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lets talk about the pre-historic internet! for me, this would be around 1989 to 1998, 1999 would be an in between and 2000s well, I was around for the 2000s so its not that interesting. tbe pre-historic internet is very fascinating to me because there is almost no photos, footage or archives of it and most of the website from this time have been closed for years! I was also not a part of it, so all I can rely on to know what it was like is the little information I can find now. if any of you were internet users at this time, please tell me your stories, as I am very interested! I guess I'll start the discussion by a little history I could find, which is the history of the first ever public internet provider. they are a company that established in Brookline on 1989 called "the world". the first guy to log on was some random guy from australia, but that's not important. what is important is that the internet actually existed long before this but it was a secret government service that was used for military bases and universities to talk to each other through their computers, and it was actually illegal for the public to use it. what "the world" was doing was illegal and the government attempted to shut them down many times, but eventually they gave up and let them provide the internet to the public as "an experiment". fun fact, "the world" is actually still a running company and people actually still use it! but... they provide dial up internet... I don't know how or why there are still people using that, but whatever.

That sounds very interesting, specially because the world started as a clandestine operation, it should be a more well know story because it just fits the narratives people wants to hear. The history of the internet is a sad topic because I feel it isn't told as it should be and even worse people is letting it fade away, we need a history to write it from the point of view of the users, what was it like to be part of a community and the drama that came from it, so like ED but serious

>>7020 yeah, this should get researched more, though it does make me wonder if the government would allow it. maybe the old internet isn't being researched because people have attempted to do it but were stopped? who knows. something else I recently learned that is interesting is that, supposedly, before the internet was public, the few websites that existed were for scientists. those websites are long gone now, so who knows what top secret info could've gotten posted there...

>>7024 The old internet was probably too small and it's content wasn't deem to important by its users. I imagine those old webpages were no different from a scientific journal of the era or the university's own newsbulletin

"the world" HEY IS THAT A MOTHERFUCKING JOJOKE? ZA WARUDO

Yes, this thread is perfect! I recently became interested in this topic as well! I was doing some digging up on ancient websites, and I found out of an old school web browser chatroom called Bianca.com Apparently, this soykaf was a big deal back then, yet I can find 0 screenshots of what it looked like and barely any info of it, besides some (now dead as well) news sites from the 90s which talked about its closing down in 2002, and a wikipedia article. Bianca was infamous for free speech (which I'm guessing it meant there was a lot of racism, pedophilia, ect.) and sex talk (people talked about sex... and hooking up...). It was also one of the first places where trolling (or internet vandalism as it was apparently called back then) occurred. I'm interested in learning more about this website. I found recently this sister website which is still up called bianca.org. If any of you know more about this website, please tell me!

I have heard tidbits from people on IRCs about the early internet: >having to use phonebook style references to connect to other computers >hackers running websites/blogs off gov servers (because physical access to before security caught up with it) >hacking free HBO/satellite TV. When I was a kid, I remember there being free 15day AOL trial CDs that you could get. Stuff earlier than that I know virtually nothing about. There was a good documentary on the internet by werner herzog (the guy who made the documentary about antarctica with the lonely suicidal penguin that became a meme) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5275828/ In some ways, I see the early internet as a sort of dark age/information abyss that signals what is to come... All that data that existed in the wired is no longer with us simply because the hardware is too outdated or the information degraded. Unlike written text or books that can last hundreds or thousands of years, there is an extensive history of an era that has lost a good portion of its information in only 50 years. Philosophers have proposed a dark age in which facebook photo albums and cloud storage gets dumped and digitized records or records that were never in printed form just vanish from the face of the earth in an instant with no chance of recovery of reconstruction. Just an observation I have made can be illustrated in this most wondrous tapestry that I have woven with the paint tool courtesy of some programmer somewhere.

>>10642 have you tried the internet wayback machine? sometimes old websites are archived that are of interest example being the heavens gate people. based purely on what you said aint clickin dat soykaf tho... url to search at is https://archive.org/web/web.php

The first time I got online was in 1996 or 97 i think, at a relatives house, and I had a blast! Our city of 1 Million people then got the first internet cafe in 1997 or 98. I visited it 1-2 times a week and browsed for two to three hours or so, usually researching japanese game releases as I already imported them, but any info about them was super rare. Sony had a lovely database with all their PSX games, cover scans and some info. I'd write all of this down into an excel sheet so I could look at it again later. We got internet at home than in late '98. Of course it was AOL. I remember "late 98" so well because one of the first things I did was watching my first live video stream in november '98 when the Dreamcast was released in japan, it was a press conference or something. Of course it was a thumbnail sized video with hardcore compression, but damn was that cool :-). After some months I managed to rack up a phone bill of several hundred dollars per month and we got a flatrate that was still expensive but much cheaper. I also remember that I got derezzed from AOL twice because I used a Punter, a tool that could DDoS people out of the AOL Chat among other things. Of course it was a super soykafty script kiddy tool, but it worked. They called my dad and I had to promise to not do it again lol. Well anyway, the internet was much more fun imho. Corporate bullsoykaf, social networks and all this soykaf just didn't exist. If you want to make something you had to learn HTML and put it somewhere. That weeded out all the idiots I guess :-).

>>10646 I remember those days, that reminded me of my friend who used to look for obscure game guides and kept physical binders of the printouts so he could reference them all the time. I used to call him when I could not figure something out... that was a different time, when games based on movies were a thing, and you had the "dial for hints" phone lines for games that charged something like 5 dollars per hint lol. Although not internet specific, I remember watching my dad set up a LAN network, and was fascinated at how people could play computer games from different computers all in the same game world. Then I discovered a few multiplayer games, and kid me was somehow fascinated at people using obscenities openly towards one another.

First some definitions as the common ones are not all that accurate and are simplified to match the needs of the telecom monopolies. internet -- connecting multiple networks together Internet (or the Internet) -- the global network of internetworked networks POP (Point of Presence) -- A site that allows multiple users to connect their networks ISP - A site that provides end-point connections -- If they have more than one upstream routable upstream provider they are also POP. The primary protocols of early packet switching networks was telnet, and ftp. (not necessarily as specified in the RFCs as it wans't all that standardized). Their was also email but email was primarily implemented by store-and-forward networking. If you have ever wondered why senmail's config files are so insanely complicated it's because it was designed to be able send mail on nearly all the early networks. The Internet was always public, it just wasn't well known and was very expensive if their was no local POPs. The primary networks that made up the early Internet in the US where: ARPA Net MilNet Telenet Tymenet UUNET There where more smaller ones, and many international ones too. All but the first two could be used by anyone with a modem and payment. And when ARPA Net became NSF Net it was publicly too. This was all long before Bill Clinton sold off tax payer funded free and public servers to Network Solutions and claimed he was opening up the Internet to the public. And before http/html was invented at CERN. As most early Internet traffic was transient there really isn't anything to preserve. You can still experience quite a bit of how it was just by using telnet to what's being run now. Most of the stuff that was ftpable can still be found in various archives and most of it at archive.org. You can read the vast majority of old usenet posts too. The big difference between now and back then was that most sites where non-commercial and local. If you wanted to run a mud, you just ran it on your own machine. If you wanted to join usenet you ran it yourself, and it wasn't hard to find a free upstream link. Joining irc was a little more difficult as you had to get special permission to join (except a server in Berkeley named eris, but the mess that made got the Berkeley server kicked out and created Eris Free Net) Later on we got services gopher which created network of paths to files, and the first popular search engine Veronica. gopher is smaller now than it used but is still around, and much more feasible to run on a home server. Even Veronica has been resurrected. Archie was another of the old search tools, I'm not sure if it was Veronica or Archie that was first, but the naming scheme is obvious. Archie was for indexing public ftp sites. Yes a lot of old websites have vanished, a lot of gophers, a lot of muds, a lot of telnet services, but you can still use the old internet, and even better it's a lot more affordable to run the stuff yourself with a VPS, or a VPN that won't block incoming connections. The biggest problem with the older stuff is the same as it used to be -- where is this neat thing? -- as you can't google much of it. The September that never ended apparently will end because normal people can't figure out that google on a browser are not everything. Keeping the old internet alive is simply a matter of using it. Project Gutenberg has the 1987 Hitchhikers Guide to the Internet http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/39

>>10645 Oh soykaf it worked! I don't know why I didn't think about using that place sooner. Browsing through this stuff is so trippy to me. It's like having a lucid dream. You can only see things that you've seen before, so if you tried to revisit a memory, only the parts you remember will be available and everything else would be incomplete. That's what it feels like to browse through these archives. You get a vague idea of what it was like but not a full picture.

Not really prehistoric but i found it funny https://gendou.com/crap/hentai.php

So I havent read any stories yet, but thought I'd post one of my own. I was around when the internet kinda went "Mainstream" in my neck of the woods (Oklahoma.) I remember the first thing I ever looked for on the internet. So I guess I'll start there, and kinds give you some insights to what it was like. My cousin and I used to look guides up on gamefaqs in 1998. Mostly for final fantasy 2 and 3 for super nintendo. We would spend a day running everyone out of printer ink printing them out. We printed them out and put them in binders because we didnt have small portable screens and wanted the guide with us. These guides were HUGE even back then. It was crazy printing out pages and putting it in binders looking back but at the time just seemed like the thing to do. Also used search engines like Lycos and Hotbot. ISP's back then would set your homepage to their website and usually their website was full of links to all kinds of different things including different search engines. I used hotbot personally until google bought them and hotbot was a really good search engine. First naked pictures of someone I looked up was of Jenny Mcarthy. Sometime in 1999 my brother, sister and I found mplayer.com (which now redirects to ign) but back then it was a chat site where you could hook up a microphone and talk to people over the net. I remember basically foaming at the mouth running to Walmart and picking up a desktop mic. Yes voice over dial up lol. It wasnt that bad either. I remember rooms at this place which we pretty much stayed in called "fight rooms" where you just verbally abused each other. fuarrrk that was awesome. My sister and I were always pissing the people off that started the room and would get kicked out. Good memories. Call waiting was your mortal enemy back then. Cause it would kick you off the net, and browsers had built in support for caller ID when that got fixed to tell you who was calling you. So did most satellite services, and it would pop up on your tv because you had to have a phone line hooked to your receiver. Picking up the phone while someone was online was a no no. Couple times of that soykaf happening and you learned to look if anyone was in the "computer room" before you did that. You would pick it up and hear the modem sounding off. And directly after that someone would yell "IM ON THE INTERNET." God I'm old.

Also Napster. Everyone at the time when you were still able to download songs was pissed at Metallica making a big deal about people stealing their music on Napster. I'm retrospect they were probably right but we didnt like Metallica much for bitching. Flash was just becoming a thing and everyone was making flash cartoons. One of them was making fun of Metallica and it was really funny. It was called "Napster bad" I'm sure you could still find it somewhere. It would be fun to look up and see now so many years later.

>>10701 I found "Napster Bad" on swfchan, but it was soykaf, so here's another Flash thing of a similar vintage which you cannot find anywhere else any more. http://eye.swfchan.com/flash.asp?id=19544&n=jada.swf

I remember this science site we used all the time in elementary school. Forgot the name of it, but the style of the site and especially the graphics it used stuck out in my mind. Wasn't tacky or anything, just distinctive: white background, blue text, and I'm pretty sure the fonts on the graphics were something on a Mac. I haven't seen any remains of it besides a couple files on those "90s website graphics" blogs on Tumblr and such. Hell, I don't even remember what the site was called, but something tells me it started with an E. >>10700 >ISP's back then would set your homepage to their website and usually their website was full of links to all kinds of different things including different search engines. I actually committed to memory a URL for such a page back then, it had search boxes for all the major engines at the time. Made browsing the web so much easier until Google came along.

>>10703 Lol, I did too for the longest. That page is gone now but long after I'd moved on to bigger and better ISPs I still went back to that first ISPs website just for the links. Well played!!