Using the internet like it's 1999

https://joshblais.com/blog/using-the-internet-like-its-1999/

by joshuablais • 3 months ago

258 189 3 months ago

joshblais.com

pixel_popping• 3 months ago

OpenAI will love this article, noM nom nom

t1234s• 3 months ago

The best was the FTP search feature from alltheweb.com. You could find almost any software you needed.

vunderba6• 3 months ago

If it were 1999, most people would still be browsing the web on their US Robotics 56k modem (at best). This page is about 1 MB of assets (500kb gzip compressed if your browser supported it) , so it would have taken at least a minute just to finish loading.

boudin• 3 months ago

Closer to 2 as it was rarelly running at full 56kb/s.

Although, being patient was part of the experience as well

Loughla• 3 months ago

I was a lot more careful about clicking things when it took a full minute to load. Now I know that it'll be open in less than a second and I can leave immediately if I need to, so there's WAY less thinking beforehand.

mdb333• 3 months ago

so true, re: patience

I was just thinking back the other day about BBS days and how frustrating a busy signal could be, or connection time limits, etc.

joshuablais2• 3 months ago

and 1MB is "small" for the modern web!

vunderba6• 3 months ago

No shade! I went and checked out of curiosity, since it looks like we’re both using Astro as a static site generator.

Most of my articles are pretty media rich and weigh in between 1-2 megs. I do try to be pretty conscientious about asset compression (mozjpeg, h264 for video, etc.). I'd love to switch over to AV1 but I've heard compatibility on older devices is spotty.

alex11382• 3 months ago

Yeah, but you know something? Flash worked damn near perfectly even on potato connections

vunderba6• 3 months ago

I know flash had its downsides - but messing around with Macromedia Flash to make stupid little animations back in the day was so fun.

Plus Silverlight made Flash seem like a dream.

icedchai3• 3 months ago

I got my first cable modem in 1998! All sites were still built for dialup, so everything was incredibly fast.

t-3• 3 months ago

Some sites were fast. Some sites had pictures and it took long enough to load that I would sometimes make a sandwich while waiting.

vunderba6• 3 months ago

Nice! We were one of the first families on the block to have a 33.6 kbps modem, and were the envy of every filthy peasant who still had a 28.8 back in the day.

acheron• 3 months ago

Same! I got called “LPB” in Quake 2 a lot.

jghn• 3 months ago

This comment reminded me of the early days of Ultima Online. I was on a high speed campus connection with a ping time of ~5ms to my server. Given most players were on a 28.8/56k modem with ping times ~300ms, it was an amazing speed difference. I could walk, not run, faster than other people riding horses at full speed.

Needless to say, I got accused of cheating quite a bit.

rootusrootus• 3 months ago

Still pretty prevalent at that time, definitely, but DSL was definitely a thing by the time 1999 rolled around. I even had pretty fast DSL for the time -- 640 kbps.

But otherwise totally agree with the critique. Modern connection speeds have enabled a huge amount of bloat. I grew up when 1200 baud modems were the latest rage, and patience when downloading was a hard requirement.

NDlurker• 3 months ago

I lived in rural North Dakota and had dial up until 2005. It really sucked the last couple of years.

chairmansteve• 3 months ago

"This page is about 1 MB of assets".

And it could easily have been 10 KB.

vunderba6• 3 months ago

Now now. Don't be so tightfisted with the bandwidth. You know what they say, "People will hate you Steve, if you're too sting-ee!"

https://www.audioatrocities.com/games/lastalert/index.html

b3ing• 3 months ago

No tabbed browsing and if IE crashed it locked up Windows 95/98 with it. No 2fa, no comment spam, and Java applets that froze the browser for 10-30 seconds. No content creator bs just people making fan pages just for the heck of it before Wikipedia gobbled all that information

elevation3• 3 months ago

We used dialup until 1996, when we got a 10mbps cable internet connection, newly available in our 20k population town. We have never had a slower service plan than that since.

flomo• 3 months ago

Questioning this, because I worked with a sysadmin who was in an @Home/CableLabs DOCSIS beta region at about that same time, and we all envied him of course. That was in San Jose, CA.

So what's the real story behind your piddlly little town getting bleeding edge cable internet service? (Or was it somewhere like Los Gatos?)

ButlerianJihad• 3 months ago

Firstly, you’ve spelled “megabits” wrong.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bit_rate

Secondly, that 10 Mbps was only your downstream signaling rate.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_signaling_rate

Was your upstream via analog dialup?

prmoustache• 3 months ago

I knew dial up for a little while but I was lucky to have been on broadband for a couple of years already in 1999.

This early access + a 4x SCSI CD burner made me one of the 2 official warez provider at school. I was even taking orders from parents of friends.

d3Xt3r• 3 months ago

Luckily, we had web accelerating proxies like OnSpeed[1] back in the day that would compress web pages (including lossy image compression) so if you were one of the poor sods still on dialup (like I was), it was a lot more bearable.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OnSpeed

vunderba6• 3 months ago

Oh neat, I'd never heard of them. Almost feels like a spiritual predecessor of CDNs, serving optimized assets from existing websites via their servers.

nick__m• 3 months ago

I had cable internet in 1997; it was wonderful in it's unmetered¹ symmetric 10Mbs glory.

1) wasn't supposed to be unlimited but the ISP didn't bother to mesure it until sometime in 2000

bitterhop• 3 months ago

Oh how much I wanted those super expensive ISDN lines...

zahirbmirza• 3 months ago

How can we solve this problem, of the current state of the internet, without reverting to the compromises of the past? This has been on my mind for a while. The layer of trash some companies have built over the internet has been ruinous.

joshuablais2• 3 months ago

I theorize it is going back to the protocol layer. The "web" for most people is a bunch of social media frontends.

abraxas2• 3 months ago

Yeah, it's quite sad where we landed. Circa 2004-2006 while the internet was mostly open and accessible I mentally grouped "the internet" into two buckets. There was the real web plus usenet plus email and then there was "facebook" with its weird garden wall and exclusive invites or some such shit. I didn't think of facebook as being "on the web" even though they used the http protocol. It was highly unusual then to have any web content behind a registration wall.

So hardly anyone considered facebook to be a part of "the web". It was its own weird duck. Twenty years later and most people only frequent this "weird" part of the internet - this limited ensemble of paid and unpaid walled gardens.

NetOpWibby4• 3 months ago

I think the current web is sick and will never get better.

I propose building a new stack, without ICANN and friends (Verisign is raising .com prices yet again). I'm planning to build it[1] at some point, just working on other foundational stuff at the moment.

Cozy corners, webrings, and Gemini/Gopher is where I see the spirit of the old web alive and well.

---

[1] https://dap.sh

jjulius2• 3 months ago

How can we solve this problem, of the current state of the internet, without reverting to the compromises of the past?

In order to actually have and maintain a healthy balance of life and technology, such compromises are required.

prawn2• 3 months ago

A movement where some sites are only accessible by a specific browser or class of browsers, much more simplified than now? Where a site could put an agreeable browser into a no-JS, lo-fi mode?

9dev2• 3 months ago

That is pretty much the definition of Gopher

aboardRat44• 3 months ago

How can we solve this problem, of the current state of the internet, without reverting to the compromises of the past?

We need to be on the offensive, not on the defensive. We need to pro-actively scrape walled gardens and re-publish them without fluff.

We need to consider .onion to be the default domain for our websites.

And we should also not be ashamed of using AI to achieve our goals.

We need to implement modern conveniences in our programs.

We need to be writing bridges between walled gardens and deltachat.

Terr_• 3 months ago

To me the what we wanted/got distinction is something like:

1. A kind of capital that is widely available, so that people could exercise control and agency with machines that do what you want them to do for your own needs.

2. A distribution tool controlled by mega-corporations as they decide what you should be able to see or have.

jakedata2• 3 months ago

Just go to fark.com, a lingering glimmer of light from before the dead web. They are still aggregating human curated news and hosting reasonably civil discussions.

Then buy a Totalfark subscription so they don't need to bend over backwards to show more ads just to keep the lights on. See ya there!

zugi2• 3 months ago

Fark is farking great! Though its old-school HTML doesn't flow so well on mobile.

Can we get the best of 1999 with the best of 2026? Probably not...

rglover• 3 months ago

Just a stylesheet away.

jakedata2• 3 months ago

m.fark.com looks pretty good on my phone.

rvnx• 3 months ago

There is slashdot.org also

ranger_danger• 3 months ago

I would like to relive my fark memories but I only get endless captcha loops on it now :(

aboardRat44• 3 months ago

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This website is using a security service to protect itself from online attacks. The action you just performed triggered the security solution. There are several actions that could trigger this block including submitting a certain word or phrase, a SQL command or malformed data. What can I do to resolve this?

You can email the site owner to let them know you were blocked. Please include what you were doing when this page came up and the Cloudflare Ray ID found at the bottom of this page.

thot_experiment• 3 months ago

I don't know if I'm crazy but I think social media is pretty okay at the like, core building and enhancing social networks thing.

Instagram is probably my most used one these days and I love seeing my friend's stories and I don't think I've parsed more than a handful of ads in the last 2 or 3 years that I've been an active user, probably a few tens of hours wasted with dumb reels, not a bad cost at all imo. I have probably 400 irl people and 200 internet accounts I follow. It doesn't have the charm and honesty of navigating a webring or whatever, but the friction is so low so I get to see a lot of stuff my friends, acquaintances and especially just people i'm peripherally in community with share that I probably wouldn't otherwise.

I miss the old internet for sure, but I'm not convinced the current situation is as horrible as people say.

kyledrake3• 3 months ago

On your router, you can and should setup blocklists for various malicious and nefarious domains, advertisements, adult content, etc. This is not “1999-esque” in practice, but is a requirement for the modern web.

I worked on a Geocities archive restoration. There was a boat load of porn (including illegal porn), malicious domains, spamvertising, malware, predators, political extremists, etc on the 1999 web, and you can find all of it within the raw Geocities archive that was made before it shut down. The idea that the old web was some kind of pure place of innocence is a weird and factually inaccurate take. If anything, the late 90s web was more dark than it is now, perhaps in part because nobody had any idea of how to police anything on it and things like PhotoDNA didn't exist yet.

If anything, my work on 90s site archival has taught me that the web has always been a place with a lot of dark places, and the narrative that the old web was some sort of pure innocent place that became evil is not matched by evidence.

It's just as plausible to me that the general "misbehavior" of humans on the internet hasn't changed all that much, but that we have, frankly, adopted a more puritanical and intolerant approach towards it. Nobody was talking about getting rid of Section 230, carding people for 18+ before they could use IRC (or install an operating system, what the actual fuck is wrong with you California), and Congress wasn't dragging evil Geocities CEO David Bohnett into grilling sessions where they were accusing him of hooking kids on digital cigarettes. Perhaps it would be wise to have a little nostalgia for some of that too.

alex11382• 3 months ago

Hey Kyle! Neocities is great

kyledrake3• 3 months ago

marginalia_nu• 3 months ago

It's worth keeping in mind how much more fringe the web used to be. You were almost by definition a bit of a deviant if you spent significant time online in the '90s and early '00s ("nerd" was a pejorative). People who found no acceptance in the physical world many times found like minded people online, which sometimes was a good thing and sometimes unfortunate.

kyledrake3• 3 months ago

Parrot Ass Club is a classic clip I like to return to when discussing this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S5lx-17OV8g

II2II2• 3 months ago

If anything, my work on 90s site archival has taught me that the web has always been a place with a lot of dark places, and the narrative that the old web was some sort of pure innocent place that became evil is not matched by evidence.

No argument there. That said, I think the big difference between the 1990's and today is that everyone knew the nefarious places and people existed but, for the most part, you actually had to seek it out. I am not suggesting that it was hard to find. Perhaps the worse of the worse was easier to find. On the other hand, it wasn't quite the same thing as algorithmic feeds. For example: I absolutely refuse to view anything remotely political on some sites (including reputable news sources or material that is clearly satire) since that is the surest way to be fed extremist crap. How far those feeds will 5ake me, I simply do not want to know.

GaryBluto• 3 months ago

I'm not opposed to the message but it perplexes me the amount of people who bemoan the loss of the "old web" and then use a web page comprised of massive modern frameworks to deliver said message.

NetOpWibby4• 3 months ago

People clamoring for the old web are almost never talking about slow speeds or XHTML, they're talking about the FEELING of being on the web.

keepamovin4• 3 months ago

YES! You were there. Takes one to see one. :)

Truly, I think you’ve over the target here. I think it's more than just being young. It was the transition from an analog life to a 'cosmic' one. We are the bridge generation! I remember waiting for a Zine or a Phrack manifest, or for an image to waterfall down the screen. It wasn't 'inefficient'—it was a frontier.

People comparing the 'load times' and 'inconveniences' are kinda missing the point. I grew up with a telephone. Remembered my friends' phone numbers. Then the interenet exploded down those phone lines. And the world was changed forever. From my desk, I could touch the world. A world i Had never seen. And it could all come to me...And I was reading about other people having similar experiences, similar excitement. There was an excitement in the air, except it wasn't in the air - it was in the space we all shared - that space that came down those wires, over those modems, with that distinctive siren-like mating call. It was the fucking 90s and the Internet came online. You had to be there. It was incredible. You have no idea if you didn't live through it.

That feeling of connection. Somehow it's tied up in the aesthetics for me, too. The juxtaposition between that aesthetic combining poverty-of-content with the compared-to-modern "visually stunted" aesthetics, compared with the shocking immediate global access of the analog to "cosmic" transition, somehow symbolizes it precisely and strongly for me. But the part that isn't conveyed (tho I try), is how I felt at the time. The graphics are the finger pointing at the moon. You had to walk that path, you had to have been there.

I tried to recapture that specific 'gateway' feeling in a Win98 demo: https://win9-5.com/desktop.html. I used modern sound and RBI to try to recapture the feeling of using the web when it was 1999. It's evocative, if you were there. Playing with it, sometimes i get a sense boundless horizon again. But then it flashes and is gone. That fire that I felt of excitement and expanse at that time is an endless source of inspiration for me. I long to somehow recreate an experience that gives it form, so others can know.

pjmorris3• 3 months ago

I feel like 'Party like it's 1999' could become the slogan for a movement. Sure, the tech was a little less convenient, but overarching control was also less hard-wired into everything.

pragma_x• 3 months ago

It even comes pre-packaged with a theme song.

pjmorris3• 3 months ago

I confess that I had this in mind. Is it time to start running LAN parties again?

mghackerlady5• 3 months ago

From Prince no less! If we've learned anything from the past year, Minnesotans know what's up :-) (totally not biased)

butlike2• 3 months ago

https://archive.org/details/essential-keygen-music/01+-+rez%...

deadbabe• 3 months ago

I think it’s time to give up on the old web.

What made the old web cool, is that it was the first time we can communicate with so many random people in far away places digitally and share information through cool web pages.

That novelty has mostly died now. Communicating with people in distant lands is mundane now. And there is little new things to share that we haven’t already seen or heard before.

So what’s the point of the web now? Maybe the internet will become purely a utility for exchanging data for infrastructural and business purposes, and the idea of using the internet as a source of entertainment or recreation will fade away.

It would be nice to retreat back to an analog world, where the internet still exists, but only as a layer of glue in the background that orchestrates multiple technologies that power our world, and nothing more.

krapp3• 3 months ago

Tons of people still use the internet as a source of entertainment and recreation. Just because you're too jaded to care doesn't mean the rest of the world is.

myself2485• 3 months ago

And we were just getting a breath of fresh-air after being restricted to local phone calls (or paying ghastly long-distance phone bills). Finally we could communicate anywhere for one price!

Without that context, it all falls flat, I agree.

I've considered trying to make a speed-of-light-ping-limited BBS that can _only_ be connected to by actual-locals, but reality is harder. (And the moment it got popular, nefarious actors would just rent or compromise a box in-radius.)

kungfuscious• 3 months ago

A lot of these recommendations seem prudent. I especially like the idea of POSSE for using social media without actually using it (every time you open a site to post is an opportunity to be ensnared). Completely stripping the browser from your smartphone is a bit extreme and excessive for me, but doesn't invalidate the other reccomendations.

01nate• 3 months ago

One minor 'gripe' for lack of a better term, is that I feel like a push to go backwards in technology is a bit misguided. I feel like a lot if people see ads and trackers, then look to older protocols like Gopher/Gemini/IRC (or at least 'inspired' by older stuff like Gemini).

The issue isn't javascript, it's ads/trackers/algos/slop. I feel like tracker/ad/algorithm free static site on the status quo of http, or something newer like IPFS, is worlds better than trying to use arbitrary restrictions on something like a Gemini capsule.

tptacek6• 3 months ago

This is going to come off glib, but I don't think you can believe any of this having actually used the Internet of 1999. As is so often the case, there are lots of real annoyances and offenses behind the sentiment, but still, the Internet of 2026 is vastly better than that of 1999. The amount of things you're just one quick search away from right now would break the brains of a 1999 netizen. We were still required to buy paper books for all sorts of routine knowledge work tasks.

chromacity• 3 months ago

Dunno. The internet was definitely smaller, but it was also largely uncorrupted, so you could literally just email a random university professor or an industry expert and get answers to dumb questions.

And today, if you want to learn something the right way, you probably still should buy a book (or, I guess, pirate an ebook). I don't think you can really learn much from YouTube influencers and the like.

tptacek6• 3 months ago

I respectfully respect the premise that the choices are "paper books" or "Youtube influencers", though I'll note we didn't have Gilbert Strang's 18.06 course back in 1999 either.

I'd also note that the Internet of 1999 was loaded with spam, bursting at the seams with it, so much so that it was actually a big deal when ~30 months later Paul Graham wrote a post about Bayesian filtering.

datadrivenangel• 3 months ago

You can still email people! A genuinely interesting email will probably get at least a 20% success rate

mghackerlady5• 3 months ago

you still can (at least, professors. not so sure about industry experts). I've done it on a number of occasions

gylterud• 3 months ago

As a university professor, I still get random people e-mailing me “dumb questions” every once in a while. And I still try my best to answer them – in the spirit of keep the Internet alive!

Online community and connections are very valuable, and I also get genuinely interesting e-mails from random people. Usually someone who has read something I wrote, and want to discuss it. I also send out random e-mails, and my experience is that many people will answer, if you write to them about something they care about.

II2II2• 3 months ago

Different people have different tastes, or balance the good and the bad of the different eras differently.

Personally, I prefer the Internet of the 1990's. Part of that was the novelty and excitement. That led to a lot more experimentation. Part of that was the accessibility of the information that did exist. There was less wading through crap to simply find something, and the useless stuff that did exist tended to be easy to detect. (A lot of it was simply: I have an ambitious idea for a website but, Under Construction!) Most of all, the diversity was easier to access.

Today's Internet is much more polished and much more is available. Yet a lot of it is also siloed behind accounts, paywalls, or is a profit project rather than a passion project. That's not to say there is anything wrong with profiting off of good work, but there is a lot of people putting up low quality junk either because they don't realize how much effort is involved or because they are trying to make a quick buck.

tptacek6• 3 months ago

I think a lot of people who say stuff like this are really saying that they prefer being in their teens and early 20s. Understandable!

aboardRat44• 3 months ago

We were still required to buy paper books for all sorts of routine knowledge work tasks.

I download books from libgen and print them out. Printed books will never be replaced.

butlike2• 3 months ago

"Reading" the internet then going to buy a book from Borders or Barnes and Noble is a comfy memory to me. I liked the split between 'online' and 'offline' better than this semi-integrated present we live in

tptacek6• 3 months ago

Lots of people have pleasant memories of bookstores, and are unhappy that those stores haven't thrived since the Internet, but not needing to schlep down to a store to buy information printed on dead trees is an unalloyed good.

amatecha• 3 months ago

As someone who has been online since 1992, I love the post. I miss the internet of the late 90's every day. We're no longer "one quick search" away from anything now, because web search has been completely poisoned by SEO slop. It was nice while it lasted though. As far as I can tell, all of the advancements we have were possible without completely ruining the web and the global commons we started to have a taste of.

petee• 3 months ago

Are there any decent webrings left, or newly existing?

cosmicgadget2• 3 months ago

Decent is a matter of opinion but there are active ones. There've been a few HN posts on the subject in the last few months.

I compiled some old web meta links here: https://outerweb.org/blog/web-discovery.html

brisray• 3 months ago

I thought webrings had died when things like Webring, Ringsurf, Ringo, Rail and others went offline years ago. But there is a new interest in them. I've listed all the ones I know of at https://brisray.com/web/webring-list.htm

globalnode• 3 months ago

Turn off javascript and use a text based browser? What? May as well not use the internet.

onchainintel• 3 months ago

Thanks for the bit of nostalgia today OP. I remember the first time that I saw that browser screen. Pure discovery back in those early days of the web. I can still hear the dial-up modem crackling...

keepamovin4• 3 months ago

Yes, that crackling! God, that shreak. You hear it and it just pulls you right back. Like some kind of rhythm that told you something was happening, something exciting was about to occur.

For us bridge-generation kids, that sound is probably etched like vinyl. Quiet room, 2 AM, and then that thrum, shreek and hiss. I literally missed it, whatever the next thing was. Whenever "modems" became obsolete. It was sad. It was the audio reminder, the signal hanging in the air, of the literal lifeline out of your analog bedroom and into a cosmos filled with electricity, buzzing with knowledge and light.

For me, half the experience of that era was purely sensory. The clunky physical sounds of the machine doing the heavy lifting to connect you... the clunky graphics....the need to wait...the gradual adjustment to the pace of life and the "gentle introduction" these "reduce speed" effects had to the threshold moment that that was, were somehow the right gentleness to take the world on such an epic journey.

I have labored a lot to recapture that feeling. Across many projects. Idk why exactly, but there was something so hopeful and exciting about the internet at that time. And I know it's worth remembering. Like a precious flame you have to protect from the rain, I guess. Check out this one: https://win9-5.com/desktop.html

Just a small set of experiments to see if I can grab that feeling. The modem sound evoke the vibe. Browsing the modern web with it is a little strange, if you can do that "in the gallery watching the walls between the paintings" kind of mind-job and not focus too much on the web portal content (which is designed to always suck you in, even framed retro like this).

Dwedit• 3 months ago

1999 was Dialup for me. The modem said "56k" but didn't actually connect at that speed, it was more like 4.4KB/sec max.

The biggest thing I grabbed then was an overnight bulk-downloading session from animewallpapers.com, made possible by using GetRight. It had a download queue, as well as the "GetRight Browser" which presented the links on a html page as files to select, or other html pages as directories to view.

calpaterson• 3 months ago

"56k" meant 7 kilobytes per second as a theoretical max. So 4.4 was ok. Everything with networks is done as bits, I think honestly for marketing reasons now

prawn2• 3 months ago

I remember a few years prior to that - I have faint recollections of dialling into BBSes or paying by the hour, so you'd want to plan in advance for what you might do on the internet while connected. A BBS often tracked what you uploaded vs downloaded, so unless you had something to share, you needed to be mindful of what you grabbed.

theandrewbailey3• 3 months ago

56k was bits, your 4.4KB was bytes, which is 36k bits. That was a pretty typical real world speed for dialup around 2000.

bergie• 3 months ago

Now, I think the author would consider it "solutionism", but the other day I spent a bunch of time browsing Reticulum's NomadNet sites (using the Columba mobile app).

And while aesthetically it was more early 90s than 1999, it filled me not only with nostalgia, but also with some optimism for the future of the Internet. Something I haven't felt in a while...

nullbyte808• 3 months ago

Did not even consider encrypted IRC as an alternative to Matrix or Signal. Or even running my own search engine. Good writeup! Very much for the 1%ers in tech skills.

anovikov• 3 months ago

Internet in 1999 was like democracy in 1791. An elite club for the few percents of best people. Good days indeed.

stra1ghtarrow90• 3 months ago

part of the problem is that most people don't own a pc or personal laptop - they use their phone and apps. None of my friends (35 years +) use laptops other than for work and openly say how much they have regressed technically. Some of these guys grew up with the internet in the early 00's and would be setting up switches for lan partys, using torrents and usenxt, limewire etc. These days they can barely open up microsoft word - but on instagram/twitter they're all over it. Sad really. I would always reach for my laptop first before my phone and I tend to very rarely visit social media sites (other than reddit) on laptop/desktop. I use glance - https://github.com/glanceapp/glance to parse my rss feeds - it's pretty good.

jjbinx007• 3 months ago

I always find it strange when people refer to twitter and YouTube etc as apps rather than websites.

9dev2• 3 months ago

That's what they are by now, though. The websites of social media sites are crippled and bug-ridden - try using Instagram in a browser, for example. They want to coerce you into using their apps, because that gives them better tracking opportunities.

nunez3• 3 months ago

Lol try using those sites in your browser. You’ll see why they’re typically called apps real quick.

folkrav• 3 months ago

My 8yo keeps calling any piece of software he can run an "app", regardless of it being on a computer, a website, or a mobile device. I object to it out of principle, old man yelling at clouds style. But fundamentally, it's just code I interact with to do something, I'm just used to using different terminology for each runtime. The term website came about right before we really had anything interactive on the W3, describing something rather static.

All this to say, we're both right and wrong in feeling this way lol

xg15• 3 months ago

Yeah, I don't think the true scale of the "war on general computation" is apparent for many technical people: It's good to think about alternative distribution models for the internet, better use of protocols, etc - but a large and growing number of users literally don't have (administrative) control over their client devices anymore.

The "cognitive control" of tech companies is underpinned by a much more concrete technical control of the devices.

bryanrasmussen• 3 months ago

but a large and growing number of users literally don't have (administrative) control over their client devices anymore.

would those users have had devices over which they had administrative control in the past though? Perhaps for software to eat the world, and for hardware to get distributed far enough that it could, a percentage of the world had to forego administrative rights when getting that hardware.

I suppose those who miss it can still get it, although yes, for how much longer is a question.

einpoklum3• 3 months ago

Please try to encourage them to open up LibreOffice Writer rather than Microsoft Word though! They should not have to suffer with CoPilot and MS spying on you all the time.

https://www.libreoffice.org/

dhruv3006• 3 months ago

Lemmy is the closest thing to internet in 1990s.

anthk3• 3 months ago

No. IRC, EMail lists, Usenet and webs like https://deadnet.se are closer.

Also, everything from https://wiby.me.

mentalgear• 3 months ago

We took a wrong turn by locking ourselves into content silos and embracing comfort instead of seeking truth, and it will not end well unless we do a hard u-turn to authenticity and sovereignty.

We didn't do that: capitalist interests did.

tommica• 3 months ago

Pretty sure we still chose the silos. We voted with our wallets.

spankibalt• 3 months ago

Having used the internet in 1999, it's mostly cookie cutter stuff mixed with some intellectually lazy generalizations, especially of specialist use cases.

You gotta love the subtle religious hooks leading to Christian apologetics elsewhere on the site; back in '99, and especially these days, that stuff was often enough more overt. But maybe renaming the piece to Using the internet like a Born-Again Worshipper is both more honest and accurate. ;)

anilakar• 3 months ago

We should also also embrace offline mode more. Disable all network connections until you make a conscious choice to go online. Heck, make a Windows 3.1-esque GUI for it and call it Trombone Winsock just for fun.

If any program complains it needs network connectivity for offline features, it goes into the Recycle Bin.

dannyw• 3 months ago

Offline mode, and self-hostable apps. I'm very happy with my self-hosted and open source apps; e.g. photo library, media centres, etc; the convenience of cloud, but my cloud that I fully control.

vaylian• 3 months ago

Not to discourage you from these things, but the cloud wasn't a thing in 1999. Storage space was also an issue.

myself2485• 3 months ago

I found myself doing a particularly intense stint of work the other day, finally had all the source documents and the destination program all lined up, happily finding and comparing and synthesizing and entering, and I realized it was going to take all night. Or realistically until the middle of the next day.

I put the laptop into airplane mode, to block any updates that might unceremoniously reboot it and wreck my layout. Figure if I needed to be on Teams in the meantime, I've still got a phone for that.

Airplane mode already exists, it's _wonderful_ for this, and I should use it more often. If I'm not actively internetting, just toggle that and the distractions can wait.

swingboy• 3 months ago

Does anyone remember that Pokédex game that the original Pokemon website had in the late 90s where you could collect/unlock Pokémon? I feel like you could trade them too but maybe not. I tried to ask ChatGPT but it doesn’t seem to know exactly what I’m talking about. Maybe this is a Mandela effect thing.

tsylba• 3 months ago

Albeit I agree with the general thesis, I find it funny that the very next sentence after the author say:

the moment I find something that crosses my desk which starts with “it’s not this, it’s THIS”, I immediately click off and move on.

He follows it by his very own "It's THIS, not this" statement:

I want real people, real creators, and real content in my feed, not LLM slop.

The Machine must have learn it somewhere I guess.

101008• 3 months ago

To be fair, it's different. The order is important. If he would have written "It is not LLM slop what I want, is real people, real creators, and real content no my feed", it would have sound like AI. But not in the way he wrote it.

pryncevv• 3 months ago

Join the alivenet - https://projectvv.de

aboardRat44• 3 months ago

You have useless javascript there.

vovanidze• 3 months ago

the nostalgia for 1999 isnt really about missing dial up or basic html, its about mourning the loss of user agency. back then the browser actually worked for you. today the client is basically a hostile enviroment running megabytes of third party js just to track telemetry.

going back to gopher or text-only browsers feels like admitting defeat tbh. we can still build incredibly fast modern apps if we just stop treating the users hardware like an infinite resource for adtech. you dont need massive frameworks and client--side bloat to make something good.

jazzypants• 3 months ago

In 1999, hostile websites would pop up endless new windows full of advertisements that you were powerless to stop unless you simply held down "ALT+F4" or "CTRL+ALT+DEL". Part of Mozilla Firefox's appeal is that it came with a pop-up blocker. [0]

Do you know anything about the Browser Wars? People literally had to put up images telling you which browser to use if you wanted to actually experience their website the way it was intended. Otherwise, it was just broken. [1]

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/19/business/as-consumers-rev... (sorry for the tracking code, but this is a "gift" article and it was the best source I could find on popup ads)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Browser_wars

franga2000• 3 months ago

Hostile pages did that. Today, nearly every page has a dozen tracking scripts, starts off with a cookie popup, probably pops up a "please log in" or "please give me money" after you scroll half way down, still has ads that even more effectively mimic the site topic and design to trick you into clicking them, pops up a newsletter or cupon code popup if your cursor leaves the viewport, might be secretly running experiments on you by A/B testing titles, images or testimonials...

The assault on your attention is way worse these days, it's just (mostly) contained to the viewport.

acdha• 3 months ago

In 1999, most websites were not hostile because they weren’t chasing diminishing returns from ad-tech companies. Most of the companies I worked with were trying direct revenue models getting people to buy things or subscribe directly, and the ad market paid a lot better for less obtrusive ads - the whole real-time bidding process to run arbitrary JavaScript was yet to come.

Now almost everyone has pressure to find new revenue streams and maximize income while Google and Facebook have sucked up most of the revenue, so you see more and sleazier ads everywhere and sites which rely on you reading or watching are on a much more aggressive treadmill trying to constantly give you new things to see ads on so the experience is more frenetic.

It feels not unlike how in the mid-20th century people left work at work when they went home and only extraordinary circumstances would result in phone calls home, etc. whereas in this century it’s just expected that everyone carries a smartphone and checks email/Slack. More efficient in some ways, for sure, but a lot of stress ground out of people for no extra compensation.

keepamovin4• 3 months ago

You nailed it. Retreating to text-only kinda misses the whole point. The browser back then wasn't just a document viewer. It was a portal.

People forget that the internet used to be a place you went. It was entirely separate from our analog lives. You sat down, you fired up the machine, and your screen became this portal cut right into the universe. The juxtaposition between that visually-stunted, industrial-grade gray interface and the shocking immediate global access we suddenly had... it was the everything. The UI wasn't 'boring'. It was the clunky machine whose buttons you pressed (literally) to touch the world.

Today it's all hyper-lubricated feeds, and scammy-shiny UI trying to hijack your dopamine. But back then, the machine worked for you. It was a tool for discovery. A fucking frontier.

I've been trying to build a shrine to that precise feeling, to see if I can grab the modern web and force it to face it's beautiful glorious past - to that specific gateway-to-the-world, electronic frontier feeling. Just a small set of experiments. Incomplete as a monument to the totality of it. Merely a partial body of work, trying to express what it felt like to be there. I built a Win98/1999 environment: https://win9-5.com/desktop.html to browse the web from a (abominatively) multi-tab Netscape re-imagining. It runs a live, remote modern browser session inside a pixel-perfect 98 shell. Forcing the modern web through that dial-up era lens... it’s evocative + modem sounds. The aim is to remind you what it felt like when the web was a boundless horizon, not a walled garden of weirdo nimby's and microstates and regulatory capture etc etc etc. Sometimes I catch a flash of that fire again using it. Sometimes...

1vuio0pswjnm72• 3 months ago

"going back to gopher or text-only browsers feels like admitting defeat tbh."

Interesting perspective

I have been using text-only browsers continually since the mid 90s (no lynx after 1999)

As such, I never "went back" to using the text-only browser as I have always used one, but as graphical browsers became worse I used them less

The customised text-only browsers I use today are 1.3 and 2.0 MB. I can compile them in seconds on underpowered computers

The so-called "modern" browser is [rapidly-expanding size] MB, not was easy to customise via editing the source code and takes substantial resources plus time to compile

Today, most www use for me is text-only. I am consuming information not graphics. I prefer textmode to X11 or the like

I avoid making HTTP requests to remote servers with graphical, Javascript-enabled browsers

I prefer using TCP clients and TLS forward proxies for making HTTP requests (at least one forward proxy now even has its own TCP client)

I use the text-only browser to read HTML files

For example, yc.htm is a file I create each day that contains all HN submissions where discussion is still open

Today yc.htm is 12 MB and there are 7268 stories

Using tiny command line utilities I wrote, the HTML in yc.htm is processed to CSV and added to an SQLite database. The unique domain names, today about 3704 of them, are extracted from all item URLs in yc.htm and DNS data is obtained via 1-3 pipelined lookups, each over a single TCP connection. The DNS data is then processed and inserted into an SQLite database

The TLS forward proxy stores the DNS data in memory so that I do not have to make any remote DNS when accessing the www

The yc.htm file can be opened in a text-only browser but I would not attempt it in a graphical one. The text-only browser feels more robust, less likely to stall or crash. I prefer the text-only formatting

By not using a graphical browser I would not say I am "admitting defeat". I have full control over HTTP headers, I only retrieve the data I want, I never see any ads, I do not send data to trackers or telemetry collection points

On the other hand, using a graphical browser does feel like "admitting defeat" as by doing so I allow "web developers" to destroy all preferences I have for how and when I want data retrieved and presented. If I allow the graphical browser unfettered access to the internet, and allow it to run unreviewed Javascripts, I lose all control over DNS and HTTP requests. For me, the experience of using a graphical browser where I have no such control is slow and painful, a horrible "user experience"

I do not see using "old" software as "nostalgia". I see it as being practical. "New" software generally sucks

The loss of "user agency" as some call it only occurs if one uses a so-called "modern" browser and runs Javascript. The seizure of user agency is accomplished by getting people to use a particular "user agent" that is controlled by online advertising companies (e.g., Google) or their business partners (e.g., Mozilla). If we called this a "choice" perhaps some readers might disagree. But so-called "Big Tech" have consistently argued that people "choose" Big Tech's "user agents" that, via their design and "default settings", effectively remove user agency for the majority of people who use them

1vuio0pswjnm72• 3 months ago

"(at least one forward proxy now even has its own TCP client)"

Correction: s/TCP/HTTP/

I also use a separate TCP client from the TLS proxy author

anthk3• 3 months ago

You can use Dillo and explore the light web, gopher and gemini with no JS or big plugins at all.

Gopher and Gemini are simple scripts, so is the actions plugin, but I have my own written in 'rc', a shell borrowed from Plan9 and a bit improved (readline keys, history).

For audio/video I just spawn mpv+yt-dlp in the spot.

https://dillo-browser.github.io/

sardinhada• 3 months ago

im a fan of this philosphy i really am. sadly it is utopia. who is going out of their way to use the internet like this? if youre someone whos totally oblivious to the old internet, you will have to work very hard to use it in an old fashioned way. no one will pursue this. the internet today reminds me of the matrix

dadrian• 3 months ago

The Internet in 1999 was not good at all. Browsers barely worked, computers crashed constantly, the ability to actually search for useful things was limited, and many things we take for granted as being online (news, people, documentation) were not.

The mid-to-late 2000s are perhaps closer to what the author is looking for.

einpoklum3• 3 months ago

Browsers barely worked

They worked pretty well actually, AFAICR. Internationalation was a bit sketchy in some cases though.

computers crashed constantly

You did need to be careful with Windows 98, for sure, but it wasn't that bad. Also, if you put in some elbow grease you could install Linux, which didn't crash (but had limited support for peripherals and for the latest graphics cards, and almost no games).

the ability to actually search for useful things was limited

It is arguably more limited now than it was then, since commercial search engines did not manipulate the results as much.

mholt• 3 months ago

It was FUN though.

keepamovin4• 3 months ago

Probably sounds really weird but I get almost teary eyed when I see those Windows teal-background era graphics and a Netscape browser. Those days! These are the nights that never die. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UtF6Jej8yb4) I don't know if you felt it, but I felt it. Back then, in those days. It wasn't just the heat of summer, roaming the beautiful city at night as a teenager: it was the internet. It was amazing.

superkuh• 3 months ago

It's not wrong in the direction but it goes a bit too far. Text-only really limits the capabilities. The difference with the modern web is that it is not hyperlinked web pages between web sites but instead javascript application content silos. HTTP/1.1+HTML 5 is just fine, images and video are just fine. Javascript is not fine. That's where we should draw the line.

And without javascript most of the security/privacy issues that make domains require HTTPS-only to prevent MITM attacks simply disappear. When you aren't automatically executing random programs that random places send you the web can be a lot more fun, silly, and with a lot less fragile continuing maintainence required.

einpoklum3• 3 months ago

Using technologies from yesteryear, we can solve the problems we face today on the modern advertisement riddled, javascript focused, etc. etc.

I wouldn't say you need technologies from yesteryear to achieve that. Or rather, you don't need an old browser to not be on Facebook, Instagram, Youtube and so on. Just visit _other_ sites, with your new browser. But I would recommend beefy adblocking and tracking-avoidance - uBlock Origin [1] and EFF Privacy Badger for example - or even disabling JS if you want the more static old-school feel. NoScript is a browser add-on which does this for Firefox or Chromium-based browsers: https://noscript.net/getit/

[1] : uBlock Origin is no longer supported on Chrome and Chromium-based browsers, since they've limited the already-limited extension capabilities with 'manifest v3'.

dormento• 3 months ago

One thing that i just realized is i don't know exactly when things got bad.

I remember the 90s when we had to "go" online, when the digital was apart from the analog and we kept online and offline separate. I remember simpler sites, not as many ads, I remember a time before "feeds".

However, for the life of me I can't remember exactly when it started to suck. It might be that I was busy with other things in life, but still it leaves me with an unsettling feeling. Maybe it was around the arrival of home broadband? The end of Orkut (community based social media)? The advent of algorithmic feeds?

Tade0• 3 months ago

However, for the life of me I can't remember exactly when it started to suck.

Whatever the date, it's tightly coupled with the explosion of internet-capable mobile devices.

My personal pick would be 2012, because that's when the Samsung Galaxy S3 came out and outsold its predecessor more than twofold.

Coincidentally that's when the small agency I was working for at the time started offering making pages look on mobile devices.

In terms of units the market for mobile devices peaked just four years later.

negura• 3 months ago

yeah, a lot of people pinpoint the moment when it started going downhill at around 2010. re: explosion of mobile devices, i'd say the release of apple's iPhone was a key event

retired• 3 months ago

Cookie wall was a big shift. I noticed that since the introduction of the cookie wall, websites now have about 3 to 4 modals that I have to click away before I can start interacting with the website. Typically it is the cookie wall I have to reject first through a secondary modal, then something about a newsletter, then the paywall and finally I have to hit ignore on the "Do you want to login with Google" on the top-right.

techteach00• 3 months ago

Only possible without the smartphone. That's the device that destroyed the internet. Thanks a lot Apple

fasterik2• 3 months ago

I've come to the conclusion that nostalgia is almost never about the objective quality of something. It's about the associations we make between a certain time in our lives and the media/technology that surrounded us at the time. It's also filtered through selective memory, emphasizing the positive while ignoring the negative.

We're all afraid of dying and we all wish we were 25 years younger. That's how I translate nostalgia when I read it. By any objective metric, the world is better than it's ever been, technology is better than it's ever been, and it's all continuing to get better.

rawTruthHurts2• 3 months ago

"the world is better than it's ever been, technology is better than it's ever been, and it's all continuing to get better."

Those guys in Sudan or blue whales beg to differ.

fasterik2• 3 months ago

You can always point at bad things happening, no matter what time period you're in. You need to look at the graph over decades/centuries. Poverty, child mortality, literacy, standard of living, access to healthcare, etc. etc. are all better than they have ever been, even in the poorest places in the world.

bigmadshoe• 3 months ago

I think the world really sucks in developed countries right now in a way that's hard to put your finger on. Optimism and enthusiasm is very low in young people right now. People's attention spans are shot. Kids in high school and college are less social than ever, barely date, and spend more and more time doomscrolling. Rising inequality, rise of far right politics, etc.

I get that the world is doing great by some basic metric like 'number of people starving', and that is fantastic. But the world really feels off to a growing number of people - me included - in modern America.

GuB-42• 3 months ago

It feels like the article is seeing the 1999 internet like the internet of the early 1990s.

1999 was during the dotcom bubble, Internet Explorer 4/5 was the leading browser, Yahoo! the leading search engine, pop-up ads everywhere, it was also the beginning of Flash, for the better and for the worse. Residential broadband existed, but dialup was still the norm.

I don't really miss it, despite growing into it. It was an important transition period, but it was slow, lacking in content, small and yet too big to create a sense of community, and also just as full of ads as it is now. There were good sides compared to now, but I still take today's internet. The early 1990s (before the eternal September) looked nice, but I didn't get to know it.

nunez3• 3 months ago

Internet user since 1996, so still a bit new to it. I don’t miss the old web that much (the old web was AOL for a lot of people, at least in the US). DEFINITELY don't miss 28.8k and 56k and having to hog up our family's one phone line overnight to download Netscape 7, only for it to be a steaming pile...

I definitely absolutely miss open instant messaging platforms. The days of XMPP and open clients. Trillian and Pidgin specifically.

I loved having a single app for all of my messages across all of the networks I talked to people on. Nowadays everyone is on FB Messenger, Instagram DMs, iMessage, WhatsApp and Google Chat. All of them have separate apps; all of them are loss leaders; all of them are closed.

(I tried Beeper. Loved the idea but didn’t invest time in it since it was always two lawsuits away from me getting “An update on Beeper” email.)

I guess I also miss content existing for content’s sake. Early YouTube, Quora, Reddit, etc. People helping other people...well, usually, anyway. Nowadays everything is growth-maxxed. It's all about engagement. Text-only websites would have never been born in this iteration of the Internet, and that's sad.

dzhiurgis• 3 months ago

Youtube added Ask AI where it gives you pretty good summary with timestamps. Absolute timesaver to drill down to essence.

They should just summarise and timestamp every video for everyone, but it would tank engagement and ad revenue.

Using the internet like it's 1999

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