5 ms·
I remember browsing the internet was much more of a networked thing. If you want to know what it was like you could take a look at Wikipedia, where you still ca
by dep_b 9y ago
I remember browsing the internet was much more of a networked thing. If you want to know what it was like you could take a look at Wikipedia, where you still can get lost in a never ending deeper web of links. However WikiPedia is a very cleaned up version of the early web. It lacks animated .gifs for sure.
But the difference with Wikipedia was that people would maintain a Links section full of interesting stuff and people would join web rings for various subjects, interlinking vastly different sites. Finding information often happened through Yahoo! (AltaVista was there too but it was lacking the quality of handpicked results) through a tree based discovery system, to continue through whatever you could find through links on an interesting page. Exchanging links was something that really frequently happened.
It resulted in an internet where you just kept clicking and discovering and digging. Sometimes also frustrating as browsers lacked tabs and I would navigate all links one by one by loading it and going back. I would forget how I arrived at a certain page sometimes because it was so deep and I never found the breadcrumbs again.
- neonnoodle 9y ago> It lacks animated .gifs for sure Um excuse me what do you call this masterpiece https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/ea/Ellipses_with_SliderCrank_Ellipses_at_Crank_Side.gif https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/ea/Ellipses...
- Danihan 9y agoDoesn't count unless it's a spooky skull. https://media3.giphy.com/media/6SPkShZNS9Uqs/giphy.gif https://media3.giphy.com/media/6SPkShZNS9Uqs/giphy.gif
- cooper12 9y agohttps://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/8c/Articular_tubercle_of_temporal_bone_-_skull_-_animation01.gif https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/8c/Articula...
- hawski 9y agoWow! That's nice. I started to imagine how it could be used in a geeky clock.
- awj 9y ago> If you want to know what it was like you could take a look at Wikipedia, where you still can get lost in a never ending deeper web of links. I would have said TVTropes, but the core point is the same. I remember having to restart my computer, because IE lacked tabs and Windows would let you open so many instances of it that the whole OS ground to a halt. It's weird to think that now, in the absence of Google, I couldn't find my way from anything to anything else.
- tepe1 9y agoIt's worth mentioning: Google broke the web when it monetized linking via PageRank. Literally overnight links went from being an organic expression of organization and interest to being currency that needed to be carefully hoarded and "spent" to increase PageRank. The organic web is dead. What we have now is essentially spam, content farms created not to appeal tohumans but rather whose primary audience is Google's algorithms. Google could fix this btw -- it's not that hard to identify artificial link clusters (sites that have an unusually high number of inbound links) and dead zones (sites that have an unusually low number of inbound links) ... but to do so would not be profitable in the slightest.