Although I progressed from my childhood into my teens in the 90s, l don’t retain much memory of the internet back then as l had no exposure to it.
Well, I guess there was 1 PC for the whole family. Analogue modems would scream as they talked over wires. A lot. If you picked up a phone in the house, you would hear the scream of not just the modem, but the person using the internet to put it down.
A lot of people had their own homepages hosted on Geocities or Angelfire - which were like free-form expressions of your facebook profile. Utterly abusing HTML and GIFs.
And to communicate with your friends, you used IRC, MSN Messenger, ICQ or AIM. All of them, as some friends wouldn’t be on one or the other.
You searched for information using Alta Vista, Web Crawler, Yahoo!, Lycos or Ask Jeeves.
Your email address usually ended in @hotmail.com or @yahoo.com (and regional variations, like .de or .co.uk, etc.), BUT, you also had an email address from your ISP (so aol.com, freeserve.co.uk, free.fr, etc.) were really common.
Listening to music was different. You would search for MP3s (people would ‘rip’ songs from CDs into MP3 format and upload them) using free services like Napster (the OG), then WinMX, Limewire, eDonkey. and you would listen to them using an audio playbook like WInAmp (on the family PC). MP3 players (like the iPod or Zune) were just starting out I think, so you tended to get MP3s and then burn them to a CD so you could listen to them in your car, or in your portable CD player, or even your HiFi.
Streaming video wasn’t really a thing, as modems are too slow, but, you could download movies (it just took FOREVER) and they would almost always be the worst cam quality you could imagine and compressed as much as possible.
Using Linux/Unix was really a huge pain as most of the modems were actually Winmodems so none of the manufacturers would provide binaries or modules for anything other than Windows, so they were almost always reverse engineered - and it was just a pain.
I could probably ramble on for longer, but this feels like a good place to stop and say “get off my lawn”.
aeronmelon@lemmy.world 6 days ago
“This page is designed for 800x600 monitors, sign my guestbook.”
crimson_iris@piefed.social 6 days ago
“Join the webring”
hydrashok@sh.itjust.works 5 days ago
Under construction.gif