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The Web in 1994

Wow, I remember those times... I think I first got on the Web in 1994 or 1995. I was on Prodigy before that. My parents only got it because I'd used it at school, and begged and begged until they gave in. They didn't really see any use for it, until they discovered chat rooms. :)
 
Santaman said:
The old days... 80486 DX2 66 8(!!) MB RAM a 420 Mb HDD and a Vesa local bus card! first a 33K6 and then the 56K6 Modem.. Oh yes I DO remember.. quite easily so since I still have that machine.. ;)


Sounds just like my old Laser from Microcenter.. But i had a dual speed CD-rom drive...
 
I prefer the web that way.

There are too many pictures/animations/etc. on the internet. Just give me plain text and the occasional GIF!!!
 
BTW - I really miss my ol' Packard Bell 486DX2 66Mhz...I remember trying (and failing) to get Quake run on that. Diablo ran...but it was at like 25%-50% normal speed...I loved those days though :)


Oh, and I used to play Tekwar too....shooting the pedestrians & cops was so fun!
 
saturn0660 said:
Santaman said:
The old days... 80486 DX2 66 8(!!) MB RAM a 420 Mb HDD and a Vesa local bus card! first a 33K6 and then the 56K6 Modem.. Oh yes I DO remember.. quite easily so since I still have that machine.. ;)


Sounds just like my old Laser from Microcenter.. But i had a dual speed CD-rom drive...

At first mine had a two speed Philips drive which broke down last year so now its fitted with a 32 speed IDE drive, also in those days I bought a 420 Mb Conner tapestreamer, which could back up the entire drive in about an hour or so. :D
 
Web? Pfffft... just a craze based on the GUI fad. Cooler heads will soon prevail and we'll be back to a command line interface any time now...

Any time...

Yep... any...time...

GOPHER RULZ! ;-)
 
I remember those days. That's pretty much when I discovered the internet and got hooked. It seems like a lifetime ago.
 
in 1995, I entered the Web using my trusty Macintosh Performa 475..(I was still on that bad boy in 1999 as I had upgraded it with a Power PC 601 chip..an entire screaming 66MHZ in speed)..Yes I remember the old web, and miss it dearly
 
Oh, I remember those days so well.

I got my first computer in early January of 1995. I actually recall when Star Trek Voyager had some kind of website. I can't recall what is was exactly, but compared to today, the site was so shabby and bland.

Websites always used Times New Roman on their sites. There was rarely ever some other font and there was the occasional picture somewhere. Hearing music on a site was rare, and when you'd find a site that had videos to watch, they were of the lowest quality and so tiny!

I can still remember exactly what it sounded like when you would connect to AOL using your pitiful 56K modem. Hell, I play Final Fantasy Online and I have a friend on there that I talk to and he gets a lot of lag. I say to him one time, "Why are you lagging so badly?" "I'm on dialup!" I'm like, "WTF?! That still exists?!"

It's amazing to see how far the web has come when you think about it. To me, it still feels like it's a relatively new thing.

Also, referencing a post from above, I can recall when ordering things online was a bit scary. Hell, even today, my parents still have some reservations about it. I can recall the very first time I ordered an item off Amazon and was so nervous that someone was going to have my credit card information in seconds. Now, I find myself ordering things online more than I do going into the actual stores!

It'll be funny someday. Right now, I'm 24 years old and if I ever have kids it'll be hysterical if, say, twenty years from now, "Back in my day when I used the web!" :D

And, to quote postman Cliff Claven from an episode of Frasier,

"Yeah, well, e-mail did hurt us, but the computer's gonna be dead in about five years anyway. The post office will rise again, my friend, will rise again!"

:lol:
 
1994 was the year I first got connected to the net. Earthlink was my first ISP, although before this I had used Prodigy and AOL occasionally. I also connected to local BBS' quite often, although once 1996 rolled around most of the local BBS' in my town ceased to exist because of the net. Good times back then, I remember newsgroups were my thing back then.
 
rich kolker said:
The Web! That's new stuff.

*snip*
No kidding. I remember Usenet and all those debates about the "new" Star Trek back in the 80's. And that moving from 1200 to 2400 baud was a quantum improvement in technology. :D
 
The first time I ever used the internet was the fall of '96, at the local library.

First website was made in October '97 (HTML was so tough for me initially - it took me a long time to figure out how HREF tags worked).

First time using Hi-Speed 'net was in early '99, when the new local library got a kicka$$ computer lab setup (for the time).

First time I bought something online ( early 2001).

First time I bought something off an eBay auction (early 2002).



Man, I do wish the 'ol web. Is there actually a site that documents the phases of the internet??? (Not Wayback Machine)
 
TerriO said:
Ah, those were the days. Remember when we thought 2400 baud was fast?

Yeah, I remember it took over 50 minutes to download a ~700 K driver file for Windows 3.0! And that was from a direct-dial BB. This was back in '92 or so. So before the web was the web.
 
TimelessTrek said:
Oh, and I used to play Tekwar too....shooting the pedestrians & cops was so fun!

I had that game! Damned difficult. Couldn't figure it out.

But yeah, shooting the civilians was fun.
 
I really wish there was a search engine archive...where I could redo my search for different topics and come up with the websites that were viewed, but since long lost, years ago.

These days, the same search often brings up the newer results, the older ones buried and gone.
 
^^^ Yahoo in the late 90s ALWAYS brought up those obscure and easy to overlook sites/pages. Google and the rest (including Yahoo) are now all about the Ad-words and search engine keyword hunting so you're pretty screwed unless you want the first couple hundred results to ALWAYS be the same damn businesses or major well known sites on the web.

I wish a competitor would come in and kick Google on its ass. But in order for that to happen, they'd have to do with that crappy ad-based search engine organization...and that won't ever happen.


In the 90s, the web was a virgin.

Now, it's an old used up whore of an entity........but yet I'm still on it, typing on a Messageboard!
 
Google's Ranking algorithm should have an innate bias in favour of sites that have recently become more popular. I'm sure the people at Google try to compensate for that a little, but it often doesn't seem that way.

Besides, humans are herd animals. They like mass hysteria, and Google just magnifies it a bit.
 
Yup, that's what I was talking about mostly...Yahoo search results back then.

At least there's Internet Archive for the sites one does remember and wish to revisit again. Only thing that bugs me about that are those sites which have flash intros/links and then the archive doesn't work.
 
I'm also a graphic designer who does his fair share of web work...and let me tell you. I LOVE web sites from the late 90s.

Sure, they were "CRUDE" by today's standards but dammit - aimed w/ Notepad and a knowledge of 20 different HTML tags and you could easily produce a site that looked and worked like the professional guys.

Nowadays, it's ALL FLASH, ALL-CSS (ugghhhh...what a pain!), ALL XML AND DHTML.

They've been pushing the Web 2.0 thing for a couple years now and it STILL hasn't caught on...and 2 years is an ETERNITY in the tech world.

I say we all revert. People got just as much done on the internet back then...tell me honestly...how is the web in design or little animations/apps REALLY made getting information ANY easier????????? Hmmm??????
 
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