what's "the old internet" for you?

@jollysea I still remember chatting in bitnet (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BITNET not the language model!)

@jollysea @joepie91 ii2 ! You could (gasp) upload photos !

@jollysea @patterfloof I could really gopher this poll...

@jollysea personal websites everywhere, all individually handmade

@jollysea
The old Internet¹ is when people knew there are other protocols than HTTP(S), when the Internet was one way to access Usenet, when software was provided by anonymous ftp, …

And then Angela Bennett (aka Sandra Bullock) ordered the first pizza online…

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¹the Internet is a network of computers based on IP that contains the machine internet.net. This definition is from the IPv4 only times. We still have problems with IPv6.

@Lapizistik seems like shortly after option 1.

WWW stands for "world wide web" and describes an "information system that enables content sharing over the Internet using a graphical user interface. It facilitates access to documents and other web resources according to specific rules of the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP)."

@jollysea

I know the web from before Tim Berners-Lee created http (remember gopher?

But even when http was there for some years different services still used different hand-crafted protocols – until corporate firewalls started blocking everything besides http(s) and maybe ssh (and sometimes imap(s)) and suddenly all kinds of services were tunneled over https (ok, and REST was invented).

But I am kinda off from your question as you asked from an end user perspective (where most people won't even know about what's going on under the hood). So sorry for derailing

@jollysea@chaos.social You could find stuff on it. ​​

@jollysea #IRC, #RSS, #HTML and no CSS bloat or #JS #malware!

https://disable-javascript.org

#DisableJavaScript #JavaScript

@jollysea

My first #Internet access was via Goverent gateway.
You had to be sub-contracting at the least.
It was expensive (Like 20c per minute?)

I could check my bills, but they are on a MICROFISHE!!!!

@jollysea that'd be, in order:

• Arpanet/Early Internet
• Web 1.0
• Early Web 2.0
• Late Web 2.0

Old Internet is whatever that came before the current one and you remember was better, I guess

@jollysea Web site were usable w/o adblocker. No tracking.

and at least: No Nazis.

@n_dimension wow you have your old bills on microfiche? please tell me more about that! (unironically, I only know microfiche from movies and TV!)

@Lapizistik tbh I'm loving all the replies, people telling me about times I only know from stories (I knew that gopher existed but never used it, I experienced telnet once!) to forums, early social media etc. It's all fascinating

@jollysea
Tales from these times are great, and one thing is: it is tales from a time where people were trying to figure out how to do things best without any direct commercial interests – there simply was no one online trying to sell something.

@quasiabsolut @jollysea same! Did you click 2 or 3?

@HolgerMBGL

@jollysea

Was? It still is (and I know people still actively playing – and their daughter also started to play).

I never started playing a mud when I was a student as I saw too many dropping out of university without graduating because they spent all there time in the mud (but I was on irc and played (and still play) nethack)

@jollysea Mainly searching results were not that filtered. I explored content from all countries of the world and sometimes had a hard time translating. But nowadays I get what I know from the same two or three countries.

@jollysea the old internet is when DNS was this newfangled thing that had just been introduced to replace the host files.