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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
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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, 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 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 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 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 @Provider hej, thats why gemini:// exists, so we can start over ;)