What's the golden age of online services? Well, now doesn't suck Long before the internet became our world, there was a mishmash of online services such as AOL, CompuServe, GEnie, and Prodigy. Except for being faster, there's less difference between then and now than you might think. Many of you were born to the internet. You've always had it, you can no more imagine life without it than …
I remember only too well the Grrr, ggrrr,bizzz, bizzz, bra,bra ffooofg sound of the modem connecting. It's a sound that I will never forget
I also remember that the internet was not something that made me angry...... Quite the opposite ...
Today it appears to have attracted a majority of all that is wrong in contemporary society, publicity, spying, social media manipulation, propoganda and hate groups...
It's social media that brought the rabble.
Ironically, when the internet was more anonymous (everyone used handles) the net was less angry.
I think, weirdly, lack of anonymity gives people with extreme opinions a lot more power than they otherwise would if they were just an anonymous handle.
Under a handle with no "story feed" someone like Andrew Tate would just be another random nutter on the internet.
There was something reassuringly abstract and mysterious about the old internet that has disappeared with the prevalence of people having public profiles and social media feeds etc.
To a non-critical thinker if "Dr B. H. Von Nutter" with a PhD from Harvard says some outlandish shit, it will seem plausible because you know his credentials etc etc and you don't bother thinking about it...but on the old net if "FunkyMonkey42" said the same thing, you'd be inclined to perhaps look into it before believing it. Even if FunkyMonkey42 is the same guy.
If anything have a public credible looking profile makes you *too* credible to a lot of people and perhaps puts people beyond question for a lot of folks.
"He has a PhD from Harvard, he must know what he's talking about".
There's a lot of shit happens on 4chan, but people don't take it as seriously as someone with a well crafted social media profile. Lots of people hide behind credentials and well crafted social media profiles.
4chan spawns crowds of people behind credible ideals, social media spawns crowds behind a single person with ideals that seems credible.
I'd sooner listen to people on 4chan, than people that spout bullshit, parrot style, behind a single fucking lunatic...the latter is how WW2 happened. The former is how the Berlin wall was pulled down.
I came here to voice an opinion, but instead found four nuggets of wisdom:
1) "There was something reassuringly abstract and mysterious about the old internet that has disappeared with the prevalence of people having public profiles and social media feeds etc."
2) "Look at 4chan for what anonymity by default does. That place should be banned and all its users locked up for hatespeech."
3) "The swivel eyed loons have always been there; the internet, and social media in particular, has allowed them to find each other."
4) "The knowledge barrier to entry the early internet forced upon people wanting to explore it kept the conversations mostly enlightening. Sure we're all doing the same things these days; it's the quality, intelligence, and humility of the modern netizen that's lacking."
And I suppose we'll all take from these nuggets an interpretation that supports the views we arrived with. Respect to the authors of those thoughts, I need add nothing.
I generally agree with most of what you're saying except to say that anonymity or lack of it is now somewhat meaningless. If you had a guy called "Luke Skywalker" back in the day then you didn't believe that was a real person and therefore you believed it was a nickname that made that user anonymous. Now, you see a name like "John Sheeran" and you may or may not believe that's a real name belonging to a real person. It would seem that everyone has basically realized that anonymous/real is meaningless now and that people can just behave however they want to behave without the fear of consequences or retribution since there has been nothing that would indicate otherwise.
What a sad place this has become.
I'm so fond of the old 56k modem handshaking sounds I've had it as my ringtone in the past.
For me the golden-age of the internet was that period where it was possible as an individual to connect without being extortionately expensive and before the full-on commercialisation and rise of entities like FB. Back in the early 2000s I worked as tech support for an ISP and got as an employee benefit unlimited dial-up for £1/month. Though the connection dropped after 1 hour.
This. That little nugget of time around Y2K when Google was new and actually worked, websites were not bloated with insane amounts of crap because nobody wanted to wait to download it all, and Usenet was about as close to social media as anybody got. It was far better than a BBS because it was a local rate call and you didn't need to dial into each service individually, but it was before the rot set in, when pretty much the world thing one had to deal with was same twat overusing Flash for really simple things like following a link... halcyon days.
The knowledge barrier to entry the early internet forced upon people wanting to explore it kept the conversations mostly enlightening. Sure we're all doing the same things these days; it's the quality, intelligence, and humility of the modern netizen that's lacking.
Is that everyone was in the same places, so they saw those on the other "side" of any issue were normal people. Once websites sprung up to cater to people of a particular partisan affiliation, the groupthink and echo chamber effect reinforced extremism and rewarded those who claimed the other side wasn't just wrong, but evil. Once you can believe the other side are part of some global pedophile ring, you see them the same way as the "enemy" is seen during a major war, and would not shed a tear if someone were to come along and murder them.
Mostly. The BBS (newsgroups) invented flame wars, remember. Some got pretty endemic and the "kill file", nowadays incarnated as the spam folder, came into being.
Remembering the good times is one thing, rose-tinted spectacles are another.
Somebody pointed out that social media allow the nutters to find each other. But they also enabled #metoo and it is no longer possible for serial sexual abusers to hide behind their reputations.
Like others here I am old and ugly enough to prefer asynchronous written communication most of the time. But the ability to call up a video meeting at the drop of a hat and hammer out some urgent issue is also priceless.
Tools are tools, and should be treated as such. Anybody can pick one up, but it takes finesse to get the best out of them.
I think the worst aspect of high speeds at low cost is that it makes interference cheap. If cheesy pop-ups and sophisticated malware took twenty minutes and cost twenty quid to send, there would be a lot less of them around. The old Internet was a lot less invasive. But then there was no #metoo. No going back now.
There were plenty of ways to get cheap access. Most of them involved flush cutters and a crimping kit though...and sometimes those methods included standing in a phonebox in the middle of nowhere in the pissing rain. Weirdly, this used to be called "vandalism" but these days people call it "network engineering".
Anyone else remember BT Friends & Family, the billing add-on in the mid 90s that allowed you to choose 5 of your most frequently dialled numbers as favourites, and get low cost calling to them?
And I recall the slightly exasperated BT spokesman explaining that while, technically, they couldn't stop you add your ISP's dialup number to that list, "we didn't think anyone would be sad enough to nominate their ISP as a friend or family..." :)
I had the add-on where you could call anywhere in the UK or Ireland for up to an hour in the evenings and at weekends (I live in Northern Ireland, it included the Republic of Ireland for us).
While ISPs in the UK had moved to non-geographic numbers by this time, ISPs in the Republic of Ireland were still using local numbers...
Free Internet if you remembered to redial after 59 minutes!
I think the death of MySpace should be seen as just an important demarcation as AOL giving out Usenet access. It was the last major "social" service that allowed a significant extent of user agency. You could make your page look and sound the way you wanted it. Some people went with (at the time) modern, slick, minimalist spaces. Other did the right thing and loaded it with gaudy gifs from blingee and blaring midi files.
And then it died. And with it a sense that there was a space on the internet for you, in particular. Everything that moved on went for a homogenous user experience. Same layout, same color schemes, same everything. Even places that let you do some customization (remember when you could use CSS on your YouTube channel to make it look like not YouTube?) dropped that and they didn't do it for the user. They did it to guarantee that ads would look correct on the page. Which is, ultimately, what the modern web is: a mechanism for delivering advertisements that you can maybe talk to someone on if you're lucky.
BBSes, by definition, are not "the internet". Usenet was originally UUCP only, and thus not "the internet"; even when NNTP became common, there were still UUCP links.
IRC wasn't even invented until four years after Flag Day, so the Internet was never just "Usenet and IRC".
As for "customization", whatever that's supposed to mean, there were no standards for BBSes, and so BBS organization and look & feel varied widely. They may have all been pure text,1 but there were many approaches to command-line and menu interfaces. Similarly, there were text-menu-based Internet applications over Telnet, Gopher, and other protocols. (Gopher plus WAIS had many of the capabilities of the early web.)
1Though that's debatable, since some might consider Sierra On-Line, for example, a BBS of sorts (it was dial-up; it wasn't really a "bulletin board"), and it had graphics as far back as 1980's Mystery House, though they were client-side resources selected by server-side instructions.
Huh? I just signed up with Demon and got a personal web space that lasted until they shut down. Of course, I had to hand-build every page; fond memories of the original Arachnophilia and HoTMetaL Pro (the stunningly productive tags-on view has yet to be rediscovered), it wasn't hard.
Oh, I remember plenty of hate. There was one ninny I kept seeing in some Usenet groups in the early '90s who was always trying to get people to meet him IRL to duel, for example. There was no shortage of heated words, both in the (unmoderated groups of) the Big Seven and particularly in the alt hierarchy.
At least as early as the late '90s, people on Usenet were doxxing supposed extremists, such as neo-Nazis; and there were sites doxxing abortion providers as well.
Talmadge wrote "The Flamers [sic] Bible" in 1987; flame wars were already well-established in Usenet and BBS culture then.
There was a time in the 80s when I comfortably worked from home with a VT52 and a 1200 baud modem in much the same way as I would now and with similar levels of productivity (unless the line was particularly noisy). It's not so much the technology that's changed but that it's been weaponised for commercial purposes.
I've just followed the links from an adjacent article about Openreach fibre to their "interactive map" - which just sat flashing its progress indicator until I disabled uBlock. And it then refused to give me any information unless I picked out some squares containing traffic lights.
It might once have been about communications, but it's now mostly about pushing controlled messages on condition of surveilled reception. And the faster those links get, the more information that can be extracted and used against you.
It is possible to fight back, some. Last year and into this year, Summit Racing used to constantly try to make me prove I wasn't a robot before letting me use their site. I started emailing them redacted receipts showing them what I was buying from competitors, while telling them their robocheck had turned me off their site. Earlier this year, the robot check stopped showing up. Did I force them to stop using the robocheck? I'd like to think so.
Not so happy an ending for Summit though. Because of their robonannigans©®™, they fell to the bottom of the vendor list.
> people would pick a service on the basis of their file library and how much it cost
Ah yes
> per hour to download them from the online service to your PC
*or* how much they would charge to pop a floppy into the post with Volume 11 : Best of LaTeX on it! Far cheaper than downloading - and it felt a lot faster as well (no babysitting the connection)!
> BIX, anyone?
Nobody ever got raked over the coals for running up an obscene (really, really obscene) 'phone bill from sitting on BIX well into after-office hours. Nope, didn't happen.
> Commercial Internet eXchange (CIX).
That was a Great Thing. As well as reducing the 'phone bills compared to BIX (!) and having forums for properly local people to share news in (Bristol, Avon not Tennessee!), they released the offline reader Ameol, which made it even more affordable - and I still use Ameol as my primary email client[1]
[1] Ameol - it does everything that I want it to do, avoids things that I want to avoid - and the only time that it seemed to have gone bad and refused to show my emails (it is a Win32 exe and can not index into archive files bigger than 2GB - or was it 4GB?) one simple use of "Purge anything you've explicitly marked for deletion" and all was well. They just don't make them like that any more.
*or* how much they would charge to pop a floppy into the post [...] Far cheaper than downloading...
"Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of backup tapes hurtling down the highway" :)
(that famous quote is also a good way to introduce people to the difference between bandwidth and latency, of course)
Think you've got your CIX muddled up. CIX - Compulink information Exchange UK with Ameol etc (which still exists) was then a vague equivaent to Compuserve, but UK based. originally one would sign onto CIX with a modem,
CIX - Commercial Internet exchange AIUI was a US initiative to bypass US state control of the nascent Internet.
In a surprising full circle journey, quite possibly a majority of users now access practically all their content via proprietary portals again -- just it's farcebook, blogger and their associates instead of AOL etc.
The interlude between these eras of proprietisation -- while the independent web site dominated and search engines such as infoseek returned tightly selective results to precisely specified Boolean searches -- lasted little more than a decade, is long past and unlikely to return
"Today, I sit here with my 1 Gigabit-per-second (Gbps) fiber connection that is horrifyingly slow. Trust me, though, it was the bee's knees then."
If your 1Gbps feels slow you're doing something very, very wrong and it probably is everything except that fiber which is the problem on your network.
my 2 cts.
1Gbps? I dream of 1Gbps!
My downlink rate is currently hovering around 3.2 megabits. Yet it's enough for streaming radio, Netflix, websites, and email. I even used Zoom once.
Yes, downloading stuff takes longer, and uploading stuff takes a minor eternity... but then I grew up with a 2400bps modem that was then upgraded to a 14k4 jobbie. So 3.2M is a luxury in comparison. Plus it's always connected, I don't need to wait for the bouncing oingy-boingy noises to do their thing...
I've noticed that some TV stations send you the 4K version of any programme you have asked for on catch-up, and rely on the equipment at your end to do any conversions.
It doesn't matter that your set-top box can only do 1024p or that your link can only just cope with 720p. You just have to put up with ten seconds of video per minute elapsed, because they can't be arsed.
This. It's probably the shitty ISP provided router that is the problem. I have a 600mbps connection, but I use my own gear (with the ISP router scaled back to basic routing functions only, modem mode) and it flies.
It's also possible that your storage device in your machine isn't fast enough or your NIC is crap...a few years back, I upgraded a clients network to have a 10gbps back haul in it to the comms room...client side was still 1gbps, but the backhaul went from 1gbps over fibre to 10gbps over fibre...what happened is the taps suddenly opened and allowed for "actual" gigabit to the client sockets. Laptop docks starting acting weird, PCs started crashing...all sorts of problems started to occur because suddenly the throughput on the network went through the roof. It was especially bad on laptop docks that shared bandwidth across ethernet, USB and a display.
The biggest problem was DisplayLink docks. They were hit the hardest. As a temporary measure, while we sourced new docks etc, I had to put another switch in with a 1gbps uplink to the main switch that had the 10gbps backhaul, just to bottleneck the traffic a bit!
A neighbour a picture of a planet (can't remember which) from a server in Brazil. Her look of confusion and the "that bloke's nuts" look on her face stopped me mentioning the Internet for a while. I did have another neighbour with a ginger beard and sandals who talked about EPROM and stuff but was clearly mad. Ah, the good old days.
Anyone remember when you could just type a search into Google and get results rather than tailored dross? I've been searching for something specific for weeks and couldn't find it... My device language is English. Local barmaid did the same search, device language Spanish and bingo! Very embarassing.
When BT would only approve 300baud modems and they cost the price of a modern iPhone
When a local call was 4p/min so you connected to usenet, downloaded the thread titles, flagged the threads, reconnected to download those, typed your replies and reconnected to upload them
Imagine if the UK had free local calls like the USA we might have an internet industry like the USA
I recall, back in the good ole days, that the membership secretary of a club I was in had children. You couldn't ring him during the day as he'd be at work. You couldn't ring him in the evening as the kids would have the line tied up from the moment they got home from school.
"Imagine if the UK had free local calls like the USA we might have an internet industry like the USA"
You want OUR internet? Stick your head in a vacuum cleaner and leave it turned on for the rest of your life, and you'll get the same feeling as American internet. I've been pretty vocal about how crap the EU is, but fair do's, the EU does at least work at protecting its citizen's privacy. US internet is like being in a leech infested swamp.
I know some people use their mobile so rarely that PAYG still works for them, but when you can get unlimited calls, unlimited text and some data (the I looked at was 4GB) for £6 per month it seems that that PAYG is really becoming unlikely for anyone in employment how actually uses their phone at all.
That was my first email address. I got my first proper, £10 a month internet account in August. Then September came… I would not necessarily have what we’ve got now any other way.
My first experience being online was also Compuserve in December 1990. I really liked the ASCII interface as access wasn't limited to PC's and Macs. The moderated forums were nice, had a great time meeting members of the ADD forum IRL and generally good experiences on other forums. IMHO, things started going downhill when the computing base was switched over from the DEC-10 clones to NT boxes with the resulting ending of the ASCII interface.
And for those of us in Blighty.
Hand up, I bet quite a few here were on Demon's "tenner a month".
Now, those were the days. They used to publish graphs of subscriber numbers, and some of us could look at the graph, point to a levelling off and say "ah, that's when <some problem> was limiting numbers", and then the following rise with "and that's when they did <some fix>". Back then, this dial up stuff was pretty bleeding edge, and it did need stuff fixed. Example :
Before then, internet email was SMTP and an assumption of the recipient server being "always on". This didn't work well with dial up when you were only on for short spells. Their initial fix was that when you had connected and started your email program, you could (IIRC) "finger post" and some software they had written would trigger post to try and deliver your mail. Later I think they got a trigger from when you actually connected, and then later still they added POP - oh the luxury !
And this was when even local calls were "not cheap", national calls a lot more so. At some point they added a pop at the Sedgwick exchange. Anyone that knows the place will know that it's a modest small town, and perhaps wonder why it had so many dial-in services based there (other dial up systems also had pops in Sedgwick). This was a quirk of the old calling rate system Post Office Telephones had, and which BT kept going for a long time. Exchanges were in groups, and you got to call at local rate to other exchanges in your own group, plus those of neighbouring groups. Sedgwick happened to be neighbour to a lot of exchange groups, and hence was a local rate call from a large number of exchanges - including mine :-)
> Hand up, I bet quite a few here were on Demon's "tenner a month".
Sir, me, sir. On the list with my prepayment, so he could get it set up in the first place.
Not forgetting hacking away at Phil Karn's KA9Q software to streamline it a bit for DIS, then it gained a termulator, TextWin[1], that let you do more than one thing at a time. Under DOS!
[1] glad you reminded me of DIS now, as the bottom of that URL (the first hit for TextWin) lists one John Washington as the author of TextWin: he appears to have taken on the maintenance of TextWin (glad someone did), but Anthony McCarthy (sadly no longer with us) was the original author, as noted here (buried in a long chunk of text). I helped test & debug TextWin with Tony, so I've made myself a note to go and have a proper look at what became of it.
"Hand up, I bet quite a few here were on Demon's "tenner a month"."
Yep, and (briefly) CompuServe before them. I seem to recall a time when Demon had downtime on Wednesday afternoons, though I can't recall why. It was a royal PITA, though.
I'm inclined to agree that the web was at it's best / most useful in the early 2ks, despite being slow. Email, Usenet, IRC and the web. Anyone with anything to say - including campaigners and various activists who should really have known better - could, and did, build their own little websites, or better yet, paid me to make one. These days they just throw up a Facebook page and have done with it.
Yes, acces has got better, but the more ubiquitous the web has become, the less generally useful it is. Having spent several hours today trying to help someone apply for a visitors visa to an African country, I'm torn between being impressed at how far things have come and being bloody furious that a badly designed website seems to be the only practical way to do it. Similar irritations apply to British Gas and the Pension Tracing Service, amongst others. These days, everything is web first, and, when you have an issue that the website can't resolve, getting to speak to an actual human is like waking the dead.
The problem isn't with technology per se, it's with companies who throw up a website covering the most common issues and either can't or don't address more unusual difficulties while simultaneously cutting down on staff.
On the other hand, we have services like Amazon. Yes, I know, as companies go they have their problems. But they can usually get what I need to my door when I need it - sometimes even the same day. That's not a benefit of the modern net that I'd be willing to give up in a hurry. YouTube, too, with its vast array of tutorials and how-to videos on just about everything, is incredibly useful even before you consider the funny cats.
So, did I prefer the net as it was back then, when the Information Superhighway was the future? When extravagant luxury was ISDN, and the notions of streaming video and a highly capable computer in your pocket were futuristic imaginings? Yes. Would I go back to it? Probably not.
There was this dialup text based game where you were an interstellar trader, flying from planet to planet to trade goods. It was fun for a bit. Then there was the porn, which came in pictures that printed every other line of a picture, then printed the other half, and it only took a minute to get a pic showing some nips. Grand times for a young man in the darkened privacy of his home.
But what was really great was tracking had not yet begun, even inside the office. You could do personal stuff as well as work on the same machine without worry. Now, there's keystroke and mouse trackers, and who knows what. It all makes me glad I'm an old man with not too many years left. I'd hate to be young today, with everything tracked, saved and ready to be made available in an instant at any furure point in time. Imagine having your 18 year old self held up against you in judgement when you're 50, and that typo that took you to that really weird site is displayed to the world and you don't even remember it happening.
Ah... the good old days of Gateway 2000's European BBS freephone service. How it operated for so many years without any Gateway employee actively managing it was a mystery! No wonder they went bust!
I used to take the school's dial up modem home for weekends and use their AOL account to have "free" internet... limit my use to 2-3 hours normally early Saturday morning. It was 1p a minute.
I also remember the first/real IPhone... no, not the disposable metal thing that breaks your bank account... the very early VoIP platform. I remember having a call with a girl in India. We were both somewhat amazed by the technology... and that it worked!
Ah memories...
The internet in the late 90s / early 2000s was far preferable to now. There were enough people with basic HTML skills that there were large numbers of sites on specific things, hobbies and club sites - visual design often quite basic, but many with meaningful content. For discussion groups on specific subjects, Yahoo groups were great - and didn't have loads of tracking and intrusive advertising (yes, there was some but nothing like there is with modern sites). There was also far less advertising across the board.
Now Antisocial Media has taken over. Most clubs and societies have out of date or no website and instead have a Facebook group, and tend to be light on content and heavy on picutres with the predicatable threads of inane comments following them. This centralisation has not helped anyone apart from the mega corporations who profit from it.
And the mainstream news media has of course also moved online, and the adoption of the 24 hour news cycle means that they feel they have to be posting "news" all the time so you frequently have to wade through long lists of dross to find any actual news.
And more broadly, it has led to a high level of intolerance in societies. The lack of nuance leads to polarised positions, and that in turn has increasingly led to labelling anything which doesn't agree with the current accepted viewpoints as "hate speech" and trying to get people censored / prosecuted.
While the internet offered a lot of promise, it has failed to deliver on a lot of it and overall is probably a negative influence on societies across the world.
> The internet in the late 90s / early 2000s was far preferable to now. There were enough people with basic HTML skills that there were large numbers of sites on specific things, hobbies and club sites - visual design often quite basic, but many with meaningful content.
And the web sites were coded to be as lightweight as possible due to the slower connection speeds, now you get any and all bloat, ads and gods knows how many links to other sites.
I can still remember hand coding my first html pages using notpad and it was lots of fun learning it.
Today, I sit here with my 1 Gigabit-per-second (Gbps) fiber connection that is horrifyingly slow.
What the hell are you doing that's making it appear slow? I 'only' have 70Mb/s (18Mb/s up) and it lets me do anything I want including UHD videos from Netflix.
I had a CompuServe account back in the day. Back before they allowed you to specify a user name. I think my CS handle started 1002643, but I forget the second part. So I've been online most of my adult life but can remember life before then. All I see is it getting better and better. Granted I've never participated in the cess pit of social media (No FB account, TwitterX). I have been active on numerous forums over the years but that's as far as I ever got. I read about these things called adverts but never see them thanks to my adblocker.
So..I don't really understand the author's whining here. 1Gb/s is way, way, way more than I need. I should be getting FTTP in a few months and will probably go for a 100Mb/s service but honestly might as well stay where I am on a nominal 80/20 package. Even the extra 10/2 would probably go unnoticed.
Yes, I actually preferred Compuserve to ISP/internet.
With CServe, it was so easy to find everything, know who you were communicating and it all so polite!
When things shifted to ISP/Internet...it seemed to me like chaos but... I had to adjust with the times.
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