10 Things We Miss About The 1990's Internet

the Internet has become so engrained into our lives in the 21st century that often today we take it for granted and a lot of that initial excitement we felt about being online back in the day seems to have gone now don't get me wrong it still blows my mind that I've got this always connected supercomputer that can tap into the entire vast library of human knowledge at a seconds notice in my pocket all day long but you can't deny there was a sense of wonder and intrigue about the early days of the net that we just don't experience anymore so in this video we'll be looking at 10 things we miss about the 90s internet now just a little disclaimer before the inevitable comments a lot of these things you can of course still do today online but they've certainly fallen out of flavor since the heyday back in the 90s so let's start on number 10 downloading WAV and MIDI files now long before the days of Spotify and Apple music we used to actually download audio onto our hard disks but even before the days of Napster and before the widespread adoption of mp3 files we used to download WAV and MIDI files well of course is an uncompressed format which was actually much easier for pre pentamirror machines to play as the data didn't require on the flight decoding the downside of uncompressed audio means that the files are actually quite big a single 4 megabyte song would weigh in at around 42 megabytes in wav format which but then meant that you needed a lot of floppy disks to split and join them together or as zip drive if you were downloading them at school to take home and 42 megabytes could even be bigger than your main hard disk on your computer so rather than downloading full songs what we'd usually do is download short clips of a few seconds in length and there were so many websites dedicated to providing short web files generally made up of clips of popular TV shows and movies this meant that you could then fill up your hard disk with audio clips from beavis and butthead or ren and stimpy and even set them as your window sounds or email alerts but if he did want actual music MIDI files were the main way of sharing music back in the early 90s MIDI was originally created as a way for professional studio equipment to talk to each other essentially just been a set of instructions on which notes your MIDI device should play MIDI files are actually very small in size and found a surprising second life as an early internet music format and as MIDI was supported by most web browsers of the day and most off-the-shelf sound cards could actually play MIDI files with varying degrees of quality this meant that MIDI allowed you to have a way of playing some form of music at a very small outlay and of course your nineties website wasn't complete without an auto-playing midi rendition of Nirvana playing when you visited your homepage and if you are nostalgic for MIDI files you can download the Geo city's MIDI collection from the Internet Archive for hours of a low fidelity fun making personal websites and that brings us up to number nine making a personal website in 2020 most of us are all over social media sharing nuggets and stories of our daily lives and spewing out our thoughts and opinions and videos and tweets but in the days before Facebook and Twitter if you wanted to share your mind with the collective Internet you would need to set up your own website services like geo cities angelfire and free serve gave users a few megabytes of free storage to host your own website usually in return for them displaying some form of banner advertising on your site and when geo cities launched in 1994 it really did start a revolution of personal home pages and these could be about any topic you liked and it really is hard to overstate the importance of Geo cities for most people it was the first time that the average user had a relatively easy way to publish content on the web and it really did lower the bar to entry and then to anyone who could learn basic HTML and had a text editor and of course a few animals in their arsenal could make a website pick a suitable Network neighborhood for your website fire up notepad or if you want that leet Dreamweaver or something like that and get started forget the under construction graphic of course the starfield backdrop was mandatory the now-defunct blink tag probably all over your website as well and of course the hit counter so you can brag to the world about just how popular your new website is sadly after buying Geo cities in 1999 a decade later Yahoo would delete the service and all the websites within it effectively deleting a huge section of the early internet forever luckily though they did have the foresight to release the entire server as a torrent file and today that means you can actually browse at these old sites on archive services like the Internet Archive our cities and neo cities the latter of which even allows you to create your own HTML 1.0 geo city style retro web site in 2020 and even though many geo cities web sites are rather vomit-inducing today and I certainly won't be linking to my old geo cities web sites that unfortunately have been archived in that collection there definitely is something really cozy and nostalgic about checking out these web sites today number 8 emailing memes to each other of course today memes are a central part of social media seeing something funny on Facebook or Instagram and tagging your friends is something that happens millions of times a day all around the world but memes back in the 90s were a bit different back then if you had a funny graphic or a humorless - which were very popular back then and he wanted to share that with your friends or contacts you'd have to forward them on an email and this usually led she having to scroll through a rapidly increasing list of previous email addresses who've been sent them in before you along with a few more forward tags in the email subject line each time it was sent on and I actually remember hosting college radio shows back in the early 2000s and inviting listeners to email me if you want a copy after talking about a funny email forward that I've been sent now of course today with Twitter and Facebook sharing content is really simple but it did feel like when you got an email for word that you were part of a small select group and your friend really had to make a bit of an effort to choose the people that they thought would find the email amusing then select you from their email addresses in their contacts book and send it on number seven chat rooms as exciting as the world wide web was in the early days one of the coolest experiences was joining your first real-time chat room and I still remember the first web-based chat room I went on and it would have been in around 1995 back then we had a few PCs at my school that were connected to the Internet and you could book them out in our long blocks once per day and I remember a kid before me not closing down his session Netscape was still open and he'd left the Pearl Jam chat room open now I'm not into the band Pearl Jam I've always been into my cell house and dance music really bought seeing these people chatting away on the screen in real time to each other really captivated me and ended up staying on there and talking to them and then I started visiting that web site in spending an hour or so each day chatting to people on there until I got to know them quite well then unfortunately the school did ban chat rooms as they thought it was a waste of the academic networks resources and there were loads of other chat networks and I discovered around the same time as well we had the park that globe and one of my favorites the web chat Broadcasting System WBS and I wasted far too much of my school and college time on these websites and of course AOL and Yahoo chat were really popular with Yahoo later allowing a voice chatting to their channels which was really generally just made up of people playing really low bitrate and sing called Britney Spears songs to the rest of the channel it was a bit annoying really but IRC was where the real geeks hung out using software like Merck you can connect to other like-minded people via IRC client of choice and chat as much as your phone bill could take today chat rooms have mostly been replaced by services like discord and what's happened kik and of course video chat sites but IRC actually remains somewhat popular with the more technical crowd and there are still web and Java based chat services around such as a WBS replica site that was launched in 2009 and Omni chat remains online actually since 1995 but today even though the sites are still live their virtual ghost towns with only a few messages a month compared to their busy 90s heyday number six watching webcams one of the web's most popular early websites was the Trojan room coffeepot setup in 1991 and running on an acorn archimedes computer at the University of Cambridge originally it was set up so people working in the building could see if the pot was filled with coffee remotely to save them and disappointing walk down the stairs this 128 by 128 grayscale camera captured and updated regular images of their coffee pot and the camera was connected to the World Wide Web in 1993 and became a surprising hit on the early web when the camera was finally retired in 2001 it actually received news coverage in The Times The Washington Post The Guardian wired and a lot more and other webcams followed in its wake including the amazing fish cam set up in 1994 by a then unknown startup called Netscape and you can actually still visit it today by going to fish camp calm although it's had a few relocations and a few different fish added over the years and very soon webcams are set up in all manner of locations he had views over cities and busy streets people were setting up webcams in their backyards and even their bedrooms leading of course to the infamous jenny cam where teenager jennifer ringly became the world's first life caster sharing everything with her fans from 1996 to 2003 and I mean everything like I said before I think this is the best idea I've heard for that silly internet thing and then we had Josh Harris who turned this entire life into an Internet TV show as documented in the movie we live in public number five modems now don't get me wrong I wouldn't swap my several hundred megabyte always-on fiber connection for anything these days but there was something special about the sounds of dialing into your ISP back in the day the audio coming out of your modem as it negotiated a connection with another machine over the phone line was always met with a sense of impatient excitement ready to get on and quickly download your emails and news group messages and maybe save a few FTP files or maybe even download a couple of websites ready for offline reading as quickly as you could before you ran your phone bill up to astronomical levels every second that you spent online really to count back them and if you weren't nostalgic for the old sounds of technology there is actually a brilliant website that preserves a lot of them called save the sounds or info number for choosing your search engine sure today we've got a choice of websites like Bing or DuckDuckGo for the more privacy inclined user but let's be honest the vast majority of people just use Google with an 87% share of all web searches going to Google in 2020 it's been the majority search engine for the last 15 years at least and any attempts to topple air have really been futile does anybody remember cool but it wasn't always the case back in the 90s we were really spoiled for choice with search engines if you wanted a hand curated categorized directory Yahoo was your site if you wanted a more comprehensive search all the web com offered to search a mammoth 3 million web sites if you wanted to search engine your mom could use you would ask Jeeves and there was Alta Vista for the rest of us not to mention all the smaller websites like Lycos hot bot excite and many more life might be a lot easier today with everybody just using Google poor it was nice to have a choice number 3 web rings now this ties in to the times when we all had our own personal web sites a web ring would let you promote other web sites from friends or on similar topics by placing a small piece of HTML in the bottom of your home page it would then suggest another bunch of sites that the user might want to visit and that in turn would promote your site as well before the days of running Facebook adverts are promoting your website and Twitter this was a great way for users to find websites that they might also find interesting and there were very limited ways to promote your so having a web ring then that everybody could benefit from each of this audience by simply embedding the widget onto your home page a user could then click forward or back and visit other web sites in the ring and then when they reached the end it would loop back around again number two guest books another antiquated feature that we all had on our web sites back in the 90s was of course the guestbook now I remember checking my guest books hundreds of times every day and the idea was that each time a new visitor came across your site they would then leave you a little note to tell you what they thought of it and you could also ask them a few questions to answer while they're there as well now that we've got social media commenting on our web sites guest books are no longer needed but they were a really nice way to translate those numbers that you saw increasing on your hit counter that would usually be placed next to your guest put link on your home page into actual people and you'd usually ask them for their location and a comment and it was really cool to see all these people from all around the world checking out your personal website and taking the time to leave you a comment and I was really pleased to see that the retro-themed Captain Marvel website the Marvel set of last year included a guest book for that real nineties authenticity and number one this sense of community now suppose the last few items on this list all kind of tied together under this banner it was the sense of collectively exploring this seemingly unlimited new cyber world with all these people he'd never met all around the world that now he was suddenly connected with in my early days on the web I meet people in chat rooms who would then become my email pen pals I had several of them in Australia America Canada Scotland people outright - every week we've never met in person to this day but these people back then knew me better than some of my closest friends in real life and I've got friends to this day that I met on IRC channels back in the 90s chatting away about nonsense into the early hours of the morning I had friends I met on music forums that every week would send cassette tapes to each other in the post with our latest mixtapes and then later on arranged to meet in nightclubs all around the country of course today meeting people online and then face-to-face is commonplace especially with the rise of online dating at some websites and services like Meetup allowing you to organize conferences in real life and real life meetups about anything at all and due to the power of video chat services and the speed of the modern internet it's not even always required to meet in person but the thing is it's become just that an everyday almost mundane thing back in the 90s chatting to someone from the UK in America on a chatroom was really exciting getting an email from your pen pal was something you look forward to all week and before the general population was all online and before every business was there trying to sell you something on the web it really did feel like a much smaller and cozier place an electronic playground full of like-minded people and because you weren't always connected darling up to the net really felt like an event not something that you took for granted and of course today it is possible to recapture a little bit of that magic with enough Facebook groups and Twitter and if he gave me the option and mitad lee I probably wouldn't want to go back and live it again but there was an undeniable magic about when the web was all so shiny and new and if you've got memories of the early days on the web maybe been on the internet back in the 90s I'd love to hear about them in the comments and if you are nostalgic about the Golden Age of Technology every Friday I do a podcast all of that retro gaming and Technology and every week on the show as well as updating you on the retro gaming and tech stories of the week we're joined by a special guest last week it was a story of Gamesmaster with dominic diamond he joined us for an hour to share some stories about the 90s biggest gaming TV show and this week we've got the legendary RJ Michael telling us a history of the Amiga the 3do and the atari lynx and you can get the retro hour from wherever you normally get podcast from search for the retro owl podcast or download it directly from the retro our comm and while you here on YouTube you might want to check out another one of my videos I think you'll find interesting and if you'd like to see more videos like this please consider supporting my channel on patreon stay safe and I'll see you next week

Channel: Dan Wood

Views: 109,087

Keywords: kids guide to the internet, 90s internet, old internet, early internet, aol, geocities, dial up sound, early world wide web, 90's kids guide to the internet, the kids guide to the internet, internet, netscape, netscape navigator, 1990s, 90s, chat rooms, guestbooks, oddware, 90s web, windows 95, windows 98, dan wood

Id: QnvaRWtWjHU

Length: 17min 8sec (1028 seconds)

Published: Fri May 22 2020