3 ms·

> I remember using the web on 25mhz computers. It ran about as fast as it does today with a couple ghz. I know it’s a meme on HN to complain that modern websit

> I remember using the web on 25mhz computers. It ran about as fast as it does today with a couple ghz. I know it’s a meme on HN to complain that modern websites are slow, but this is a perfect example of how completely distorted views of the past can get. No, browsing the web in the early 90s was slooow. Even simple web pages took a long time to load. As you said, internet connections were very slow too. I remember visiting pages with photos that would come with a warning about the size of the page, at which point I’d get up and go get a drink or take a break while it loaded. Then scrolling pages with images would feel like the computer was working hard. It’s silly to claim that 90s web browsers ran about as fast as they do today.

exe34 9mo ago
what a glorious time that was! now it's too easy to get stuck looking at the stream of (usually AI generated) crap. I long for the time when the regular screen break was built-in.
ok_dad 9mo ago
No, I think he’s right. I don’t recall the web being any faster today than it was thirty years ago, download speed excepted. The overall experience is about the same, if not worse, IMO.
- pibaker 9mo ago
  Why would you make an exception for download speed? It was the reason why the internet was slow back then. This is like saying Victorian Britain wasn't polluted, except for all the coal burning.
  - ok_dad 9mo ago
    Cars have much more power today but generally don’t go much faster because they’re much heavier. Just because downloads are faster doesn’t mean the user experience is faster or more snappy. In fact, it might be worse. Quality doesn’t follow from quantity.
raverbashing 9mo ago
Yeah slow? Try using a 2400baud modem, that was slow
- bluGill 9mo ago
  I started on 300baud - but never accessed the internet from that so I won't count it in this discussion.
- vardump 9mo ago
  Those things always confuse me. I think 2400 baud modems were like 9600 bps? At least 56k modems were 8000 baud.
  - raverbashing 9mo ago
    no, the other way 2400 were 300 bytes per second (though it might be that 9600bps worked at the 'official definition' of 2400 baud but nobody advertised it like that)
    - vardump 9mo ago
      You seem to be confusing baud and bits per second. Baud is symbols per second. Usually one symbol represents multiple bits. AFAIK in 56k modems one symbol corresponds up to 7 bits.
      - raverbashing 9mo ago
        I am not confusing anything, it was the marketing that was confusing Of course you're correct and a 56k modem is something like 8k Baud, but in marketing the bigger number usually wins And up until the 2400bps modems IIRC bauds and bps were interchangeable
nebula8804 9mo ago
This is probably me experiencing a simulacra but with that slow loading getting up to go get a drink workflow, each page load was more special. It was magical discovering new websites just like trying out new software by picking something up from those "pegboards" at computer stores. It also was a simpler time, the technology was in peoples lives but as a small side quest to their main lives. It took the form of a bulky desktop in the den or something like that. When you walked away from that beige box, it didn't follow or know about the rest of your life. A life where a Big Mac meal was only $2.99, a toyota corolla was $9-15k, houses were ~100k, and when average dev salaries were ~50k. That was a different life. I don't know why but I picture this music video that was included on the Windows 95 cd bonus folder when I think of this simulacra: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iqL1BLzn3qc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iqL1BLzn3qc
- vardump 9mo ago
  > music video that was included on the Windows 95 cd bonus folder when I think of this simulacra: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iqL1BLzn3qc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iqL1BLzn3qc When I saw that video in 1995, I understood something we now know as Youtube would be inevitable as the connection speeds improve. Although I thought it'd be like MTV, a way to watch the newest music videos.
Tor3 9mo ago
Browsing the web was slow, because the network was slow. It wasn't really because the desktop computers were slow. I remember our company having just a 64 kbit/s connection to the 'net, even as late as in 1997.. well, that was pretty good compared to the place where I was contracted to at the time, in Italy.. they had 19.2 kbit/s. Really big sites could have something much better, and browsing the internet at their sites was a different experience then, using the same computers.
- LeFantome 9mo ago
  Ya, what is crazy is that we were “serving” web pages over those kinds of lines.
bluGill 9mo ago
My clim is that the modern web is bloated. I had t3 connections for most of my browsing which was faster than ethernet of the day - even by todays standards that isn't too bad. I avoided dialup if I could because it was slow. Even isdn was okay speeds.
- Aurornis 9mo ago
  > My clim is that the modern web is bloated. Your claim that I responded to was that web browsers were just as fast on 25MHz CPUs. > I had t3 connections for most of my browsing which was faster than ethernet of the day - even by todays standards that isn't too bad. T3 speeds are very slow in today's terms. Even my cell phone does a couple orders of magnitude better from where I'm sitting. There are a lot of weird claims going on in your posts. I think it's a lot of nostalgia coloring your views of how fast things were in the past.
  - bluGill 9mo ago
    the modern web is very bloted and to the actual experinece isn't much different. Of course some of that bloat does more, but much of it isn't
    - pibaker 9mo ago
      If you want to complain about the state of modern web, you can just do it. You don't need to spin up a story about how the old internet was faster than it actually was. This is the same pattern you see in politics when people on all sides (even the nominally progressive ones) lie to each other about how great the olden days were, when in reality it's all about their dissatisfaction with the present day.
      - bluGill 9mo ago
        The subject here is what if computers hadn't advanced from the 1990s. Complaining about modern web bloat would be off topic. Commenting about how things weren't much slower fits the topic though.
antidamage 9mo ago
It's not an accurate recollection at all. In 1990 a couple of us 12 year olds snuck into the university library to use the web to look at the Marathon website. It took 5 minutes to load some trivially-sized gifs and a tiny amount of HTML. They had a pretty decent connection for the day. Web pages took a minute to load, now we're optimising them for instant response.
- ghssds 9mo ago
  That's really cool you visited in 1990, three years before the first graphical web browser, a website with image about a game released in 1994.
fragmede 9mo ago
Wirths law in effect.
lelanthran 9mo ago
> No, browsing the web in the early 90s was slooow. Even simple web pages took a long time to load. As you said, internet connections were very slow too. I remember visiting pages with photos that would come with a warning about the size of the page, at which point I’d get up and go get a drink or take a break while it loaded. At home, when I was on dialup, certainly. At work I did not experience this. Most pages loaded in Netscape navigator in about the same time that most pages load now - a few seconds. > Then scrolling pages with images would feel like the computer was working hard. Well, yes, single-core, single-socket and single-processor meant that the computer could literally only do a single thing at a time, and yet the scrolling experience on most sites was still good enough to be better than the scrolling experience on some current React sites.

exe34 9mo ago

what a glorious time that was! now it's too easy to get stuck looking at the stream of (usually AI generated) crap. I long for the time when the regular screen break was built-in.

ok_dad 9mo ago

No, I think he’s right. I don’t recall the web being any faster today than it was thirty years ago, download speed excepted. The overall experience is about the same, if not worse, IMO.

pibaker 9mo ago
Why would you make an exception for download speed? It was the reason why the internet was slow back then. This is like saying Victorian Britain wasn't polluted, except for all the coal burning.
- ok_dad 9mo ago
  Cars have much more power today but generally don’t go much faster because they’re much heavier. Just because downloads are faster doesn’t mean the user experience is faster or more snappy. In fact, it might be worse. Quality doesn’t follow from quantity.

raverbashing 9mo ago

Yeah slow? Try using a 2400baud modem, that was slow

bluGill 9mo ago
I started on 300baud - but never accessed the internet from that so I won't count it in this discussion.
vardump 9mo ago
Those things always confuse me. I think 2400 baud modems were like 9600 bps? At least 56k modems were 8000 baud.
- raverbashing 9mo ago
  no, the other way 2400 were 300 bytes per second (though it might be that 9600bps worked at the 'official definition' of 2400 baud but nobody advertised it like that)
  - vardump 9mo ago
    You seem to be confusing baud and bits per second. Baud is symbols per second. Usually one symbol represents multiple bits. AFAIK in 56k modems one symbol corresponds up to 7 bits.
    - raverbashing 9mo ago
      I am not confusing anything, it was the marketing that was confusing Of course you're correct and a 56k modem is something like 8k Baud, but in marketing the bigger number usually wins And up until the 2400bps modems IIRC bauds and bps were interchangeable

nebula8804 9mo ago

This is probably me experiencing a simulacra but with that slow loading getting up to go get a drink workflow, each page load was more special. It was magical discovering new websites just like trying out new software by picking something up from those "pegboards" at computer stores. It also was a simpler time, the technology was in peoples lives but as a small side quest to their main lives. It took the form of a bulky desktop in the den or something like that. When you walked away from that beige box, it didn't follow or know about the rest of your life. A life where a Big Mac meal was only $2.99, a toyota corolla was $9-15k, houses were ~100k, and when average dev salaries were ~50k. That was a different life. I don't know why but I picture this music video that was included on the Windows 95 cd bonus folder when I think of this simulacra: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iqL1BLzn3qc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iqL1BLzn3qc

vardump 9mo ago
> music video that was included on the Windows 95 cd bonus folder when I think of this simulacra: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iqL1BLzn3qc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iqL1BLzn3qc When I saw that video in 1995, I understood something we now know as Youtube would be inevitable as the connection speeds improve. Although I thought it'd be like MTV, a way to watch the newest music videos.

Tor3 9mo ago

Browsing the web was slow, because the network was slow. It wasn't really because the desktop computers were slow. I remember our company having just a 64 kbit/s connection to the 'net, even as late as in 1997.. well, that was pretty good compared to the place where I was contracted to at the time, in Italy.. they had 19.2 kbit/s. Really big sites could have something much better, and browsing the internet at their sites was a different experience then, using the same computers.

LeFantome 9mo ago
Ya, what is crazy is that we were “serving” web pages over those kinds of lines.

bluGill 9mo ago

My clim is that the modern web is bloated. I had t3 connections for most of my browsing which was faster than ethernet of the day - even by todays standards that isn't too bad. I avoided dialup if I could because it was slow. Even isdn was okay speeds.

Aurornis 9mo ago
> My clim is that the modern web is bloated. Your claim that I responded to was that web browsers were just as fast on 25MHz CPUs. > I had t3 connections for most of my browsing which was faster than ethernet of the day - even by todays standards that isn't too bad. T3 speeds are very slow in today's terms. Even my cell phone does a couple orders of magnitude better from where I'm sitting. There are a lot of weird claims going on in your posts. I think it's a lot of nostalgia coloring your views of how fast things were in the past.
- bluGill 9mo ago
  the modern web is very bloted and to the actual experinece isn't much different. Of course some of that bloat does more, but much of it isn't
  - pibaker 9mo ago
    If you want to complain about the state of modern web, you can just do it. You don't need to spin up a story about how the old internet was faster than it actually was. This is the same pattern you see in politics when people on all sides (even the nominally progressive ones) lie to each other about how great the olden days were, when in reality it's all about their dissatisfaction with the present day.
    - bluGill 9mo ago
      The subject here is what if computers hadn't advanced from the 1990s. Complaining about modern web bloat would be off topic. Commenting about how things weren't much slower fits the topic though.

antidamage 9mo ago

It's not an accurate recollection at all. In 1990 a couple of us 12 year olds snuck into the university library to use the web to look at the Marathon website. It took 5 minutes to load some trivially-sized gifs and a tiny amount of HTML. They had a pretty decent connection for the day. Web pages took a minute to load, now we're optimising them for instant response.

ghssds 9mo ago
That's really cool you visited in 1990, three years before the first graphical web browser, a website with image about a game released in 1994.

fragmede 9mo ago

Wirths law in effect.

lelanthran 9mo ago

> No, browsing the web in the early 90s was slooow. Even simple web pages took a long time to load. As you said, internet connections were very slow too. I remember visiting pages with photos that would come with a warning about the size of the page, at which point I’d get up and go get a drink or take a break while it loaded. At home, when I was on dialup, certainly. At work I did not experience this. Most pages loaded in Netscape navigator in about the same time that most pages load now - a few seconds. > Then scrolling pages with images would feel like the computer was working hard. Well, yes, single-core, single-socket and single-processor meant that the computer could literally only do a single thing at a time, and yet the scrolling experience on most sites was still good enough to be better than the scrolling experience on some current React sites.