Here's what your favorite websites looked like 20 years ago

[Liberal_in_LA]

http://money.cnn.com/gallery/technology/2015/05/08/old-websites/7.html

[NuclearDem]

1. There's a flashback...

Didn't look that different when I started using the Internet about 16 years ago.

[Cooley Hurd]

2. That is... humbling. Here's DU from its 1st archive.org snapshot:

https://web.archive.org/web/20010219033913/http://www.democraticunderground.com/

Embryonic.

...and, if you spot "bugs":

To report broken links, bugs, or other technical issues, please send an email to the Webmaster.

To: Skinner
Re: Bugs

Dear Skinner;

I was on archive.org tonight and DU looks broken...

[Aerows]

32. Oh Dear

The conservative madlibs are hilarious! I used a few too many curse words so mine is not for polite consumption, but trust me, it had me crying.

[mike_c]

3. .

[Liberal_in_LA]

4. ah...the WORLD WIDE WEB. I remember it.

[NightWatcher]

5. Shit, I never got passed this

Last edited Fri May 15, 2015, 11:57 PM - Edit history (1)

[Liberal_in_LA]

6. before AOL, I spend a lot of time on a Bulletin Board, can't even remember the name of it

[foo_bar]

7. is that WWIV?

The command set looks awfully familiar ('V' for Voting Booth!) --

[Liberal_in_LA]

8. not sure

[hunter]

18. I connected to our family AOL account using GEOS.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GeoWorks

That was when the average computer user thought AOL was email.

I also remember when this happened:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September

That was when I abandoned Usenet for good.

An almost greater horror was when google acquired the largest Usenet archive and made it easily searchable as part of "google groups," exposing the bad poetry and slash of computer geeks who'd never expected their works to be made public like that.

[marle35]

9. My homepage when I first used the internet

In 1996:



Actually not too bad. I guess it was fashioned after cable box menus at the time. I don't think this is actually a webpage, just the landing screen when you boot up the system.

The interface was surprisingly usable even without a mouse.

[nadinbrzezinski]

10. Earlier than that

and of course, in those days we all knew command language, and what those pesky F keys were for.

Memories, Word Perfect 5.1... now that WAS perfection. There are some things that Word cannot do well to this day... ahem, kernel control... and reveal codes.

[Binkie The Clown]

21. I used "pine" for usenet. Anybody remember that email client?

That was before HTML when there was no such thing as WWW or "the web". These days almost everybody thinks that "The Web" IS the Internet. They couldn't be more wrong. There is so much more to the Internet than web pages.

[IcyPeas]

11. anyone remember or use Prodigy?

They were the first forums I came across.

[nadinbrzezinski]

12. Yes, I came at the tail end of it

[Buns_of_Fire]

44. You betcha. I was hell on wheels with my 2400 Baud modem.

And after a few companies started offering Intertubes access, I actually went out and BOUGHT Netscape (this was, of course, also in the days when the local General Store accepted chickens as payment).

God, I feel old. I'd write my congresscritter to complain, but I cant get WordStar to install on this newfangled thing (I tried folding the floppy disks in half, and the little slide-out coffeecup holder STILL won't read them!).

[Still Blue in PDX]

59. I used Prodigy. nt

[OilemFirchen]

13. The eBay grab is incorrect.

The company didn't exist twenty years ago. When I joined in '96 it was, IIRC, still AuctionWeb:

[OilemFirchen]

14. "There are currently 31897 entries in the Yahoo database"

[OilemFirchen]

15. Hee hee... from December 21, 1996:

https://web.archive.org/web/19961221165158/http://freerepublic.com/

[XemaSab]

22. I have no words

[muriel_volestrangler]

36. That actually looks *better* than it does now (nt)

[arcane1]

51. I thought so too! Conservatives really are devolving!

[Rex]

16. .

[KMOD]

17. I first went online in 1990.

There was no google, no yahoo, no AOL.

It was very primitive.

[TlalocW]

19. That was about when I did as well.

I remember in 1991, my best friend from high school who as studying at another college was extremely grateful because I was able to find a bunch of Disney images for him to use for an important presentation he was giving in a class.

It's weird to look back at that and try to conceptualize how hard it was to find something back then.

TlalocW

[Binkie The Clown]

23. I went online when it was call ARPANET.

I worked at Cal State Univ as a programmer and we got to play around with it a little bit from the computer center. I didn't go online at home until around 1993 or 1994.

[Liberal_in_LA]

24. I remember playing those text based games on some type of system

"You walk into a room" "turn right"

[Binkie The Clown]

25. I remember those,

and they went really slow when you were using a teletype machine. Video terminals were rare.

[gvstn]

35. God those teletype machines were awful.

Amazing at the time but still awful.

I remember the first time I used a video monitor that was connected at 9600 baud rather than 300 or 1200 and saying to myself this is overkill no human can read this fast. Haha!

[RebelOne]

31. I used to play "Zork" on my old Apple IIe computer

before I had the internet.

[Binkie The Clown]

39. Yeah. And Wizardry!

When you went around the corner and the floppy disk started churning like mad you knew you about to face a monster! hehe

[Go Vols]

20. I can't remember before IRC

[Sen. Walter Sobchak]

26. I don't think I had graphical internet access until late 1996

I connected using a Macintosh SE/30 with a terminal emulator. Except I wasn't really connecting to the internet, I was connecting to an IBM RS/6000 in Tustin that was connected to the internet. After half a dozen or more tries entering Unix commands if I got them right I was presented with a text-only web browser called Lynx that started up to the Webcrawler search engine.

I also couldn't directly download files, I had to first download them to the machine I was connecting to and then connect with FTP to download the files to my computer, this was only allowed between 11:00PM and 9:00AM.

[rogerashton]

27. Here is the website I set up in 1996

http://web.archive.org/web/19981203081714/http://william-king.www.drexel.edu/

I was on my way to being "that crazy covered bridge guy on the WWW."

http://web.archive.org/web/19980714051512/http://william-king.www.drexel.edu/top/bridge/cb1.html

[JaneyVee]

28. ...

[Aerows]

34. OMG I nearly fell out of my chair

LMAO! Oregon Trail.

[glowing]

56. That was our favorite game on middle school.. And now I feel old

If I showed that low level graphic game to my son, he'd double over and laugh his butt off... The kid really hasn't ever remembered even having cell phones that weren't the "smart phone" version. We go the iPhone 4 when he was 5... Now on 6 and he has a 5C (since it was free). Lol

[AngryAmish]

29. Anyone remember mediawhoresonline.com?

[immoderate]

52. Sure. The horse. Disappeared suddenly. A pioneer.

--imm

[oberliner]

30. Whose favorite website was Pizza Hut?

I didn't realize it was anybody's favorite.

[WillowTree]

49. Whose fave was AOL, for that matter?

[Aerows]

33. Not to Hijack

but try out this piece of DU history: Conservative madlibs

https://web.archive.org/web/20010302032130/http://www.democraticunderground.com/madlibs/index.html

[Luminous Animal]

37. Actually, this was one of my favorite websites from 20 years ago and it was gorgeous.

http://www.atlasmagazine.com/win98r.html

It's in the permanent collection of SFMOMA.

[muriel_volestrangler]

38. RDRLIST on VM

I first used it on an overloaded system at university, with BBC microcomputers acting as 3270 emulators.

[BumRushDaShow]

40. My first dialup service was Delphi

and eventually hung out in Usenet newsgroups... Also subscribed to a couple listservs with the millions of emails associated with "internet discussions" before the "world wide web".

First graphical browser was Mosaic but eventually switched to what became the bloated Netscape that they eventually wanted to charge for (and I say that posting this using Firefox, but it took a long time for them to get from "Netscape" in '94 to Firefox in 2015). Seeking out opensource, I followed the Mozilla project and even compiled and ran v0.1 (Phoenix) on my Linux box (was running Red Hat when I compiled.. the below pic is the windoze version) -



I also remember when IE 1.0 came out as M$ bragged about their "free" browser versus Netscape's for-cost one (despite Gates dismissing the internet not long before the release).


Going back earlier though (1969) it was all teletype and killing trees!

[Liberal_in_LA]

41. "dial-up" haven't heard that term recently. I recall unplugging my phone

And plugging into my computer so I could "dialup"

[jmowreader]

42. Oh dude...

Until about three months ago, my parents were on dial-up. I finally got them to go to DSL.

[BumRushDaShow]

43. Back in the late '60s/early-'70s

we had 300 baud "couplers" that had been attached to the side of the school teletypes where you would pick-up the handset of the phone nearby, manually dial the mainframe number, wait for the characteristic "beeps & boops", and then shove the phone handset into the coupler cradle, which was something like this -





Later it was the separate modem boxes that attached to a computer serial port, and after that, the modems were on a card that plugged into a slot inside the computer. Now most are just built into the motherboard.

[Liberal_in_LA]

47. that looks sooooo old school. lol

[BumRushDaShow]

57. LOL

Used to play that old BASIC Star Trek game that *someone* had loaded on the school district's mainframe along with the "math" and "reading" programs (LOL), where in those days of no screen, every move had to print out. So if you fired torpedoes at certain coordinates, it would print out a grid like the below and show the positions of the Enterprise and a Klingon ship, etc...



One of the first commands I learned for that mainframe was "GET -$GAMES".

[bananas]

66. Oh man! I LOVED that Star Trek game!

Hours of fun limping across the galaxy on impulse power after warp engines were damaged!

[bigbrother05]

53. TI Silent 700 with 300 baud acoustic coupler in the early '80s

Dialed into a timeshare mainframe using Fortran to run simulations. Was hot spit when we got a PC knock-off and 1200 baud modem.

Of course, won't discuss keypunch and 24 hour turnaround on programs while in college, still had slide rule instruction and drafting in Engr 101.

[BumRushDaShow]

58. My dad used to be a COBOL programmer

back from the mid-'50s to the mid-70s (trained by the Grace Hopper herself, who later became an Admiral). He would bring his stacks of punch cards home when he was working on flow charts and he and his coworkers had a couple extra sets that when fed through the card reader, would actually play "tunes" (like "Jingle Bells&quot based on the tones of the pins made when popping up and down as the stack ran through and hit holes or didn't hit holes. Got treated to all kinds of "geek-created music" and got to throw write-protect rings for the mag tapes around like frisbees (yes he had the taped-up glasses and pocket protector).

[demtenjeep]

46. we used to have two phone lines

one published and one just for internet

[Ms. Toad]

45. My first two (don't recall which was first - probably Cleveland Freenet)

In the early to mid 1980s:

Cleveland Freenet

and

Quantum Link

I bought a lifetime membership sometime before 1989 for under $200, which converted to a lifetime membership in AOL, when AOL bought it out. Best money I ever spent!

[madinmaryland]

48. Heh! Free republic still has their original 1996 look and functionality.

[HughBeaumont]

50. . . . . that apparently costs in excess of mid-six figures yearly to maintain.

. . . if you asked the bastion of truth Jim Robinson, that is.

[underpants]

54. I smell nerds in this thread

NERDS!!!

[Liberal_in_LA]

64. lol

[vive la commune]

55. I first got online in 1995

with an old IBM-XT with a burnt-in screen (someone evidently didn't use/have a screensaver) that I got for free. It had been an old university office computer. It had a 10 MB hard drive. That's 10 MB, not GB. I used it with a 2400 baud modem and dial-in Unix shell account. I taught myself how to use Unix with the free Unixhelp for Users tutorial. Websites didn't look like that for me because I used Lynx, and it was all terminal/text based because I dialed in. I used Pine for email, tin for usenet, and often talked with others on ytalk. Gopher servers were still pretty common, especially for libraries. Much of the Internet was still outside the WWW. I also visited local BBS'es, which I got on first before I had any Internet access. I remember most of them disappearing within a year or two because of increased Internet access.

[Warren DeMontague]

60. I remember ascii porn.

I'm old.

[nadinbrzezinski]

67. So do I

[frazzled]

61. How about Geocities?

[BumRushDaShow]

62. Or Angelfire

[bobjacksonk2832]

63. It's amazing how quickly technology progresses.

I remember when internet speeds of 1kbs/sec were considered super fast. Ah, the memories...

[Liberal_in_LA]

65. to download a short.audio or video clip I would start download

And go to bed.