Things We Miss About Early Internet Culture
Whip out your floppy disk and whack on Lizzie McGuire. It’s time to get all nostalgic about the early days of the internet.
Dpending on how old you are, you may remember the early days of cyberspace differently too me. As a ‘98 baby, I was the final part of the generation who grew up without their phones or iPads glued to their hands. My first phone was bought exclusively so my mom could call me in emergencies, was the size of a brick, and has Tetris downloaded un-ironically.
I was the generation of Internet Cafe’s, the Impossible Quiz, Charlie Bit My Finger, and all those weird drag and drop games.
-Like super niche, but did anyone play those Eastenders dress up games? You could strip Dot Cotton off to her nylons and redress her to look like a biker.
Seeing the things I grew up come back to mainstream culture is a weird sensation, from tamagotchis, furbies, and the MSN aesthetic, I don’t think I’ve ever felt this old.
Don’t get me wrong, we all look at our childhood fondly. But do we truly want these things back in our life? Probably not, let’s be honest. The memory cards were always full, the internet was painfully slow, and the phones were practically cancerous.
Things are always meant to improve, and we can look back it this things and associate them with a simpler time, but I for one don’t want to see Ask Jeeves ever again.
First Going Online
Do we want it back? You can never get a first time back.
Once you were aware of the internet, how soon you got to actually go online depended on a number of factors. For example, you might have been lucky enough to be exposed to the internet through work or education. For most of us, our earliest forays onto the internet were furtive, and the day we managed to get regular internet access from home was marvelous.
If you started going online in the middle of the 1990s, one of the surprises was that the internet was already a highly populated world, steeped in traditions and lore. Why did people end sentences with a colon, a dash, and a closing bracket? “What exactly is an FAQ?” you wondered. The newsgroups, the search engines – it was a new frontier to be explored.
Sometimes, you’d be doing something else and think of something great to look up on the internet when you connected later that night. The difficulty in connecting imposed a distance between you and your online life. As often as not, online communities were made up of people you didn’t know in real life. The acronym IRL (in real life) doesn’t get used much these days, in part because the lines, between online and offline life, have become blurred.
Gaming the Free Offers
Do we want it back? We’re not naughty enough now.
When dipping your toe into the world of the internet for the first time, you might not be ready to make a full commitment to monthly payments. We’re not saying that any of those companies were being unfair, but some of those companies were being downright, well, unfair. For example, on top the extortionate minute by minute costs charged by the phone company, you might have to pay the ISP by the minute, too. On top of that, you typically had to pay the ISP a monthly fee. This meant that dial-up Internet access could cost more than broadband internet costs now, and that’s before you start to adjust for inflation. However, for the cunning users among us (er sorry, we mean: you), there was a little dodge you could do.
Some companies offered a free month of access, accessed via the CD-ROMs that would regularly arrive on your doormat. The procedure was: to sign up for that, complete with credit card details, and then cancel it before the 28 days were up. We’re sure many fellow veterans of the 90s internet scene will be shocked and appalled at the very suggestion that such a trick was ever carried out. Unfortunately, some ISPs made you ring a support number and answer questions, and it involved talking to an actual human person about why you were cancelling the trial.
Thinking quickly, you had to adopt a “pillar of the community” tone of voice while you made something up. Things got gradually fairer over time, thanks in part to greedy capitalism and the upstart companies that began to edge their way into the market. In addition to a better overall deal, constant reliable Internet access became an essential requirement of geek life. In the end, we all just accepted the situation and started paying those bloodsuckers.
Modems
Do we want it back? With a heavy heart – no, a thousand times no!
This one’s a classic case of something that we might miss but that we would never want to go back to. If you were in the UK, due to the extortionate daytime phone rates before 6pm, when you went online might be affected by what you could afford. Once the evening rolled around, the possibilities opened up. If it’s the web we’re talking about, “eew, aah, blewp, chrrrrr, bleep, chuur” – that is, a 14k modem – was the minimum you’d need to get around. Older 2400 bps modems went “bluuuu, bweee, chrrrrr” on connection and were only practical for text-mode access. When it became available, a 28k modem offered a quite welcome doubling in speed and a noise more like a Star Wars droid upon connection.
Whatever noise signalled your entry into Wonderland, once you were there, you couldn’t always stay for as long as you wanted. In addition to the costs, modems blocked up the house phone line at a time before most people had a mobile phone. Okay if you were a singleton living on your own, not always okay if you lived with other people. Those strange fools often wanted to use the phone line to make and receive telephone calls.
The two hour disconnect that most ISPs imposed was the final pointy stick of reality that punctured your little bubble of happiness. This could cause periodic, but mild, annoyance, or even invoke a level of sweaty tension worthy of a submarine drama when downloading a file. In the latter scenario, the end result was hopefully a shaky, breathing out of relief as the last few bytes came through. If things went wrong, and they often did, sitting there and going “fuuuuuuu-” [cut to shot of house with frightened birds flying away from it] was more like it.
Even by the time you’d upgraded to a 56k modem, the final evolution of dial-up technology, you were still left with the feeling that you were missing out on the full experience of what the internet could offer. Dial-up felt slow, even if you’d never experienced anything better. Netscape was particularly guilty of changing its mind about page layout while halfway through slurping up a page on dial-up. One moment things had begun to take shape on screen and you could start reading, then Netscape would decide to move things around, covering up the text. A few seconds later, everything would be readable again. That was until the text suddenly changed color to match a background that wasn’t there yet, adding to your wait. The cute connection noises and quaint limitations may bring back nostalgic memories, but the reality of dial-up is not something we’d ever want to revisit.
Gopher
Do we want it back? The ideas should be given a new airing.
Two hypertext systems, the World Wide Web and Gopher, were both released into the world in 1991, and they existed as rivals for a while. Like web pages, Gopher pages use clickable hypertext links to link to other pages. Gopher pages differ from web pages because the system doesn’t give much freedom in terms of page layout, imposing a standard color scheme and set of fonts. So, it might sound like Gopher was the inferior of the two from the start, but it does have a few advantages over the web. For one thing, Gopher sites are hierarchical. If you were visiting a site that stored classic literature, you might open the folder containing books by Charles Dickens and then open the folder containing Great Expectations. In contrast, on the web, each site, by and large, uses its own layout, slowing down both the user and the computer. Gopher was, in contrast to the web, fast and consistent in appearance.
In fact, perhaps Gopher, or at least its approach, could make a comeback on mobile devices? Wiki sites are a good example of a uniform system for getting information. Imagine how chaotic things would be if every page on Wikipedia used a custom layout? Some Gopher sites are still in operation, but the system is not in widespread use anymore. Think about the sensible, utilitarian nature of Gopher next time you need to find something fast on an unfamiliar website.
Gaming the free offers
Do we want it back? We’re not naughty enough now.
When dipping your toe into the world of the internet for the first time, you might not be ready to make a full commitment to monthly payments. We’re not saying that any of those companies were being unfair, but some of those companies were being downright, well, unfair. For example, on top the extortionate minute by minute costs charged by the phone company, you might have to pay the ISP by the minute, too. On top of that, you typically had to pay the ISP a monthly fee. This meant that dial-up Internet access could cost more than broadband internet costs now, and that’s before you start to adjust for inflation. However, for the cunning users among us (er sorry, we mean: you), there was a little dodge you could do.
Some companies offered a free month of access, accessed via the CD-ROMs that would regularly arrive on your doormat. The procedure was: to sign up for that, complete with credit card details, and then cancel it before the 28 days were up. We’re sure many fellow veterans of the 90s internet scene will be shocked and appalled at the very suggestion that such a trick was ever carried out. Unfortunately, some ISPs made you ring a support number and answer questions, and it involved talking to an actual human person about why you were cancelling the trial.
Thinking quickly, you had to adopt a “pillar of the community” tone of voice while you made something up. Things got gradually fairer over time, thanks in part to greedy capitalism and the upstart companies that began to edge their way into the market. In addition to a better overall deal, constant reliable Internet access became an essential requirement of geek life. In the end, we all just accepted the situation and started paying those bloodsuckers.