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The early days of the internet were something else. Social media, video streaming, and algorithms were concepts that didn't exist for everyday folks surfing the web.
Instead, everyone simply enjoyed connecting with the world and exploring it like a fascinating part of town they had never visited. It was an age of innocence, if you can call it that.
If you lived through those years, these screenshots will instantly throw you back. Youngsters, this is what life was like during much simpler times on the interwebs.
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One of the early internet's breakthroughs was AOL dial-up. Once it went mainstream in the early 1990s, normal folks were suddenly introduced to a fascinating new concept: the World Wide Web.
University of Virginia Data Science professor Mar Hicks credits AOL with connecting people to the world.
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“(AOL) allowed ordinary and not overly tech-savvy people to access the internet in a straightforward and relatively easy way,” Hicks said. “(It) made the internet more well-known and more approachable to many folks who had maybe never heard of it before or only had a vague understanding of what it was.”
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Well, we had to get through dial-up and wait to be connected, and pages loaded agonizingly slow! Apparently “millions” still didn’t give up on it.
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Speaking of dial-up internet, those who lived through those days remember the iconic sound they heard whenever they connected to the web. Hicks describes it as “robotic screaming” that signals a “hailing procedure between two machines that were trying to communicate.”
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As Hicks explains, the initial screeches during the dial-up process signify a “handshake” between your computer’s modem and the network it is trying to access. It also includes the connection type and speed.
“The latter sounds represented the process of negotiating and testing the data connection,” she said.
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Broadband internet was another breakthrough in digital technology when its early versions emerged in the late 1990s. In a 2002 report by the Pew Research Center, experts viewed this technology as the “largest driver of the frequency of people logging on daily.”
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Hicks also attributes the spike in internet usage to broadband technology, which also eventually led to the downfall of AOL dial-up.
“The internet is not so much a place anymore as it is a utility, the same way electricity and water in our homes are,” she said. “The end of AOL dial-up definitely represents the end of an era, although it’s an era that I’d argue has been in the rear-view mirror for many people for quite some time now.”
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First time I used the internet, at the local library. I looked up something, a bunch of links came up, and I didn't know I could just click on the link I thought I had to type it all out to get to the site I wanted. So that's what I did. LOL. So yeah basic help like this was very useful in the early days, it was all new for most people.
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Slowly. A VGA image 640 x 480 16-colours took appreciable time to download, five to ten seconds, but it was so much better than EGA. 800 x 600 was top quality, when it didn't crash part way through. 1024 x 768 had only about a 10% chance of arriving.
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