Do you remember the days of http://www.

57Deluxe

...say mid to late 90s when you would get excited that a URL you found actually connected to a web page? Or when you would take a chance to see if places had a web page by pre-guessing a likely URL?

I remember one Sunday going for a walk and coming back eager to know some history on the Basingstoke Canal and went to see if I could find any info online. Imagine the surprise when indeed a couple of pages of close-typed text came back and a couple of tiny b&w images... Even more exciting was that I did this on my Atari ST on a dial-up pocket modem!!

Guitar_Slinger

I remember being left alone in an office with an internet machine one day over Christmas - either 1996 or 1997, and typed a few brand names after www.

One of them was http://www.kawasaki.com and one really long a fanboy page loaded up with people's names and descriptions of their motorbikes.  It took about half an hour for the images to load up, line by line.  By then I got bored, switched it off and spent the rest of the day playing Minesweeper.    

gringopig

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Jalapeno

I remember the days before .... Gopher, Veronica etc ....

darthed1981

I can remember when the Internet was a lot friendlier!

Now it seems like most forums, Facebook etc. are a chance for people to indulge their worst instincts.

Not entirely to blame however, there would have been a reactionary kickback against the liberal consensus eventually whatever happened, I guess it being out in the open is a good thing...

Reverend

gringopig said:

I do remember being excited that the world wide web would be a source of great knowledge only to discover later that it was just a massive milking machine and a means to funnel advert right into your eyeballs after the demise of TV.

Information now comes with a coda of argument and name calling or is completely wrong.

No it doesn't, bumface.

PolarityMan

I started out on compuserv with octal email addresses and everything.

Paul_C

I don't quite go that far back with the internet, IIRC it would have been around 2000/2001.

The one thing I wish I could recall was the name of the search engine I used at the time - AltaVista was one of the big ones, but the one I used a lot had a name with "monkey" or "ape" in it (unless I'm much mistaken) and I've never been able to find any mention of it anywhere.

Snags

darthed1981 said:

I can remember when the Internet was a lot friendlier!

Now it seems like most forums, Facebook etc. are a chance for people to indulge their worst instincts.

Guess you never hung out on too many alt.blah Usenet groups, then

I remember when there were trolls, flame wars, flame baiting and all the rest, and trolling actually meant something proper, not just being mean to someone. t'Internet has always a been a weird mix of friendly people (still in touch with folk I met via IRC) and total psycho's.  And sometimes friendly psychos.

Reverend

Music Radar use to run the Metal Hammer forum where an argument led to someone being stabbed. 

Grumpyrocker

darthed1981 said:

I can remember when the Internet was a lot friendlier!

It was definitely a lot friendly. My job has been online since the late 90s and I remember the internet being a much more interesting, varied, and friendly place back then.

Even now toxic places like Xbox Live used to be wonderfully friendly, where you'd end up meeting, chatting, and befriending people.

Sassafras

I can;t even remember what I went upstairs for.

exocet

Yep, first foray was via Compuserve....when it wasn't on the Internet (dial up BBS only), then got an IP connection with them in 94. Then jumped to an ISP called DirCon...again pretty much all DIY - terminal session to access software (Trumpet Winsock) once installed you had an IP connection and could then download Netscape Navigator via FTP.
Remember working at BBC - Novell Netware network in the days when you could only have one active protocol stack....IPX or IP. Even used Lynx (text based www browser)

Octafish

Ah the days of printing off the internet . I used to access the internet in the mid/late 90's on university computers and at an internet cafe. Due to time constraints and having to pay per half hour at the internet cafe, I would look stuff up or access emails and print them off to read at leisure later on. Those were the days were you could set up a yahoo email with just your name @yahoo.co.uk, no numbers or characters needed.

Got dial up at home in about 99 and used to go off and make a cup of tea while basic images loaded. I had 56k dial up, a friend only had 28k . Used Napster for a bit and used to leave computer online all day while I went to work to come home 8-9 hours later to find one or two 4 MB mp3s downloaded.

jonnyburgo

Paul_C said:

I don't quite go that far back with the internet, IIRC it would have been around 2000/2001.

The one thing I wish I could recall was the name of the search engine I used at the time - AltaVista was one of the big ones, but the one I used a lot had a name with "monkey" or "ape" in it (unless I'm much mistaken) and I've never been able to find any mention of it anywhere.

Yes it was Askmonkeyape.com

Grumpyrocker

I started using the Internet in the mid 90s at university. At first I didn't think it was a big deal as in the UK we'd already had the Ceefax TV information service but also before going back into education I'd worked at ICL where we had a whole internal net-like system for messaging and other work things. So the Internet felt like a continuation of those rather than a new thing.

I do remember when Lynx was our only option for a browser, and how much easier things felt coming back to uni after a holiday and Netscape Navigator had been released. It was also interesting how many music pages were already up in the mid 90s. I think the first band page I went to was Dream Theater, and maybe Megadeth who were also quick on the uptake. I also remember there being a really good All About Even fan page up quite early on. 

Early search engines I remember using - Excite, Alta Vista, Yahoo, Lycos, Infoseek.

And I remember reading somewhere a suggestion to try a brand new, very minimalist little search engine that had just been release with the odd name of Google. 

exocet

Usenet newsgroups anyone? Remember using that a lot....Free Agent was the application, spent far too much time in UK.politics and UK.rec.diy.

shrinkwrap

Dial up modems and sending docs from one side of the world to the other - it never worked so the guy in the UK and I would sit on a voice line checking all the damn settings one by one. All for a Word file or PDF.

Have still got the 14,400 Modem I bought a year or two later.

Mind I always felt the web was such a big step back from the wonders of Macromedia Director. Director could do touch screen, play audio and video at will, made sprite animation easy and all fully interactive 25 years ago.

Axe_meister

1985 I has an acoustic coppler you attached to your phone with a rubber band on my Acorn electron. I would download the listings from Acorn User magazine. 

prowla

I remember Hypercard on the Mac, before there was a www...

Danny1969

I got on the net with a 486 and Freeserve, which was one of the first free signup no monthly subscription services ... you simply payed a penny a minute to your telephone service which back than was BT. The next breakthrough was a company called Ezysurf or something which gave you free net access an hour at a time. A couple of years of that and then BT came out with ADSL 
Newsgroups, chat rooms and Webferret were my main uses of the net back then