5 ms·

This article is looking at the older Internet from one point of view. There was much more to it than the Web. There were thriving communities on Usenet and IRC.

This article is looking at the older Internet from one point of view. There was much more to it than the Web. There were thriving communities on Usenet and IRC. People had personal home pages instead of MySpace/Facebook/Bebo/Whatever accounts. You hosted your own scanned photos.

eru 18y ago
And MUDs!
tptacek 18y ago
There were thriving Usenet and IRC communities (I miss Usenet), but you had those things on BBS's too; it wasn't really a breakthrough.
- baddox 18y ago
  Oh, Usenet is still out there. There are even still communities, although it's mostly just used for binaries now.
  - tptacek 18y ago
    Usenet is a crappy P2P file sharing system now, as pretty much everyone who ran a Freenix-rated Usenet server predicted. It was something much cooler than that before the file sharing douchebags wrecked it.
    - baddox 18y ago
      P2P?
- joeyo 18y ago
  IRC is most definitely still there.
- wallflower 18y ago
  Nothing like the puzzle of collecting and putting together UUEncoded-split "warez" (invariably one or two pieces would be missing)
gb 18y ago
I was on CompuServe back then (95 or 96 anyway), at the time I never even opened the web browser - my time online was spent in the CompuServe app looking at the board/chatroom/portal type things that it used to serve. Strangely I can still remember the "phone number" style email address I had too...