Probably sounds really weird but I get almost teary eyed when I see those Windows teal-background era graphics and a Netscape browser. Those days! These are the nights that never die. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UtF6Jej8yb4) I don't know if you felt it, but I felt it. Back then, in those days. It wasn't just the heat of summer, roaming the beautiful city at night as a teenager: it was the internet. It was amazing.
part of the problem is that most people don't own a pc or personal laptop - they use their phone and apps. None of my friends (35 years +) use laptops other than for work and openly say how much they have regressed technically. Some of these guys grew up with the internet in the early 00's and would be setting up switches for lan partys, using torrents and usenxt, limewire etc. These days they can barely open up microsoft word - but on instagram/twitter they're all over it. Sad really. I would always reach for my laptop first before my phone and I tend to very rarely visit social media sites (other than reddit) on laptop/desktop.
I use glance - https://github.com/glanceapp/glance to parse my rss feeds - it's pretty good.
Yeah, I don't think the true scale of the "war on general computation" is apparent for many technical people: It's good to think about alternative distribution models for the internet, better use of protocols, etc - but a large and growing number of users literally don't have (administrative) control over their client devices anymore.
The "cognitive control" of tech companies is underpinned by a much more concrete technical control of the devices.
>but a large and growing number of users literally don't have (administrative) control over their client devices anymore.
would those users have had devices over which they had administrative control in the past though? Perhaps for software to eat the world, and for hardware to get distributed far enough that it could, a percentage of the world had to forego administrative rights when getting that hardware.
I suppose those who miss it can still get it, although yes, for how much longer is a question.
That's what they are by now, though. The websites of social media sites are crippled and bug-ridden - try using Instagram in a browser, for example. They want to coerce you into using their apps, because that gives them better tracking opportunities.
That's just what I've been doing after deleting Instagram from my. phone. I can't trust my evening dopamine-seeking behaviour with the phone app, but there's much much less stickiness in the browser.
Yes, it does help. But it's too easily switched off. I basically have to be my own worst enemy I have to order to prevent myself from being my own worst enemy!
Have you tried just not using a smartphone? I have a flip phone I take with me and leave my iPhone at home for things that need it. Otherwise, I carry my laptop/tablet everywhere. If I need to check my social media or email I have to sit down and deliberately do that
I've been resisting this for various reasons. Parking apps, maps, camera, podcast app, many many timers, and banking apps are all phone functions I use quite often and I can't see obvious ways around them which don't involve lots of other gubbins which I will inevitably lose or forget.
I could possibly uninstall everything but the absolute necessities on a smartphone for when I need it, and otherwise carry a flip phone. Maybe use the flip phone for tethering so the smartphone doesn't need a Sim card. But it seems that might be introducing lot of extra stress into my life, especially for stressful jobs like parking before a meeting, keeping up to date with clients, etc
It’s funny, I’ve never installed any of the apps because I figured if, with all their engineering, they can’t even build a usable website, why would I trust their native code?
My 8yo keeps calling any piece of software he can run an "app", regardless of it being on a computer, a website, or a mobile device. I object to it out of principle, old man yelling at clouds style. But fundamentally, it's just code I interact with to do something, I'm just used to using different terminology for each runtime. The term website came about right before we really had anything interactive on the W3, describing something rather static.
All this to say, we're both right and wrong in feeling this way lol
Please try to encourage them to open up LibreOffice Writer rather than Microsoft Word though! They should not have to suffer with CoPilot and MS spying on you all the time.
the nostalgia for 1999 isnt really about missing dial up or basic html, its about mourning the loss of user agency. back then the browser actually worked for you. today the client is basically a hostile enviroment running megabytes of third party js just to track telemetry.
going back to gopher or text-only browsers feels like admitting defeat tbh. we can still build incredibly fast modern apps if we just stop treating the users hardware like an infinite resource for adtech. you dont need massive frameworks and client--side bloat to make something good.
In 1999, hostile websites would pop up endless new windows full of advertisements that you were powerless to stop unless you simply held down "ALT+F4" or "CTRL+ALT+DEL". Part of Mozilla Firefox's appeal is that it came with a pop-up blocker. [0]
Do you know anything about the Browser Wars? People literally had to put up images telling you which browser to use if you wanted to actually experience their website the way it was intended. Otherwise, it was just broken. [1]
Hostile pages did that. Today, nearly every page has a dozen tracking scripts, starts off with a cookie popup, probably pops up a "please log in" or "please give me money" after you scroll half way down, still has ads that even more effectively mimic the site topic and design to trick you into clicking them, pops up a newsletter or cupon code popup if your cursor leaves the viewport, might be secretly running experiments on you by A/B testing titles, images or testimonials...
The assault on your attention is way worse these days, it's just (mostly) contained to the viewport.
In 1999, most websites were not hostile because they weren’t chasing diminishing returns from ad-tech companies. Most of the companies I worked with were trying direct revenue models getting people to buy things or subscribe directly, and the ad market paid a lot better for less obtrusive ads - the whole real-time bidding process to run arbitrary JavaScript was yet to come.
Now almost everyone has pressure to find new revenue streams and maximize income while Google and Facebook have sucked up most of the revenue, so you see more and sleazier ads everywhere and sites which rely on you reading or watching are on a much more aggressive treadmill trying to constantly give you new things to see ads on so the experience is more frenetic.
It feels not unlike how in the mid-20th century people left work at work when they went home and only extraordinary circumstances would result in phone calls home, etc. whereas in this century it’s just expected that everyone carries a smartphone and checks email/Slack. More efficient in some ways, for sure, but a lot of stress ground out of people for no extra compensation.
You nailed it. Retreating to text-only kinda misses the whole point. The browser back then wasn't just a document viewer. It was a portal.
People forget that the internet used to be a place you went. It was entirely separate from our analog lives. You sat down, you fired up the machine, and your screen became this portal cut right into the universe. The juxtaposition between that visually-stunted, industrial-grade gray interface and the shocking immediate global access we suddenly had... it was the everything. The UI wasn't 'boring'. It was the clunky machine whose buttons you pressed (literally) to touch the world.
Today it's all hyper-lubricated feeds, and scammy-shiny UI trying to hijack your dopamine. But back then, the machine worked for you. It was a tool for discovery. A fucking frontier.
I've been trying to build a shrine to that precise feeling, to see if I can grab the modern web and force it to face it's beautiful glorious past - to that specific gateway-to-the-world, electronic frontier feeling. Just a small set of experiments. Incomplete as a monument to the totality of it. Merely a partial body of work, trying to express what it felt like to be there. I built a Win98/1999 environment: https://win9-5.com/desktop.html to browse the web from a (abominatively) multi-tab Netscape re-imagining. It runs a live, remote modern browser session inside a pixel-perfect 98 shell. Forcing the modern web through that dial-up era lens... it’s evocative + modem sounds. The aim is to remind you what it felt like when the web was a boundless horizon, not a walled garden of weirdo nimby's and microstates and regulatory capture etc etc etc. Sometimes I catch a flash of that fire again using it. Sometimes...
"going back to gopher or text-only browsers feels like admitting defeat tbh."
Interesting perspective
I have been using text-only browsers continually since the mid 90s (no lynx after 1999)
As such, I never "went back" to using the text-only browser as I have always used one, but as graphical browsers became worse I used them less
The customised text-only browsers I use today are 1.3 and 2.0 MB. I can compile them in seconds on underpowered computers
The so-called "modern" browser is [rapidly-expanding size] MB, not was easy to customise via editing the source code and takes substantial resources plus time to compile
Today, most www use for me is text-only. I am consuming information not graphics. I prefer textmode to X11 or the like
I avoid making HTTP requests to remote servers with graphical, Javascript-enabled browsers
I prefer using TCP clients and TLS forward proxies for making HTTP requests (at least one forward proxy now even has its own TCP client)
I use the text-only browser to read HTML files
For example, yc.htm is a file I create each day that contains all HN submissions where discussion is still open
Today yc.htm is 12 MB and there are 7268 stories
Using tiny command line utilities I wrote, the HTML in yc.htm is processed to CSV and added to an SQLite database. The unique domain names, today about 3704 of them, are extracted from all item URLs in yc.htm and DNS data is obtained via 1-3 pipelined lookups, each over a single TCP connection. The DNS data is then processed and inserted into an SQLite database
The TLS forward proxy stores the DNS data in memory so that I do not have to make any remote DNS when accessing the www
The yc.htm file can be opened in a text-only browser but I would not attempt it in a graphical one. The text-only browser feels more robust, less likely to stall or crash. I prefer the text-only formatting
By not using a graphical browser I would not say I am "admitting defeat". I have full control over HTTP headers, I only retrieve the data I want, I never see any ads, I do not send data to trackers or telemetry collection points
On the other hand, using a graphical browser does feel like "admitting defeat" as by doing so I allow "web developers" to destroy all preferences I have for how and when I want data retrieved and presented. If I allow the graphical browser unfettered access to the internet, and allow it to run unreviewed Javascripts, I lose all control over DNS and HTTP requests. For me, the experience of using a graphical browser where I have no such control is slow and painful, a horrible "user experience"
I do not see using "old" software as "nostalgia". I see it as being practical. "New" software generally sucks
The loss of "user agency" as some call it only occurs if one uses a so-called "modern" browser and runs Javascript. The seizure of user agency is accomplished by getting people to use a particular "user agent" that is controlled by online advertising companies (e.g., Google) or their business partners (e.g., Mozilla). If we called this a "choice" perhaps some readers might disagree. But so-called "Big Tech" have consistently argued that people "choose" Big Tech's "user agents" that, via their design and "default settings", effectively remove user agency for the majority of people who use them
You can use Dillo and explore the light web, gopher and gemini with no JS or big plugins at all.
Gopher and Gemini are simple scripts, so is the actions plugin, but I have my own written in
'rc', a shell borrowed from Plan9 and a bit improved (readline keys, history).
For audio/video I just spawn mpv+yt-dlp in the spot.
Just go to fark.com, a lingering glimmer of light from before the dead web. They are still aggregating human curated news and hosting reasonably civil discussions.
Then buy a Totalfark subscription so they don't need to bend over backwards to show more ads just to keep the lights on. See ya there!
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This is going to come off glib, but I don't think you can believe any of this having actually used the Internet of 1999. As is so often the case, there are lots of real annoyances and offenses behind the sentiment, but still, the Internet of 2026 is vastly better than that of 1999. The amount of things you're just one quick search away from right now would break the brains of a 1999 netizen. We were still required to buy paper books for all sorts of routine knowledge work tasks.
Dunno. The internet was definitely smaller, but it was also largely uncorrupted, so you could literally just email a random university professor or an industry expert and get answers to dumb questions.
And today, if you want to learn something the right way, you probably still should buy a book (or, I guess, pirate an ebook). I don't think you can really learn much from YouTube influencers and the like.
I respectfully respect the premise that the choices are "paper books" or "Youtube influencers", though I'll note we didn't have Gilbert Strang's 18.06 course back in 1999 either.
I'd also note that the Internet of 1999 was loaded with spam, bursting at the seams with it, so much so that it was actually a big deal when ~30 months later Paul Graham wrote a post about Bayesian filtering.
As a university professor, I still get random people e-mailing me “dumb questions” every once in a while. And I still try my best to answer them – in the spirit of keep the Internet alive!
Online community and connections are very valuable, and I also get genuinely interesting e-mails from random people. Usually someone who has read something I wrote, and want to discuss it. I also send out random e-mails, and my experience is that many people will answer, if you write to them about something they care about.
"Reading" the internet then going to buy a book from Borders or Barnes and Noble is a comfy memory to me. I liked the split between 'online' and 'offline' better than this semi-integrated present we live in
Lots of people have pleasant memories of bookstores, and are unhappy that those stores haven't thrived since the Internet, but not needing to schlep down to a store to buy information printed on dead trees is an unalloyed good.
I think I'm mostly thinking about technical books. Like having to go to the store to know how to write a socket program or to do multithreaded C++. Not good!
Different people have different tastes, or balance the good and the bad of the different eras differently.
Personally, I prefer the Internet of the 1990's. Part of that was the novelty and excitement. That led to a lot more experimentation. Part of that was the accessibility of the information that did exist. There was less wading through crap to simply find something, and the useless stuff that did exist tended to be easy to detect. (A lot of it was simply: I have an ambitious idea for a website but, Under Construction!) Most of all, the diversity was easier to access.
Today's Internet is much more polished and much more is available. Yet a lot of it is also siloed behind accounts, paywalls, or is a profit project rather than a passion project. That's not to say there is anything wrong with profiting off of good work, but there is a lot of people putting up low quality junk either because they don't realize how much effort is involved or because they are trying to make a quick buck.
No it's the modern web itself. Signal:noise ratio has become poor (as the article notes). Much more crap to wade through before finding a gem somewhere.
That's ignoring software bloat, super-heavy web frameworks, social media's addictive algorithms, user tracking & what have you.
As someone who has been online since 1992, I love the post. I miss the internet of the late 90's every day. We're no longer "one quick search" away from anything now, because web search has been completely poisoned by SEO slop. It was nice while it lasted though. As far as I can tell, all of the advancements we have were possible without completely ruining the web and the global commons we started to have a taste of.
I'm not opposed to the message but it perplexes me the amount of people who bemoan the loss of the "old web" and then use a web page comprised of massive modern frameworks to deliver said message.
Truly, I think you’ve over the target here. I think it's more than just being young. It was the transition from an analog life to a 'cosmic' one. We are the bridge generation! I remember waiting for a Zine or a Phrack manifest, or for an image to waterfall down the screen. It wasn't 'inefficient'—it was a frontier.
People comparing the 'load times' and 'inconveniences' are kinda missing the point. I grew up with a telephone. Remembered my friends' phone numbers. Then the interenet exploded down those phone lines. And the world was changed forever. From my desk, I could touch the world. A world i Had never seen. And it could all come to me...And I was reading about other people having similar experiences, similar excitement. There was an excitement in the air, except it wasn't in the air - it was in the space we all shared - that space that came down those wires, over those modems, with that distinctive siren-like mating call. It was the fucking 90s and the Internet came online. You had to be there. It was incredible. You have no idea if you didn't live through it.
That feeling of connection. Somehow it's tied up in the aesthetics for me, too. The juxtaposition between that aesthetic combining poverty-of-content with the compared-to-modern "visually stunted" aesthetics, compared with the shocking immediate global access of the analog to "cosmic" transition, somehow symbolizes it precisely and strongly for me. But the part that isn't conveyed (tho I try), is how I felt at the time. The graphics are the finger pointing at the moon. You had to walk that path, you had to have been there.
I tried to recapture that specific 'gateway' feeling in a Win98 demo: https://win9-5.com/desktop.html. I used modern sound and RBI to try to recapture the feeling of using the web when it was 1999. It's evocative, if you were there. Playing with it, sometimes i get a sense boundless horizon again. But then it flashes and is gone. That fire that I felt of excitement and expanse at that time is an endless source of inspiration for me. I long to somehow recreate an experience that gives it form, so others can know.
The "sense of boundless horizon" you speak of is literally what I feel when I play the Megaman Battle Network series or listen to the internet music. That feeling drives me when nothing else does.
I love your Windows 98½ project, that dialup sounds so good to me haha!
I'm finally at a point where I can see a viable path towards a spatial internet ("metaverse" has been ruined by Facebook). I can't wait to start building it.
I feel like 'Party like it's 1999' could become the slogan for a movement. Sure, the tech was a little less convenient, but overarching control was also less hard-wired into everything.
I've been to several retro LAN parties recently. They're wonderful, and they cost nothing to run. 10/100 switches are free, and cat5 nearly so, and the people attending can probably bring plenty of both.
Today is Friday. Send out a group text right now. Saturday evening. Bring whatever. We'll order pizza, it'll be a good time. Make it happen.
Logistically: One was specifically focused on the CDROM era. Any game that shipped on CD or came out roughly 1995-2005 was fair game, and the organizers mentioned a few by name that you might want to pre-install. The other was anything-goes, networking optional; I brought a TI 99/4A and a handful of cartridges, and it was very popular, apparently that grabbed a bunch of folks right in the childhood, in between rounds of Quake.
How can we solve this problem, of the current state of the internet, without reverting to the compromises of the past? This has been on my mind for a while. The layer of trash some companies have built over the internet has been ruinous.
I think the current web is sick and will never get better.
I propose building a new stack, without ICANN and friends (Verisign is raising .com prices yet again). I'm planning to build it[1] at some point, just working on other foundational stuff at the moment.
Cozy corners, webrings, and Gemini/Gopher is where I see the spirit of the old web alive and well.
Yeah, it's quite sad where we landed. Circa 2004-2006 while the internet was mostly open and accessible I mentally grouped "the internet" into two buckets. There was the real web plus usenet plus email and then there was "facebook" with its weird garden wall and exclusive invites or some such shit. I didn't think of facebook as being "on the web" even though they used the http protocol. It was highly unusual then to have any web content behind a registration wall.
So hardly anyone considered facebook to be a part of "the web". It was its own weird duck. Twenty years later and most people only frequent this "weird" part of the internet - this limited ensemble of paid and unpaid walled gardens.
Your statement of ‘hardly anyone considered facebook part of the web’ is incorrect. Facebook became popular a bit after the Web had become quite mainstream. The idea of signing up for online services was not foreign to most of these folks. Now, AOL/Compuserve and such were more considered as non web.
Yeah, those didn't count either. AOL and compuserve were not even available outside the USA in the late nineties. With AOL I'm quite sure nobody considered them to be a part of the web. Their pages didn't have URLs early on but AOL "keywords" instead. Compuserve also weren't using http I believe. It was some kind of commercial WAN that was pitched as a competitor to the internet, no?
Similarly Twitter; I signed up in I think 2007 and only used SMS for the next several years until they finally stopped it. Once I switched to the web/app version I was frankly appalled.
A movement where some sites are only accessible by a specific browser or class of browsers, much more simplified than now? Where a site could put an agreeable browser into a no-JS, lo-fi mode?
Now, I think the author would consider it "solutionism", but the other day I spent a bunch of time browsing Reticulum's NomadNet sites (using the Columba mobile app).
And while aesthetically it was more early 90s than 1999, it filled me not only with nostalgia, but also with some optimism for the future of the Internet. Something I haven't felt in a while...
It feels like the article is seeing the 1999 internet like the internet of the early 1990s.
1999 was during the dotcom bubble, Internet Explorer 4/5 was the leading browser, Yahoo! the leading search engine, pop-up ads everywhere, it was also the beginning of Flash, for the better and for the worse. Residential broadband existed, but dialup was still the norm.
I don't really miss it, despite growing into it. It was an important transition period, but it was slow, lacking in content, small and yet too big to create a sense of community, and also just as full of ads as it is now. There were good sides compared to now, but I still take today's internet. The early 1990s (before the eternal September) looked nice, but I didn't get to know it.
If it were 1999, most people would still be browsing the web on their US Robotics 56k modem (at best). This page is about 1 MB of assets (500kb gzip compressed if your browser supported it) , so it would have taken at least a minute just to finish loading.
No tabbed browsing and if IE crashed it locked up Windows 95/98 with it. No 2fa, no comment spam, and Java applets that froze the browser for 10-30 seconds. No content creator bs just people making fan pages just for the heck of it before Wikipedia gobbled all that information
I was a lot more careful about clicking things when it took a full minute to load. Now I know that it'll be open in less than a second and I can leave immediately if I need to, so there's WAY less thinking beforehand.
It's funny to think back, as I've just recently installed a browser extension to do the opposite (i.e. to prevent "open in new tab" tabs from doing any work until I foreground them.)
Today, my computer's memory is far more constrained than its network bandwidth. I find it very easy to accidentally open tons of tabs very quickly (esp. from the HN front page!) until suddenly the browser is swapping and everything's slowing to a crawl trying to process all those new page DOMs.
And yet, even when it doesn't choke the computer, I find no real benefit to preloading pages in the background any more. At least on my connection, the page load time after I focus a tab is almost imperceptible.
Also, tabbed browsing was still a couple years off for most people, although some browsers got there earlier than others:
> In 1994, BookLink Technologies featured tabbed windows in its InternetWorks browser.[citation needed] That same year, the text editor UltraEdit also appeared with a modern multi-row tabbed interface. The tabbed interface approach was then followed by the Internet Explorer shell NetCaptor in 1997. These were followed by several others like IBrowse in 1999, and Opera in 2000 (with the release of version 4 - although an MDI interface was supported before then), MultiViews October 2000, which changed its name into MultiZilla on April 1st, 2001 (an extension for the Mozilla Application Suite[11]), Galeon in early 2001, Mozilla 0.9.5 in October 2001, Phoenix 0.1 (now Mozilla Firefox) in October 2002, Konqueror 3.1 in January 2003, and Safari in 2003. With the release of Internet Explorer 7 in 2006, all major web browsers featured a tabbed interface.
Also, Opera had a Multiple-Document Interface from the start, so 1995 or so. That's not "tabs" per se but multiple mini-windows inside the main window; much the same "Hey, I can have multiple things open!" deal
I just opened multiple copies of the browser; I'd have 5 or 10 running most of the time on my 98se box. It's where I got my habit which I still use today, of opening outlinks as I read the page, so they can load in the background, then once I finish the content of this page, I'll go skim those to fill in context.
It meant I cared _less_ about page load time, even on dialup, because they were happening in other windows. I could happily tolerate a 2-minute load time as long as the first page took more than 2 minutes to read.
Still pretty prevalent at that time, definitely, but DSL was definitely a thing by the time 1999 rolled around. I even had pretty fast DSL for the time -- 640 kbps.
But otherwise totally agree with the critique. Modern connection speeds have enabled a huge amount of bloat. I grew up when 1200 baud modems were the latest rage, and patience when downloading was a hard requirement.
I lived on a suburban street a mile from the Stanford campus that didn't get broadband until 2003. I would go to the local copy center to rent an hour of computer time to edit my blog.
Ok.. so broadband in 1996, route-able (unique) IPv4 broadband in 1997 (177.1..), route-able satellite internet in Nigeria in 2002 (it sucked when it rained). Your Stanford proximity apparently didn't help.
I had a friend who had dial-up I think until at least 2007 because his house was apparently right on the border of our town and the next and for whatever reason all of the ISPs other than AOL considered his address outside their coverage. This was in a suburb within 10 miles of Boston.
I was raised by cheap boomers that would never pay more than the absolute minimum for anything, no matter how shitty the option, and most of my friends lived way out in the country. Paying $40/month for DSL or cable internet was off the table, because the library ran a free dialup ISP, so thats what we used even though their line was almost always busy. The cheap ass modem wouldn't reset the line correctly either, requiring someone to physically pull the phone cord out and back in the modem, otherwise the line wouldn't hang up, so redialling on a busy signal required physical intervention. (At some point, I recall my mom's friend/neighbor convincing her to pay $99/year for a dialup ISP that connected the first time.) I moved off dialup when I got a fast food job in 2005.
Luckily, we had web accelerating proxies like OnSpeed[1] back in the day that would compress web pages (including lossy image compression) so if you were one of the poor sods still on dialup (like I was), it was a lot more bearable.
Oh neat, I'd never heard of them. Almost feels like a spiritual predecessor of CDNs, serving optimized assets from existing websites via their servers.
Nice! We were one of the first families on the block to have a 33.6 kbps modem, and were the envy of every filthy peasant who still had a 28.8 back in the day.
My first dialup modem was 1200 baud, back in 1987! I remember it taking an hour to download a game from a local warez BBS. My first modem to establish an Internet connection (SLIP) was 9600, sometime around 1993! Time flies...
And if the sysop had upgraded to 28.8 while you were still on 2400, you were probably persona non grata for tying up the line for so long!
Some of the most popular boards had minimum connect speeds; if you couldn't connect at at least 9600 or 14.4k, it would immediately hang up on you, for this reason.
This comment reminded me of the early days of Ultima Online. I was on a high speed campus connection with a ping time of ~5ms to my server. Given most players were on a 28.8/56k modem with ping times ~300ms, it was an amazing speed difference. I could walk, not run, faster than other people riding horses at full speed.
Needless to say, I got accused of cheating quite a bit.
We used dialup until 1996, when we got a 10mbps cable internet connection, newly available in our 20k population town. We have never had a slower service plan than that since.
Questioning this, because I worked with a sysadmin who was in an @Home/CableLabs DOCSIS beta region at about that same time, and we all envied him of course. That was in San Jose, CA.
So what's the real story behind your piddlly little town getting bleeding edge cable internet service? (Or was it somewhere like Los Gatos?)
No shade! I went and checked out of curiosity, since it looks like we’re both using Astro as a static site generator.
Most of my articles are pretty media rich and weigh in between 1-2 megs. I do try to be pretty conscientious about asset compression (mozjpeg, h264 for video, etc.). I'd love to switch over to AV1 but I've heard compatibility on older devices is spotty.
I've come to the conclusion that nostalgia is almost never about the objective quality of something. It's about the associations we make between a certain time in our lives and the media/technology that surrounded us at the time. It's also filtered through selective memory, emphasizing the positive while ignoring the negative.
We're all afraid of dying and we all wish we were 25 years younger. That's how I translate nostalgia when I read it. By any objective metric, the world is better than it's ever been, technology is better than it's ever been, and it's all continuing to get better.
I think the world really sucks in developed countries right now in a way that's hard to put your finger on. Optimism and enthusiasm is very low in young people right now. People's attention spans are shot. Kids in high school and college are less social than ever, barely date, and spend more and more time doomscrolling. Rising inequality, rise of far right politics, etc.
I get that the world is doing great by some basic metric like 'number of people starving', and that is fantastic. But the world really feels off to a growing number of people - me included - in modern America.
You can always point at bad things happening, no matter what time period you're in. You need to look at the graph over decades/centuries. Poverty, child mortality, literacy, standard of living, access to healthcare, etc. etc. are all better than they have ever been, even in the poorest places in the world.
I can't help thinking how those graphs conveniently ignore the damage such improvements have on the environment, on which they themselves depend. Damaged environments -> scarcity -> war.
But I agree it's nice to have that happening away from home.
One thing that i just realized is i don't know exactly when things got bad.
I remember the 90s when we had to "go" online, when the digital was apart from the analog and we kept online and offline separate. I remember simpler sites, not as many ads, I remember a time before "feeds".
However, for the life of me I can't remember exactly when it started to suck. It might be that I was busy with other things in life, but still it leaves me with an unsettling feeling. Maybe it was around the arrival of home broadband? The end of Orkut (community based social media)? The advent of algorithmic feeds?
yeah, a lot of people pinpoint the moment when it started going downhill at around 2010. re: explosion of mobile devices, i'd say the release of apple's iPhone was a key event
Cookie wall was a big shift. I noticed that since the introduction of the cookie wall, websites now have about 3 to 4 modals that I have to click away before I can start interacting with the website. Typically it is the cookie wall I have to reject first through a secondary modal, then something about a newsletter, then the paywall and finally I have to hit ignore on the "Do you want to login with Google" on the top-right.
Internet user since 1996, so still a bit new to it. I don’t miss the old web that much (the old web was AOL for a lot of people, at least in the US). DEFINITELY don't miss 28.8k and 56k and having to hog up our family's one phone line overnight to download Netscape 7, only for it to be a steaming pile...
I definitely absolutely miss open instant messaging platforms. The days of XMPP and open clients. Trillian and Pidgin specifically.
I loved having a single app for all of my messages across all of the networks I talked to people on. Nowadays everyone is on FB Messenger, Instagram DMs, iMessage, WhatsApp and Google Chat. All of them have separate apps; all of them are loss leaders; all of them are closed.
(I tried Beeper. Loved the idea but didn’t invest time in it since it was always two lawsuits away from me getting “An update on Beeper” email.)
I guess I also miss content existing for content’s sake. Early YouTube, Quora, Reddit, etc. People helping other people...well, usually, anyway. Nowadays everything is growth-maxxed. It's all about engagement. Text-only websites would have never been born in this iteration of the Internet, and that's sad.
Having used the internet in 1999, it's mostly cookie cutter stuff mixed with some intellectually lazy generalizations, especially of specialist use cases.
You gotta love the subtle religious hooks leading to Christian apologetics elsewhere on the site; back in '99, and especially these days, that stuff was often enough more overt. But maybe renaming the piece to Using the internet like a Born-Again Worshipper is both more honest and accurate. ;)
1999 was Dialup for me. The modem said "56k" but didn't actually connect at that speed, it was more like 4.4KB/sec max.
The biggest thing I grabbed then was an overnight bulk-downloading session from animewallpapers.com, made possible by using GetRight. It had a download queue, as well as the "GetRight Browser" which presented the links on a html page as files to select, or other html pages as directories to view.
"56k" meant 7 kilobytes per second as a theoretical max.
So 4.4 was ok. Everything with networks is done as bits, I think honestly for marketing reasons now
I remember a few years prior to that - I have faint recollections of dialling into BBSes or paying by the hour, so you'd want to plan in advance for what you might do on the internet while connected. A BBS often tracked what you uploaded vs downloaded, so unless you had something to share, you needed to be mindful of what you grabbed.
> Using technologies from yesteryear, we can solve the problems we face today on the modern advertisement riddled, javascript focused, etc. etc.
I wouldn't say you need technologies from yesteryear to achieve that. Or rather, you don't need an old browser to not be on Facebook, Instagram, Youtube and so on. Just visit _other_ sites, with your new browser. But I would recommend beefy adblocking and tracking-avoidance - uBlock Origin [1] and EFF Privacy Badger for example - or even disabling JS if you want the more static old-school feel. NoScript is a browser add-on which does this for Firefox or Chromium-based browsers: https://noscript.net/getit/
[1] : uBlock Origin is no longer supported on Chrome and Chromium-based browsers, since they've limited the already-limited extension capabilities with 'manifest v3'.
The Internet in 1999 was not good at all. Browsers barely worked, computers crashed constantly, the ability to actually search for useful things was limited, and many things we take for granted as being online (news, people, documentation) were not.
The mid-to-late 2000s are perhaps closer to what the author is looking for.
They worked pretty well actually, AFAICR. Internationalation was a bit sketchy in some cases though.
> computers crashed constantly
You did need to be careful with Windows 98, for sure, but it wasn't that bad. Also, if you put in some elbow grease you could install Linux, which didn't crash (but had limited support for peripherals and for the latest graphics cards, and almost no games).
> the ability to actually search for useful things was limited
It is arguably more limited now than it was then, since commercial search engines did not manipulate the results as much.
Does anyone remember that Pokédex game that the original Pokemon website had in the late 90s where you could collect/unlock Pokémon? I feel like you could trade them too but maybe not. I tried to ask ChatGPT but it doesn’t seem to know exactly what I’m talking about. Maybe this is a Mandela effect thing.
A lot of these recommendations seem prudent. I especially like the idea of POSSE for using social media without actually using it (every time you open a site to post is an opportunity to be ensnared). Completely stripping the browser from your smartphone is a bit extreme and excessive for me, but doesn't invalidate the other reccomendations.
We should also also embrace offline mode more. Disable all network connections until you make a conscious choice to go online. Heck, make a Windows 3.1-esque GUI for it and call it Trombone Winsock just for fun.
If any program complains it needs network connectivity for offline features, it goes into the Recycle Bin.
I found myself doing a particularly intense stint of work the other day, finally had all the source documents and the destination program all lined up, happily finding and comparing and synthesizing and entering, and I realized it was going to take all night. Or realistically until the middle of the next day.
I put the laptop into airplane mode, to block any updates that might unceremoniously reboot it and wreck my layout. Figure if I needed to be on Teams in the meantime, I've still got a phone for that.
Airplane mode already exists, it's _wonderful_ for this, and I should use it more often. If I'm not actively internetting, just toggle that and the distractions can wait.
Offline mode, and self-hostable apps. I'm very happy with my self-hosted and open source apps; e.g. photo library, media centres, etc; the convenience of cloud, but my cloud that I fully control.
It's not wrong in the direction but it goes a bit too far. Text-only really limits the capabilities. The difference with the modern web is that it is not hyperlinked web pages between web sites but instead javascript application content silos. HTTP/1.1+HTML 5 is just fine, images and video are just fine. Javascript is not fine. That's where we should draw the line.
And without javascript most of the security/privacy issues that make domains require HTTPS-only to prevent MITM attacks simply disappear. When you aren't automatically executing random programs that random places send you the web can be a lot more fun, silly, and with a lot less fragile continuing maintainence required.
To me the what we wanted/got distinction is something like:
1. A kind of capital that is widely available, so that people could exercise control and agency with machines that do what you want them to do for your own needs.
2. A distribution tool controlled by mega-corporations as they decide what you should be able to see or have.
> On your router, you can and should setup blocklists for various malicious and nefarious domains, advertisements, adult content, etc. This is not “1999-esque” in practice, but is a requirement for the modern web.
I worked on a Geocities archive restoration. There was a boat load of porn (including illegal porn), malicious domains, spamvertising, malware, predators, political extremists, etc on the 1999 web, and you can find all of it within the raw Geocities archive that was made before it shut down. The idea that the old web was some kind of pure place of innocence is a weird and factually inaccurate take. If anything, the late 90s web was more dark than it is now, perhaps in part because nobody had any idea of how to police anything on it and things like PhotoDNA didn't exist yet.
If anything, my work on 90s site archival has taught me that the web has always been a place with a lot of dark places, and the narrative that the old web was some sort of pure innocent place that became evil is not matched by evidence.
It's just as plausible to me that the general "misbehavior" of humans on the internet hasn't changed all that much, but that we have, frankly, adopted a more puritanical and intolerant approach towards it. Nobody was talking about getting rid of Section 230, carding people for 18+ before they could use IRC (or install an operating system, what the actual fuck is wrong with you California), and Congress wasn't dragging evil Geocities CEO David Bohnett into grilling sessions where they were accusing him of hooking kids on digital cigarettes. Perhaps it would be wise to have a little nostalgia for some of that too.
It's worth keeping in mind how much more fringe the web used to be. You were almost by definition a bit of a deviant if you spent significant time online in the '90s and early '00s ("nerd" was a pejorative). People who found no acceptance in the physical world many times found like minded people online, which sometimes was a good thing and sometimes unfortunate.
> If anything, my work on 90s site archival has taught me that the web has always been a place with a lot of dark places, and the narrative that the old web was some sort of pure innocent place that became evil is not matched by evidence.
No argument there. That said, I think the big difference between the 1990's and today is that everyone knew the nefarious places and people existed but, for the most part, you actually had to seek it out. I am not suggesting that it was hard to find. Perhaps the worse of the worse was easier to find. On the other hand, it wasn't quite the same thing as algorithmic feeds. For example: I absolutely refuse to view anything remotely political on some sites (including reputable news sources or material that is clearly satire) since that is the surest way to be fed extremist crap. How far those feeds will 5ake me, I simply do not want to know.
Thanks for the bit of nostalgia today OP. I remember the first time that I saw that browser screen. Pure discovery back in those early days of the web. I can still hear the dial-up modem crackling...
Yes, that crackling! God, that shreak. You hear it and it just pulls you right back. Like some kind of rhythm that told you something was happening, something exciting was about to occur.
For us bridge-generation kids, that sound is probably etched like vinyl. Quiet room, 2 AM, and then that thrum, shreek and hiss. I literally missed it, whatever the next thing was. Whenever "modems" became obsolete. It was sad. It was the audio reminder, the signal hanging in the air, of the literal lifeline out of your analog bedroom and into a cosmos filled with electricity, buzzing with knowledge and light.
For me, half the experience of that era was purely sensory. The clunky physical sounds of the machine doing the heavy lifting to connect you... the clunky graphics....the need to wait...the gradual adjustment to the pace of life and the "gentle introduction" these "reduce speed" effects had to the threshold moment that that was, were somehow the right gentleness to take the world on such an epic journey.
I have labored a lot to recapture that feeling. Across many projects. Idk why exactly, but there was something so hopeful and exciting about the internet at that time. And I know it's worth remembering. Like a precious flame you have to protect from the rain, I guess. Check out this one: https://win9-5.com/desktop.html
Just a small set of experiments to see if I can grab that feeling. The modem sound evoke the vibe. Browsing the modern web with it is a little strange, if you can do that "in the gallery watching the walls between the paintings" kind of mind-job and not focus too much on the web portal content (which is designed to always suck you in, even framed retro like this).
Did not even consider encrypted IRC as an alternative to Matrix or Signal. Or even running my own search engine. Good writeup! Very much for the 1%ers in tech skills.
im a fan of this philosphy i really am. sadly it is utopia. who is going out of their way to use the internet like this? if youre someone whos totally oblivious to the old internet, you will have to work very hard to use it in an old fashioned way. no one will pursue this. the internet today reminds me of the matrix
One minor 'gripe' for lack of a better term, is that I feel like a push to go backwards in technology is a bit misguided. I feel like a lot if people see ads and trackers, then look to older protocols like Gopher/Gemini/IRC (or at least 'inspired' by older stuff like Gemini).
The issue isn't javascript, it's ads/trackers/algos/slop. I feel like tracker/ad/algorithm free static site on the status quo of http, or something newer like IPFS, is worlds better than trying to use arbitrary restrictions on something like a Gemini capsule.
To be fair, it's different. The order is important. If he would have written "It is not LLM slop what I want, is real people, real creators, and real content no my feed", it would have sound like AI. But not in the way he wrote it.
I thought webrings had died when things like Webring, Ringsurf, Ringo, Rail and others went offline years ago. But there is a new interest in them. I've listed all the ones I know of at https://brisray.com/web/webring-list.htm
> We took a wrong turn by locking ourselves into content silos and embracing comfort instead of seeking truth, and it will not end well unless we do a hard u-turn to authenticity and sovereignty.
What made the old web cool, is that it was the first time we can communicate with so many random people in far away places digitally and share information through cool web pages.
That novelty has mostly died now. Communicating with people in distant lands is mundane now. And there is little new things to share that we haven’t already seen or heard before.
So what’s the point of the web now? Maybe the internet will become purely a utility for exchanging data for infrastructural and business purposes, and the idea of using the internet as a source of entertainment or recreation will fade away.
It would be nice to retreat back to an analog world, where the internet still exists, but only as a layer of glue in the background that orchestrates multiple technologies that power our world, and nothing more.
Tons of people still use the internet as a source of entertainment and recreation. Just because you're too jaded to care doesn't mean the rest of the world is.
And we were just getting a breath of fresh-air after being restricted to local phone calls (or paying ghastly long-distance phone bills). Finally we could communicate anywhere for one price!
Without that context, it all falls flat, I agree.
I've considered trying to make a speed-of-light-ping-limited BBS that can _only_ be connected to by actual-locals, but reality is harder. (And the moment it got popular, nefarious actors would just rent or compromise a box in-radius.)
It's a matter of focus, we cannot stop the internet adoption to the current business needs.
The reason you are posting here is an example of how people from all over the world are still can benefit from the internet to share their optinions and communicate regardless to the internet changes.
I don't know if I'm crazy but I think social media is pretty okay at the like, core building and enhancing social networks thing.
Instagram is probably my most used one these days and I love seeing my friend's stories and I don't think I've parsed more than a handful of ads in the last 2 or 3 years that I've been an active user, probably a few tens of hours wasted with dumb reels, not a bad cost at all imo. I have probably 400 irl people and 200 internet accounts I follow. It doesn't have the charm and honesty of navigating a webring or whatever, but the friction is so low so I get to see a lot of stuff my friends, acquaintances and especially just people i'm peripherally in community with share that I probably wouldn't otherwise.
I miss the old internet for sure, but I'm not convinced the current situation is as horrible as people say.
Probably sounds really weird but I get almost teary eyed when I see those Windows teal-background era graphics and a Netscape browser. Those days! These are the nights that never die. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UtF6Jej8yb4) I don't know if you felt it, but I felt it. Back then, in those days. It wasn't just the heat of summer, roaming the beautiful city at night as a teenager: it was the internet. It was amazing.
part of the problem is that most people don't own a pc or personal laptop - they use their phone and apps. None of my friends (35 years +) use laptops other than for work and openly say how much they have regressed technically. Some of these guys grew up with the internet in the early 00's and would be setting up switches for lan partys, using torrents and usenxt, limewire etc. These days they can barely open up microsoft word - but on instagram/twitter they're all over it. Sad really. I would always reach for my laptop first before my phone and I tend to very rarely visit social media sites (other than reddit) on laptop/desktop. I use glance - https://github.com/glanceapp/glance to parse my rss feeds - it's pretty good.
Yeah, I don't think the true scale of the "war on general computation" is apparent for many technical people: It's good to think about alternative distribution models for the internet, better use of protocols, etc - but a large and growing number of users literally don't have (administrative) control over their client devices anymore.
The "cognitive control" of tech companies is underpinned by a much more concrete technical control of the devices.
>but a large and growing number of users literally don't have (administrative) control over their client devices anymore.
would those users have had devices over which they had administrative control in the past though? Perhaps for software to eat the world, and for hardware to get distributed far enough that it could, a percentage of the world had to forego administrative rights when getting that hardware.
I suppose those who miss it can still get it, although yes, for how much longer is a question.
I always find it strange when people refer to twitter and YouTube etc as apps rather than websites.
That's what they are by now, though. The websites of social media sites are crippled and bug-ridden - try using Instagram in a browser, for example. They want to coerce you into using their apps, because that gives them better tracking opportunities.
That's just what I've been doing after deleting Instagram from my. phone. I can't trust my evening dopamine-seeking behaviour with the phone app, but there's much much less stickiness in the browser.
Tried greyscale yet?
Yes, it does help. But it's too easily switched off. I basically have to be my own worst enemy I have to order to prevent myself from being my own worst enemy!
Have you tried just not using a smartphone? I have a flip phone I take with me and leave my iPhone at home for things that need it. Otherwise, I carry my laptop/tablet everywhere. If I need to check my social media or email I have to sit down and deliberately do that
I've been resisting this for various reasons. Parking apps, maps, camera, podcast app, many many timers, and banking apps are all phone functions I use quite often and I can't see obvious ways around them which don't involve lots of other gubbins which I will inevitably lose or forget.
I could possibly uninstall everything but the absolute necessities on a smartphone for when I need it, and otherwise carry a flip phone. Maybe use the flip phone for tethering so the smartphone doesn't need a Sim card. But it seems that might be introducing lot of extra stress into my life, especially for stressful jobs like parking before a meeting, keeping up to date with clients, etc
Sometimes. YouTube (and Google Maps, and old.reddit.com but not default reddit) I find to be better on the website than the app.
Lol try using those sites in your browser. You’ll see why they’re typically called apps real quick.
It’s funny, I’ve never installed any of the apps because I figured if, with all their engineering, they can’t even build a usable website, why would I trust their native code?
My 8yo keeps calling any piece of software he can run an "app", regardless of it being on a computer, a website, or a mobile device. I object to it out of principle, old man yelling at clouds style. But fundamentally, it's just code I interact with to do something, I'm just used to using different terminology for each runtime. The term website came about right before we really had anything interactive on the W3, describing something rather static.
All this to say, we're both right and wrong in feeling this way lol
Please try to encourage them to open up LibreOffice Writer rather than Microsoft Word though! They should not have to suffer with CoPilot and MS spying on you all the time.
https://www.libreoffice.org/
the nostalgia for 1999 isnt really about missing dial up or basic html, its about mourning the loss of user agency. back then the browser actually worked for you. today the client is basically a hostile enviroment running megabytes of third party js just to track telemetry.
going back to gopher or text-only browsers feels like admitting defeat tbh. we can still build incredibly fast modern apps if we just stop treating the users hardware like an infinite resource for adtech. you dont need massive frameworks and client--side bloat to make something good.
In 1999, hostile websites would pop up endless new windows full of advertisements that you were powerless to stop unless you simply held down "ALT+F4" or "CTRL+ALT+DEL". Part of Mozilla Firefox's appeal is that it came with a pop-up blocker. [0]
Do you know anything about the Browser Wars? People literally had to put up images telling you which browser to use if you wanted to actually experience their website the way it was intended. Otherwise, it was just broken. [1]
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/19/business/as-consumers-rev... (sorry for the tracking code, but this is a "gift" article and it was the best source I could find on popup ads)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Browser_wars
Hostile pages did that. Today, nearly every page has a dozen tracking scripts, starts off with a cookie popup, probably pops up a "please log in" or "please give me money" after you scroll half way down, still has ads that even more effectively mimic the site topic and design to trick you into clicking them, pops up a newsletter or cupon code popup if your cursor leaves the viewport, might be secretly running experiments on you by A/B testing titles, images or testimonials...
The assault on your attention is way worse these days, it's just (mostly) contained to the viewport.
In 1999, most websites were not hostile because they weren’t chasing diminishing returns from ad-tech companies. Most of the companies I worked with were trying direct revenue models getting people to buy things or subscribe directly, and the ad market paid a lot better for less obtrusive ads - the whole real-time bidding process to run arbitrary JavaScript was yet to come.
Now almost everyone has pressure to find new revenue streams and maximize income while Google and Facebook have sucked up most of the revenue, so you see more and sleazier ads everywhere and sites which rely on you reading or watching are on a much more aggressive treadmill trying to constantly give you new things to see ads on so the experience is more frenetic.
It feels not unlike how in the mid-20th century people left work at work when they went home and only extraordinary circumstances would result in phone calls home, etc. whereas in this century it’s just expected that everyone carries a smartphone and checks email/Slack. More efficient in some ways, for sure, but a lot of stress ground out of people for no extra compensation.
You nailed it. Retreating to text-only kinda misses the whole point. The browser back then wasn't just a document viewer. It was a portal.
People forget that the internet used to be a place you went. It was entirely separate from our analog lives. You sat down, you fired up the machine, and your screen became this portal cut right into the universe. The juxtaposition between that visually-stunted, industrial-grade gray interface and the shocking immediate global access we suddenly had... it was the everything. The UI wasn't 'boring'. It was the clunky machine whose buttons you pressed (literally) to touch the world.
Today it's all hyper-lubricated feeds, and scammy-shiny UI trying to hijack your dopamine. But back then, the machine worked for you. It was a tool for discovery. A fucking frontier.
I've been trying to build a shrine to that precise feeling, to see if I can grab the modern web and force it to face it's beautiful glorious past - to that specific gateway-to-the-world, electronic frontier feeling. Just a small set of experiments. Incomplete as a monument to the totality of it. Merely a partial body of work, trying to express what it felt like to be there. I built a Win98/1999 environment: https://win9-5.com/desktop.html to browse the web from a (abominatively) multi-tab Netscape re-imagining. It runs a live, remote modern browser session inside a pixel-perfect 98 shell. Forcing the modern web through that dial-up era lens... it’s evocative + modem sounds. The aim is to remind you what it felt like when the web was a boundless horizon, not a walled garden of weirdo nimby's and microstates and regulatory capture etc etc etc. Sometimes I catch a flash of that fire again using it. Sometimes...
"going back to gopher or text-only browsers feels like admitting defeat tbh."
Interesting perspective
I have been using text-only browsers continually since the mid 90s (no lynx after 1999)
As such, I never "went back" to using the text-only browser as I have always used one, but as graphical browsers became worse I used them less
The customised text-only browsers I use today are 1.3 and 2.0 MB. I can compile them in seconds on underpowered computers
The so-called "modern" browser is [rapidly-expanding size] MB, not was easy to customise via editing the source code and takes substantial resources plus time to compile
Today, most www use for me is text-only. I am consuming information not graphics. I prefer textmode to X11 or the like
I avoid making HTTP requests to remote servers with graphical, Javascript-enabled browsers
I prefer using TCP clients and TLS forward proxies for making HTTP requests (at least one forward proxy now even has its own TCP client)
I use the text-only browser to read HTML files
For example, yc.htm is a file I create each day that contains all HN submissions where discussion is still open
Today yc.htm is 12 MB and there are 7268 stories
Using tiny command line utilities I wrote, the HTML in yc.htm is processed to CSV and added to an SQLite database. The unique domain names, today about 3704 of them, are extracted from all item URLs in yc.htm and DNS data is obtained via 1-3 pipelined lookups, each over a single TCP connection. The DNS data is then processed and inserted into an SQLite database
The TLS forward proxy stores the DNS data in memory so that I do not have to make any remote DNS when accessing the www
The yc.htm file can be opened in a text-only browser but I would not attempt it in a graphical one. The text-only browser feels more robust, less likely to stall or crash. I prefer the text-only formatting
By not using a graphical browser I would not say I am "admitting defeat". I have full control over HTTP headers, I only retrieve the data I want, I never see any ads, I do not send data to trackers or telemetry collection points
On the other hand, using a graphical browser does feel like "admitting defeat" as by doing so I allow "web developers" to destroy all preferences I have for how and when I want data retrieved and presented. If I allow the graphical browser unfettered access to the internet, and allow it to run unreviewed Javascripts, I lose all control over DNS and HTTP requests. For me, the experience of using a graphical browser where I have no such control is slow and painful, a horrible "user experience"
I do not see using "old" software as "nostalgia". I see it as being practical. "New" software generally sucks
The loss of "user agency" as some call it only occurs if one uses a so-called "modern" browser and runs Javascript. The seizure of user agency is accomplished by getting people to use a particular "user agent" that is controlled by online advertising companies (e.g., Google) or their business partners (e.g., Mozilla). If we called this a "choice" perhaps some readers might disagree. But so-called "Big Tech" have consistently argued that people "choose" Big Tech's "user agents" that, via their design and "default settings", effectively remove user agency for the majority of people who use them
You can use Dillo and explore the light web, gopher and gemini with no JS or big plugins at all.
Gopher and Gemini are simple scripts, so is the actions plugin, but I have my own written in 'rc', a shell borrowed from Plan9 and a bit improved (readline keys, history).
For audio/video I just spawn mpv+yt-dlp in the spot.
https://dillo-browser.github.io/
"(at least one forward proxy now even has its own TCP client)"
Correction: s/TCP/HTTP/
I also use a separate TCP client from the TLS proxy author
Just go to fark.com, a lingering glimmer of light from before the dead web. They are still aggregating human curated news and hosting reasonably civil discussions.
Then buy a Totalfark subscription so they don't need to bend over backwards to show more ads just to keep the lights on. See ya there!
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Fark is farking great! Though its old-school HTML doesn't flow so well on mobile.
Can we get the best of 1999 with the best of 2026? Probably not...
m.fark.com looks pretty good on my phone.
You sir or ma'am have greatly improved my quality of life!
Just a stylesheet away.
There is slashdot.org also
I would like to relive my fark memories but I only get endless captcha loops on it now :(
This is going to come off glib, but I don't think you can believe any of this having actually used the Internet of 1999. As is so often the case, there are lots of real annoyances and offenses behind the sentiment, but still, the Internet of 2026 is vastly better than that of 1999. The amount of things you're just one quick search away from right now would break the brains of a 1999 netizen. We were still required to buy paper books for all sorts of routine knowledge work tasks.
Dunno. The internet was definitely smaller, but it was also largely uncorrupted, so you could literally just email a random university professor or an industry expert and get answers to dumb questions.
And today, if you want to learn something the right way, you probably still should buy a book (or, I guess, pirate an ebook). I don't think you can really learn much from YouTube influencers and the like.
I respectfully respect the premise that the choices are "paper books" or "Youtube influencers", though I'll note we didn't have Gilbert Strang's 18.06 course back in 1999 either.
I'd also note that the Internet of 1999 was loaded with spam, bursting at the seams with it, so much so that it was actually a big deal when ~30 months later Paul Graham wrote a post about Bayesian filtering.
>Id also note that the Internet of 1999 was loaded with spam, bursting at the seams with it...
[gestures wildly at all the bots in 2026]
As a university professor, I still get random people e-mailing me “dumb questions” every once in a while. And I still try my best to answer them – in the spirit of keep the Internet alive!
Online community and connections are very valuable, and I also get genuinely interesting e-mails from random people. Usually someone who has read something I wrote, and want to discuss it. I also send out random e-mails, and my experience is that many people will answer, if you write to them about something they care about.
You can still email people! A genuinely interesting email will probably get at least a 20% success rate
There’s luck involved in doing this, as most people have thousands/tens of thousands of unreads in their inbox.
you still can (at least, professors. not so sure about industry experts). I've done it on a number of occasions
"Reading" the internet then going to buy a book from Borders or Barnes and Noble is a comfy memory to me. I liked the split between 'online' and 'offline' better than this semi-integrated present we live in
Lots of people have pleasant memories of bookstores, and are unhappy that those stores haven't thrived since the Internet, but not needing to schlep down to a store to buy information printed on dead trees is an unalloyed good.
You aren’t invited over for dinner anymore…
I like bookstores!
I think I'm mostly thinking about technical books. Like having to go to the store to know how to write a socket program or to do multithreaded C++. Not good!
I’m telling my wife you spit on her livelihood.
I'm more scared of her than I am of you! I did nothing of the sort!
Different people have different tastes, or balance the good and the bad of the different eras differently.
Personally, I prefer the Internet of the 1990's. Part of that was the novelty and excitement. That led to a lot more experimentation. Part of that was the accessibility of the information that did exist. There was less wading through crap to simply find something, and the useless stuff that did exist tended to be easy to detect. (A lot of it was simply: I have an ambitious idea for a website but, Under Construction!) Most of all, the diversity was easier to access.
Today's Internet is much more polished and much more is available. Yet a lot of it is also siloed behind accounts, paywalls, or is a profit project rather than a passion project. That's not to say there is anything wrong with profiting off of good work, but there is a lot of people putting up low quality junk either because they don't realize how much effort is involved or because they are trying to make a quick buck.
I think a lot of people who say stuff like this are really saying that they prefer being in their teens and early 20s. Understandable!
No it's the modern web itself. Signal:noise ratio has become poor (as the article notes). Much more crap to wade through before finding a gem somewhere.
That's ignoring software bloat, super-heavy web frameworks, social media's addictive algorithms, user tracking & what have you.
As someone who has been online since 1992, I love the post. I miss the internet of the late 90's every day. We're no longer "one quick search" away from anything now, because web search has been completely poisoned by SEO slop. It was nice while it lasted though. As far as I can tell, all of the advancements we have were possible without completely ruining the web and the global commons we started to have a taste of.
>We were still required to buy paper books for all sorts of routine knowledge work tasks.
I download books from libgen and print them out. Printed books will never be replaced.
I'm not opposed to the message but it perplexes me the amount of people who bemoan the loss of the "old web" and then use a web page comprised of massive modern frameworks to deliver said message.
People clamoring for the old web are almost never talking about slow speeds or XHTML, they're talking about the FEELING of being on the web.
YES! You were there. Takes one to see one. :)
Truly, I think you’ve over the target here. I think it's more than just being young. It was the transition from an analog life to a 'cosmic' one. We are the bridge generation! I remember waiting for a Zine or a Phrack manifest, or for an image to waterfall down the screen. It wasn't 'inefficient'—it was a frontier.
People comparing the 'load times' and 'inconveniences' are kinda missing the point. I grew up with a telephone. Remembered my friends' phone numbers. Then the interenet exploded down those phone lines. And the world was changed forever. From my desk, I could touch the world. A world i Had never seen. And it could all come to me...And I was reading about other people having similar experiences, similar excitement. There was an excitement in the air, except it wasn't in the air - it was in the space we all shared - that space that came down those wires, over those modems, with that distinctive siren-like mating call. It was the fucking 90s and the Internet came online. You had to be there. It was incredible. You have no idea if you didn't live through it.
That feeling of connection. Somehow it's tied up in the aesthetics for me, too. The juxtaposition between that aesthetic combining poverty-of-content with the compared-to-modern "visually stunted" aesthetics, compared with the shocking immediate global access of the analog to "cosmic" transition, somehow symbolizes it precisely and strongly for me. But the part that isn't conveyed (tho I try), is how I felt at the time. The graphics are the finger pointing at the moon. You had to walk that path, you had to have been there.
I tried to recapture that specific 'gateway' feeling in a Win98 demo: https://win9-5.com/desktop.html. I used modern sound and RBI to try to recapture the feeling of using the web when it was 1999. It's evocative, if you were there. Playing with it, sometimes i get a sense boundless horizon again. But then it flashes and is gone. That fire that I felt of excitement and expanse at that time is an endless source of inspiration for me. I long to somehow recreate an experience that gives it form, so others can know.
The "sense of boundless horizon" you speak of is literally what I feel when I play the Megaman Battle Network series or listen to the internet music. That feeling drives me when nothing else does.
I love your Windows 98½ project, that dialup sounds so good to me haha!
I'm finally at a point where I can see a viable path towards a spatial internet ("metaverse" has been ruined by Facebook). I can't wait to start building it.
I feel like 'Party like it's 1999' could become the slogan for a movement. Sure, the tech was a little less convenient, but overarching control was also less hard-wired into everything.
It even comes pre-packaged with a theme song.
From Prince no less! If we've learned anything from the past year, Minnesotans know what's up :-) (totally not biased)
I confess that I had this in mind. Is it time to start running LAN parties again?
I've been to several retro LAN parties recently. They're wonderful, and they cost nothing to run. 10/100 switches are free, and cat5 nearly so, and the people attending can probably bring plenty of both.
Today is Friday. Send out a group text right now. Saturday evening. Bring whatever. We'll order pizza, it'll be a good time. Make it happen.
Logistically: One was specifically focused on the CDROM era. Any game that shipped on CD or came out roughly 1995-2005 was fair game, and the organizers mentioned a few by name that you might want to pre-install. The other was anything-goes, networking optional; I brought a TI 99/4A and a handful of cartridges, and it was very popular, apparently that grabbed a bunch of folks right in the childhood, in between rounds of Quake.
The only thing missing was the Josta. RIP.
the 99/4a was so weird, I love it
I appreciate the enthusiasm for LAN parties and will talk to my gaming friends about getting one going.
Related possibilities:
1. Dust off some DVDs and a DVD player, pop some popcorn and watch a movie or two. Explore the extended editions, commentaries, alternate scenes, etc.
2. Dust off some CDs and a player and jam. My 2008 Honda has a CD player, I'm not restricted to streaming Spotify through a Bluetooth adapter :)
3. Dig up an N64 console, Goldeneye, the friends you played against back when, and order some pizza.
4. Go find a local bookstore, new or used, and buy a book.
I'm sure there are a dozen ideas I'm not thinking of, feel free to plug them in.
Electrical panels and air conditioning have not kept pace with graphics cards.
I hear you. Topless Quake LAN sweatathon, the sport of gentlemen.
I'll bring the diet coke if we're playing CS 1.6
https://archive.org/details/essential-keygen-music/01+-+rez%...
How can we solve this problem, of the current state of the internet, without reverting to the compromises of the past? This has been on my mind for a while. The layer of trash some companies have built over the internet has been ruinous.
>How can we solve this problem, of the current state of the internet, without reverting to the compromises of the past?
In order to actually have and maintain a healthy balance of life and technology, such compromises are required.
I theorize it is going back to the protocol layer. The "web" for most people is a bunch of social media frontends.
I think the current web is sick and will never get better.
I propose building a new stack, without ICANN and friends (Verisign is raising .com prices yet again). I'm planning to build it[1] at some point, just working on other foundational stuff at the moment.
Cozy corners, webrings, and Gemini/Gopher is where I see the spirit of the old web alive and well.
---
[1]: https://dap.sh
Yggdrasil works like that. No bitcoin, no bullshit, your own tunneled ipv6.
Yggdrasil is on my list of things to try! I need to delve into it more tbh.
Yeah, it's quite sad where we landed. Circa 2004-2006 while the internet was mostly open and accessible I mentally grouped "the internet" into two buckets. There was the real web plus usenet plus email and then there was "facebook" with its weird garden wall and exclusive invites or some such shit. I didn't think of facebook as being "on the web" even though they used the http protocol. It was highly unusual then to have any web content behind a registration wall.
So hardly anyone considered facebook to be a part of "the web". It was its own weird duck. Twenty years later and most people only frequent this "weird" part of the internet - this limited ensemble of paid and unpaid walled gardens.
Your statement of ‘hardly anyone considered facebook part of the web’ is incorrect. Facebook became popular a bit after the Web had become quite mainstream. The idea of signing up for online services was not foreign to most of these folks. Now, AOL/Compuserve and such were more considered as non web.
That applies to aol, msn, compuserve etc, not to Facebook which you only ever accessed via http from a browser.
Yeah, those didn't count either. AOL and compuserve were not even available outside the USA in the late nineties. With AOL I'm quite sure nobody considered them to be a part of the web. Their pages didn't have URLs early on but AOL "keywords" instead. Compuserve also weren't using http I believe. It was some kind of commercial WAN that was pitched as a competitor to the internet, no?
> AOL and compuserve were not even available outside the USA in the late nineties
yes, they were, in the UK at least. speaking as a compuserve user.
Ids like 102615,1320, with pay per minute for compuserve and for the phone call
Personally I never used cix but one of the magazines (pc pro?) has columnists on it at least.
Similarly Twitter; I signed up in I think 2007 and only used SMS for the next several years until they finally stopped it. Once I switched to the web/app version I was frankly appalled.
>How can we solve this problem, of the current state of the internet, without reverting to the compromises of the past?
We need to be on the offensive, not on the defensive. We need to pro-actively scrape walled gardens and re-publish them without fluff.
We need to consider .onion to be the default domain for our websites.
And we should also not be ashamed of using AI to achieve our goals.
We need to implement modern conveniences in our programs.
We need to be writing bridges between walled gardens and deltachat.
A movement where some sites are only accessible by a specific browser or class of browsers, much more simplified than now? Where a site could put an agreeable browser into a no-JS, lo-fi mode?
That is pretty much the definition of Gopher
Now, I think the author would consider it "solutionism", but the other day I spent a bunch of time browsing Reticulum's NomadNet sites (using the Columba mobile app).
And while aesthetically it was more early 90s than 1999, it filled me not only with nostalgia, but also with some optimism for the future of the Internet. Something I haven't felt in a while...
It feels like the article is seeing the 1999 internet like the internet of the early 1990s.
1999 was during the dotcom bubble, Internet Explorer 4/5 was the leading browser, Yahoo! the leading search engine, pop-up ads everywhere, it was also the beginning of Flash, for the better and for the worse. Residential broadband existed, but dialup was still the norm.
I don't really miss it, despite growing into it. It was an important transition period, but it was slow, lacking in content, small and yet too big to create a sense of community, and also just as full of ads as it is now. There were good sides compared to now, but I still take today's internet. The early 1990s (before the eternal September) looked nice, but I didn't get to know it.
If it were 1999, most people would still be browsing the web on their US Robotics 56k modem (at best). This page is about 1 MB of assets (500kb gzip compressed if your browser supported it) , so it would have taken at least a minute just to finish loading.
No tabbed browsing and if IE crashed it locked up Windows 95/98 with it. No 2fa, no comment spam, and Java applets that froze the browser for 10-30 seconds. No content creator bs just people making fan pages just for the heck of it before Wikipedia gobbled all that information
Closer to 2 as it was rarelly running at full 56kb/s.
Although, being patient was part of the experience as well
I was a lot more careful about clicking things when it took a full minute to load. Now I know that it'll be open in less than a second and I can leave immediately if I need to, so there's WAY less thinking beforehand.
There are quite a few sites that take more than a second to load even now. Should be a war crime, but alas
Youtube and Gmail take ages to load for me. Patreon is another one.
When I found my first tabbed browser. Netcaptor. It changed everything. Open in new tab. Open in new tab. Open in new tab.
Go back to the first tab which has finally finished loading. Consume.
I would open links in new windows instead. By the time I got done reading one forum thread, the 5 others would be loaded.
It's funny to think back, as I've just recently installed a browser extension to do the opposite (i.e. to prevent "open in new tab" tabs from doing any work until I foreground them.)
Today, my computer's memory is far more constrained than its network bandwidth. I find it very easy to accidentally open tons of tabs very quickly (esp. from the HN front page!) until suddenly the browser is swapping and everything's slowing to a crawl trying to process all those new page DOMs.
And yet, even when it doesn't choke the computer, I find no real benefit to preloading pages in the background any more. At least on my connection, the page load time after I focus a tab is almost imperceptible.
How things have changed!
Also, tabbed browsing was still a couple years off for most people, although some browsers got there earlier than others:
> In 1994, BookLink Technologies featured tabbed windows in its InternetWorks browser.[citation needed] That same year, the text editor UltraEdit also appeared with a modern multi-row tabbed interface. The tabbed interface approach was then followed by the Internet Explorer shell NetCaptor in 1997. These were followed by several others like IBrowse in 1999, and Opera in 2000 (with the release of version 4 - although an MDI interface was supported before then), MultiViews October 2000, which changed its name into MultiZilla on April 1st, 2001 (an extension for the Mozilla Application Suite[11]), Galeon in early 2001, Mozilla 0.9.5 in October 2001, Phoenix 0.1 (now Mozilla Firefox) in October 2002, Konqueror 3.1 in January 2003, and Safari in 2003. With the release of Internet Explorer 7 in 2006, all major web browsers featured a tabbed interface.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tab_%28interface%29
Also, Opera had a Multiple-Document Interface from the start, so 1995 or so. That's not "tabs" per se but multiple mini-windows inside the main window; much the same "Hey, I can have multiple things open!" deal
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Opera_web_brows...
My point is, you think more about clicking a link when it'll monopolize your whole UI and you can't just stash it in a background tab or mini-window.
I just opened multiple copies of the browser; I'd have 5 or 10 running most of the time on my 98se box. It's where I got my habit which I still use today, of opening outlinks as I read the page, so they can load in the background, then once I finish the content of this page, I'll go skim those to fill in context.
It meant I cared _less_ about page load time, even on dialup, because they were happening in other windows. I could happily tolerate a 2-minute load time as long as the first page took more than 2 minutes to read.
so true, re: patience
I was just thinking back the other day about BBS days and how frustrating a busy signal could be, or connection time limits, etc.
Still pretty prevalent at that time, definitely, but DSL was definitely a thing by the time 1999 rolled around. I even had pretty fast DSL for the time -- 640 kbps.
But otherwise totally agree with the critique. Modern connection speeds have enabled a huge amount of bloat. I grew up when 1200 baud modems were the latest rage, and patience when downloading was a hard requirement.
I lived in rural North Dakota and had dial up until 2005. It really sucked the last couple of years.
I lived on a suburban street a mile from the Stanford campus that didn't get broadband until 2003. I would go to the local copy center to rent an hour of computer time to edit my blog.
Ok.. so broadband in 1996, route-able (unique) IPv4 broadband in 1997 (177.1..), route-able satellite internet in Nigeria in 2002 (it sucked when it rained). Your Stanford proximity apparently didn't help.
I had a friend who had dial-up I think until at least 2007 because his house was apparently right on the border of our town and the next and for whatever reason all of the ISPs other than AOL considered his address outside their coverage. This was in a suburb within 10 miles of Boston.
I was raised by cheap boomers that would never pay more than the absolute minimum for anything, no matter how shitty the option, and most of my friends lived way out in the country. Paying $40/month for DSL or cable internet was off the table, because the library ran a free dialup ISP, so thats what we used even though their line was almost always busy. The cheap ass modem wouldn't reset the line correctly either, requiring someone to physically pull the phone cord out and back in the modem, otherwise the line wouldn't hang up, so redialling on a busy signal required physical intervention. (At some point, I recall my mom's friend/neighbor convincing her to pay $99/year for a dialup ISP that connected the first time.) I moved off dialup when I got a fast food job in 2005.
Luckily, we had web accelerating proxies like OnSpeed[1] back in the day that would compress web pages (including lossy image compression) so if you were one of the poor sods still on dialup (like I was), it was a lot more bearable.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OnSpeed
Oh neat, I'd never heard of them. Almost feels like a spiritual predecessor of CDNs, serving optimized assets from existing websites via their servers.
I got my first cable modem in 1998! All sites were still built for dialup, so everything was incredibly fast.
Nice! We were one of the first families on the block to have a 33.6 kbps modem, and were the envy of every filthy peasant who still had a 28.8 back in the day.
My first dialup modem was 1200 baud, back in 1987! I remember it taking an hour to download a game from a local warez BBS. My first modem to establish an Internet connection (SLIP) was 9600, sometime around 1993! Time flies...
And if the sysop had upgraded to 28.8 while you were still on 2400, you were probably persona non grata for tying up the line for so long!
Some of the most popular boards had minimum connect speeds; if you couldn't connect at at least 9600 or 14.4k, it would immediately hang up on you, for this reason.
This comment reminded me of the early days of Ultima Online. I was on a high speed campus connection with a ping time of ~5ms to my server. Given most players were on a 28.8/56k modem with ping times ~300ms, it was an amazing speed difference. I could walk, not run, faster than other people riding horses at full speed.
Needless to say, I got accused of cheating quite a bit.
Some sites were fast. Some sites had pictures and it took long enough to load that I would sometimes make a sandwich while waiting.
I literally remember watching images load line by line.
I know nostalgia for the old days is de rigueur especially on HN but I definitely do not want to go back to that.
I told a coworker born in 2001 about this and he could not believe his ears
We dither on the shoulders of giants.
Not with cable (3 megabits down, 128kbits up!) Almost everything was fast.
Same! I got called “LPB” in Quake 2 a lot.
I knew dial up for a little while but I was lucky to have been on broadband for a couple of years already in 1999.
This early access + a 4x SCSI CD burner made me one of the 2 official warez provider at school. I was even taking orders from parents of friends.
I had cable internet in 1997; it was wonderful in it's unmetered¹ symmetric 10Mbs glory.
1) wasn't supposed to be unlimited but the ISP didn't bother to mesure it until sometime in 2000
We used dialup until 1996, when we got a 10mbps cable internet connection, newly available in our 20k population town. We have never had a slower service plan than that since.
Questioning this, because I worked with a sysadmin who was in an @Home/CableLabs DOCSIS beta region at about that same time, and we all envied him of course. That was in San Jose, CA.
So what's the real story behind your piddlly little town getting bleeding edge cable internet service? (Or was it somewhere like Los Gatos?)
Firstly, you’ve spelled “megabits” wrong.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bit_rate
Secondly, that 10 Mbps was only your downstream signaling rate.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_signaling_rate
Was your upstream via analog dialup?
"This page is about 1 MB of assets".
And it could easily have been 10 KB.
Now now. Don't be so tightfisted with the bandwidth. You know what they say, "People will hate you Steve, if you're too sting-ee!"
https://www.audioatrocities.com/games/lastalert/index.html
Yeah, but you know something? Flash worked damn near perfectly even on potato connections
I know flash had its downsides - but messing around with Macromedia Flash to make stupid little animations back in the day was so fun.
Plus Silverlight made Flash seem like a dream.
Oh how much I wanted those super expensive ISDN lines...
and 1MB is "small" for the modern web!
No shade! I went and checked out of curiosity, since it looks like we’re both using Astro as a static site generator.
Most of my articles are pretty media rich and weigh in between 1-2 megs. I do try to be pretty conscientious about asset compression (mozjpeg, h264 for video, etc.). I'd love to switch over to AV1 but I've heard compatibility on older devices is spotty.
I've come to the conclusion that nostalgia is almost never about the objective quality of something. It's about the associations we make between a certain time in our lives and the media/technology that surrounded us at the time. It's also filtered through selective memory, emphasizing the positive while ignoring the negative.
We're all afraid of dying and we all wish we were 25 years younger. That's how I translate nostalgia when I read it. By any objective metric, the world is better than it's ever been, technology is better than it's ever been, and it's all continuing to get better.
I think the world really sucks in developed countries right now in a way that's hard to put your finger on. Optimism and enthusiasm is very low in young people right now. People's attention spans are shot. Kids in high school and college are less social than ever, barely date, and spend more and more time doomscrolling. Rising inequality, rise of far right politics, etc.
I get that the world is doing great by some basic metric like 'number of people starving', and that is fantastic. But the world really feels off to a growing number of people - me included - in modern America.
"the world is better than it's ever been, technology is better than it's ever been, and it's all continuing to get better."
Those guys in Sudan or blue whales beg to differ.
You can always point at bad things happening, no matter what time period you're in. You need to look at the graph over decades/centuries. Poverty, child mortality, literacy, standard of living, access to healthcare, etc. etc. are all better than they have ever been, even in the poorest places in the world.
I can't help thinking how those graphs conveniently ignore the damage such improvements have on the environment, on which they themselves depend. Damaged environments -> scarcity -> war. But I agree it's nice to have that happening away from home.
One thing that i just realized is i don't know exactly when things got bad.
I remember the 90s when we had to "go" online, when the digital was apart from the analog and we kept online and offline separate. I remember simpler sites, not as many ads, I remember a time before "feeds".
However, for the life of me I can't remember exactly when it started to suck. It might be that I was busy with other things in life, but still it leaves me with an unsettling feeling. Maybe it was around the arrival of home broadband? The end of Orkut (community based social media)? The advent of algorithmic feeds?
> However, for the life of me I can't remember exactly when it started to suck.
Whatever the date, it's tightly coupled with the explosion of internet-capable mobile devices.
My personal pick would be 2012, because that's when the Samsung Galaxy S3 came out and outsold its predecessor more than twofold.
Coincidentally that's when the small agency I was working for at the time started offering making pages look on mobile devices.
In terms of units the market for mobile devices peaked just four years later.
yeah, a lot of people pinpoint the moment when it started going downhill at around 2010. re: explosion of mobile devices, i'd say the release of apple's iPhone was a key event
Cookie wall was a big shift. I noticed that since the introduction of the cookie wall, websites now have about 3 to 4 modals that I have to click away before I can start interacting with the website. Typically it is the cookie wall I have to reject first through a secondary modal, then something about a newsletter, then the paywall and finally I have to hit ignore on the "Do you want to login with Google" on the top-right.
Internet user since 1996, so still a bit new to it. I don’t miss the old web that much (the old web was AOL for a lot of people, at least in the US). DEFINITELY don't miss 28.8k and 56k and having to hog up our family's one phone line overnight to download Netscape 7, only for it to be a steaming pile...
I definitely absolutely miss open instant messaging platforms. The days of XMPP and open clients. Trillian and Pidgin specifically.
I loved having a single app for all of my messages across all of the networks I talked to people on. Nowadays everyone is on FB Messenger, Instagram DMs, iMessage, WhatsApp and Google Chat. All of them have separate apps; all of them are loss leaders; all of them are closed.
(I tried Beeper. Loved the idea but didn’t invest time in it since it was always two lawsuits away from me getting “An update on Beeper” email.)
I guess I also miss content existing for content’s sake. Early YouTube, Quora, Reddit, etc. People helping other people...well, usually, anyway. Nowadays everything is growth-maxxed. It's all about engagement. Text-only websites would have never been born in this iteration of the Internet, and that's sad.
Youtube added Ask AI where it gives you pretty good summary with timestamps. Absolute timesaver to drill down to essence.
They should just summarise and timestamp every video for everyone, but it would tank engagement and ad revenue.
Having used the internet in 1999, it's mostly cookie cutter stuff mixed with some intellectually lazy generalizations, especially of specialist use cases.
You gotta love the subtle religious hooks leading to Christian apologetics elsewhere on the site; back in '99, and especially these days, that stuff was often enough more overt. But maybe renaming the piece to Using the internet like a Born-Again Worshipper is both more honest and accurate. ;)
1999 was Dialup for me. The modem said "56k" but didn't actually connect at that speed, it was more like 4.4KB/sec max.
The biggest thing I grabbed then was an overnight bulk-downloading session from animewallpapers.com, made possible by using GetRight. It had a download queue, as well as the "GetRight Browser" which presented the links on a html page as files to select, or other html pages as directories to view.
"56k" meant 7 kilobytes per second as a theoretical max. So 4.4 was ok. Everything with networks is done as bits, I think honestly for marketing reasons now
56k was bits, your 4.4KB was bytes, which is 36k bits. That was a pretty typical real world speed for dialup around 2000.
I remember a few years prior to that - I have faint recollections of dialling into BBSes or paying by the hour, so you'd want to plan in advance for what you might do on the internet while connected. A BBS often tracked what you uploaded vs downloaded, so unless you had something to share, you needed to be mindful of what you grabbed.
> Using technologies from yesteryear, we can solve the problems we face today on the modern advertisement riddled, javascript focused, etc. etc.
I wouldn't say you need technologies from yesteryear to achieve that. Or rather, you don't need an old browser to not be on Facebook, Instagram, Youtube and so on. Just visit _other_ sites, with your new browser. But I would recommend beefy adblocking and tracking-avoidance - uBlock Origin [1] and EFF Privacy Badger for example - or even disabling JS if you want the more static old-school feel. NoScript is a browser add-on which does this for Firefox or Chromium-based browsers: https://noscript.net/getit/
[1] : uBlock Origin is no longer supported on Chrome and Chromium-based browsers, since they've limited the already-limited extension capabilities with 'manifest v3'.
The Internet in 1999 was not good at all. Browsers barely worked, computers crashed constantly, the ability to actually search for useful things was limited, and many things we take for granted as being online (news, people, documentation) were not.
The mid-to-late 2000s are perhaps closer to what the author is looking for.
> Browsers barely worked
They worked pretty well actually, AFAICR. Internationalation was a bit sketchy in some cases though.
> computers crashed constantly
You did need to be careful with Windows 98, for sure, but it wasn't that bad. Also, if you put in some elbow grease you could install Linux, which didn't crash (but had limited support for peripherals and for the latest graphics cards, and almost no games).
> the ability to actually search for useful things was limited
It is arguably more limited now than it was then, since commercial search engines did not manipulate the results as much.
It was FUN though.
Does anyone remember that Pokédex game that the original Pokemon website had in the late 90s where you could collect/unlock Pokémon? I feel like you could trade them too but maybe not. I tried to ask ChatGPT but it doesn’t seem to know exactly what I’m talking about. Maybe this is a Mandela effect thing.
A lot of these recommendations seem prudent. I especially like the idea of POSSE for using social media without actually using it (every time you open a site to post is an opportunity to be ensnared). Completely stripping the browser from your smartphone is a bit extreme and excessive for me, but doesn't invalidate the other reccomendations.
We should also also embrace offline mode more. Disable all network connections until you make a conscious choice to go online. Heck, make a Windows 3.1-esque GUI for it and call it Trombone Winsock just for fun.
If any program complains it needs network connectivity for offline features, it goes into the Recycle Bin.
I found myself doing a particularly intense stint of work the other day, finally had all the source documents and the destination program all lined up, happily finding and comparing and synthesizing and entering, and I realized it was going to take all night. Or realistically until the middle of the next day.
I put the laptop into airplane mode, to block any updates that might unceremoniously reboot it and wreck my layout. Figure if I needed to be on Teams in the meantime, I've still got a phone for that.
Airplane mode already exists, it's _wonderful_ for this, and I should use it more often. If I'm not actively internetting, just toggle that and the distractions can wait.
Offline mode, and self-hostable apps. I'm very happy with my self-hosted and open source apps; e.g. photo library, media centres, etc; the convenience of cloud, but my cloud that I fully control.
Not to discourage you from these things, but the cloud wasn't a thing in 1999. Storage space was also an issue.
FTP?
Internet in 1999 was like democracy in 1791. An elite club for the few percents of best people. Good days indeed.
It's not wrong in the direction but it goes a bit too far. Text-only really limits the capabilities. The difference with the modern web is that it is not hyperlinked web pages between web sites but instead javascript application content silos. HTTP/1.1+HTML 5 is just fine, images and video are just fine. Javascript is not fine. That's where we should draw the line.
And without javascript most of the security/privacy issues that make domains require HTTPS-only to prevent MITM attacks simply disappear. When you aren't automatically executing random programs that random places send you the web can be a lot more fun, silly, and with a lot less fragile continuing maintainence required.
To me the what we wanted/got distinction is something like:
1. A kind of capital that is widely available, so that people could exercise control and agency with machines that do what you want them to do for your own needs.
2. A distribution tool controlled by mega-corporations as they decide what you should be able to see or have.
> On your router, you can and should setup blocklists for various malicious and nefarious domains, advertisements, adult content, etc. This is not “1999-esque” in practice, but is a requirement for the modern web.
I worked on a Geocities archive restoration. There was a boat load of porn (including illegal porn), malicious domains, spamvertising, malware, predators, political extremists, etc on the 1999 web, and you can find all of it within the raw Geocities archive that was made before it shut down. The idea that the old web was some kind of pure place of innocence is a weird and factually inaccurate take. If anything, the late 90s web was more dark than it is now, perhaps in part because nobody had any idea of how to police anything on it and things like PhotoDNA didn't exist yet.
If anything, my work on 90s site archival has taught me that the web has always been a place with a lot of dark places, and the narrative that the old web was some sort of pure innocent place that became evil is not matched by evidence.
It's just as plausible to me that the general "misbehavior" of humans on the internet hasn't changed all that much, but that we have, frankly, adopted a more puritanical and intolerant approach towards it. Nobody was talking about getting rid of Section 230, carding people for 18+ before they could use IRC (or install an operating system, what the actual fuck is wrong with you California), and Congress wasn't dragging evil Geocities CEO David Bohnett into grilling sessions where they were accusing him of hooking kids on digital cigarettes. Perhaps it would be wise to have a little nostalgia for some of that too.
It's worth keeping in mind how much more fringe the web used to be. You were almost by definition a bit of a deviant if you spent significant time online in the '90s and early '00s ("nerd" was a pejorative). People who found no acceptance in the physical world many times found like minded people online, which sometimes was a good thing and sometimes unfortunate.
Parrot Ass Club is a classic clip I like to return to when discussing this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S5lx-17OV8g
> If anything, my work on 90s site archival has taught me that the web has always been a place with a lot of dark places, and the narrative that the old web was some sort of pure innocent place that became evil is not matched by evidence.
No argument there. That said, I think the big difference between the 1990's and today is that everyone knew the nefarious places and people existed but, for the most part, you actually had to seek it out. I am not suggesting that it was hard to find. Perhaps the worse of the worse was easier to find. On the other hand, it wasn't quite the same thing as algorithmic feeds. For example: I absolutely refuse to view anything remotely political on some sites (including reputable news sources or material that is clearly satire) since that is the surest way to be fed extremist crap. How far those feeds will 5ake me, I simply do not want to know.
Hey Kyle! Neocities is great
<3
Turn off javascript and use a text based browser? What? May as well not use the internet.
The best was the FTP search feature from alltheweb.com. You could find almost any software you needed.
Thanks for the bit of nostalgia today OP. I remember the first time that I saw that browser screen. Pure discovery back in those early days of the web. I can still hear the dial-up modem crackling...
Yes, that crackling! God, that shreak. You hear it and it just pulls you right back. Like some kind of rhythm that told you something was happening, something exciting was about to occur.
For us bridge-generation kids, that sound is probably etched like vinyl. Quiet room, 2 AM, and then that thrum, shreek and hiss. I literally missed it, whatever the next thing was. Whenever "modems" became obsolete. It was sad. It was the audio reminder, the signal hanging in the air, of the literal lifeline out of your analog bedroom and into a cosmos filled with electricity, buzzing with knowledge and light.
For me, half the experience of that era was purely sensory. The clunky physical sounds of the machine doing the heavy lifting to connect you... the clunky graphics....the need to wait...the gradual adjustment to the pace of life and the "gentle introduction" these "reduce speed" effects had to the threshold moment that that was, were somehow the right gentleness to take the world on such an epic journey.
I have labored a lot to recapture that feeling. Across many projects. Idk why exactly, but there was something so hopeful and exciting about the internet at that time. And I know it's worth remembering. Like a precious flame you have to protect from the rain, I guess. Check out this one: https://win9-5.com/desktop.html
Just a small set of experiments to see if I can grab that feeling. The modem sound evoke the vibe. Browsing the modern web with it is a little strange, if you can do that "in the gallery watching the walls between the paintings" kind of mind-job and not focus too much on the web portal content (which is designed to always suck you in, even framed retro like this).
Did not even consider encrypted IRC as an alternative to Matrix or Signal. Or even running my own search engine. Good writeup! Very much for the 1%ers in tech skills.
im a fan of this philosphy i really am. sadly it is utopia. who is going out of their way to use the internet like this? if youre someone whos totally oblivious to the old internet, you will have to work very hard to use it in an old fashioned way. no one will pursue this. the internet today reminds me of the matrix
Join the alivenet - https://projectvv.de
You have useless javascript there.
OpenAI will love this article, noM nom nom
One minor 'gripe' for lack of a better term, is that I feel like a push to go backwards in technology is a bit misguided. I feel like a lot if people see ads and trackers, then look to older protocols like Gopher/Gemini/IRC (or at least 'inspired' by older stuff like Gemini).
The issue isn't javascript, it's ads/trackers/algos/slop. I feel like tracker/ad/algorithm free static site on the status quo of http, or something newer like IPFS, is worlds better than trying to use arbitrary restrictions on something like a Gemini capsule.
Albeit I agree with the general thesis, I find it funny that the very next sentence after the author say:
> the moment I find something that crosses my desk which starts with “it’s not this, it’s THIS”, I immediately click off and move on.
He follows it by his very own "It's THIS, not this" statement:
> I want real people, real creators, and real content in my feed, not LLM slop.
The Machine must have learn it somewhere I guess.
To be fair, it's different. The order is important. If he would have written "It is not LLM slop what I want, is real people, real creators, and real content no my feed", it would have sound like AI. But not in the way he wrote it.
Are there any decent webrings left, or newly existing?
Decent is a matter of opinion but there are active ones. There've been a few HN posts on the subject in the last few months.
I compiled some old web meta links here: https://outerweb.org/blog/web-discovery.html
I thought webrings had died when things like Webring, Ringsurf, Ringo, Rail and others went offline years ago. But there is a new interest in them. I've listed all the ones I know of at https://brisray.com/web/webring-list.htm
Lemmy is the closest thing to internet in 1990s.
No. IRC, EMail lists, Usenet and webs like https://deadnet.se are closer.
Also, everything from https://wiby.me.
> We took a wrong turn by locking ourselves into content silos and embracing comfort instead of seeking truth, and it will not end well unless we do a hard u-turn to authenticity and sovereignty.
We didn't do that: capitalist interests did.
Pretty sure we still chose the silos. We voted with our wallets.
I think it’s time to give up on the old web.
What made the old web cool, is that it was the first time we can communicate with so many random people in far away places digitally and share information through cool web pages.
That novelty has mostly died now. Communicating with people in distant lands is mundane now. And there is little new things to share that we haven’t already seen or heard before.
So what’s the point of the web now? Maybe the internet will become purely a utility for exchanging data for infrastructural and business purposes, and the idea of using the internet as a source of entertainment or recreation will fade away.
It would be nice to retreat back to an analog world, where the internet still exists, but only as a layer of glue in the background that orchestrates multiple technologies that power our world, and nothing more.
Tons of people still use the internet as a source of entertainment and recreation. Just because you're too jaded to care doesn't mean the rest of the world is.
And we were just getting a breath of fresh-air after being restricted to local phone calls (or paying ghastly long-distance phone bills). Finally we could communicate anywhere for one price!
Without that context, it all falls flat, I agree.
I've considered trying to make a speed-of-light-ping-limited BBS that can _only_ be connected to by actual-locals, but reality is harder. (And the moment it got popular, nefarious actors would just rent or compromise a box in-radius.)
It's a matter of focus, we cannot stop the internet adoption to the current business needs. The reason you are posting here is an example of how people from all over the world are still can benefit from the internet to share their optinions and communicate regardless to the internet changes.
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Only possible without the smartphone. That's the device that destroyed the internet. Thanks a lot Apple
I don't know if I'm crazy but I think social media is pretty okay at the like, core building and enhancing social networks thing.
Instagram is probably my most used one these days and I love seeing my friend's stories and I don't think I've parsed more than a handful of ads in the last 2 or 3 years that I've been an active user, probably a few tens of hours wasted with dumb reels, not a bad cost at all imo. I have probably 400 irl people and 200 internet accounts I follow. It doesn't have the charm and honesty of navigating a webring or whatever, but the friction is so low so I get to see a lot of stuff my friends, acquaintances and especially just people i'm peripherally in community with share that I probably wouldn't otherwise.
I miss the old internet for sure, but I'm not convinced the current situation is as horrible as people say.