My first introduction to the Internet was circa 1998, by way of an Acer Aspire very similar (if not identical, it’s been 25 years and the memory has faded) to this: https://cdn11.bigcommerce.com/s-a1x7hg2jgk/images/stencil/1280x1280/products/22921/129379/acer-aspire-7121-pentium-2-400mhz-256-mb-8.6gb-cd-rw-desktop-com-1.27__54621.1490192556.jpg?c=2
When I first got to spend time on that machine (it was shared with the rest of the family, so time was limited) I was immediately drawn to the open web and how I could (in my own small way) be a part of something very new and incredibly big.
I created a website, several actually, hosted on members.xoom.com (I don’t remember why not geocities, I just remember that there was a reason at the time). I met (and made friends) with people in countries around the world, and I was fascinated that in any direction I turned to look for anything, there seemed to be a niche community fervently dedicated to that special interest and each other.
It felt like one huge counter-culture (containing a million smaller ones) all at once.
That Internet had jarring ads. Google was just starting out, and the computers had a small fraction of the power of a modern phone today.
But it felt free. You could just make a thing, and put it up for the whole world or no-one to find, and it felt like the future was condensing rapidly in front of the whole world. Like everything would accelerate from here and that we were going somewhere incredibly exciting, and then we went somewhere.. else.
I’ve watched documentaries of the 60’s and I inherently get what people were saying in terms of one needing to have been there, then.
I don’t think anyone here needs me to explain what happened next in terms of the open web and open communities, but what I wanted to ask is if it’s just me? Did anyone else even care about the Internet of the 90’s like I did? Was it all in my head? Is it a case of rose-tinted glasses?
More importantly, if it wasn’t just me, can we get it back? Is there a way to recapture the freedom and magic that existed then?
I try to explain to my kids now what the Internet used to be but all they know is YouTube, TikTok and a few other silos. The sense of loss is very real, at least to me, and it makes me sad that my kids will never experience the web and the culture that I grew up with.
My kids made me watch Sex Education on Netflix. My initial reaction was just irritation. There is so much content that uses sex, shock and awe to capture attention. And once achieved, there is no further message delivered. My initial reaction was here we go again with this crap. It also took me straight back to my days as a kid, waiting eagerly with the neighborhood gang for episodes of the Wonder Years. It was innocent. It was beautiful. It was dealing with day to day stuff kids dealt with. At least that's what I thought kids needed to see. And was I annoyed at what they were getting instead.
But as Sex Education progressed, and it pulled me in quick, I was just blown away, by how the writers were handling so many complicated subjects. Not with the usual cynicism (think fight club or the wire) but with humor, imagination and loads of innocence and beauty. It was just so heartwarming. I was looking forward to the new seasons as much as my kids were :) And I cant imagine it being produced in the 90s.
And it showed me, as complicated as the world is getting, there is so much more possible today. And beauty isn't dead. It just looks different.
Your lament is pretty common to adults of that age, and has been going on for hundreds of years. It has nothing to do with the Web, and everything to do with a time which was less complicated for you, a time when you first interacted with a world beyond home/school. A time unfettered by the responsibilities of adult life.
Yes, your experience will be different to your children. You bemoan that they're not writing blogs, I bemoan that my kids were inside (in my youth we didn't have computers, we roamed outside on the mountains.) Our kids will bemoan to their kids (as they spend all their time in VR) of the simple days watching tiktok on a phone.
In truth of course, nothing stops you having a personal site today. Of writing a blog. Of building community around a shared interest. But I bet you don't, because in truth that's not what you are really missing.
Rest assured though. You don't need to be sad. Your kids will find their own experiences, they'll form their own memories, ultimately they'll have their own nostalgia- and when they do in 20 years or so, smile gracefully.
You can get hosting almost anywhere for a few $ per month, free in a few places, and put whatever you want there, if it's legal, and suitable for polite company. Get a hosting plan, set up some FTP folders for your kids to upload things into, and away you go. You can edit HTML files in notepad++ if you want.
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20080621173441/http://killsave.o...
People used to make websites and post on BBS/forums because they enjoyed it, and they didn't expect anything back. But as the Internet became more mainstream, the corporates started to wipe out many of the small sites - because they could make money from their views and that data.
And it's not just the Internet - think about how much gaming has changes with microtransactions, lootboxes and pay2win compared to how it used to be. Or how much YouTube has changed since people were trying to make money and a career out of it, rather than just making cool content. Or how much cryptocurrencies changed when they shifted from being largely supported by people who really believed in them as the future, rather than day-traders trying to get rich.
> But it felt free. You could just make a thing, and put it up for the whole world or no-one to find, and it felt like the future was condensing rapidly in front of the whole world. Like everything would accelerate from here and that we were going somewhere incredibly exciting, and then we went somewhere.. else.
Nothing is stopping you creating your own website today and sticking it on the Internet - a domain and hosting is dirt cheap. And there are still plenty of sites and communities out there - you just have to go and look for them.
The mainstream has moved on and will never come back - but that doesn't mean that everyone has to follow it.
No you're not alone. No, it had nothing to do with age (the most patronizing retort tbh).
No it's not coming back, something else will have a reminscient feel of the freedom, exploration, hype and Witness to something realy exciting that computing did at the start. This event won't happen for quite a while.
We got to experience. The only options you have is to capture your experience in some media, books, film, spoken tradition, ect. Or keep the fond memories of the golden age in your mind, revisiting them to precent them from fading.
All the old haunts are gone and empty now, discarded like broken down robots on the scrap heap. All the promises were lies, tech has it's own purposes and it's lip service to our dreams is the same old lie from middle management.
Most people gave up on their forums and communities because they can't monetize effectively, as google favors mobile, large advertisers, and their own content (youtube). Visa will make up arbitrary rules about what content is allowed and in any case microtransactions is an unsolved problem. Things like Patreon make up even more rules and don't help, it soon becomes a festival of rent-seekers.
If you want to see people putting up things on the open web, start by fixing those
The only way the Web gets better is by re-distributing all of that to smaller players, undoing the acquisitions that made all of that possible. The only way that happens is if you continue to vote for politicians with the fortitude to use anti-trust laws to target Google.
Want a better web, vote for it.
Sure, it was nascent and full of promise. But that's mostly what it was - promise. Yes, there were all these offbeat websites you could find in the Yahoo directory, but that was not much different to aimlessly scrolling (or, fine, clicking on HN stories).
When I was studying CS one didn't have a hope in hell of building anything of substance independently, because Every.Single.Little.Thing had to be built from scratch - in C or C++ at best. And you'd better have enjoyed those late nights at the lab, it's not like you had anywhere to turn to at 1am when your code is buggy...
The ability to just build is, I feel, far more democratized today - and there's still a long way to go. So to me, the web is still very new, and still full of promise.
The Internet was also incredibly elitist back then. In 1998 only 17% of people in the developed world had access to it. Globally, that number was 3%...You could meet anyone in the world! So long as they were rich. Today these corresponding numbers are 90% and 63% - I think it's better that way. Certainly, that has been the promise, hasn't it?
And walled gardens? AOL wanted to own the Internet point blank... I think if anything, our generation was dumb the way all people are dumb in the face of something new. I think our kids would look back at the time we wasted on FB and Twitter and think - "You morons. You spent hours scrolling reading random people's posts? Were you THAT bored?"
Besides, we ARE, right now, part of something very new and incredibly big. Anyone can play with transformer models, with about the same relative ease and accessibility as you could with the Internet 25 years ago. (Which is to say - as a user, easy enough. As a builder, requiring a healthy dose of determination.)
I think of technology as, like, a tidal force, that just sweeps everyone. It does good and bad. It creates and destroys. Pining for any moment in time is like pinpointing a moment in a stochastic process...it was only ever just a moment in flux.