What the Internet used to be like

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mbug

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May 4, 2011
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*sigh* i remember having to ask to use the net because no one could call our house phone... oh good memories
 

Saltyk

Sane among the insane.
Sep 12, 2010
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ravensheart18 said:
Saltyk said:
Innegativeion said:

ALL OF MY HATRED

so.

much.

teeth gnashing.
You know what the worst part is? I learned recently that the whole noise was unnecessary. It wasn't actually the sound of connecting to the internet. There was no sound. Someone just though we needed to hear something. Isn't that awesome?
Whoever told you that was full of it. Modem connections were SOUND transmitions. It was the same tech used on the cassette tape drives used on some early PCs. The initial sound was a carrier tone, which waited for an answering response, which then initiated the handshake. All data was transferred in tones.

Later modems were more sophistiated and had to scale through different handshake options to find the correct speed and protocol in use (very similar to a fax handshake that's still in use today).

Whether or not you HEARD the noise was up to you. Initially we used phone couplers, you heard a bit of leak but not more than that. Later direct connect modems often had a speaker that you could turn on and off either by a physical switch, or more commonly by AT commands sent to the COM port. People often left it on because early modems and connection software couldn't tell the difference between fail to handshake, busy, no answer, and a human answering. So, if you didn't connnect you wanted to know why. Other people left it off and would manually dial the number if they didn't connect after a few tries so they could hear what was happening.

The linked recording is of a fairly late modem (It cycles up to a 1200+ baud speed) and of course it touch tones, the sign of a fairly modern system! It also seems be be hanging on post handshake, I think someone forced speaker on during the actual datatransmition after connection.
Well, I probably misinterpreted that. I just remember being told that we didn't have to listen to that sound every time we logged on. I might have taken that to mean that it didn't actually do anything. The more you know, right?
 

isometry

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Mar 17, 2010
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Keeping careful lists of bookmarks because all we had were those primitive pre-google search engines. Early versions of internet explorer and the huge gap in time between the invention of pop-up ads and the invention of pop-up blockers. Video clips with horrendously low quality, formats like realplayer. Using download managers to pull files over 1 MB to avoid corrupt files. Giant MP3 players that were basically full-size hard drives in a portable casing.

Thinking about those days really makes me appreciate google search as the best upgrade the internet ever got, followed by broadband, followed by youtube, IMO.
 

Dags90

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Oct 27, 2009
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Yomandude said:
Wow...
...suddenly I feel so young.
Thanks for this thread, OP.
That's probably because you are so young. Sort of like there are soon going to be children in developed countries who haven't heard of chickenpox, because they and all their classmates were vaccinated.

Back in my day, we had our varicella zoster and we liked it! We loved it.

I remember by about 2000 our house had four landlines, so we could use our computers without tying up the phone. And oh Lordy the popups. You think computer viruses are bad now, my brother got one that made his computer dial-up to a long distance connection. We got a phone bill for over two grand.

I also remember that before 4chan became popular there was a site that was...rotten.

And seeing this meme on a TV show...
 

Vault101

I'm in your mind fuzz
Sep 26, 2010
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I remember HTML...GIF's...joecartoon..comic sans

then later newgrounds was the place to be...and salad fingers *shudder*

and of coarse the ones that hung around for ageis...like the "plok" fan page which had a petition for "plok 3d!" (presumibly on the n64) unfortunatly it is no more
 

Gottesstrafe

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Oct 23, 2010
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I remember hating AOL with a fiery passion then, and to this very day when they continued to bill me even after I ended my subscription. I remember when in order to navigate to another site you had to brave a sea of pop up windows for porn sites that were sure to give you a virus even when you didn't click them. I remember the days of Xanga, LiveJournal, and even Napster when they first started. I remember when AYB was everywhere and most flash movies were watched on Albino Black Sheep. Hell, I even remember all those god awful Penny Arcade clones and sprite comics ripping off 8-Bit Theater in the early 2000s.

And you know what? I don't miss them.
 

gbemery

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Jun 27, 2009
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I remember the ungodly amount of AOL discs for your free 7 day trial of the internet they were everywhere...and I think there was even a news spot on the amount of them piling up in landfills
 

Capt. Crankypants

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Jan 6, 2010
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Habbohotel. Neopets. Funnyjunk. Playing Flash games (like 'tanks') in class. All the teachers telling us to use fucking 'AskJeeves'. And yes, the Dial-up tone, this nostalgia includes being disconnected every time someone used the phone.
 

Limecake

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May 18, 2011
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I remember visiting websites where every link would lead to an "under construction" page, you know so you could check back later when it was finished.

I remember neopets, I was pretty boss at snagging expensive items in the stores and I would make a killing.
 

Comando96

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May 26, 2009
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Saltyk said:
You know what the worst part is? I learned recently that the whole noise was unnecessary. It wasn't actually the sound of connecting to the internet. There was no sound. Someone just though we needed to hear something. Isn't that awesome?
You know something...
I honestly think that there... that fucker there who though that up... that person is the Internets first troll... ever... the first internet trolling was the unnecessary dial up noise...
 

Esotera

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May 5, 2011
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RIP.

I came into the internet on the back-end of this, around 2000. There were enough people on it for companies to make cool websites, but the old-school style of websites/blogs remained.

Internet speeds have risen dramatically, and sites always find a way to add unnecessary crap that takes longer to download these days. There were also less ads back in the day.
 

Elementary - Dear Watson

RIP Eleuthera, I will miss you
Nov 9, 2010
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Saltyk said:
Well, there was stuff like Hamster Dance. Wasn't that the first internet meme? Like before there was even a term for it.
Was 'Milk and Cereal' before it? And the good old hamster song was a legitimate hit in the UK in 1996/7! :p
 

Frybird

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Jan 7, 2008
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I think that sums it up pretty well

(yeah i know it's not working, just put it in notepad and save it as html)

Other than that, i remember using Search Engines not called Google (wich i ignored for a long time for some reason), trying to make Websites with the atrocity that was Microsoft Frontpage, my father buying print magazines about Internetpages (not making them, it was actually mostly a reviewed link list), and him being angry at me for downloading a crapy 280p bootleg trailer of Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within for two hours or so.

Also, i still have a disc with tools, tutorials, examples and resources for creating your own websites....The Sample Websites are so awful by todays standards that one has to wonder how they could sell this shit.
 

Zack Alklazaris

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Oct 6, 2011
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If anyone was lucky enough to visit hulu on april fools day they were presented with the internet in 96. It definitely took me back, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/04/01/hulu-april-fools-2011_n_843507.html heres a screen shot.
 

iLikeHippos

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Jan 19, 2010
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Well, I was too young to be surfing the Internet when the big, black N was the most popular cheese around.
But I remember that every time dad was on the computer, he was always pissed, 100% of the time. If you asked him anything, you'd hear the most apathetic moan of your life in response.
He also liked to moan and utter "Jesus Christ" as if he was preaching the web constantly as his annoying and obnoxious lord and savior.

When I began surfing the web finally however, I mostly visited the most fucked-up sites and content, and most of it was unintentional. There was just nothing else to do with the computer I found. And yeah, a flash video of 3 minutes took an hour to load. And even than, there wasn't a guarantee it wouldn't stop mid-section and make you rage completely.

I liked those days though. I had more exercise and I was more healthy. Now I risk of becoming a sack with no muscles (Except I often hit the gym and don't spend so much time on consoles nor computers).
 

BishopofAges

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Sep 15, 2010
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I actually have a website for this one, found out that the hype site for the movie Space Jam (1996) is actually still up and running, and for its time it was considered 'dynamic' though these days if you went to a site like this is more for its quick load content like reading comics than anything else.

You can also tell by the old school style url, this site is pretty old.

http://www2.warnerbros.com/spacejam/movie/jam.htm

Reminds me of playing Oregon Trail on candy colored apple mac computers, ahh memories.
 

Kragg

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Mar 30, 2010
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Dags90 said:
Yomandude said:
Wow...
...suddenly I feel so young.
Thanks for this thread, OP.
That's probably because you are so young. Sort of like there are soon going to be children in developed countries who haven't heard of chickenpox, because they and all their classmates were vaccinated.

Back in my day, we had our varicella zoster and we liked it! We loved it.

I remember by about 2000 our house had four landlines, so we could use our computers without tying up the phone. And oh Lordy the popups. You think computer viruses are bad now, my brother got one that made his computer dial-up to a long distance connection. We got a phone bill for over two grand.

I also remember that before 4chan became popular there was a site that was...rotten.

And seeing this meme on a TV show...
rofl was thinking the same thing, kid is 16 years old

its interesting how these generation gaps happen, personally i cant relate to people who, to put it in gamer terms, didnt have bulbasaur or charmander as a starter pokemon
 

tgr

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Feb 3, 2008
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When I used internet the first time back in the beginning of the 90's, It was just a bunch of black text on a grey background. Sometimes there was a link to a small black/white picture. I looked around for a while, got bored and didn't touch it for over half a year. Next time I opened Netscape, internet was full of animated gifs and blinking text in all kinds of eye-watering colors. I was like "Whoa, what is this madness?".