderment/achievement from finding a great website, whether that be free pr0n, gaming news, an interesting column (the term 'blog' wasn't yet widely used) etc
-Generally speaking most of the people you came into contact with were serious about a shared interest you had. You'd meet gaming people in gaming communities, PC enthusiasts on technology forums etc. Nowadays most communities are more diverse (these forums being a case in point) so you can never really be sure how serious people are in terms of whether they are 'into' your chosen subject matter as you are. In some ways this is a good thing (bringing you into contact with a wider audience) but it can dilute the experience somewhat.

Somebody used the word "esoteric" earlier and that was a good way to describe it, you'd sit there thinking you were the ****ing bomb because you were listening to mp3s (the average man on the street wouldn't have a clue what they were) while downloading the latest game/movie (that hadn't been released over here) via some protocol that even the self-professed w4r3z kings had never heard of never mind got access to, on a completely free connection while everyone else was paying by the minute. Meanwhile you'd be using some spammy IRC script to announce to everyone how you were downloading at 15k/sec and they'd all be bowing down at how elite you were. Or something.

Nowadays the tables have turned and I'm probably seen as a weirdo for buying music on CDs :)
 
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HangTime ... You sound a bit like the kinda person that floated in the circles I did in the early/mid 90's. Especially mention of 0800 numbers. I seem to remember Hawaii, Trinidad and South Africa were popular destinations at one time.
 
HangTime said:
-Heightened sense of elitism from using dodgy 0800s (or even legal ones like xstream coupled with custom dialling software to hammer it multiple times a second over ISDN) and non-mainstream methods of software acquisition
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Come on let us in on your secret. How did you get away without paying for the phone calls and what are 0800 isps?

I remember the sense of elitism when I got an ISDN connection. Back then you'd go onto a Quake 2 server and probably only 2-3 people in the game were on ISDN everyone else 56k. It was great being called an 'ISDN freak' and all the other negative comments because an ISDN connection gave you a huge advanatge.
 
magick said:
Come on let us in on your secret. How did you get away without paying for the phone calls and what are 0800 isps?
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0800 isps are what they sound like, providers that used a freecall (typically 0800 prefix) number so you wouldn't pay by the minute.

Basically in the late 90s before all the mainstream flat rate services took off (starting with BT free weekends) there were some dodgy BT Internet accounts floating around, then a few providers started offering legit services but of course there would be hacked passwords etc doing the rounds. Also one quickly discovered that certain IP ranges on the BT free weekend often didn't cut you off after 2hrs like they were supposed to - if your hostname was of the format "host62-x-x-x.btinternet.com" you had a good chance of not getting booted (quite sad I can remember this I suppose!). So at 10mins to midnight on Sunday you'd redial as many times as required to get on that host. Then there would be the anxious wait to 01:50 to see if you'd stay online before calling it a night, downloads chugging away. Slowly throughout the monday people would drop off, but you'd get the odd lucky sod staying online for days. Other interesting vagaries of the system included the fact that despite BT prohibiting the use of dual-channel ISDN on the free weekend service, foolishly they'd only blocked multilink on the published ISDN number. If you dialled the v90/k56 modem number, it would still work on ISDN, and multilink was permitted!

There were even some really crazy ass ideas being introduced, like this company X-stream released a freecall isp using some custom software to display adverts and limit how many dial attempts you could use (it was massively oversubscribed). But it was trivial to just take the number out and manually create your own dialup connection using some utility to spam redial. Needless to say they didn't last very long, nor did ISPs like ezsurf and RedHotAnt that offered LIFETIME (or at least a year) unlimited access for a flat fee of say £25-£50. Essentially my interpretation is there was a MASSIVE flaw in market research they did, they looked at what the average amount of time people spent online was, it was maybe 5hrs per week. But the reason it was only 5hrs per week was because people had to pay by the minute! If you offered a free service, you'd instantly attract all the heavy users. Bear in mind this was dialup days i.e. a single channel ISDN could download about 500MB/day. So obviously you'd leave it downloading 24/7 to pull down stuff, it wasn't like today where people have connections capable of pulling down anything they want in under an hour.

Another 'scam' some people I knew in London pulled was there was this telco that didn't charge for local calls up to 10mins in length. So they'd tracked down an ISP (Nildram) that has a published localrate number and also offered static IP. Then one of the guys wrote a program to automatically redial the ISDN after 09:50 or so. Because ISDN reconnects so fast, and because they had static IPs, this basically meant that they could stay 'permanently' connected to 128k ISDN save for a couple of seconds of downtime every 10mins. They wouldn't even timeout from IRC etc because they'd come back online with the same IP before any timeout period.
 
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