10 Things We Miss About The 1990's Internet

[@danwood_uk]

On the whole wav/wave debate. I’ve always called them wave files if the full name is written or “wav” if it’s the abbreviation (or even “dot wav”). Guess I’ve been saying it wrong, but we didn’t have KZbin to teach us that 25 years ago, so just had to roll with how you thought it was pronounced I guess.

[@TheOnjLouis]

In the 90’s, I was at boarding school in Worcestershire. Our school was connected over a very slow ISDN line to a lot of other schools. I found?... A few open servers connected via the ISDN, and on one server was a .wav file called wildwood. Since this was pre-Windows-95, and I was doing all this in DOS and the file was really big, I just had to know what it was. I set up this copy from the network to the local drive, and sat and sat and waited. Remember the days of no status updates? No progress bars? Nothing like that. It took so long that I had to leave the machine and hope nobody turned it off, as I went for dinner. I came back and it was still running! About 10 minutes after that, it gave me that lovely message on-screen ‘One File(S) Copied’ And I then used the Play command to play it. Luckily, I was on a machine with a Creative AWE32 sound-card so I could hear it. As it turned out, it was a track by Paul Weller called ‘Wild Wood’ which, at the time I’d never heard of. It was 11 KHz mono and very crappy audio, and for months after, I’d play this file as I really loved the tune. No google back then, no real way to find a copy of the track or even know if that was it’s real name. Not for years later did I get a chance to listen to it properly in glorious stereo, and I loved it even more. Maybe not the best track in the world, but for me, because of how I found it and how I heard it for years, it always felt very special to me, and that’s a story about .wav files nobody cares about anyway. Haha. PS. I’m a musician and every day create ‘wav’ not ‘wave’ files, yes. It’s .wav. I don’t care what anyone says. Lol

[@TefenCa]

Yeah, I've always just called them wave files. Maybe just because it feels easier to say and more common than a new word I didn't know "wav".

[@RacerX-]

Yeah I always called them wave since they were short for Waveform, not wavform. But in todays world it probably doesnt matter.

[@vwestlife]

Also, back in the '90s, most people pronounced GIF as "jiff". I still do today.

[@TheGuvOfWythenshawe]

Only JUST seen this comment! I remember wave (.wav) files like yesterday! Would be well and truly outdated by todays standards! Happy days!

[@cdeford]

The biggest thing was the feeling that the web belonged to us, not governments or corporations.

[@samuelschwager]

I miss the innocence and creativity of the 90s internet.

[@anisomniac5931]

Same. I was born in 2003 and the internet was still at least _marginally_ better 10 years ago than it is now (especially if we're talking about KZbin and most social media from the time). I wish I was born in the 80s or 70s so that I could experience the early internet... So much less corruption back then...

[@mrpedrobraga]

@@anisomniac5931 I was born in 2003, too, but i missed that side of the world.

[@CoconutPete]

it was much more exciting than today's Internet

[@mbirth]

What I miss about the 90s Internet: - Small, lean websites of a few kilobytes, not several megabytes with 50-something huge JavaScript libraries like today. - Unobtrusive ads, mostly only static banners. - People usually were more "open", so you could easily make new friends or just talk to some stranger for hours. - No "Accept cookies" dialogues. What I don't miss: - $400 phone bills. - Modem speed - AOL CDs

[@KC9UDX]

And Alta Vista.

[@seanc.5310]

Hey man don't knock those AOL disks and cd's...I was able to build a small home out of just AOL media and duct tape

[@ronmoore8609]

Amen....... I loathe today's HTML 5 overbloat and overused embedded media

[@Thelemorf]

IRC

[@KC9UDX]

@@Thelemorf that's still there. I think gopher is gone. I think Usenet might still be there.

[@MaxDamage1984]

The Internet has gone to shits: Now we have pay-to-win games, paywalls to read a news article, data gathering, social media who offers nothing but polarisation and people complaining and turning against each other, millions of ads, forcing you to click to consent to sharing your cookies, etc.... I'd go back to the way slower Internet of the 90's in a heartbeat!

[@JanEspen]

Such great memories being connected to the world wide web in the 90s. I met a girl on IRC, this summer we have been married for 20 years.

[@StigDesign]

Heldig :D You lucky :)

[@nickabbott4411]

@@StigDesign He didn't say happily married though! (She's buried under the patio!) jk

[@JanEspen]

@@nickabbott4411 lol

[@allan.n.7227]

Wow.. what a first-mover 😉👍 !!.. And congrats 😁

[@TheZorolord]

Look at you capitalising on the emerging technology, you Casanova ;) - in all seriousness that is really nice to hear some positive information from the WWW :)

[@SeverityOne]

What I miss from the very, very early World Wide Web: no adverts.

[@danieldaniels7571]

I miss everyone on the internet being computer literate enough to configure a modem.

[@davidjames4915]

Or computer literate enough to adjust the i/o and irq of ethernet cards when they first showed up. Today some woke sort would probably write a screed complaining about how that was systemically racist and a barrier to social justice and equity.

[@danieldaniels7571]

David James most likely, but if you ask me what’s truly racist is to suggest that race is what would determine one’s capacity to be computer literate.

[@freeculture]

Or type simple commands on the command line...

[@lztx]

Trumpet Winsock

[@lztx]

Or even pppd

[@theretromillennial]

The last point of community really got me. In high school I didn’t have many friends and was often bullied, but I was pretty active on collaborative fiction forums. The people on those boards became friends of mine and later I found out that one of my best friends on there lived in Venezuela. At the time I lived in suburban southern Indiana so it was a really cool thing.

[@ttrep4957]

What i miss most about the early internet: The lack of advertising. Nowadays we are constantly bombarded with advertising through email, web pages, pop-ups, embedded in games, etc, etc... People were respectful and polite. It's impossible to have a nice conversation, forum thread, etc... without some haters spewing vile at everyone or trying to scam you anymore.

[@Sirenhound]

When mainstream advertisers thought it was a fad.

[@MattRichardsonX]

Unmoderated newsgroups in the 90s were some of the rudest internet spaces in memory.

[@10MARC]

I am not sure about that "Lack of advertising" - I seem to remember being bombarded with pop up ads coming out my ears back in the 90's, and banner ads that made my eyes bleed...

[@nebularain3338]

I think you may have some rose tinted glasses on there. Popup ads were rife in the 90s, and folk on chat rooms/message boards could be proper vicious. In fact, some were borderline sick.

[@MylarFoilBalloons]

I miss 00s flash games

[@strawberrylemonadelioness]

I started using the internet around 2004, and I remember Dial up. I even remember my brother covering the computer with a pillow to hide the dial up sound so he could go online.

[@wakegary]

Lol why couldn't be go online?

[@conflictmagazine]

If I could live '94 to '98 in a loop I could do it forever. There was a balance still in place then. The web hadn't wiped out of the external world and it just seemed like you were drinking from a fire hose. Many forget that this was the peak of magazine publishing at the time as well as the real explosion of home video. The '80s were a time of excruciating boredom unless you lived in a few choice spots. The 90's were so overwhelming in choices of things to do it was crazy. Wired magazine, Net magazine (the U.S. mag with the blue pages section) cd-rom magazines, the X-Files, Millennium, Brimstone, Aeon Flux, the websites jodi.org (?), Dreaming Methods, etc. Yeah, I try not to say it but I would trade the whole 21st century to ride that train again (-:

[@CoconutPete]

I have several copies of The Net magazine (including the floppies or perhaps cds!)

[@HugoRibeiroDrummer]

I miss the 90s as a whole! Not just the internet.

[@BWPT.]

I'd forgotten Webrings existed! You could spend hours finding some of the most bizarre and brilliant websites the internet had to offer. There was always this feeling that you had stumbled upon something that only few people knew about.

[@realmichaud]

are referring to geocities?

[@lazarusblackwell6988]

I used to chat with people all over the world back then They all slowly dissapeared from my life

[@lifeschool]

Dial Up used to be an event, the sound was a teleport to the world. Now its an unconditional habit.

[@matsv201]

I never used modem... that is.. I never used modem for my own connection. First in 94 I got 512kb cable network at high school. Then I moved to a dorm room, and ther I had 10Mbit. Moved to a flat in 2001, got adsl, the later cable modem. In 2003 I got always on 3g. In 2006 i moved over to use only always on 3g... and 4g... last year I switched to fiber..

[@johndorian4078]

The best part was when you connected at 2am, and you had to sit there like "please dont wake dad please dont wake dad please don....."GET OFF THAT COMPUTER AND GOTO BED"......"fuuckkk"

[@TECHLOVER_91]

Don't be ungrateful because the technology we have today is magic and superior in every way to 90's internet so appreciate how far we've come

[@AndRewUK24]

Remember spend 20 minutes to get into dialler before I could do my homework research. I used to be near to the top of the class because I was the one to get access to the internet early back in the 90s.

[@lztx]

@@johndorian4078 you never learnt ATM0?

[@pkaulf]

90s internet had character and soul. It lacked many of today's comforts and conveniences, but something was sacrificed to get where we are now. Everything just feels very bland and homogenous now, whereas back then every website was unique, and you learned skills being online and participating. It felt special to be involved. It was an exciting time and I'm glad to be able to say I was there.

[@thwomysdonutland9042]

Will That Be Possible In 2021? IDK But It Was A Lot Of Fun!!!

[@davethomas1241]

The net was a lot more fun back then

[@IzludeTingel]

Damn right it was a lot more fun. I used to visit this one Digimon fan site called Sora's World, 1999. It had a message board (my first exposure to talking with others) and eventually the girl put in this chatroom (by bravenet). That was quite an experience. The site was literally a hangout. Fan fics, fan art etc... The girl ended up closing the site because of spam attacks. All we were left with was "I'll reopen one day"... she never did. Fast forward to 2012, I actually was able to gain access to the angelfire account because the e-mail associated with it expired. (her site's contact e-mail was the angelfire e-mail, oops?) So I re-registered that e-mail, got access to angelfire account, and downloaded all the resources. Low and behold, I put the site back together, albiet a few layout and content changes. It still isn't finished, it's a project I put some time into, but eventually stopped due to work :/ Maybe now I'll try to finish it.

[@Menaceblue3]

*Anime Web Turnpike*

[@Ton369]

nope

[@maicrowsoft8867]

There was certainly the adventure element.

[@InvadeleYogurt]

@@IzludeTingel Just how old are you now, ancient one.

[@NorkelFjols]

OMG, I had almost forgotten how so many websites played midi music when you first loaded them.

[@zhongyangli]

internet in the 90's was my shelter. Internet of today is what I want to escape from

[@voltigore]

I miss the "personal websites". Now everything is in one big template and boring.

[@matsv201]

Social networks really killed that... I really want to bring it back... or rather a hybrid. The idea is that everyone have there page on what ever service they like, and its like with there friends on what ever service they have. So... if I dont want to have Facebook, I could still communicate and se people having Facebook. Eliminating the need to have multiple social networks.

[@sgillman16]

Even MySpace was semi personalized. I love making everything orange and adding music and weird things.

[@walterbrunswick]

Personally I prefer a more organized structure as opposed to the disorganized mess of yesteryear.

[@pkmnan00bis]

Miss how unique and personalized sites looked back then. Now every site looks like (and probably is) a Wordpress Blog. Also miss the variety of content on sites -- instead of most sites being blogs/vlogs.

[@wasserruebenvergilbungsvirus]

​@@retrospacenet I'd say basic HTML can still be learned easily, and basic CSS too. You don't need Javascript or a fancy layout to have your own personal website. You could even have a 90s style HTML-only website with flashing text and animated gifs if you so please.

[@HellonWheels777]

I wasn't around for the 90s internet, so this is really interesting! It's amazing to see how much the internet the internet has changed since then.

[@missmama919]

I was JUST recently talking my preteen about internet in the 90s... I told him how my sisters and I would pick up the phone to kick each other off the internet so we could use it. He laughed hysterically... we weren't laughing back then, getting kicked off the internet ESPECIALLY while AOLing after having to listen to wee oooh weeeee eEeEeE for 5 mins and wait forever for the chat rooms to load up was not a pleasant experience...

[@chynnasjrnl]

😂😂😂😂

[@emmcee476]

Perfect sound effect 😁

[@JohnnyUtah488]

I miss how people used to create things online just for fun, out of pure passion for the subject matter. Now it's all about self-promotion and making money. "Don't forget to subscribe, ring that bell, check out my social media, become a patreon, sign up for my newsletter/e-book/online course, blah blah blah." In the new attention economy, we all bow to the almighty algorithm.

[@Guybrushsland]

Truth.

[@dirk600]

You should'a mentioned warez. The absolute thrill of downloading the 500 Rar files one at a time on 56, to finally uncompress it without any corrupt files, install the game and the no CD crack, then for it to actually run without issue.

[@WaterShowsProd]

What do I miss about the 1990s' internet? Everything. I remember seeing a guy in a shop wearing a cap with a :) emoticon on it and it felt great to see a fellow netizen. This was before "normal people" knew what emoticons were. Another time, probably in 1996, an older person said to me, "The internet is just a fad." I replied, "Yeah, like television." One day somebody contacted me on Yahoo Messenger, though this would have been in the early 2000s. They were from Thailand and we began chatting regularly and I met their friends and relatives all on messenger. I learnt about their country, and eventually visited. Now, I've been living in Thailand for more than 10 years.

[@captaincrash12]

Wow thats kewl. And RAD dude.

[@WaterShowsProd]

@@captaincrash12 Ha ha... Those are expressions I never used. :)

[@captaincrash12]

@@WaterShowsProd Fair enough.

[@adhodgson1]

The main thing I miss is Usenet. Really got a lot of technical know-how from that over the years. Enjoyed giving back to the community towards the end, stopped when it became all forum based.

[@Nightweaver1]

"Stay in 1996, it's better than 2020." Boy truer words have never been spoken. This is an awful year.

[@thwomysdonutland9042]

Probably Because Of Quarantine!!!

[@kylehill3643]

@@thwomysdonutland9042 And a whole lot of things including President's that can't remember what they said in their last telephone call! You voted all this in and should've read the fine print sonny. We did and knew better but CNN sold you up a river.

[@adorkability]

I miss that you actually had to be smart to get online.

[@djsaekrakem3608]

yes. THIS! People you meet online now.. are mostly just. YO DAWG I HEARD YOU LIKE TOASTERS, SO WE PUT A TOASTER IN YOUR TOASTER SO YOU CAN TOASTER WHILE YOU TOASTER :p

[@Anonymous-qb4vc]

Yup internet back then was mostly full of actual geeks gamers and genius people

[@ModernVintageGamer]

great video mate. really enjoyed it !

[@intostuff8653]

I miss all those bad animations/ toy videos people used to do on KZbin. You could make a KZbin video with lps or other kid toys with a bad camera and everyone would be invested in your story. You could make a bad animation about you're favorite cartoon/ show and you wouldn't get put in a cringe comp. Heck, I even miss those sonic stories where they used images from Google and put text over them to tell some story about sonic. Was it cringe? Yes. Did anyone care? No. They easily passed the time. Same with sonic Sprite/ plush stories.

[@the_mariocrafter]

My mother met my father on an old 90s dating site, I don’t know what it is named, but whoever created it, thank you. I’m currently 15 years old.

[@murphycreationsvideos]

0:58 Masters At Work - Great choice of music 😁 Plus I still use winamp today alongside with vlc.

[@stopthink9000]

I miss the creativity of early 90s webpages. It was very wild west, anything goes. ICQ chat was always an interesting distraction. The people you met online were generally good natured harmless geeks. It was smaller but full of potential. Now everything is marketing, tracking, selling your data. Glad I got to experience the web in its relative innocence.

[@realmichaud]

I agree. I was better in many ways. I always say, If I could take my computer with ability to download like we do now and the great tvs we have these days I'd taka a time machine bacck to 95 and just loop 95-2000. It was a great time in those days. Now everything is so frigging PC it sucks.

[@Dev_olution]

I remember coding my first webpage in HTML, wish I still had it. Great video and memories, love it

[@warweezil2802]

Mark Devlin I have most of my second one backed up on zip disc still problem is that I no longer have an awe64 soundblaster audio card and the .wav files just don’t sound right

[@freeculture]

Did you check the Internet Archive? Mine is still in there...

[@realmichaud]

back in 2000 when I was learning I used frontpage!

[@440s]

One thing i would add are the bottom of the posts on forums, dont remember what they where called but they startrd with that blood driping line and under it you would put your nick name, a lot of gifs, part of the lyric of a song, links to your personal page and others pages you did free advertasing cos you tought it would be cool to have a link to something cool that you had nothing to do with 😂

[@LandNfan]

Back before the Internet was widely available to the public, I ran a computer bulletin board system from 1988-1992. It wasn’t fancy, but it got a lot of traffic. 50,000 connections over it’s life. By the end, we were running 70% connected time around the clock. Just an old XT clone and a single phone line. Fun, but a lot of work.

[@enilenis]

Internet was fun when it wasn't for everyone.

[@PooperScooperTrooper]

I agree. Once the normies got involved, it went to shit.

[@Hasse.Andersson]

na... It was really fun to meet all kind of weird people.... It went to hell when coorporations and politicians took over everything... But there is some places that sort of mimick the "feeling" of that era, i2p in my opinion is the most like it..... (even if there might be some bad things to avoid... just like in the old days)

[@johnbeer4963]

Haha oh man i'm glad i'm not the only one who misses it being exclusive to the exceptional. I remember thinking it was the end when the normals started getting online. I didn't even know then it was the beginning of the end times

[@440s]

I often think this...when i was young i was really into computers...one thing that i did the most was gaming(not like the ones today xd) but i remember those tournaments where kids around 12 could go play with 30+ adults and it was normal, where you didnt worry about cheaters or baning people...then more and more people git access to pcs and internet and just got into to mess around and didnt care about anything, they just where therr to annoy until it was imposible to manage so the communities started to die..this more or less happened with everything...now companies and goverments decide what to do and not to do and you can do nothing or you get baned, cancel or broke and all cos now you need to know nothing and still use a pc and well...the kids that boder everyone in thr playground for no reason now can do it on a pc also...thanks userfriendly

[@FuzzWoof]

I loved the internet back then, you had to be a combination of at least semi-smart to get it all to work, and patient as everything took so long, so that generally resulted in the online world being filled with some really interesting people. These days anyone can just mash a fleshy appendage against a pretty picture on the touchscreen of a phone while you're waiting in line at the supermarket.

[@aaronreece13]

I never in a million years thought I'd see anyone else remember WBS chat! I logged on for the first time when I was 9 years old in 1996. Hard to believe it's almost been 30 years!

[@SkyFly19853]

People, including myself, also miss movies from 90s and 80s... 😏

[@eratno111]

Thanks for this vid! it reminded me a lot of the early days of the web. I do agree the sense of community then is somewhat missing now.

[@d-h4ck401]

internet today = google, facebook, twitter. internet in 90s = internet itself

[@the_mariocrafter]

I wish you could just host a website easily today, not have companies host it for you.

[@BlueLiminality]

I literally screamed when i saw the Ah! Megami-Sama tribute page. That was one of my first subbed animes. A friend got it from an anime IRC channel and ripped it on a CD; she passed it to me in class like it was contraband. 😆It was middle school and I was working on a tribute site to BT from dot hack sign; I had a midi of Obsession autoplay for the opening page. My friend and I were in love with the guys from Gundam Wing and we swapped fanfiction. Oh man, those were the days.

[@Zenas521]

In the 90s we had netiquette. Internet trolls had a hard time existing back then and spam wasn't wide spread. It was wonderful... and slow. Playing Mechwarrior 2 over the internet was Awesome!

[@nowthatsjustducky]

And for the worst offenders, there was a thing called an Internet Death Sentence. That meant if a server became known for having spammers and the owners of that server refused to take any responsibility for their system, then other server operators could agree to simply not forward any from messages from the offending server, effectively silencing them on USENet. I seem to remember late 90s, one of the major internet providers (I think it was Netcom) nearly had an IDS passed on it. Not sure if it ever happened though, since I think they cleaned up their act before any consensus could be reached.

[@kylehill3643]

@@nowthatsjustducky Back then we didn't have capitalism take a hard stance on things so people breathed better and actually had competition to deal with.

[@ikeyasector]

I remember a chatroom back in 1996 that I still have fond memories to this day. It was called the "Blue Lamp Tavern". It was a chat room on the Blues Travelers website. Most of the people there didn't even know who the Blues Travelers were but just found a chatroom to talk to people. It was all HTML based and you had to refresh your Netscape Navigator for the chat log to be updated. I met this girl, Daisy, on there. A student at Michigan State University, and we became pen pals for years. She wasn't the nerdy type either. Very attractive girl who was my age. We did arrange to meet up since I wasn't too far from her but it just fizzled out... but I still have fond memories of that time.

[@thwomysdonutland9042]

There's Discord If You Miss That!!!

[@ikeyasector]

@@thwomysdonutland9042 I know about Discord. I was just reflecting back to simpler times when the internet was still kind of new to everyone.

[@Silver_Nomad]

LOL. Like in 2000's, I still prefer to keep music on a hard drive instead of using streaming services. Main reason for today - because, there are no lossless audio streaming services at all. I spent money for some studio quality headphones and top-tier sound card not for a low bitrate audio, after all.

[@ZERARCHIVE2023]

100% plus not depending on your connection to their servers is a +

[@ebinrock]

You missed the MOST important things we miss about the 90's internet: 1. NO popups - at least not until the later 90's and 2000's. 2. NO automatic videos playing. Kinda hard to do when the most data you could push through to most people's homes was 56kbps (that's kilo. bits. per. second.). 3. NO elements on pages JUMPING AROUND when loading. It was slow as hell, but at least pages loaded pretty much top to bottom, in a predictable way. Today's internet is much faster (and I'm grateful for that), but damn, today's browsers tend to load up everything at random, and today's internet speeds are so fast that at first you might think the page is loaded, then try to click on something, only to discover that the thing you wanted to click on has shifted position, so then you accidentally click on some other link (ugh!). 4. NO TONS OF ADS cluttering your page, and certainly not ads that are eerily tailored to what you searched! 5. General sense that the internet was supposed to be something that educated and lifted people up to greater knowledge, and would connect people in a profound way like never before. (Boy, did the architects of the internet NOT understand that basic, banal human nature NEVER changes??) Web pages were simple ways to just get INFORMATION about things in a convenient way. That was the original premise and promise, as I understand. Of course, it was naive to think that it wouldn't expose the dark side of humanity like never before, and that it wouldn't be HEAVILY commercialized. Now the things I DON'T like about the 90's internet: 1. It was SLOOOOW. Dial-up sucked. 2. No always-on fast connection. Sorry, Dan, I have to disagree with you on this one. It was a bitch trying to dial in and cross fingers that the connection would go through. Sometimes it wouldn't and you'd have to dial again. And back then we still had our landlines, so unless you splurged on a second phone line (from the greedy overpriced phone company), you couldn't make/receive calls if you were online. So yeah, any nostalgia about "that sound" is greatly overshadowed for me by that annoyance of tying up the phone line AND not always getting a reliable connection. 3. Those CHEESY fonts and colors! Seriously, ever since the WWW came about, there was the ability to choose from a wealth of fonts and colors. WHY did so many people stick to that ugly Times New Roman font with so many horrible colors?? It's like no one had any sense of art direction in their HTML, even if the pages were primitive and static. They could have looked better, even before CSS. Many people had things like blue text over black, which is hardly readable, and other colors that just wreaked havoc on your retina, like blue and red, etc. 4. No video streaming! Yes, I like the convenience of watching videos online today, although for my movies and TV shows I still prefer physical media like DVD & blu-ray. I just don't like them *automatically* playing, like it's in my face when I don't want it. That's annoying. Back in the 90's, if you wanted to post a video online, you had to compress the HELL out of it and make it maybe 100 pixels wide at the most, and MAYBE it would fit on there with trial and error in encoding and play 10-15 frames a second at best and look very blocky. I *don't* miss that!

[@doublearon9942]

Loved chat rooms back in the 90’s!! I was just trolling the entire time, like being in the quilting chat room and saying I was working on quilting a net to catch dolphins. So much fun!!

[@dsfddsgh]

I loved those old chat rooms in the late 1990's. Trolling was so fun. I started on the net with a Webtv which had no memory to speak of but i still was in chatrooms that used java and had to keep refreshing just to see new text. LOL But the wonder back in 1998 with getting on the net was a feeling that i miss. But i knew a Webtv couldn't surf the internet like i wanted so i got a PC about 9 months later and was off to the races.

[@Pocket-Calculator]

No ads, no corporate bs, no censorship by big corporations, more independent websites, less centralization, no 50 MB of useless JavaScript libraries to render a stupid animation, etc. The past 10 years have been terrible for the web.

[@bazza5699]

hey dan, hope you're doing well. totally loved this list.. brought back great memories.. i miss those days too.. and still use winamp, still download (not stream -pah!) music. i remember spending 24hrs continually in an excite chat room, got a £300 phone bill. also had my own website which (embarrassingly) has been archived on the waybackmachine.. there was a real excitement back then.. i feel sad that so much of the creativity has gone from the net, replaced by corporate facebook and generic twitter. for all their reach, today's social media lacks that certain something.

[@SnabbKassa]

In 2001 there were only a few hundred blogs that were updated daily and it was easy to be quite influential. By Jan 2002, there were millions.

[@Leahi84]

Thank you for making this, Its brought back so many great memories. Much appreciated!!! I miss the 90s internet so much. One of the biggest things I miss was the sense of discovery that the earlier web used to have. Finding a website could be a really exciting thing. Also is it just me or did people seem to be a lot nicer back then on the net?

[@JulianAndresGuarinReyes]

Hey you forget to mention GET RIGHT! Downloading things, pausing, and resuming up from the point your download was interrupted it was amazing.

[@mattsaul6963]

One of my proudest achievements was winning GeoCities Cool Site of the Day on June 3, 1996 SoHo/2439 if you want to look it up.

[@IamRobotMonkey]

That's worthy of a mention on your CV!

[@XavierY828]

What I miss is that you could surf from website to website. Somehow this seems to be less possible now. Also you could search what you wanted. Know your search results are not what you are looking for.

[@danielszulc9574]

I remember saving pages to floppy discs at school and reading it at home (on PC without internet)

[@nowthatsjustducky]

@@GladeSwope If their service was text based, you could have still pulled it off easy enough. 1993 or 1994, I was dialing into Prairienet, our library's Freenet to access the internet. And that was on an Apple IIGS with no hard drive, and a 2400bps modem.

[@erinwiebe7026]

A wonderful nostalgic look back, thank you Dan. This brings back so many memories! I grew up in the BBS age and I remember my first year in university. The local BBS scene was winding down and I was looking for new ways to connect with people online. I remember hearing about a friend of a friend of a friend who had a list of accounts to my cities other university's online network. Some friends and I gathered round and tried them out, dialing into this unknown network with our questionable userid's & passwords. We sat watching my greyscale Atari ST monitor as the modem chimed away and after many attempts, disconnects & busy signals, we successfully logged on! None of us knew unix, or even what it was we were connected to, but that flashing prompt was there, waiting for us to explore. The system was completely open and we tried all sorts of commands, and that's when we stumbled across IRC, and it opened up a completely new world. I was used to chatting with the same couple of dozen people on our local BBS's, but here there were seemingly endless chat rooms with people hailing from all over the world! I was in awe, and I understand and share your sense of nostalgic wonder when thinking back on those moments. For a time, I expected that sense of close community to continue - this was around 1991 and before many people had heard about the internet, or even what email was. But then, in 93-94 when the internet exploded into everyone's consciousness, it felt like that little world that I had discovered had been blown wide open. And while it brought so many wonderful things with it in the years & decades since, there are times when I do miss that sense of newness & discovery of being a part of something that few others knew about.

[@wearecity]

So true, the internet was an amazing adventure, with so many amazing discoveries and was for fun. Nowadays I generally just visit the same websites and so much information is available in one place, so you don't need to trawl several sites. Also it's becoming as much about serious stuff as fun.

[@adawnhowell9256]

Ah yes the internet in the 90s.

[@Furienna]

Oh, what a pain it was to get some internet access at home back in the dial-up days! But yes, there's a feeling of nostalgia when you think about the sound of a modem, Geocities, chatrooms and Altavista and Hotbot.

[@realmichaud]

remember planetsearch?

[@Furienna]

@@realmichaud Actually, no. That must have passed me by.

[@Halflife2-y2m]

I think you nailed it. I have noticed that I don't feel the same about the www now in all its massive glory than I did when it was new. I miss Nestcape Navigator and Napster. It is like having met a celebrate before they were famous.

[@billywhitewolf]

What I most loved about the internet at that time were the chatrooms. The one-on-one and small group chats. You could talk to someone for hours and they'd genuinely be interested in getting to know you and vice versa. I don't think I've used the A/S/L acronym in at least 20 years I forgot all about that lol. I used to anticipate going back on to see if my "friends" would be there and feeling disappointed if they weren't lol. Looking back I don't know if that's good or just sad lol. What I hated though was when downloading MP3s which sometimes took 5-10 mins would fail at 99% or your internet would cut out at 99% usually because someone would fucking pick the phone up lol. My fondest memories of the internet were the late 90s/early 00s for sure. Good times.

[@jamesa4958]

Great commentary. Thank you

[@Elfnetdesigns]

The LACK of social media.

[@nowthatsjustducky]

USENet, IRC, IMs, MUDs/MUCKS/MUSHes, and Email lists via listserv were our Social Media. DartMUD, StyxMUD, and ElephantMUD were among my biggest hangouts.

[@mlovmo]

12:23, yeah, remember "webrings?" Those were tools (banners) where websites were connected through that banner since the sites were on a similar theme.

[@leandrotami]

The feeling of being connected and the sense of urgency because using the phone was very expensive so you had to make your time count and download as much stuff as you could. I felt extremely aware of that moment of being connected. I remember going to the Louvre website for the first time and thinking... this info is coming from France!? Right now?! Across the ocean!?

[@TheZXKUQYB]

ICQ with magic spell, with USR Courier 33.6 or Diamond 56k with Shotgun technology. I was in heaven getting one way cable modem in 98. So many memories of the web, building my computers or playing Everquest. A thousand stories from friends around the world. I was so fascinated by the 80s micro scene from UK friends.

[@SportPilotPR]

The sound of the modem connecting was great, but for me the best sound of the late 90s/early 2k was the "uh-oh" sound of a new message on the ICQ.

[@VeritasAbsoluta]

I miss the small barrier to entry that meant most of the numpties stayed offline. I miss the website terms of use being clear and actually stuck to by the websites themselves. I miss ICQ, Yahoo messenger, MSN messenger, Aim, and having all of them open at once to talk to your different friends who used them (or using Trillian). I miss the annonymity, as opposed to people willingly handing over their personal data for public display (probably linked to the lack of numpties again).

[@hermetic_wizard777]

Social media and big tech ruined everything. I have deleted all my social media account except youtube.

[@jeremywj]

IRC is what I miss the most. Yes, IRC is still around but it is nothing like the 90s. Also, since the internet wasn't "always-on" back in the 90's, it was always kind of a fun experience dialing in and then playing around. These days the internet just seems mundane. Not saying the internet isn't great, it is. It just isn't fun like it used to be.

[@organfairy]

What I miss most from the early days of the internet is the feeling of being a pioneer. Whenever I do something online today, I can be sure that most five year olds have done the same and I even have the risc of meeting my parents online. One expression I really hate is "Just Google it" (sometimes even with an expletive added). Google has killed many interesting discussions with its ease of access to instant facts. I think in a way that life was more interesting when information was a little harder to get - you would argue for several minutes before somebody suggested that we could look it up on AltaVista (and maybe the argument was over before the search engine was loaded).

[@dragonusmolamola4140]

when the website gets filled with ai generated stuff itll sure be harder to get actual information probably

[@JoelMurphy77]

In addition to WAVs and MIDIs, there were module file formats such as MOD, S3M, XM, and IT. Each file was a collection of digital samples along with a script that would the tracker software would read to play back the samples in a specific pattern. Where MIDI files sounded different, depending on what hardware you were using, modules had a more consistent sound between computers and had the advantage of smaller sizes than raw WAV files.

[@bobdouglass8010]

first time I saw the internet was college in 1994. I was a freshman and just found out the computer lab had newsgroup readers on their sparc stations. I didn't know what it was but there was an option to read news groups on wuarchive and that first day I managed to find and read the complete history of Iron Maiden. It was awesome. And I remember downloading a wav too - "rita.wav". "ahh after 10,000 years I'm free! It's time to conquer Earth!" I can't remember what I had for dinner today but I remember that sound clip download 26 years ago.

[@jk8557]

I'm missing all the personal web sites and making my own personal web site. Back in the end of the 90s and early 2000s I had lots of online friends and we made our own websites and visited each others web sites but we never knew anyones real names but just the Internet nickname and as the personal web sites died out we lost contact with each others. I wonder what they are doing today? Are they all still alive? Do they have families of their own now?

[@Phlegethon]

People on the internet in the 90s weren’t assholes and scammers. It was mostly intellectuals and curious people. I was able to sell a card and someone just sent me a money order with no guarantee but trusted I would send something back

[@KratostheThird]

Because those guys were also computer geeks and appreciated the then new tech they were using. Those assholes back in the 90s were those guys running crooked schemes on the Yellowbook pages, posted their advertisements on telephone poles, ran a shady business at the local meat market, etc etc. There was a high barrier of entry to access the internet in the 90s and the slow speeds of dial-up kept a lot of morons away from it. The people who held a background in computer technology were the ones who were most interested in the internet and they were basically your everyday user.

[@guntherschadow9383]

You forgot about USENET News. The time before the WWW was even a thing. There was a thing called "Gopher" which had links. We had FTP site directories to find interesting information resources. When I started you still had to be in the Uni data-center somewhere. And there was a sense of community even more tightly knit before those AOL commoners came online.

[@zka77]

Best thing I miss about the 90s internet: the online community wasn't full of idiots yet.

[@andrewbatts7678]

I remember taking 45 minutes plus to download a 3 and a half minute song on napster. Or getting 99% or a song downloaded only to have grandma pick up the phone and ruining the whole download😂. All the songs had a slight underwatery quality to them. Id say for PC people in the 90s, Gateway was the standard for the 🎶INFORMATION SUPER HIGHWAY🎶!!!

[@davinp]

I was in high school in the 1990s. My high school had launched its first website in 1995. I remember the IBM PCs in the school library with Netscape Navigator. The local NBC4 station had their own WeatherNet4 website

[@thepastcomesalive2082]

Remember the Internet sensation, ask Jeeves? Do you remember when they used to advertise something called America online? And phrases like the information superhighway? I do, I was a teenager when the Internet first came out so I remember those early days, especially dial up Internet. I remember when somebody tries to get on the computer and then when you pick up the telephone I cut the person off and then the person they try to get on the Internet gets really mad and says get off the phone! And it was vice versa, when you’re on the Internet back then and somebody tried to pick up the telephone you would hear the static or something like that and they would say can you get off the computer! I am trying to call my friend, I’m so glad we have high-speed Internet and cell phones now because now even if you do use a landline it doesn’t affect the Internet anymore it’s amazing how far we’ve come, but the sounds of dial up Internet are funny and sometimes I miss those sounds so I go on KZbin and look up those sound effects and I listen to it.

[@ronaldrico3208]

Discovering websites is something I used to do a lot of, nowadays I just visit the same ones repeatedly. The discovery factor of the whole internet has diminished for me. I think like with many things, the more visually advanced it's become, the less your imagination fires whilst using it. Email went from being exciting to a burden. Nothing was more exciting than bulletin boards for me then it's been a slow decline ever since..

[@boxingfan2796]

Its moreso that the internet these days has become so monopolized and commercialized. A few mega entities control most of everything and control the vast majority of traffic. Back in the day, you used to be able to make a website and get traffic to it easily with no need to pay for ads. Now you need to pay "gatekeepers" (Google, Facebook, etc) to get any decent traffic.

[@morphshag]

I remember dialing up to the internet on my parents 486 when I was in my mid teens. You could tell if you were going to have a good connection by the sounds the modem made. Early on I was introduced to the eXcite home page but more importantly the eXcite chat software. Here in Australia a local phone call is only 25c meaning one dial up session of 10 hours would only cost you 25c and a friend of mine worked in a computer store and have me free internet logins so it prctically cost nothing. I was so addicted toeXcite chat rooms, usually hanging out in UK chat rooms (as I'm originally from the uk) I met some amazing people and became an "Avitar Painter" designing custom avitars for people to use in the chat room. Every day I would get online and chat with a female friend in Greece who came to Australia on her travels and we actually met! All these years later I'm still friends with people I met in the eXcite chat room and it was probably my fondest days on the web. Like you said it had a sense of community and excitement. Now we expect it and while todays internet is SO much better in every way. It doesn't have the amazement and wonder any more.

[@KatelynJewel]

I can name a lot of neat things I fondly remember from old websites. Awards: These were given to personal sites through web rings or other websites and they would be displayed in their own section. Adoptables: Similarly to awards, some websites would have images of baby or animal characters for other websites to adopt by displaying them on their websites with permission from the creator. Oekakis: Art boards where you drew pictures and published them then others could comment on them; DeviantART made these obsolete. Forums/Message Boards: They've mainly been replaced with social media. Informative fan sites: It was always neat seeing a website with a bunch of content dedicated to a franchise including episode/game guides, downloadable music, videos, fan art, etc.; but these days the internet is more organized with social media websites, wikis, KZbin and such. Sprite comics: It was always fun exploring video game fan sites reading comic strips made with sprites taken from the games and seeing different interpretations of the characters. Hoaxes: Similar to sprite comics, some video game websites would have sections where people shared fake screen shots from games that they made. They could range from being almost the same as sprite comics but with one panel to being jokes like placing Mario in a Sonic game, or simply just a game of "What's wrong with this picture?" Thanks to technology with fan hacks improving, people have been able to make a lot of these things a reality like now you can have Mario in a Sonic game.

[@TemplarsWildFire]

Bud, you forgot one VERY IMPORT aspect.. BBS's! (Bulletin Board Systems). That was where it was at!

[@anakondase]

Oh, you didn't mention Usenet. Best place to find warez and other stuff back in the early days.

[@bassistguy]

I agree that being "online" used to seem like an event. You more or less had to plan to go online, especially if you didn't want to tie up the phone line. Nowadays, you just habitually pick up your phone any time you want. It's actually quite boring now.

[@allan.n.7227]

Before the interweb I connected to a local BBS on my Amiga and recieved Fidonet messages (newsgroups and personal messages afair).. That sound of the modem negotiating speed was also signalling the start of an adrenalinepacked and expensive session.. add to that that mom, dad, or a sibling could pick up the landline phone anytime and ruin your session at any given moment.... My first modem was 1200 down and 75 up ... this was for my Commodore 64..

[@maicrowsoft8867]

Playing browser games, tending my Neopets, and listening to midi clips, sending stuff through emails. Those were my preteen days....

[@Avtovaz21057]

i still use irc every saturday on dalnet lol, love it, and the guy i talk to is in bulgaira, who i have never met, and knows me like no one else... known him for 20 years !! thanks for the vids!

[@JustinEvitable80]

How about things we don't miss? -Slow loading times. -Phone calls knocking you offline. -Unable to make a call if someone else in online. -Schools blocking websites that had nothing educational (Even when allowed to surf randomly at lunch or breaks). -Downloading a wav file sometimes taking up to an hour. -Going through a small process in order to get "It is now safe to turn off your computer" so you can switch it off.

[@nowthatsjustducky]

Call Waiting also knocking you offline.

[@AwesomeYena]

Oh man, if you thought the schools filters were bad then, you should see them now! Where I live, you can't even search the words "crap" or booger and the filter often interferes with teachers' lessons. I remember a teacher when I was in middle school saying that the filter's gone out of control.

[@GeddyRC]

This really took me back, thanks for putting this together! I never really used BBSes but spent some time on IRC back in the day, usually trading files, talking about music and stuff like that. I’ll tell you what really killed the classic and far better Internet, and that’s spam. Everyone started doing away with anonymity in order to combat the nonstop amount of junk that will come through. Eventually that led to so much sterilization and then you get left with crap like Facebook and Twitter, no room for rational thought or debate, and you just have the modern cesspool of three or four mega sites with echo chambers of retards. You can probably tell I’m bitter having grown up using the early Internet and then watching it turn to shit, anyway, this was a breath of fresh air today.

[@RachaelSA]

I have been administering mail servers for ISP's since the 90's, if you only knew how much work I did trying to fight that stuff, I hated spam more than the average person.

[@henmanchow9045]

Just Kill All Classic Stuff Muahahahaha

[@motleykingdom9394]

I can't remember the name of that chat tool but I have found memories of it. It allowed you to overlay a chat on a web browser and you could select your own transparent GIFs as your avatar. The main feature though is someone could upload a larger GIF file like the Mystery Van or a magic carpet that would serve as a chat vehicle. If anyone placed their avatar on your vehicle you controlled what website their browser was looking at so it was a cool way to give people a tour of your favorite websites. I truly missed the day when the internet was something that was earned.

[@RojamZane]

A really nostalgic look back. I started on CompuServe; we only had ID numbers which were our email addresses too. It was such a big switch when you could have an alias email address. For me, the big part of the early Internet was Usenet news groups. That did feel like a community. Messaging with lots of people from around the globe. I think I was subscribed to at least four "Friends" (the TV show) groups.

[@movax20h]

Waves, not wavs. The most I miss about 90s, were homepages, yes, some were all cringe small personal pages, but a lot of was cool stuff, articles, howtos, blogs, etc. Pages were small, and you could find them. Now, we have more people, but pages are huge, most people share things using social media instead, or some generic hosting providers, with lot of other people crap, ads, etc. It feeled more organic and less commercial and bland. We still had this in 2000s, but after 2010, things started dying, unless you are really dedicated for this. I still use IRC, mailing lists, do not use social media (was using Reddit a lot, as a website aggregator and for discussions, but golden age of Reddit is gone long time ago; and of course KZbin, which has a lot of content too).

[@drewb3665]

1990s interent was so mysterious. There was an atmosphere to it that I can't describe but it was magical.

[@nO_3Xcuses]

I first experienced online chatting back in 92 on AOL. I was so amazed that I could actually go into a chat room, type a message, and others could actually read and respond to my comment in real time! That’s taking for granted today. I a was 18 back in 1992 and saw the potential of what the internet would eventually bring although the technology wasn’t quite there yet. I remember when webpages would take ages to load up. Watching anything stream was a slide show. I remember being an early adopter of buying things online. Amazon started out as a simple book store in the 90’s and that was all they sold online lol. I remember purchasing Windows Me and 2000 on eBay in the early 00’s. I’m glad that we have passed that era lol.

[@toybarons]

Sure miss those days. I remember back then, before KZbin, there was Useless Pages. Just random webs sites, some hosting several useless things. One of my favs was Virtual Bubblewrap which was just a piece of bubble wrap you could pop. Some hosted weird news stories like the Exploding Whale of how a town tried to remove a dead whale by blowing it up. Finding these sites was always so much fun.

[@kylehill3643]

The internet was truly a super highway. Now it's a toll road with machine gun guards.

[@Trancer006]

This makes me nostalgic and wanna go back to those times even tho i didnt even have a computer in the 90s lol

[@mrflamewars]

If I care about losing access to something, I download it and keep the file. Can't have access revoked that way. Be it music or movies or programs/games or whatever, a file I have on my local storage and also have backup copies is a file containing content that some corporate weasel can't revoke my access to.

[@КриптоНовости-х1о]

this is so true. Whoever controls the medium you use, controls you. Thinking and desicion making are delegated to google in 2020. People actually google for "what to do if there is a spider in the bathroom?" And this is promoted as progress. Our neural network systems, also known as "nervous systems" remain neglected and see less and less use.

[@KratostheThird]

@@КриптоНовости-х1о You also have cloud services that corporations also use to try to control you. That's why Windows 11 is being critiqued by some many people now. I want full control on the operating system that I paid money for, not some trillion dollar corporation that tries to tell me what I can and can't do. Linux is really getting more and more appealing for the average person, and for good reason.