What the Internet looked like in 1995

[RAMA]

http://mentalfloss.com/article/49676/what-internet-looked-1995

Wow, blast from the past...though I was on the net using a friend's computer for years before this, I didn't get my own till 1995...

Some of you here are young enough not to know, which is scary...

RAMA

 

[CorporalClegg]

Computer Chronicles! That was one of my favorite shows when I was a kid.

Yeah. I'm a nerd.

The hourglass picture made me laugh.

 

[StarCruiser]

A trip through the way-back machine! I had forgotten that old show... Just watched about 5-6 episodes.

Hard to believe it's been off the air for over a decade now.

 

[Captain Kathryn]

Wow.. I got my first computer in 1995-ish and it only had MS-DOS and really bad games.

Then I got a "real computer" in 1997 and I DID belong to newsgroups and hit up AOL chatrooms...chat with SmarterChild...oh man the memories hahahaha. Dang.

Remember Netscape?

 

[StarCruiser]

You mean "Netscrape" - was good for a while and then just fell rapidly behind...

Not that IE was all that good either - or is it still not that good?!

 

[CorporalClegg]

Netscape never fell that far behind. It's only real issues had to do with compatibility/page formatting which really weren't Netscape's fault. And even in the years leading up to Mozilla (like version 5 and 6), Netscape did offer browsing features (that we now take for granted) that would take IE years to provide.

and hit up AOL chatrooms...

A/S/L?

 

[Haggis and tatties]

Wow.. I got my first computer in 1995-ish and it only had MS-DOS and really bad games.

Then I got a "real computer" in 1997 and I DID belong to newsgroups and hit up AOL chatrooms...chat with SmarterChild...oh man the memories hahahaha. Dang.

Remember Netscape?

I also got my first PC way back in 1993 specifically for Star Trek The 25th Anniversary game, a Sprint 386 25 mhz, and MS-dos 4 if i remember correctly, and a manual that made war and peace look like a leaflet. lol

I have no idea the internet was about back then, i did not become internet aware until the millenium.

 

[Robert Maxwell]

Netscape never fell that far behind. It's only real issues had to do with compatibility/page formatting which really weren't Netscape's fault. And even in the years leading up to Mozilla (like version 5 and 6), Netscape did offer browsing features (that we now take for granted) that would take IE years to provide.

and hit up AOL chatrooms...

A/S/L?

I liked Netscape up until the Communicator series--4.x, I think. 4.5 was the worst version of it. It would crash on standards compliant pages if they used things like CSS positioning. Absolutely absurd. Number one, a browser should never crash due to HTML/JS code on the page, and it's entirely unforgivable for it to do so on a page actually adhering to standards.

I abandoned it and never looked back. I went to Firefox for a few years, later on, but then switched to Chrome and that's where I've been for some time now.

 

[FPAlpha]

Always nice to have these flashbacks.. in 95 i was 20 years old though not much into computers since i didn't have one at home.

It was not until my mid 20s that i actually got one but in the meantime i used one at friends and the university computer room to get online and check stuff out. The amount of information readily available was insane (and i didn't even start to look for porn!).

I remember how Netscape for a time utterly kicked Microsofts ass, how annoying it was to have an AOL CD in nearly every magazine you bought and sometimes just there in your mailbox and what a 56k modem sounded (one of the most vile sounds ever).

I remember when i got my first 768k DSL modem and how lightning fast it seemed and that i had a 2GB volume package per month that i didn't use up.

And i also remember 90s/early 00s style websites and the worst one were the private ego pages you stumbled onto occasionally with their garish colors, embedded music and flashing background.. and people were so proud that they had pulled that off by themselves and were regarded as tech-geeks for being able to code HTML.

I loved that time!

 

[Hound of UIster]

Always nice to have these flashbacks.. in 95 i was 20 years old though not much into computers since i didn't have one at home.

It was not until my mid 20s that i actually got one but in the meantime i used one at friends and the university computer room to get online and check stuff out. The amount of information readily available was insane (and i didn't even start to look for porn!).

I remember how Netscape for a time utterly kicked Microsofts ass, how annoying it was to have an AOL CD in nearly every magazine you bought and sometimes just there in your mailbox and what a 56k modem sounded (one of the most vile sounds ever).

They even had those AOL CDs in Germany?

 

[137th Gebirg]

Damn...I still use Eudora on my Mac at home!

God! I hated the goofy haircuts back then...

 

[CorporalClegg]

Netscape never fell that far behind. It's only real issues had to do with compatibility/page formatting which really weren't Netscape's fault. And even in the years leading up to Mozilla (like version 5 and 6), Netscape did offer browsing features (that we now take for granted) that would take IE years to provide.

and hit up AOL chatrooms...

A/S/L?

I liked Netscape up until the Communicator series--4.x, I think. 4.5 was the worst version of it. It would crash on standards compliant pages if they used things like CSS positioning. Absolutely absurd. Number one, a browser should never crash due to HTML/JS code on the page, and it's entirely unforgivable for it to do so on a page actually adhering to standards.

I abandoned it and never looked back. I went to Firefox for a few years, later on, but then switched to Chrome and that's where I've been for some time now.

Oh, I'm fully aware of the problems it had. I was just pointing out that it did offer some nice features. And there weren't exactly a lot of options back then.

I finally abandoned Firefox myself a few months ago. I've been switching back and forth between Opera and Chrome, but I have issues with both.

And I actually upgraded to IE10 a few days ago. It's definitely the best browser Microsoft has ever released.

If I could find some decent security tools for it, I might just stick with it.

 

[Mr. Laser Beam]

I remember when I was using Netscape and I liked to download "Throbbers" for it.

(A Throbber is that little icon that goes all shifty and transformy when Netscape is actually loading a page.)

 

[RAMA]

There were 3-4 computer shows on tv all about this new WWW thing that I watched regularly around that time.

RAMA

 

[Mr. Adventure]

I think 95 was a big year because Win 95 made it so much easier to get on the net than before. I remember wrestling with Trumpet Winsock under Win 3.1 with a 2400 baud modem and somehow got it to work.

I still have my original Netscape 1.0 on a CD somewhere. Actually ran it, talk about *bare* bones functionality these days. The first time I saw pictures slowwwwwly come in from a web page it was pretty magical though.

 

[JessDD]

I remember when I downloaded Netscape for the very first time. I downloaded it on a 14.4k modem if I recall.

The funny part is I thought I was downloading THE ENTIRE INTERNET just in the netscape program alone. Like I would have access to the entire internet now without a modem.

Yeah, I was kind of a noob back then.

 

[Captain Kathryn]

I think 95 was a big year because Win 95 made it so much easier to get on the net than before. I remember wrestling with Trumpet Winsock under Win 3.1 with a 2400 baud modem and somehow got it to work.

I still have my original Netscape 1.0 on a CD somewhere. Actually ran it, talk about *bare* bones functionality these days. The first time I saw pictures slowwwwwly come in from a web page it was pretty magical though.

I missed Windows 95 because my computer in 1995 only had MS-DOS. My second computer had Windows 98 which was a big one back then. Then I had XP for a long time which was my Sims2 computer lol. Sims2 was pretty much made to run well on XP. When I got Windows 7, my simmies won't run as well.

I had a work comp with Vista. I have Windows 7 on both my computers now, but my dad has Windows 8. I really hate using his computer because they tried to make Windows 8 like some kind of mobile device or ipad with the App Store...and you can't access anything unless you move your mouse to the top right corner of the screen. I don't know about anyone else, but I liked my normal Windows layout just fine lol.

 

[Mr. Adventure]

^^ I have Windows 8 which is tolerable if you get a start menu replacement. There's some free ones but I use Start8 from Stardock which for $5 makes my experience much more pleasant. Basically I never see the tiles and just stick to the desktop underneath.

I switched to Windows 95 on day one just because I always wanted long filenames lol.

 

[Tora Ziyal]

Okay, kiddies, I bought my first computer, a Tandy 2000, in 1983. I remember using Word 4.2, Lotus 1-2-3, and some dial-up bbs.

Bought a Zeos laptop in 1991. Then a Quantex laptop around 1998, which is when I went on the Internet.

 

[YellowSubmarine]

I think 95 was a big year because Win 95 made it so much easier to get on the net than before. I remember wrestling with Trumpet Winsock under Win 3.1 with a 2400 baud modem and somehow got it to work.

I don't think Windows 95 made it any easier. It did not even install with Internet support, let alone a browser. OS/2 Warp, released an year earlier, had both. Star Trek fans ought to know about this as not only were the series a great inspiration inside the team behind it, Kate Mulgrew was there when the release was announced.

Sadly, OS/2 was not pirated here back then, so I only heard about it on TV and felt jealous of its users.

The only thing Windows 95 ever did was sabotage OS/2 and turn around Microsoft's agreement with IBM by backstabbing them and obliterating an otherwise better operating system.

Even Slackware 2.1 offered you more at the time as far as Internet is concerned. Microsoft did not have a clue that the Internet was a thing.