what's "the old internet" for you?

@jollysea AH-OH

@jollysea
IRC, Usenet mostly

@jollysea there were tildes in urls!? Why?

@jollysea BBSes, Usenet, Compuserve, Prodigy. My first computer was a TI-99/4A, but it never connected to anything. My first connected computer was a 486 laptop in 1995, and it's only been downhill from there

@cubeofcheese universities offered their staff (sometimes students) webspace, and because your home directory is marked with a tilde, it was also in the URL. This text has some interesting reflections on it:
https://art.teleportacia.org/observation/vernacular/tilde.html

@jollysea A little prior to tildes, but not much. I remember when nobody knew what Netcsape was because it was new, not because it was dead. Mozilla was the name of a browser, not a corporation. And your computer screamed at you when you connected it to the internet.

Now we have to do our own screaming.

@jollysea I was here for the pre-www times (gopher, telnet and walled gardens like AOL) but I didn't really ~enjoy~ the internet until the WWW came around.

EDIT: man ... I remember typing an FTP address from a book so that I could download Cello and Mosaic so I could get on WWW for the first time.

@jollysea I'm between no browser and slow loading images. The short lived gopher era.

@jollysea@chaos.social flash and java infesting everything as the predecessor to the JavaScript hell we inhabit today.

@jollysea One of my first favourite cartoon porn sites was hosted on a tilde URL at the university of Uppsala.

Same time, IRC chats, forums, etc. Blogs soon after. Twitter was the beginning of the end, but we didn’t get it at the time. Thought only facebook was the enemy.

@jollysea Depending on how you view it, both none of these and a combination of them, since the options on the poll only describe the English-speaking internet.
In my country we had our own social media, blogs, personal websites, slow-loading images and more. They started dying around the time sites such as Facebook started becoming popular (late 2000s).
MySpace wasn't very known and to this day I haven't seen an iPod in person.

@jollysea
Something between BTX and flashing, moving text

@jollysea@chaos.social Depends when you're asking me but overall the old internet is "cute but not something I want to return to" regardless of when it was.

@jollysea

Tough choice. I voted 1, but in reality somewhere between 1 and 2 for me. There was a bit of WWW but mostly text, very few images. Interactions were mostly mailing lists and usenet. Downloads were ftp. Searches were archie and gopher.

@lethe thanks for your insight! you are right, it's very hard to pick descriptors of an era that are even somewhat universal.

Maybe I should have replaced one option with "local and early social media sites", seems like there was a time with a lot of these (at least I remember them from my time as a teenager)

@jollysea
telnet, gopher, and all those other fun things.

@jollysea <BLINK> Disco disco 🪩 </BLINK>

@jollysea Standing in line at the university computing centre until somebody leaves a workstation.

@jollysea Between 1 and 2. I remember the Well, and BBS.

@jollysea
DARPA/ARPANET & BBSs for all us old greybeards!