209
How do you guys remember the early days of the internet? What do you miss about it?
(tim.kicker.dev)
this post was submitted on 25 Jul 2023
209 points (98.2% liked)
Asklemmy
43463 readers
805 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
Search asklemmy ๐
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- [email protected]: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_[email protected]~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
People talk about the early days of the Internet, then only go back as far as the world wide web.
There was Internet before Web servers.
When I think of the early Internet, I'm usually thinking of USENET. Posting a question about a Linux device driver not working, getting an answer back from the guy who wrote it, and then him fixing it to work with your hardware.
If I think of the early web, it was very exciting. Mosaic was the browser, and HTML was clean. Briefly, it was almost pure information and untainted by profit motive.
Anyone with a server on the Internet (an extremely exclusive group) could install a web server and start their own site. It was very populist among the privileged few who could participate.
There were assholes. There are always assholes. But there were very few stupid assholes. The nature of the early Internet meant there was a certain threshold you had to cross before you had access. Then, AOL came, and stupid assholes arrived.
It's been downhill ever since.
Now GET OFF MY LAWN!!!
Edit: typo
I never used usenet but I really appreciate being able to view discussion forums from when back to the future came out.
@NABDad @Provider Usenet was certainly an amazing space, for a long time. It was a lot of my social life from the 1980s until into the 2000s. It slightly predates the Internet, running on UUCP; and indeed I ran a UUCP relay from my home for a time.
I then, in the 1990s and after, ran webservers from home. Yes, I was privileged to do so. The web, too, was a very exciting place in the early days.
@NABDad @Provider
Do you remember alt.flames? Not only were there assholes, there were glorified assholes.
@NABDad @Provider
Usenet, random FTP sites, and wonderful (but slow) Archie. :)
I think there was a Jughead and Veronica, too, but I never knew what those were for.
@NABDad @Provider I dunno. I was on soc.culture.german, and I remember the Nazi Holocaust denier cross-posters.
Cross posting largely ruined the experience. When I discovered moderated web-based forums, I never looked back.
@NABDad Pine never worked well for me as a Mac client in the TCP/IP days. I loved and still miss listservs. They were the best. Played around in MUDs and MOOs, even took a rich grad seminar in one. Never had as much luck with Archie/gopher as I should have.
@NABDad @Provider hej, thats why gemini:// exists, so we can start over ;)