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Individuals hosting servers with whatever functionality they wanted that people would connect to, substantially spread by word of mouth (like MUDs and IRC chann

Individuals hosting servers with whatever functionality they wanted that people would connect to, substantially spread by word of mouth (like MUDs and IRC channels) but otherwise difficult to search. People would link to others they found interesting in "rings" to help visitors find new people to read, and often online communities were made up of a lot of people who knew each other in person and wanted a way to communicate from home more easily. Information you found was generally published or organized by a passionate individual, for instance if you wanted to know about Star Trek you could find a star trek website that had factoids assembled manually by a few people. So you can imagine that the information was probably pretty reliable, delivered without commercial intent, but the breadth of availability was limited to what individual people felt like publishing. In the beginning, I remember borrowing books on the internet from the local public library which had a CDROM that had basic software like mosaic to browse the web, and many would provide IP addresses and port numbers for public FTP servers containing things like freeware games and open source software. I was about 11, I'm not sure how adults at the time got online but it's probably not that far different. Basically, imagine the entire content of the internet being like open source -- if someone was passionate about something and wanted to share it it was there. If not, it wasn't. Servers were often located in people's homes, I remember many times services just not responding because the hosts home internet was down.

lucb1e 8y ago
> Individuals hosting servers with whatever functionality they wanted that people would connect to, substantially spread by word of mouth ... Information you found was generally published or organized by a passionate individual ... delivered without commercial intent ... if someone was passionate about something and wanted to share it it was there. ... Servers were often located in people's homes Woa, I'm not old enough to have experienced that period of the internet, but this perfectly describes what I do. My servers are at home, I have lots of little tools in a folder that I'm happy for people to use ('connect to'), I used to run a lot more services but with my email hosted on it that is quite a security risk (maybe I'll start doing it again on the new system that I'm setting up, which is much more compartmentalized), my websites do not have ads and only one has visitor counting (using StatCounter, installed when I was 16 and curious how people used my first site). In the early days, I collected facts, links, and flash games about BMXing because I thought that sport was epic. I also shamelessly hacked those games' online highscores, if they had one, and that's how I ended up where I am today (security consultant) :-)
- topkai22 8y ago
  If you want to see what the tail end of that, where we had the web but content generation was still largely amateur, a lurkers guide to Babylon 5 is exactly as I remember http://www.midwinter.com/lurk/lurker.html http://www.midwinter.com/lurk/lurker.html
bayofpigs 8y ago
This really captures many of the differences. I'll just add that though we have more content creators today the motivation is what's really changed so much. Back then it was harder to share your own content, either by learning HTML or hosting your own server and no real monetary rewards for doing so, and no social status indicators except for maybe 'hit counters'. Because of this it was passion for the topic that motivated people to share with far less focus on how it looked or the way it was presented. Now with advertising, upvoting and platform biases people are more judgemental while reading others work. The motivation to create traffic and increase social outreach changed the nature of sharing itself.
hvs 8y ago
I had forgotten about webrings. The web of the mid-90s was truly a "web". The search engines were basically garbage, so you never knew what you were going to find. It was weird and interesting and there was a lot of random interesting stuff on it (mostly if you were a nerd, which we all were because normal people didn't use it yet).

lucb1e 8y ago

> Individuals hosting servers with whatever functionality they wanted that people would connect to, substantially spread by word of mouth ... Information you found was generally published or organized by a passionate individual ... delivered without commercial intent ... if someone was passionate about something and wanted to share it it was there. ... Servers were often located in people's homes Woa, I'm not old enough to have experienced that period of the internet, but this perfectly describes what I do. My servers are at home, I have lots of little tools in a folder that I'm happy for people to use ('connect to'), I used to run a lot more services but with my email hosted on it that is quite a security risk (maybe I'll start doing it again on the new system that I'm setting up, which is much more compartmentalized), my websites do not have ads and only one has visitor counting (using StatCounter, installed when I was 16 and curious how people used my first site). In the early days, I collected facts, links, and flash games about BMXing because I thought that sport was epic. I also shamelessly hacked those games' online highscores, if they had one, and that's how I ended up where I am today (security consultant) :-)

topkai22 8y ago
If you want to see what the tail end of that, where we had the web but content generation was still largely amateur, a lurkers guide to Babylon 5 is exactly as I remember http://www.midwinter.com/lurk/lurker.html http://www.midwinter.com/lurk/lurker.html

bayofpigs 8y ago

This really captures many of the differences. I'll just add that though we have more content creators today the motivation is what's really changed so much. Back then it was harder to share your own content, either by learning HTML or hosting your own server and no real monetary rewards for doing so, and no social status indicators except for maybe 'hit counters'. Because of this it was passion for the topic that motivated people to share with far less focus on how it looked or the way it was presented. Now with advertising, upvoting and platform biases people are more judgemental while reading others work. The motivation to create traffic and increase social outreach changed the nature of sharing itself.

hvs 8y ago

I had forgotten about webrings. The web of the mid-90s was truly a "web". The search engines were basically garbage, so you never knew what you were going to find. It was weird and interesting and there was a lot of random interesting stuff on it (mostly if you were a nerd, which we all were because normal people didn't use it yet).