What was the internet like in the 90's?

Just did. Utter crap results.

The Internet does seem to be a lot more Disneyfied and sanitized. That's mostly just because of all the normies and perpetually triggered trannies influencing the policies of the popular sites, most of which didn't even exist in the 90s.
There were no good search engines, so you relied on links from other sites, web rings, or even sites someone mentions on television or a newspaper. The design sucked. Think current .onion sites but with more gifs, atrocious backgrounds, and scrolling or moving text that only works in certain browsers.
Some of the 90s web is still there, but it's not easy to find given all the search engines direct you to popular sites. You find them pretty much the same way you did back in 1996.
1999 to 2007 was the golden age of the Internet. Design was getting decent, it was easy to find good information, and there were fewer people posting their food and vacation photos. Myspace and later Facebook opened the door for people who probably shouldn't be on the Internet, but it wasn't until the iPhone that things really went to shit.

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All of society feels sanitized, honestly. Everyone is cynical and depressed and no one goes outside anymore. There is no interesting pop culture being produced and the fashion hasn't changed in like 15 years when frosted tips and baggy jeans died.

Do you think we will ever see another optimistic or fun era again? I tell myself that my grandparents saw the 50s to today, that's a lot of ups and downs. But thinking that way really just makes me jealous.

>You'd run into the the same people in weird places (IRC, message boards, newsgroups, guestbooks)
>Guestbooks were a much bigger deal
>Lots of cool little websites run by average people
>Musical autists put hundreds of hours into creating and perfecting MIDI files of popular music
>It was MUCH easier to prank people both online and on the phone

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This prank call to an AOL user will make people nostalgia

youtube.com/watch?v=dTapP1yylY8

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try using a search engine besides google
i've found google is only good for those predictable results, you rarely hit anything interesting from it anymore, it's so heavily filtered and skewed these days

glorious beyond your ability to imagine

too bad you missed it

slow

'surfing the net' actually meant something. tons of good sites required you to do some deep searching because google's indexing wasnt that great then

pop ups

basic html pages

the internet was mostly an informational tool back then. it wasnt really used for entertainment until early 2000s

i remember my brother having his first computer, a windows 93 os mammoth. the sceen alone weighted more than 10 full hd tvs nowdays. to connect to internet he had to go buy some kind of cards or whatever and connect to internet via a phone line. it probably took a good minute to open internet explorer and another one to try to connect to each website every time. it was awkward as fuck really but for the time, it was the most beautiful achievement the human kind has archived. connecting people all over the world and being able from your home to send texts to someone in the other side of the world. that was just an absolute masterpiece. im glad i was born around the years of internet, you know they gonna talk about our generation that internet started in thousands years from now.

It was a lot smaller and slower. If you were into a certain subject you could conceivably keep up with all the major news and information about to the point where you wouldn't have anything else to look at on the internet that day, and you could get up and do other things.

At the same time it was an endless treasure hunt because new and amazing things were being uploaded all the time. All kinds of communities were emerging and digging into various niches and hobbies in ways they never had access to before.

Want to download subbed anime? It's possible if you try hard enough?

Play all the games you saw in magazines for free? There's this thing called emulation.

People set up tape trades of Japanese pro wrestling matches. Uploaded scans of old magazines and books that were next to impossible to find.

Hentai... Porn... everything you ever wanted.

More or less, yes. Look up CU-See-Me. And the flaming! Usenet was /b/ before moot got out of diapers, complete with constant demands everybody kill themselves.

>windows 93
Surprise kek of the day.

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you cant compare something like that. obviously when internet came out it was a unique idea that exploded to the internet it is today. like everything in this world, it obviously made progress.it took several minutes from the time you open the computer to the time you connected toa website. you will never feel that joy of having to wait a single minute on internet explorer every time you entered a website for it to load. but we never seen it that way. we thought that was the normal and it was. if it took you a minute to refresh Jow Forums you would be raging. internet will be different in 10 years like it was different 10 years ago. its how everything works, its called evolution

Can't testify first-hand because i first got the internet in 2000, and the first ISP in my country officially started operations in 1996.

I'd say there's a vast difference between the early 90's and after about 1997. If it were say, 1994, you'd either still be visitng BBSes, or you'd be on AOL, none of them being "the real internet". If you were on the actual internet you'd be using gopher or early http, 99-100% of them being only text.I doubt you'd be spending more than 15-20 minutes online a day, you'd be reading the pages while offline. You'd be communicating via mailing lists.

Flash forward just a few years, in 1997 you'd be going to actual geocities websites and seeing gifs on them. What most people remember as "90s internet".

It was so fucken slow back then. No wifi either.

It was slower but there was much more freedom and far less centralization, search engine sucked hard so once you found a good site/forum ect... You stick to it. Internet from around 2002-2007 (may be 2008) was peak and best Internet in my book. It became faster everyday, more free shit around the corner, free as fuck, communities being created left and right, early Jow Forums, meeting people IRL, early MMORPG and shieeet. The fun was endless.

And then now... normies everywhere, centralization up this hoe, spying, NSA, content being removed at a frivolous pace, people being prosecuted for homosexual jokes, self censorship everywhere ect... Safespacisation of the overall network, even online vidaya get the same treatment, everything being turned into a business tool, you're being tracked left and right, massive removal of content, iTune, Netflix, Reddit crap, Reddit. Internet looks more like an IRL mall now.

Smarphone merged the web with real life and now real life laws applies more and more to the internet. Which is a terrible thing. But it's over, the big players are established, the Far-West Internet is dead. Jow Forums is one of the last cowboy. Nostalgia fags try to migrate some shit to overlay net or mesh net but it's over, the State caught up, the normies caught up.
The more those cunt talk about MUH freedom and privacy the less actual freedom and privacy you get in the name of "your protection", lmao bitch I've been on the Internet since 1994 I don't need some old cuck to write stupid law to protect me. In some western countries there is now laws to: prevent you to visualize hateful content (this include ideological paper)s, forbid you to make hateful post (even jokes), browsing Jow Forums can be used against you in court lmao, prosecution over twitts and comments in media outlet (and I not even talking about harassement or death threat, simple stuff like "lol nigger lmao" send you straight in front of Court).

yeah whats wrong with win 93. it was great back then

>Windows 93

The rejects (You) tend to flee to their own special safe space now. But now that the normie know, they want them to die. So subreddits are closed, then websites are de-indexed by search engine, Cloudflare kick some of their clients out to protect their branding, host provider refuse to associate with some sites because it would cause a shitfest on Twitter, etc, ect. Terrible shits I tell you.

Only people with niche hobbies or advanced academical background can still experience the good old internet because the "normies" (probably (You) too) aren't sexually aroused my mathematic or beekeeping. They can't experience the self-righteous rage that makes their cock feel important when they go to tending-to-ants.com, so what happen in those communities stay there and the hungry-for-censorship normies stay fucking out.

could be 95 fuck knows its been decades ago. pretty sure it was 93 and no not the windows 93 with the hello kitty logo

>Wait 30 mins for a flash game/animation to load
>no image search engines, you need to search for "whatever gallery" and find a geocities page with images you want
>common practice to use music in websites
>190p videos where everything is so pixilated it looks censored, but it isn't
>Lots of fan pages. Nothing is localized on a single hub website like it is now.
>no SJWs
>LOL SOCIALIZING ONLINE? DONT YOU HAVE ANY REAL FRIENDS?
>pirating involves buying physical VHS tapes from a store
>Anarchists Cookbook
>Yahoo email, AOL email, or Hotmail.

90s was a wierd era.
You would use multiple search engines, since keywords for homepages were a thing, gaming search engines to get your page on top meant that most relevant results were on page 4 or 5. IRC was the most common way of getting info or books on the internet, fileservers with warez was ratio limited so you had to upload something to download something. Internet pages could range from a first graders frontpage express page, to some real master works. Welcome tunes for a page would play in glorious midi. Video hosting wasn't a real thing, but the videos you got a hold on had different players that worked. Realplayer, quick time and so on. It was chaotic, messy, but at times really fun.

Compuserve AOL Prodigy 56K Geocities Tripod Angelfire Pop Ups dogpile altavista IRC Usenet RealPlayer Warez.am Napster

This

The internet is now ruled by about half a dozen companies. It's like walking around zurich, clean but boring as fuck

I'm sad that facebook killed individual blogs. There was way more interesting shit to read about before it got centralized and inundated with ads and food/duckface posting

>Some of the 90s web is still there, but it's not easy to find given all the search engines direct you to popular sites.
have you been to wiby.me? found lots of 90s web there

Imagine everything on the internet being as slow as i.4cdn.org :^)

Haven't heard this in a long long time. Thanks for the memories user.

i can't tell if you were just 5yo at the time, or your brother told you shit you barely remember, or both
- there was no windows 93, you're either thinking of windows 3, 95, or beta versions of 95 which came out in 93 (but were never called windows 93)
- internet explorer didn't exist in 1993
- you would have had to have had a machine barely meeting win95's specs to get IE to load as slow as a minute, and a modem even older for basic pages to take a minute
>it was the most beautiful achievement the human kind has archived.
>archived

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IRC IRC IRC was in its bloom. The feeling that you're connected to many people realtime without saying a word from your mouth was something extraordinary. It is hard to imagine because now you take it for granted.

I still keep all my pirated application iso's in my irc file serve folder tree. Can't let go :(

It was far less corporate. Ebay, AOL and others were there, but not in the same way Big Tech is ever present.

Most sites were single owner passion projects and had a fun mix of coding and design talent back before web design was widely taught

Geocities and Anglefire gave people their first free websites, so there was a generation of shitty DIY sites made with WYSIWYG designers. This phenomenon hit peak obnoxiousness with Myspace giving people the tools to run glitter text over patterned backgrounds, playing Lil Kim on continuous loop.

Meeting people online for relationships was considered one step below personal ads.

Piracy was easy and widespread. Winamp was the media player of choice and the monitization of mp3s and portable media players was yet to come. The quality of pirated material varied considerably, and if you made a DVR mix the sound quality could be all over the place.

>tfw i ran a college radio station off a 486 with an 1/8th male to male cable and it blew everyone's minds.

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windows93.net

UNDERAGE BA-
>People born in the year 2000 can now legally post here.

Shit, well, to answer your question, lad, I would say that the 90s Internet was like what we have now, but with less websites, but more user-ability, if that makes sense? Basically message boards, very similar to Jow Forums were on the rage. E-mail was the primary use-case, but back in the 90s there were WAY more people using their own private e-mail clients, rather than using AOL, Yahoo, or whatever there was available now and then. YouTube was not a thing, in fact, Google was pretty weak at the time, and speaking of social media sites, the closest thing we got ended up being what would become the short-lived MySpace-ques sites that died out by 2010. Oh, but customization was on the rage. The most popular sites were definitely search engines and message boards, but any site that offered customization ended up getting nice traffic.

The downfall of all this is that Internet speeds were slow, and if you wanted to game online, you either did LAN parties, or you waited in long ques, usually filled with lag. The upside of this is that arcades still had a fighting chance and gaming in general was way more social than it is now (no, your fake-ass e-celebs putting on a persona on Twitch and YouTube do not count). Around this time video game magazines were just now facing competition from gamers who were documenting cheats, glitches, and gaming trivia online for free.

If you wanted a to run a server back in the 90s, you could, but it was way more expensive than it is now, but due to less competition, you could make WAY more money that you can now (mining aside). Oh, yeah, mining was not a thing, buts Ads were, in fact, they kept the Internet alive, however they were also far more invasive at the time. People would pay BIG money for pop-up blocker services and programs at the time.

Anonymity was preached, privacy was sacred, and people like Mister Metokur managed to stay anonymous, even now.