The development of the Internet through my eyes – Part 1 (1996-1999)
Posted in Miscellaneous
Internet Explorer 3, sex on Windows
Reminiscing is always fun, I was recently having a laugh to myself how things used to be with the internet (which used to the “Internet” with a capital I – there’s even a Wikipedia article on internet capitalization).
I’m still only 22, but I made my first website when I was just 11 so I feel a bit like a wise old man when it comes to the web.
Things have come a long way over those years – here’s a brief history through my eyes.
1996
My first experience with the net. I had a friend from overseas email address. To use it I attempted to type it into the address bar and expected a view of their house from their computers point of view in Canberra. It may have seemed a stupid assumption (despite the fact I was 10 and from South Auckland where shoes were still something futuristic) but now with Skype it more or less works just like that.
1997
It's time to kick ass and chew bubble gum. And I'm all out of gum.
Got my first computer for a birthday/my parents wanted one anyone gift. Pentium 166 MMX, 32MB of RAM with a nice 14″ CRT screen running Windows 95. Pimping to say the least. We had a 33.6KBPS modem on Dialup that cost NZ$2.50 per hour.
I remember trying to download IE4 when it came out, I was so excited after reading about it in a computer magazine. The download kept failing as the dialup connect for often lose connection. I also was under the impression while downloading you couldn’l look at other sites as it’ll crash the download. I guess that wasn’t far from the truth.
I got a couple of games with the computer including classics such as Duke Nukem 3D and Quake.
None of my friends had the internet at this stage.
1998
This is when I started getting serious about the net. I downloaded and frequently used ICQ (chat client with similar to social network features – i.e. search and find people with similar interests to you). I remember every conversation started with “hey, ASL?”. Took me a search on Altavista to find out what that one meant.
I also made my first online purchase with a borrowed credit card (computer game on CD). I remember claiming it was an accident and I just was curious how it worked and liked filling out the form. I sure was a cunning little shit.
I tried online gaming for the first time (Red Alert). The players in the USA would always ask “cable?” before playing me. It was quite painful playing online with dialup.
Still none of my friends had the net, so I would often print things out I found interesting and take it to school/their houses. I guess this is a primitive form of Digg.
I also remember trying to burn CD’s to the computer (before MP3’s as far as I know) which took up 700MB of a tiny hard drive unless converted into Real Player format.
Building a website
My first web design tool, now probably made by Fisher Price
From there I got really stuck into being a part of the web thanks for MS FrontPage. Like every other 11 year old, I was obsessed with South Park. I built a South Park fan website and hosted it on a free service similar to Geocities (looking back Geocities was pretty impressive for its time).
The website had a tiled background image, stolen content and popup ads thanks to the free hosting service. It also receive hundred of visitors a day (according to Webalizer anyway) most of which came from Altavista search engine (of course this was before Google). I guess at this stage supply of websites to look at was so low that it wasn’t hard to reach a lot of the tiny audience.
I got so keen on making that website I faked being sick for an entire week to build the website.
Looking back I’m quite surprised with how easy it was to build and publish a website. Considering most people still wouldn’t have any idea where to start.
1999
Napster
Friends at school and the school itself more commonly had access to the net, it was getting to the stage where if you didn’t have it you were missing out.
The big highlight of 99 though was of course Napster which completely changed the way I and many others went about finding new music.
I absolutely loved Napster, I loved being able to download songs so easily when I used try to record onto cassette from the radio.
Some of the features were great too – you could chat with the person you were downloading from along with browsing all of their files.
I think Napster was the big thing that got the masses of the youth really into the web. It was a nice piece of bait that enticed us to embrace the internet as a whole. Well, I guess it was more a piece of jailbait.
2000 and beyond?
I’ll leave this blog post at that for now, already close to 1000 words. It’s easy to ramble about fond memories.
When I get around to out (sounds promising…) I’ll continue on with and finish my story of how I saw things progress.
Please post a comment with your own experiences, some of the things are pretty funny looking back I must say.