what's "the old internet" for you?

@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!

@jollysea I think WWW existed, but we were on BBSs (Bulletin Board Systems) that had email networks.

IE5.5 & IE6

@jollysea

@jollysea while I was around for the “no www” version and used gopher a lot, still think of the “tildes” one as the old internet.

@jollysea @grindcrank I came in when the O'Reilly book "The Whole Internet, User's Guide and Catalogue" just had its 2nd edition "now with WWW".

@jollysea @cubeofcheese My Uni had one computer in the library, where everyone went to check their email. Which read like a wifi passkey.

@jollysea downloading fine art images from
gopher. Blew my mind. Also asking questions on Usenet and getting answers from kernel (SunOs/NetBSD) devs in a matter of hours.

@jollysea
Club Penguin and games on the LEGO website...?

@jollysea websites with funny flash games (Im not old enough to have experienced the time before)

@jollysea Modems, mailboxes, FIDOnet

@jollysea
Dial up BBS with an acoustic coupler.

@jollysea I swear this is more accurate than just saying 'Xennial, millenial, etc.

(Personally I'm a geocities/angelfire, younger than the usenets but older than the myspaces.)