3 ms·

> I was born in July 1989, which means I am of the last generation who will remember the time before the internet. The internet or the WWW? I was in my late te

> I was born in July 1989, which means I am of the last generation who will remember the time before the internet. The internet or the WWW? I was in my late teens in 1989 and we had been using the Internet in our home for years by that point.

Swizec 3y ago
Author probably means the web and forgot that the internet ever existed. Which is funny because kids these days use the internet a lot more than they use the web. That said, I’m from ye olde 1987 and we only got internet in the house in 2001. The library started having it around 1997. Or that’s when I found out about it. I think my mom’s work had something like a WAN in the early 90’s.
nkrisc 3y ago
Feel free to tell me I'm wrong as well because I too was born in 1989, but to the best of my knowledge of the times before I was born, the internet was not a ubiquitous part of society and culture. The reason I believe that is I saw it myself go from a peripheral part of a society to taking a central role during the 90s and become mainstream. My dad had an internet-connected credit card terminal in his store, but the internet wasn’t a mainstream cultural phenomenon. I was playing StarCraft online in 1998 and even then most of my friends (middle and upper class in Chicago) didn't do much online, or only used the internet for schoolwork which was a pretty new thing for us at that point. Even at that time I was still using our Britannica Encyclopedia CDs for school projects. So, paraphrasing and specifying a bit more, I do agree with the author. I too feel like I was part of the last generation who remembers a time before the internet, and the World Wide Web, completely proliferated society. Again, I was a child while all this was happening in the 90s, so perhaps my perspective is skewed, so I'm interested to hear if anyone older thinks that's completely off-base.
- chubot 3y ago
  For reference, I used BBSes before the Internet around 1993, in middle school/high school. When I got the Internet in 1994 or 1995, I used Gopher as well as the web. College was a big upgrade with broadband, and I used it all through-- 1997-2002. Everybody used e-mail at college, but there were few "regular people" on the web, except maybe professors/scientists and programmers. It was mostly "web pages". I started my first job in 2002, programming in the Bay Area, and the funny thing is that I didn't have Internet access at home for 3 months. I guess it wasn't really necessary or worth the cost for a temporary place. I just used the Internet at work. These days I think people would look at you funny if you only used Internet at work. So it's hard to say, but yeah in 1997 the web was all over the news, because companies like Yahoo started to make money. EBay was kinda popular. There was all the IPO talk, so the Internet was in the public consciousness. But most people still weren't on the Internet. It was more like the news was reporting on this trend, and I wouldn't say it's essential to daily life. I also think the daily "news" conversation was still on TV at that point, not on the Internet. --- It's hard for me to remember now, but now I kinda want to read what the Internet was like in 2002. Definitely Google was a huge thing back then. It made the Internet more popular, because it was easier to find things. I started using it in summer 2000, when I lived at Stanford, after a research co-worker told me about it! There was no Facebook/Reddit/Twitter/Stack Overflow, etc. The whole thing was just less important, and you did less on it. The web continuously grew over 20+ years, so yeah everyone feels they were "early" because it kept growing a lot after they started using it! It kept taking over more and more of life. But I think I saw more or less the whole thing since I used gopher before the web. I didn't see all of the Internet though. I remember talking to people on Usenet that had been on the Internet since the 80's, 10 years before me. Usenet was really big for me -- I learned a ton of stuff about playing guitar and drums -- but I think the 1989 generation probably never touched Usenet. For that generation maybe ICQ was more formative, etc. --- For someone my age, Klosterman's recent book the 90's is kinda fun for remembering what things were like before the Internet https://www.amazon.com/Nineties-Book-Chuck-Klosterman/dp/0735217955 https://www.amazon.com/Nineties-Book-Chuck-Klosterman/dp/073... He's kind of an information hoarder, an extreme trivia master (of musics and sports and pop culture), and he makes some interesting points about the nature of memory and how the Internet changed us and our memories. Kinda summed up by this comic - https://www.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/tuy27/thats_a_damn_shame/ https://www.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/tuy27/thats_a_damn_s...
  - sebastiennight 3y ago
    Your comment makes me think that it would be cool to have a browser that would only allow you to browse the Web of a certain era (eg you could pick 2002, as per your post). Content would be automatically sourced from the Internet Archive or similar sources, so that you could actually get the experience from back then.
    - chubot 3y ago
      Yeah by 2002 I think the web had mostly taken over. But I used Usenet in 2002 through Microsoft Outlook Express, a mail reader that was also a news client. Not a web browser. My e-mail was still through Outlook too, and my work e-mail at my first job was through Outlook. But in the mid 90's you would need a Windows 3.1 virtual machine to capture the online experience. All the PEOPLE I interacted with were actually on BBSes, which had ANSI graphics, which I used through MS-DOS. The web was a separate thing -- I switched into the Windows 3.1 GUI, which had fewer programs. And I probably downloaded Netscape Navigator over a really slow modem connection. Browsers didn't come with OSes! And then I would visit a web page -- there was a good site about guitars hosted at MIT. Maybe Yahoo or Alta Vista, and later eBay. For regular people, AOL or Prodigy was more popular than the web. The reason is that they were CURATED. I think they had professional writers and they had games portals and all that. Probably some stock quotes and news. You couldn't really play games on the web then, not until Java applets became popular. I'm pretty sure Java games and Flash games came much before JavaScript games. And AOL and Prodigy and Compuserve had e-mail. I think most regular people had AOL addresses. So it was kind of this walled garden, that they mostly kept you on, and the web was a separate thing. It was only around 2004 that Gmail and Maps and Facebook came out, and then the "open web" properties became dominant. Of course they repeated the playbook of AOL and tried to keep you on their site! The young companies always advertise themselves as open, and when they get users, they close down. So yeah I'd say the 90's was online, but for most people, the experience was mediated by some kind of "online service" like AOL/Prodigy/Compuserve. I had both -- my parents used AOL and I used the pretty much all the network-connected services I knew about.
  - nkrisc 3y ago
    Yeah that’s how it seemed to me - as much as I can remember. I obviously don’t remember 1990, but by 1997 or so it was clear to me that all this web stuff was a new thing to most people. Before that it was just a technical thing that the computers at work used. Almost parallel was remembering what things were like before everyone had cell phones. I remember going around to my friends’ houses and their parents telling me that my parents called and I have to go home now. I used to have so many phone numbers memorized. But I also remember getting a cell phone in high school and calling my friends all the time, and eventually texting - if my parents weren’t complaining about the phone bill from all my texts. > Usenet was really big for me -- I learned a ton of stuff about playing guitar and drums -- but I think the 1989 generation probably never touched Usenet. For that generation maybe ICQ was more formative, etc. ICQ maybe, AIM and MSN Messenger and others were more likely in my experience at the end of the 90s and early 00s. Usenet was what my uncle who’s basement reeked of cigarette smoke that stuck to the server fans used. He was also the one who wired our house’s phone lines and ran Cat-5 to every room when my parents remodeled a new house in 1999.
tessierashpool 3y ago
that 1989 thing is just Eternal September on the generational scale. we’ll probably see it happen on the centuries scale too. (we as a culture.)

Swizec 3y ago

Author probably means the web and forgot that the internet ever existed. Which is funny because kids these days use the internet a lot more than they use the web. That said, I’m from ye olde 1987 and we only got internet in the house in 2001. The library started having it around 1997. Or that’s when I found out about it. I think my mom’s work had something like a WAN in the early 90’s.

nkrisc 3y ago

Feel free to tell me I'm wrong as well because I too was born in 1989, but to the best of my knowledge of the times before I was born, the internet was not a ubiquitous part of society and culture. The reason I believe that is I saw it myself go from a peripheral part of a society to taking a central role during the 90s and become mainstream. My dad had an internet-connected credit card terminal in his store, but the internet wasn’t a mainstream cultural phenomenon. I was playing StarCraft online in 1998 and even then most of my friends (middle and upper class in Chicago) didn't do much online, or only used the internet for schoolwork which was a pretty new thing for us at that point. Even at that time I was still using our Britannica Encyclopedia CDs for school projects. So, paraphrasing and specifying a bit more, I do agree with the author. I too feel like I was part of the last generation who remembers a time before the internet, and the World Wide Web, completely proliferated society. Again, I was a child while all this was happening in the 90s, so perhaps my perspective is skewed, so I'm interested to hear if anyone older thinks that's completely off-base.

chubot 3y ago
For reference, I used BBSes before the Internet around 1993, in middle school/high school. When I got the Internet in 1994 or 1995, I used Gopher as well as the web. College was a big upgrade with broadband, and I used it all through-- 1997-2002. Everybody used e-mail at college, but there were few "regular people" on the web, except maybe professors/scientists and programmers. It was mostly "web pages". I started my first job in 2002, programming in the Bay Area, and the funny thing is that I didn't have Internet access at home for 3 months. I guess it wasn't really necessary or worth the cost for a temporary place. I just used the Internet at work. These days I think people would look at you funny if you only used Internet at work. So it's hard to say, but yeah in 1997 the web was all over the news, because companies like Yahoo started to make money. EBay was kinda popular. There was all the IPO talk, so the Internet was in the public consciousness. But most people still weren't on the Internet. It was more like the news was reporting on this trend, and I wouldn't say it's essential to daily life. I also think the daily "news" conversation was still on TV at that point, not on the Internet. --- It's hard for me to remember now, but now I kinda want to read what the Internet was like in 2002. Definitely Google was a huge thing back then. It made the Internet more popular, because it was easier to find things. I started using it in summer 2000, when I lived at Stanford, after a research co-worker told me about it! There was no Facebook/Reddit/Twitter/Stack Overflow, etc. The whole thing was just less important, and you did less on it. The web continuously grew over 20+ years, so yeah everyone feels they were "early" because it kept growing a lot after they started using it! It kept taking over more and more of life. But I think I saw more or less the whole thing since I used gopher before the web. I didn't see all of the Internet though. I remember talking to people on Usenet that had been on the Internet since the 80's, 10 years before me. Usenet was really big for me -- I learned a ton of stuff about playing guitar and drums -- but I think the 1989 generation probably never touched Usenet. For that generation maybe ICQ was more formative, etc. --- For someone my age, Klosterman's recent book the 90's is kinda fun for remembering what things were like before the Internet https://www.amazon.com/Nineties-Book-Chuck-Klosterman/dp/0735217955 https://www.amazon.com/Nineties-Book-Chuck-Klosterman/dp/073... He's kind of an information hoarder, an extreme trivia master (of musics and sports and pop culture), and he makes some interesting points about the nature of memory and how the Internet changed us and our memories. Kinda summed up by this comic - https://www.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/tuy27/thats_a_damn_shame/ https://www.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/tuy27/thats_a_damn_s...
- sebastiennight 3y ago
  Your comment makes me think that it would be cool to have a browser that would only allow you to browse the Web of a certain era (eg you could pick 2002, as per your post). Content would be automatically sourced from the Internet Archive or similar sources, so that you could actually get the experience from back then.
  - chubot 3y ago
    Yeah by 2002 I think the web had mostly taken over. But I used Usenet in 2002 through Microsoft Outlook Express, a mail reader that was also a news client. Not a web browser. My e-mail was still through Outlook too, and my work e-mail at my first job was through Outlook. But in the mid 90's you would need a Windows 3.1 virtual machine to capture the online experience. All the PEOPLE I interacted with were actually on BBSes, which had ANSI graphics, which I used through MS-DOS. The web was a separate thing -- I switched into the Windows 3.1 GUI, which had fewer programs. And I probably downloaded Netscape Navigator over a really slow modem connection. Browsers didn't come with OSes! And then I would visit a web page -- there was a good site about guitars hosted at MIT. Maybe Yahoo or Alta Vista, and later eBay. For regular people, AOL or Prodigy was more popular than the web. The reason is that they were CURATED. I think they had professional writers and they had games portals and all that. Probably some stock quotes and news. You couldn't really play games on the web then, not until Java applets became popular. I'm pretty sure Java games and Flash games came much before JavaScript games. And AOL and Prodigy and Compuserve had e-mail. I think most regular people had AOL addresses. So it was kind of this walled garden, that they mostly kept you on, and the web was a separate thing. It was only around 2004 that Gmail and Maps and Facebook came out, and then the "open web" properties became dominant. Of course they repeated the playbook of AOL and tried to keep you on their site! The young companies always advertise themselves as open, and when they get users, they close down. So yeah I'd say the 90's was online, but for most people, the experience was mediated by some kind of "online service" like AOL/Prodigy/Compuserve. I had both -- my parents used AOL and I used the pretty much all the network-connected services I knew about.
- nkrisc 3y ago
  Yeah that’s how it seemed to me - as much as I can remember. I obviously don’t remember 1990, but by 1997 or so it was clear to me that all this web stuff was a new thing to most people. Before that it was just a technical thing that the computers at work used. Almost parallel was remembering what things were like before everyone had cell phones. I remember going around to my friends’ houses and their parents telling me that my parents called and I have to go home now. I used to have so many phone numbers memorized. But I also remember getting a cell phone in high school and calling my friends all the time, and eventually texting - if my parents weren’t complaining about the phone bill from all my texts. > Usenet was really big for me -- I learned a ton of stuff about playing guitar and drums -- but I think the 1989 generation probably never touched Usenet. For that generation maybe ICQ was more formative, etc. ICQ maybe, AIM and MSN Messenger and others were more likely in my experience at the end of the 90s and early 00s. Usenet was what my uncle who’s basement reeked of cigarette smoke that stuck to the server fans used. He was also the one who wired our house’s phone lines and ran Cat-5 to every room when my parents remodeled a new house in 1999.

tessierashpool 3y ago

that 1989 thing is just Eternal September on the generational scale. we’ll probably see it happen on the centuries scale too. (we as a culture.)