Early internet; 90s/early 2000s technology

Let's post internet-related images/stories/websites from the 90s or early 2000s; feeling nostalgic today

I'll start: when I first started using the internet, I didn't know about Google (or maybe it didn't even exist yet), and I used to use Altavista as my default search engine. I also remember playing a lot of dress-up games and play on Cartoon Network and Nickelodeon's websites

What did a normal surfing session look like to you in the early days of the internet?

Attached: Altavista.jpg (1024x576, 42K)

Other urls found in this thread:

jazzmess.com/
futureblues.com/
404pagefound.com/
dmoztools.net/
internetworldstats.com/emarketing.htm
districts.neocities.org/
spyware.neocities.org/
digdeeper.neocities.org/
rainheaven.neocities.org/
spacejam.com/archive/spacejam/movie/jam.htm
decidedlygrim.net/
archive.org/web/web.php
losernet.tripod.com/loser.html
pastebin.com/RhXVTEsz
twitter.com/NSFWRedditGif

My small town ISP charged me less for time-restricted Internet that I could only use after 6pm but they didn't have the tech to enforce this rule so I just connected anytime.

A "friend" of mine snitched on me but I just continued, it was all good.

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ah. A classic

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I remember when you could download mp3's directly from a webpage without fuss(audiogalaxy, I think).

I would use the internet from my school then some freeware (can't recall the name, the icon was a hatchet I think) to splice it in order to fit 3.15 diskettes.

I used like 11 for I wish you were here from Pink Floyd.

Shit was cash

oh yeah nostalgia

Old school webcrawler was great, especially with the voyeur mode where you could watch what everyone was searching for in near realtime. Pure kino.

Also I miss when every ISP included usenet access. Old usenet was so comfy.

altavista was god tier for searching beastiality and japanese school girls porn

I didn't have internet at home at the beginning, so I would go to a cyber-cafe near my house and save anime images on diskettes to bring home. I had like 5 diskettes full of pictures of Sailor Moon lol

One thing I loved about the old internet is the way you discovered websites. Since search engines weren't super common, if you found a cool website, you then could go to the little banners they had on the side or at the bottom for websites similar to that one like pic related

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Astalavista for all those warez

Yeah web rings and such were great, way more organic back before everything was advertising/consumerist driven. There was actually all sorts of different interesting content there for no other reason than that someone felt like putting it out there.

This. My ISP gave shell access too. Good times.

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It's still out there, the whole 'internet was better' thing is based on misunderstanding stats, sure fb/ig/yt take 90% of traffic, but 10% is still bigger than it was whole in 90s, niche sites still exist, who gives a fuck about 90% of pure consumers, ad companies do, fuck them, searchlores.org is still just as relevant as it used to be

I agree. It was easier to find good content and the internet just felt more varied than nowadays

I remember I used to go to this website for some reason when I was a teenager. It scared the shit out of me and probably left me traumatized

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I remember searching for porn with this particular layout of altavista.

The one thing that is fucked is search, used to be able to find niche sites easier as they were bread and butter, now it's msm being pushed by all search engines fueling the funneling to the 3-4 conglomerates aside from manipulation

it's true that they're still out there, but they're harder to reach. And the way search engines work always takes you to the same websites. It also creates this effect for people who are not very tech-savvy or who don't care about exploring the internet beyond social media. They just go to Facebook/Instagram so they all think the same way and never have to have their opinions and ideas challenged by different information

pic related is RE's website in the early 2000s. I remember going there and reading the characters' bios and save the pictures. It was pretty dope

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I love how kids' idea of the "early days of the internet" involve the WWW existing.

Go take a nap grandpa

>boohoo he's right better troll we're so young and dumb but i can't admit that

About a month ago I tried to see if I could find some really old web fiction archives and personal sites, and every fucking result for about 10 pages was Goodreads.

I miss gopher.

Gopher is only worth missing in comparison to what the web turned in to.

You understand.

searchlores.org needs an update for the concentrated internet era, not how to find more, how to filter the crap this time

what was it like before then? Tell us your stories, show us some screenshots. I'm genuinely interested

jazzmess.com/
futureblues.com/

So much of it is locked up in cancer like facebook groups and discord, relatively few people bother making their own pages now.

wow, that Cowboy Bebop website is fucking cool, man. Great find

404pagefound.com/ this site has some very old still active websites on it, but it's pretty limited. There surely must be more active old websites around, but it's still neat to take a look at them all together like that

>So much of it is locked up in cancer like facebook groups and discord
a lot of shit is on fb true, but it's not 'it', it's fucking gen z's farming likes and upvotes, which old internet didn't have

Imagine thinking some totally generic old website is "cool"
get a life

My first search engine.

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>it's fucking gen z's farming likes and upvotes, which old internet didn't have
this is pretty much it, might be elitist, who cares, but in 90s very few people were 'on the internet', 1-2% of populace with most of them with technical background, now 99% on the internet is zoomers and their grandmas on fb, the series of tubes just got something dumped on them, it's not a big truck

I posted them in the past, and I got them from here:
dmoztools.net/

internetworldstats.com/emarketing.htm
And it's not just a technical background, but you could also be sure on a degree of cultural homogeneity, and class: uppler- and middle-class western, mostly Anglo, males.

early 90s it was pretty much all technical background, first places connected to internet outside of technological institutions were universities, but computers/smartphones weren't everywhere so it was IT students that actually got to use it, still while normie internet might be 95% of current traffic, the 5% today is still a lot larger than the whole internet of 90s, just fucking hard to find as you get page after page after page of fb and instagram from google, finding rare places is algorithmically suppressed by them, they push you towards normie internet filled with their ads, why would you like anything else

>gets this angry at someone excited about something
you should get a nap

You might be interested in districts.neocities.org/ too
Found a few fun neocities sites around spyware.neocities.org/ too :
digdeeper.neocities.org/
rainheaven.neocities.org/

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pretty neat, man. Thanks

here's another relic of the internet that's still active spacejam.com/archive/spacejam/movie/jam.htm

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Ratemypoo.com

>.flv

Thanks. I hope we can rebuild the communities we had in the 90s-00s. It wouldn't require much people, just enough to sustain a constant stream of OC

I mean, sites like geocities or whatever don't require much bandwidth nowadays so couldn't they stay up with passive advertising revenue?
private websites were always fun because people took more liberty with content and being unique

When google wasn't cucked like now

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Ikr? I still have some websites with that kind of feel and I love them. This is one of them: decidedlygrim.net/

I know some sites that are basically HTMLv1 that run on solar powered SBCs.
Even my site only uses some CSS for some tags on the main body of text to stop it running so wide and to center it.

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it's not the tech they run on, it's the content that jewgle doesn't want you to see

It is pretty cool though.

i used to download songs on a website that was called something like audiofind, before napster and other p2p.

zombo.com

Compuserve
AOL
Prodigy

warez.am
acedown

dogpile
excite

tripod

retrogames
mame boards
mame.dk

usenet for free, and for those who don't know usenet was the first file share system everyone used, and the first reddit before reddit but without all the reddit awfulness
then it stopped being free, ISPs no longer offered it, and it's basically non existent in comparison to torrents and ddl now

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i fucking hate always loading and scrolling websites, give me a fucking page number so i can quickly go back in history

so, there's a geocities clone, what about live journal?

tumblr kinda sucks since its all about media and has no order besides just updates

Is it weird that this is pretty much how I remember facebook? I deleted mine in 2010 and haven't used it since.

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if you never used it again I guess it's normal. I still have mine, but I do remember this layout a lot

try archive.org/web/web.php and travel back in time to any website you want

>tfw can't remember my old bang path anymore

duckduckgo.com\!oldbang

The problem is that you can no longer share niche shit with just your corner of the Internet. It winds up on Facebook and reddit soon enough. From there the secondaries of whatever interest you have come and change it.

>what about live journal?
Make one, user. Somebody had to create Neocities, so why shouldn't you start this? You'll make hundreds of dollars.

>so why shouldn't you start this? You'll make hundreds of dollars.
This is all what is wrong with 'new internet', old internet was not about making money or profit, people made webpages because they were passionate about a subject, now fan pages get created before something can even get a fanbase, see artifact, people were making a webfanpage for this shit of a game before it even came out, unthinkable in the 90s. Fuck people who think only about $

there are some pretty fun things on neocities

meow

gopher is still alive, friend. Visit floodgap and explore.

>What did a normal surfing session look like to you in the early days of the internet?
Early to mid-90's at the computer lab. Viola, Mosaic, Netscape Navigator. Surfing was an adventure, because it really was exploring. Search engines were in their infancy at best, so you found new things by following links on webpages. Most webpage authors would have a section of links to other pages they thought were interesting or entertaining. You might find a page about Geology, but then at the bottom you'd find a link to a collection of Matchbox cars. You'd visit that page, and maybe you'd find a personal link to someone's chess games. You'd follow that link, and somewhere on that page would be a link to somewhere else that was exotic, personal, out of the way. It was like going up some giant river, and you'd fork off into deeper and deeper tributaries, maybe eventually finding a small place that was uniquely interesting that almost no one knew about.

That was surfing. You never knew what you'd find or where you'd end up.

I started one day from Yahoo Directories (where links were hand picked for the list), wandered around, found some site called Mirsky's Worst of the Web, randomly picked a letter from an alphabetic hierarchy ("L"), sort of scrolled down the list of links, found "The Loser Living Upstairs", read it, and have cherished that find forever. For personal reasons (like music and a favorite song might be), this is one of the most favorite things I have ever read. Maybe you might enjoy it. It's an example of what you could find back then. losernet.tripod.com/loser.html

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it's just geocities clone? there were some pretty fun things on geocities is more like it

well not really a clone, people have to make those new websites that you find on neocities, it's just a clone of the idea.

>old internet was not about making money or profit, people made webpages because they were passionate about a subject, now fan pages get created before something can even get a fanbase, see artifact, people were making a webfanpage for this shit of a game before it even came out, unthinkable in the 90s. Fuck people who think only about $
Preach it brother, now every site is by default signed with one of the ad networks before it even has a starting page, fuck making sites for things people like, we'll make a site for a thing people might actually like and then bitch on plebbit when it fails tremendously

>eople have to make those new websites that you find on neocities
are there any? was pretty sure neocities is just a geocities archive, you can make a new neocities page? cool I guess

nigga you drunk
www.neocities.org
just click it

not clicking dat shit nigger

fist website i made was like in 1998.

i was playing half-life a lot and thought it was the best shit ever so i made a website where i was just talking about half-life.

like a section for the monsters, the weapons, some random screenshots, some nice tfc sprays i had and, as you can guess, it was complete and utter shit (i was 13). it was not up to date with new tf2 rumors or anything, just very static.

it had absolutely no point other than talking about something i enjoyed.

>show us some screenshots.
the concept of saving a screenshot from that time would have been honestly ridiculous
nobody knew about compression so it would have been basically raw bmp, and the hard drives barely even had 100mb of space by the time of the aol days

there's a higher chance of someone having a printed out screenshot than one that was actually stored all that time

yes, do you see the difference between a website about a game thousands of people enjoyed and wanted to discuss and a game that was just announced and noone played having 4 websistes just for gossip? (artifact?) then when the game failed one of the sites even was high enough on their investment to shout at valve they ruined their investment, websites/fansites are investments now, used to be fan creations

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i have a cd that was a backup cd i made in 1999.
it's mostly radiohead images and tfc "memes" and screenshots though.

seems there are also a bunch of wallpapers from digitalblasphemy that i thought were pretty cool, some getright download files and many baldur's gate save backups.

Post that shit

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i guess not everything was so different.

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Reminds me of this

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Even a 1280x1024 screencap is not really that big. Why are you LARPing? Even today I take plenty of screenshots on my shitboxes with 80-200MB disks.

much of what you find on wiby.me is similar to the old experience, one thing I miss also is web buttons, and the tacky stuff people would put on their pages because they weren't professional designers and weren't pompous about it and that was just fine

Was anyone else on this? First flat rate ISP. The interface was horrible but it wasn't long until users figured out how to connect to it without loading the software.

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>there's a higher chance of someone having a printed out screenshot than one that was actually stored all that time
Zoomers are fucking cute.

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Neocities is not an archive of anything. It's a nu Geocities that give you X amount of free space of blank slate to do whatever the fuck you want as far as static web goes. Instead of neighborhoods you just add keyword tags to your site. There is a slight bit of modernness to it where you can follow sites and post comments. Jow Forums users have Neocities sites.

Excuse me, they were called "funny internet pictures" back then

Nobody said that there are no screenshots from that era you simpleton

Nobody here seems to know that wiby.me exist.

Why tell them? Pearls before swine if you ask me.

If they can help enrich it then why not, it's easy to submit a page and if it gets some traction why not.

Not sure if anyone's posted it yet, but an user made a neocities site listing all sorts of shit like this a few threads back. It's pretty good, can check it out here: peelopaalu.neocities.org

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I don't recall taking a screenshot until the early half of the 00s. Definitely didn't take one during the BBS days or early internet days.

Ah yes, a time when we were somewhat free from media and corporate censorship pressure

>Search: Worldwide, USA

Why is this more advanced than fucking google?

now I know and I saved it

pretty neat, user. Thank you

This pastebin from /x/'s sticky also has a bunch of interesting websites, some of them pretty old too: pastebin.com/RhXVTEsz

>Spiral galaxy NGC 6503
>News release ID: STScI-2015-23
>Release Date: Jun 10, 2015

You fucked up esé

>ywn get on bungie.net and discuss halo ever again

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