No Stupid Questions

Here ya go.

P.S. it's still alive go visit it! https://www.webtender.com/

P.P.S. I know you didn't mean what did a website look like but I love sharing it and it's not entirely wrong to connect it to your question since it is still a functional site that really hasn't changed much. Enjoy responsibly. And feel free to share your favourite drink recipe.

P.P.P.S the rest of the internet had just as much clutter as today's obnoxious ads, they were just a lot more annoying in some ways. Also more colourful. Ahh Geocities

First got AOL in maybe 1995/1996. That was back during the days of dial up and 1 phone line per house. Where you could be in online chats, then get knocked off because someone called your house. Finding your way into Warez/Server/Zeraw rooms run by AOL proggies like Fate-X and getting the first exposure to piracy. That's how I first learned VB programmingz Photoshop with EyeCandy, and Bryce 3D in Jr High. It's also my PC got crazy viruses. This had to be downloaded in from 10+ volumes via WinRAR. The game changer was when AOL finally added download resume so if you got knocked offline by a phone call when the download was at 90% you could simply resume it instead of having to restart. And you could queue email downloads, so you could have 20+ email queued and let it download overnight.

The shit storm hit one summer when AOL user base increased faster than they could expand and it was nothing but busy signals trying to connect. They eventually caught up but it was baaad.

Then came the era of "free" dialup internet services where it was a matter of having some ad bars run whole connected...but there were ways around that. Then About 2 year later cable internet started becoming common.

It came on a CD-ROM, and they were everywhere.

Children throwing the internet like shuriken across fields, hanging them from trees as decorations, occasionally actually putting them in a PC for 2 free hours!

The good internet still exists, and is pretty damn good even now. The problem is social media and a handful of bad-but-popular sites.

I tell people this every so often, but in terms of percentage of the world population, there are far more people on the good internet than there were back then. The problem is, with the advent of smartphones, social media use exploded, and Facebook and Twitter became gigantic, far exceeding the size of the good web. Your aunts and uncles with little net savvy and a bucket of bad opinions swamped Facebook, and never really changed. The popular tech media, which tends to follow the biggest crowds to the exclusion of all else, began treating Facebook as if it were THE internet. It's the tyranny of crowds.

Once it became evident that you could be successful by doing it, everyone started chasing the favor of those largely clueless users. Google began to prioritize a handful of websites like Reddit, Stack Exchange, Wikipedia and their own Youtube, and largely gave up the fight against SEO abusers like Fandom. Sites that had been considered internet utilities decided to cash in.

There are still fun web games being made, if you know where to look for them (some places to look: Vole.wtf, Neal.fun, Ferry Halim's long-running Orisinal and hey Newgrounds is still around). There are great free web hosts still, like Neocities and Nekoweb. (Although note, I just learned that Angelfire shut down in April.) A version of the old good Google still exists through the Web search option, a.k.a. udm14, but now there's multiple other search engines that aren't so bad. There is the Fediverse, of course. And if you look around you might find out about these awesome things called tildes, free Linux machines you can apply for a shell account on just to mess around, often with internal chat, bulletin boards, web space, community games and even weirder things like Gopher and Gemini (not Google Gemini) sites.

All these things exist. You just gotta know where to find them, amidst all the suck out there. They CAN be hard to find, but that's one reason why I linked to some of them above. Seek out sources of links! Metafilter, the venerable community weblog, is one of them. A few other places to look: Andy Baio's Waxy, Rusty Foster's Today In Tabs and even Mozilla's own Ten Tabs. You can also find a good RSS reader to keep up with many websites at once.

It takes work to find things now, it is true, it takes the realization that you can't be passive about finding the good things out there. But, truly, it's always been like that. The good days of Google were an aberration. The natural order of the internet is, the great stuff has never been, and will never be mainstream.

The environment was more organically natural. Real people without corporate filters doing what they wanted, what interested them. More weird products, websites, small service doohickies that have long since been abandoned as tech became corporate and monolithic

“This page is designed for 800x600 monitors, sign my guestbook.”

Instead of like a handful of big corporate run websites, everyone had a personal one. Businesses didn't just make a Facebook page; they had their own .com domain. You could very easily find stuff that you would only be able to find on the dark web now; though this is sometimes a good thing, like when it comes to accidentally coming across CP. Not very likely today as it was back in the Wild West of the 'net.

The internet before y2k was nuts. There were no safeguards for anything. Some of my favorites was just the weird game rumors and fake cheats at the time. Since there was no way to really verify stuff. Wild claims of going to professor bills backyard for pikablu or getting into the side grass area of pallet town to catch the starters.

Y2K was not the problem. Eternal September is. Before that, the Internet was a better place. Much better.

Well, I guess there was 1 PC for the whole family. Analogue modems would scream as they talked over wires. A lot. If you picked up a phone in the house, you would hear the scream of not just the modem, but the person using the internet to put it down.

A lot of people had their own homepages hosted on Geocities or Angelfire - which were like free-form expressions of your facebook profile. Utterly abusing HTML and GIFs.

And to communicate with your friends, you used IRC, MSN Messenger, ICQ or AIM. All of them, as some friends wouldn't be on one or the other.

You searched for information using Alta Vista, Web Crawler, Yahoo!, Lycos or Ask Jeeves.

Your email address usually ended in @hotmail.com or @yahoo.com (and regional variations, like .de or .co.uk, etc.), BUT, you also had an email address from your ISP (so aol.com, freeserve.co.uk, free.fr, etc.) were really common.

Listening to music was different. You would search for MP3s (people would 'rip' songs from CDs into MP3 format and upload them) using free services like Napster (the OG), then WinMX, Limewire, eDonkey. and you would listen to them using an audio player like WInAmp (on the family PC). MP3 players (like the iPod or Zune) were just starting out I think, so you tended to get MP3s and then burn them to a CD so you could listen to them in your car, or in your portable CD player, or even your HiFi.

Streaming video wasn't really a thing, as modems are too slow, but, you could download movies (it just took FOREVER) and they would almost always be the worst cam quality you could imagine and compressed as much as possible.

Using Linux/Unix was really a huge pain as most of the modems were actually Winmodems so none of the manufacturers would provide binaries or modules for anything other than Windows, so they were almost always reverse engineered - and it was just a pain.

I could probably ramble on for longer, but this feels like a good place to stop and say "get off my lawn".

Man, it was glorious.

Remember when it was generally accepted that an advert was a small banner at the top of your phpnuke forum, while you listened to Iron Maiden in musicmatch jukebox, while hanging on msn messenger and talked about your geocities website.

The Internet was a place.

Compared to now, you had to go somewhere physical to be on the Internet. That changed the relationship that people had with the Internet, you went there to do something rather than have it entertain you when bored. It also meant you weren't always available to being messaged.

There were also a lot less videos online due to bandwidth. Animation was a far bigger deal since the bandwidth needed to show an animation was significantly less than the bandwidth needed to show even SD video.

Same as post Y2K, but with more stressed out IT and programming staff.

Y2K didn’t happen, because of massive coordinated efforts to avoid it. Nothing changed as a result of y2k.

The dot com bubble burst and a few years later web2.0 happened. Those events were much bigger.

Internet was mostly used for my people to find each other and do nerd shit. The rest were normies being trolls or casual people that just kind of stumbled through it. Corporations had websites but they were mostly just a one page description of the company and not really useful. Social media was basically chat rooms and message forums. Ads were mostly banners and maybe a few pop ups, sometimes a website would have so many pop ups that your computer would lock up. Search engines would bring up the wildest results. It was basically free and open and mostly unregulated, until Metallica attacked P2P (Napster) sharing and that's about the time it started to fall apart and the glory days ended.

The Internet was 95% shit posting.

All the gifs and jpegs were in sepia.

Back then internet servers were getting a bit of flack from environmentalists for the destruction of cuttlefish populations.

But napster kept the masses placated so there was never a revolution.

You are visitor number 0000000000000027

Biggest change was there use to be more internet than web.