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 UA-cam to teach us that 25 years ago, so just had to roll with how you thought it was pronounced I guess.
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
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 UA-cam 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...
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
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 :)
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.
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.
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...
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.
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!
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.
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.
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...
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 (-:
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.
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..
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"
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
@@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.
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)
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
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
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.
@@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.
When people thought it was important to conduct proper "netiquette" ... It was important on Usenet News -- a distributed online forum that you needed a "News Reader" to access. Before it was swamped with users, before it became 99% spam.
I agree. :P On 22nd May 2020, Findecanor wrote: >>When people thought it was important to conduct proper "netiquette" ... >> >>It was important on Usenet News -- a distributed online forum that you needed a "News Reader" to access. Before it was swamped with users, before it became 99% spam.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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!!
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.
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!?
a thing I miss is there was no verification codes and pictures and you didn't have to use an email to sign up, sometimes it was so much easier to get access to some information
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.
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?
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.
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!
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.
@@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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I got addicted to the "internet" and spent almost 2 weeks straight, "searching the web". I'm sure I looked homeless and disheveled by the end of my tenure on the "web". And believe me, you had to have some major patience when it was dial up and the only land line you had.
@@NathanChisholm041 You must be VERY tech savvy! I get gratification from all the information readily available. I find it all, to be very useful. As far as hardware, idk...I'm kinda burnt out on the video game scene, smartphones, tablets, etc...I do dig my SNES Classic though! Lol What would it take to get you excited about tech? Androids? I think those exist. Hover vehicles?
USENet, IRC, IMs, MUDs/MUCKS/MUSHes, and Email lists via listserv were our Social Media. DartMUD, StyxMUD, and ElephantMUD were among my biggest hangouts.
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..
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.
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.
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.
@@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.
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..
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.
I miss not having to hire a lawyer to satisfy EU and national regulations that, it turns out, don't only apply to Google and Facebook. I miss free speech being seen as a promise, not an almost-agreed-upon threat to be curbed. I miss visiting pseudonymous personal websites (which did not have to be garish *or* hosted on Geocities) instead of datamined social media profiles where each expressed oddity may come back to haunt the """owner""" once seen by a co-worker, prospective employer, and so forth.
Agreed. Back then people actually _wanted_ to be anonymous online. Now people turn over all their personal info without a second thought. It's now a giant popularity contest, like a never-ending global high school.
@@JohnnyUtah488 I still prefer pseudonyms, because they are fun to use. Plus, I lived through the 70s and 80s CB era, and became hooked on handles at a very young age.
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!
Sure miss those days. I remember back then, before UA-cam, 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.
In the 90s you had to explore the web to find that community that resonated with you, there was quite a large array of people and organisations hosting their own sites, forums, and chat servers. The internet community of today is consolidated by large tech giants. People tend to only navigate to the big name services, Google,UA-cam,Facebook etc. For example UA-cam hosts videos of such a broad cross section of my interest, I really don't feel compelled to search for other websites that might host different videos. It's amazing and at the same time troubling. Even though I write UA-cam comments, it's not the same as being part of a smaller more personal community where you got to know the people and eventually even meet some of them. Even though some of those communities faded away, to this day I have connections to people locally and internationally to those that I met (some still yet to meet) from the 90s internet!
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.
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
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.
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.
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, UA-cam 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.
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.
I use to love making my own website and fan site, but things have changed so much, that its just not the same anymore. If you want the fanbase or to communicate with likeminded people, there are now social networks.
There's one social network and it's called bloody facebook. I miss the days where everybody made their own personal site. Took a bit more effort but it was just a bit more special IMHO.
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!
when you could online game on a 56k dial up software modem without any lag... What an awesome well put together video Dan thoroughly enjoyed that - almost like a time machine was taken back and could relate to so much of this.
hah without lag? The real l33t FPS players on Quake etcc. managed with pings of 200ms+ , back in the days when the routing to the UK Dircon quake server used to route via new york due to some bizarre Pipex routing issue.
Back around 1997 through 2003 I learned how to set up a dialup router with just an old PC. That way, I could do my online stuff, assorted MUCKs and MUDS, plus coursework, while my housemate played Ultima Online.
Censorship was something that was nicely missing in the 90's internet and your browsing history was not viewed as gold to read your mind, steer your opinion and then foist things upon you. I'm happy to have experienced the free internet which is thousands of miles away from today's internet, which took a strange turn around 2006-2008 for me personally, can't say how other people felt about the change of the internet over time. When I heard 3:28 geocities and the other sites I felt warm in my soul and the thought of the dialup tone of logging on and getting onto sites and writing daft things on sites.
the amount of stuff you could get away with on the early web is quite hilarious when I think about it... people used to do a lot of crazy stuff back then... 100% pure free speech
Love you comments towards the end relating to the sense of community. An area I really miss was Newsgroups which eventually got invaded with ads for viagra and such. Thanks Dan as always
Some of the subject lines in those waves of penis enlargement spams were simply epic and hilarious though, to where we often had to reply in group to them, such as... YOUR PENIS WILL EXPLODE IN SIZE!!! Best comment to that was just a simple, "Uhm, ouch?"
12:23, yeah, remember "webrings?" Those were tools (banners) where websites were connected through that banner since the sites were on a similar theme.
I remember limewire where pretty much everything you attempted to download was a virus, those were the days where you had to take that risk to ruin your machine to get the music you wanted! Great video as always Dan, do you have anything on podcast? Plus I remember dial up where I was allowed an hour an night of internet use and my dad would pick the phone up to make a call and then go ape shit because I was still on it 3 hours later 😅
@@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.
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.
It was just something so special back then and I really do miss that lost innocence. Just like in the 80's being one of a few in class with a home computer. IRC and Lycos in '95 was what I remember the most. Also getting a Hotmail accound pre-Microsoft. It was all so incredibly exotic. I didn't get dial-up at home until '99 but boy that was cool. So slow though when loading a website with images on it 😂
Brilliant video! Yes, it was so exciting back then! The first thing I searched for "emulators" and was amazed with what came back :-) I was playing SNES games at 10fps in no time! Actually, that was the first thing I search for when I had brief access to a BBS on a friends Amiga. I searched for spectrum emulator and was amazed to get a speccy emu for my Amiga that I excitedly copied onto a disk, took home and managed to load my old tapes via my sampler cartridge on my A500. Aaah the nostalgia!
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.
Nailed it.... I ran an ISP back in 1996-2004 and they were the best days of my life, what a blast! The 'newness' of the internet was such an amazing buzz, not to mention the simple uncomplicated internet of the days was so much fun. I met some great people on IRC. Dont get me wrong - the internet today is great, but it definately doesnt have the same buzz that we experienced in the 90s! Thanks for sharing this and bringing back some great memories.
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.
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.
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.
Thanks so much for this Dan. Amazing video. Oh my nostalgia galore. Nostalgia feels like something very much needed in these current times. I remember qs a kid enjoying windows 3.1.but when Windows 95 came out, it was like the most amazing development of all time. You brought all that fun back to me in this video brother. Thank you
Actually the dial up sounds can be 'understood'. The changes in frequency and the alternating beeps and random noise let you recognize the current connection speed. When you hear the sounds you can say what speed is set up for this connection. A specific connection mode always sounds exactly the same on each conntection attempt.
I feel like one big difference is that in the 90's the internet was embraced more as an educational tool for kids. There were a lot of websites for kids that don't exist anymore. There were all kinds of kids software programs that don't exist anymore, or at least aren't as good as they used to be. I think kids were encouraged to go online back then, more than they are today. Now parents are concerned about kids spending to much time in front of screens and there's this push to get kids to read books and go outside more. There used to be a kids site called playmusic .com. It was a classical music site for kids from the American Symphony Orchestra League. They ran TV commercials for it all the time. They must've spent a lot of money on it. They had a kid's forum where they were supposed to discuss playing instruments and stuff. It had no moderation and didn't require you to set up an account. Naturally, it was an online bullying free for all and a total embarrassment for the organization. The fact that they thought they could trust kids to actually use an online forum like that for its intended purpose, goes to show you how much people's mentality about kids and the internet has changed in the past 20 years.
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 UA-cam to teach us that 25 years ago, so just had to roll with how you thought it was pronounced I guess.
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
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".
Yeah I always called them wave since they were short for Waveform, not wavform. But in todays world it probably doesnt matter.
Also, back in the '90s, most people pronounced GIF as "jiff". I still do today.
Only JUST seen this comment! I remember wave (.wav) files like yesterday! Would be well and truly outdated by todays standards! Happy days!
The biggest thing was the feeling that the web belonged to us, not governments or corporations.
I miss the innocence and creativity of the 90s internet.
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 UA-cam 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...
@@anisomniac5931 I was born in 2003, too, but i missed that side of the world.
it was much more exciting than today's Internet
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
And Alta Vista.
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
Amen....... I loathe today's HTML 5 overbloat and overused embedded media
IRC
@@Thelemorf that's still there. I think gopher is gone. I think Usenet might still be there.
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.
Heldig :D You lucky :)
@@StigDesign He didn't say happily married though! (She's buried under the patio!) jk
@@nickabbott4411 lol
Wow.. what a first-mover 😉👍 !!.. And congrats 😁
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 :)
I miss everyone on the internet being computer literate enough to configure a modem.
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.
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.
Or type simple commands on the command line...
Trumpet Winsock
Or even pppd
What I miss from the very, very early World Wide Web: no adverts.
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.
When mainstream advertisers thought it was a fad.
Unmoderated newsgroups in the 90s were some of the rudest internet spaces in memory.
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...
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.
I miss 00s flash games
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!
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.
Will That Be Possible In 2021?
IDK But It Was A Lot Of Fun!!!
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.
are referring to geocities?
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...
😂😂😂😂
Perfect sound effect 😁
I miss the 90s as a whole! Not just the internet.
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 (-:
I have several copies of The Net magazine (including the floppies or perhaps cds!)
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.
Dial Up used to be an event, the sound was a teleport to the world. Now its an unconditional habit.
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..
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"
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
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.
@@johndorian4078 you never learnt ATM0?
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.
Wow thats kewl. And RAD dude.
@@captaincrash12 Ha ha... Those are expressions I never used. :)
@@WaterShowsProd Fair enough.
The net was a lot more fun back then
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.
*Anime Web Turnpike*
nope
There was certainly the adventure element.
@@IzludeTingel Just how old are you now, ancient one.
I miss the "personal websites". Now everything is in one big template and boring.
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.
Even MySpace was semi personalized. I love making everything orange and adding music and weird things.
Personally I prefer a more organized structure as opposed to the disorganized mess of yesteryear.
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.
@@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.
internet in the 90's was my shelter. Internet of today is what I want to escape from
Internet was fun when it wasn't for everyone.
I agree. Once the normies got involved, it went to shit.
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)
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
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
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.
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.
"Stay in 1996, it's better than 2020." Boy truer words have never been spoken. This is an awful year.
Probably Because Of Quarantine!!!
@@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.
When people thought it was important to conduct proper "netiquette" ...
It was important on Usenet News -- a distributed online forum that you needed a "News Reader" to access. Before it was swamped with users, before it became 99% spam.
I agree. :P
On 22nd May 2020, Findecanor wrote:
>>When people thought it was important to conduct proper "netiquette" ...
>>
>>It was important on Usenet News -- a distributed online forum that you needed a "News Reader" to access. Before it was swamped with users, before it became 99% spam.
@@lister_of_smeg6545 I see what you did there. :) Usenet is what I miss most about the 90s Internet.
It's not all spam. Lots of great Linux ISOs on usenet today. I still use it
@@lister_of_smeg6545 Remember replies go *below* the quoted text.
heh usenet is the first place i bumped into Goatse :D, it was also the place do download the warez and music!
great video mate. really enjoyed it !
I remember coding my first webpage in HTML, wish I still had it. Great video and memories, love it
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
Did you check the Internet Archive? Mine is still in there...
back in 2000 when I was learning I used frontpage!
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.
There's Discord If You Miss That!!!
@@thwomysdonutland9042 I know about Discord. I was just reflecting back to simpler times when the internet was still kind of new to everyone.
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.
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.
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.
I miss that you actually had to be smart to get online.
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
Yup internet back then was mostly full of actual geeks gamers and genius people
People, including myself, also miss movies from 90s and 80s... 😏
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.
Truth.
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!!
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.
1990s interent was so mysterious. There was an atmosphere to it that I can't describe but it was magical.
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!?
a thing I miss is there was no verification codes and pictures and you didn't have to use an email to sign up, sometimes it was so much easier to get access to some information
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.
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?
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.
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!
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.
@@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.
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).
when the website gets filled with ai generated stuff itll sure be harder to get actual information probably
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.
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.
That's worthy of a mention on your CV!
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.
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.
remember planetsearch?
@@realmichaud Actually, no.
That must have passed me by.
Social media and big tech ruined everything. I have deleted all my social media account except youtube.
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.
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.
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.
I got addicted to the "internet" and spent almost 2 weeks straight, "searching the web". I'm sure I looked homeless and disheveled by the end of my tenure on the "web". And believe me, you had to have some major patience when it was dial up and the only land line you had.
Sounds like good times! I used to do the same with friends with empty pizza boxes and coke bottles...
@@NathanChisholm041 I'm not sure I'd call it good times, but it certainly was a development phase. A turning of the times, if you will.
@@boodro2122 I find tech bores me these days as there nothing exciting on the horizon!
@@NathanChisholm041 You must be VERY tech savvy! I get gratification from all the information readily available. I find it all, to be very useful. As far as hardware, idk...I'm kinda burnt out on the video game scene, smartphones, tablets, etc...I do dig my SNES Classic though! Lol
What would it take to get you excited about tech? Androids? I think those exist. Hover vehicles?
The LACK of social media.
USENet, IRC, IMs, MUDs/MUCKS/MUSHes, and Email lists via listserv were our Social Media. DartMUD, StyxMUD, and ElephantMUD were among my biggest hangouts.
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..
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.
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.
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.
@@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.
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..
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.
I miss not having to hire a lawyer to satisfy EU and national regulations that, it turns out, don't only apply to Google and Facebook. I miss free speech being seen as a promise, not an almost-agreed-upon threat to be curbed. I miss visiting pseudonymous personal websites (which did not have to be garish *or* hosted on Geocities) instead of datamined social media profiles where each expressed oddity may come back to haunt the """owner""" once seen by a co-worker, prospective employer, and so forth.
the 00s had WAY better internet than the 90s. I still have a website on Geocities and I miss old MySpace and original youtube etc. but yeah EU sucks
Agreed. Back then people actually _wanted_ to be anonymous online. Now people turn over all their personal info without a second thought. It's now a giant popularity contest, like a never-ending global high school.
@@JohnnyUtah488 I still prefer pseudonyms, because they are fun to use. Plus, I lived through the 70s and 80s CB era, and became hooked on handles at a very young age.
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!
I just miss the days when the Internet wasn't full of "rank and file" people who think the Internet should be "safe" for them and their broods.
The Wild West was tamed for the weak.
@@ottomatic42 It was fun while it lasted.
Sure miss those days. I remember back then, before UA-cam, 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.
The internet was truly a super highway. Now it's a toll road with machine gun guards.
In the 90s you had to explore the web to find that community that resonated with you, there was quite a large array of people and organisations hosting their own sites, forums, and chat servers. The internet community of today is consolidated by large tech giants. People tend to only navigate to the big name services, Google,UA-cam,Facebook etc. For example UA-cam hosts videos of such a broad cross section of my interest, I really don't feel compelled to search for other websites that might host different videos. It's amazing and at the same time troubling. Even though I write UA-cam comments, it's not the same as being part of a smaller more personal community where you got to know the people and eventually even meet some of them. Even though some of those communities faded away, to this day I have connections to people locally and internationally to those that I met (some still yet to meet) from the 90s internet!
PeerTube looks promising.
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.
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
Best thing I miss about the 90s internet: the online community wasn't full of idiots yet.
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.
BLEW my MIND when I first saw a hit counter! I copied a static image of one from a high traffic site and pasted it on my page ;)
I remember fredom of expression. Miss that
Started with the wake-up that your online content will come back to haunt you. Then the darkness to the darknet wasn't that dark.
Bon sang.
Bingo!
You just got cancelled!
@@TLM860 I thought I was shadow banned by youtube.
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.
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, UA-cam 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.
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.
Before this I was a part of many and ran my own local BBS system. Met a lot of great people that way.
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.
I use to love making my own website and fan site, but things have changed so much, that its just not the same anymore.
If you want the fanbase or to communicate with likeminded people, there are now social networks.
There's one social network and it's called bloody facebook. I miss the days where everybody made their own personal site. Took a bit more effort but it was just a bit more special IMHO.
This was one of my fan site designed using a notepad and domain name and hosting from lycos
web.archive.org/web/20031229223251/www.shrine2aeris.co.uk/
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!
I used to chat with people all over the world back then
They all slowly dissapeared from my life
when you could online game on a 56k dial up software modem without any lag... What an awesome well put together video Dan thoroughly enjoyed that - almost like a time machine was taken back and could relate to so much of this.
hah without lag? The real l33t FPS players on Quake etcc. managed with pings of 200ms+ , back in the days when the routing to the UK Dircon quake server used to route via new york due to some bizarre Pipex routing issue.
Back around 1997 through 2003 I learned how to set up a dialup router with just an old PC. That way, I could do my online stuff, assorted MUCKs and MUDS, plus coursework, while my housemate played Ultima Online.
Never heard anyone refer to WAV files as "wav" files before... We always said "wave" files...
Censorship was something that was nicely missing in the 90's internet and your browsing history was not viewed as gold to read your mind, steer your opinion and then foist things upon you. I'm happy to have experienced the free internet which is thousands of miles away from today's internet, which took a strange turn around 2006-2008 for me personally, can't say how other people felt about the change of the internet over time.
When I heard 3:28 geocities and the other sites I felt warm in my soul and the thought of the dialup tone of logging on and getting onto sites and writing daft things on sites.
the amount of stuff you could get away with on the early web is quite hilarious when I think about it... people used to do a lot of crazy stuff back then... 100% pure free speech
I remember when you had your internet persona and the "real word" you separated from one another (until the mid 00's)
Love you comments towards the end relating to the sense of community. An area I really miss was Newsgroups which eventually got invaded with ads for viagra and such. Thanks Dan as always
Some of the subject lines in those waves of penis enlargement spams were simply epic and hilarious though, to where we often had to reply in group to them, such as...
YOUR PENIS WILL EXPLODE IN SIZE!!!
Best comment to that was just a simple, "Uhm, ouch?"
12:23, yeah, remember "webrings?" Those were tools (banners) where websites were connected through that banner since the sites were on a similar theme.
Dan, you have very nicely captured the Internet in the 90s. Well done!
Forgot the usenet! This was brilliant, thanks for the nostalgia train.
I remember limewire where pretty much everything you attempted to download was a virus, those were the days where you had to take that risk to ruin your machine to get the music you wanted! Great video as always Dan, do you have anything on podcast? Plus I remember dial up where I was allowed an hour an night of internet use and my dad would pick the phone up to make a call and then go ape shit because I was still on it 3 hours later 😅
Are you paid by the big tech overlords to stop us questioning web 2.0?
Oh, you didn't mention Usenet. Best place to find warez and other stuff back in the early days.
internet today = google, facebook, twitter.
internet in 90s = internet itself
I wish you could just host a website easily today, not have companies host it for you.
messageboards. I felt you had deeper more interesting conversations in messageboards then on modern social media.
The something awful forums are still up. Do you have stairs in your house?
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.
I remember saving pages to floppy discs at school and reading it at home (on PC without internet)
@@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.
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.
It was just something so special back then and I really do miss that lost innocence. Just like in the 80's being one of a few in class with a home computer. IRC and Lycos in '95 was what I remember the most. Also getting a Hotmail accound pre-Microsoft. It was all so incredibly exotic. I didn't get dial-up at home until '99 but boy that was cool. So slow though when loading a website with images on it 😂
Brilliant video! Yes, it was so exciting back then! The first thing I searched for "emulators" and was amazed with what came back :-) I was playing SNES games at 10fps in no time! Actually, that was the first thing I search for when I had brief access to a BBS on a friends Amiga. I searched for spectrum emulator and was amazed to get a speccy emu for my Amiga that I excitedly copied onto a disk, took home and managed to load my old tapes via my sampler cartridge on my A500. Aaah the nostalgia!
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.
100% plus not depending on your connection to their servers is a +
Nailed it.... I ran an ISP back in 1996-2004 and they were the best days of my life, what a blast! The 'newness' of the internet was such an amazing buzz, not to mention the simple uncomplicated internet of the days was so much fun. I met some great people on IRC. Dont get me wrong - the internet today is great, but it definately doesnt have the same buzz that we experienced in the 90s!
Thanks for sharing this and bringing back some great memories.
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.
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.
Just Kill All Classic Stuff Muahahahaha
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.
Dan...great video mate! And thanks for making me feel old! mIRC!!! Thsts a blast from the past. #Undernet :)
Thanks so much for this Dan. Amazing video. Oh my nostalgia galore. Nostalgia feels like something very much needed in these current times. I remember qs a kid enjoying windows 3.1.but when Windows 95 came out, it was like the most amazing development of all time. You brought all that fun back to me in this video brother. Thank you
The thing I miss about the 90s is computer stores like CompUsa, Egghead and MicroCenter.
Vincent Aurelius MicroCenter is still around. Not sure about the other two.
@@arashjadidiproductions Gateway
And 80s... Waldensoftware, B. Dalton Software (which I think then became Babbages and then Software Etc.)
Actually the dial up sounds can be 'understood'. The changes in frequency and the alternating beeps and random noise let you recognize the current connection speed. When you hear the sounds you can say what speed is set up for this connection.
A specific connection mode always sounds exactly the same on each conntection attempt.
I feel like one big difference is that in the 90's the internet was embraced more as an educational tool for kids. There were a lot of websites for kids that don't exist anymore. There were all kinds of kids software programs that don't exist anymore, or at least aren't as good as they used to be. I think kids were encouraged to go online back then, more than they are today. Now parents are concerned about kids spending to much time in front of screens and there's this push to get kids to read books and go outside more. There used to be a kids site called playmusic .com. It was a classical music site for kids from the American Symphony Orchestra League. They ran TV commercials for it all the time. They must've spent a lot of money on it. They had a kid's forum where they were supposed to discuss playing instruments and stuff. It had no moderation and didn't require you to set up an account. Naturally, it was an online bullying free for all and a total embarrassment for the organization. The fact that they thought they could trust kids to actually use an online forum like that for its intended purpose, goes to show you how much people's mentality about kids and the internet has changed in the past 20 years.
I think kids are still online. I don't know what they're doing now. Probably social media. But it's not the cool stuff they used to do.