I often wish the Web still worked the way it did around Y2K. I enjoy my Youtube, Facebook, Ebay etc., and wouldn't have them gone, but I also wouldn't miss today's banners, pop-ups, pop-unders, trojans, video ads and all the other crap grinding even a decent system to a crawl.
At least in the days of dial-up there seemed far less clog for your content. It was there but tamed - as far as I was concerned.
So what do we think? Is this just nostalgia for even the Internet now? Or am I forgetting a whole host of other problems which put top-heavy websites in the shade?
Having been using the internet since it started I think the net is better these days. There is more variety and websites look better than they did. Broadband was a big step in the right direction for downloading files etc -Much better than the 56 and 128k modems that I used to have. Look at the quality of the remixes appearing today. Much higher than 10 years ago - now converted to 192k. Package deals for accessing the net are a lot easier with plug and play devices cutting out the hard work for the masses.
Of course its all rose tinted specs for yesteryear and there are big problems with the net now. Not much is free anymore you have to sign up for something. Remember MAME roms they were everywhere free to download. You've got to be more careful about what details you put on the net these days too - and what ever happened to the FAQ page that we used to see on so many sites? Some are still there but are being phased out. I miss also the stop button you had - it solved a lot of crash issues on the old internet browsers when something being downloaded was locking the system.
So what is the future? I think the internet will end up being licensed like your TV in the UK. The government will want a tax on it where you have to pay £150 -200 a year. It won't be tax free forever mark my words.
Though it's not just the ads. Flash-driven pages and other needless whoppers can be a real millstone. I don't want to keep upgrading just to keep those happy. I'm usually glad when my PC says Flash has crashed on load. All the quicker to then load what I want to see, though you do need the Flash for as much good stuff.
And Italy had a go at trying to load down bloggers with so much tax and regulation that it wouldn't have been worth saying anything to anyone, ever. Mussolini would have loved it: http://gatesofvienna.blogspot.co.uk/200 ... ernet.html
Though if I do make a prediction, I'd say some kind of battle between governments and ISPs may result in some kind of censorship before long and many court battles: http://www.mozilla.org/sopa/
Back when we were on 56k modems, the line maxed out with just a few animated GIFs.
Now you have DSL and the lot - which allows for fat flashanims. Capacity will be used and filled. Always.
It was no fun to download the whole ID software's ftp server with a 56k, but then i can't decently play onlinegames with my shitty DSL right now.
There were ads right from the beginning but back then marketing dupes didn't think they own the internet like they do today.
Oh, and there were less people on the net. Today, there are tons of them on faecesbook alone.
Talk about censorship of the internet is not new, it's been around right from the start to "protect" people.
I think the whole thing with the north african revolutions shaked up the old farts and now they really want to crack down on information flow.
I don't suppose there was anything to censor in the old days. Basic looking back, it was still fairyland for any young '90s user. These days it's just the plain old over-abused Web.
I'm amazed Lycos still works. At school and college it ran with Netscape and I'm glad I missed most of dial-up's bottlenecking that way. I'm glad I didn't even want a PC of my own until they could make CDs, as by then Plug And Play and Windows 95b or 98 took the hell out of setting them up.
Yup, there's still a net benefit running today's Web with today's PCs. But even so, I doubt we'll get that 'Christmas morning' magic back nor be able to truly stay on top of the resources it demands.
Oh, there was porn and extremistic stuff right from the start and measures to fight it on the underbelly of the Internet. Many of that stuff had no DNS entries, just IPs.
So "normal" people usually didn't had access anyway.
A little more on our masters' meddling with the Web. Punishing death threats is good but we've already laws against that without a new attempt at Internet censorship for speaking out or being loudmouths. Those idiots being rude about football players on Twitter were jailed, which itself was an over-reaction.
But get those easy victories on the statute books and it'll be normal people next.
Getting death threats and nasty malicious forms of emails needs to be addressed. (pardon the pun) After all what would you do if you woke up one morning to collect your mail on the mat that the postman had delivered and discovered a letter with the same content.
However action over certain forms of cyberbulling need to be culled. Freedom of speech is what the net is all about and if laws are going to be enforced by Big Brother then many peoples views on topics could be construed trolling when in fact they were just giving their opinion. For example, if someone didn't like a remix on RKO and continuously gave a bad rating and a negative comment for every track the artist released. So give me nice comments and outstanding ratings from now on or you could be jailed!!
Back when we were on 56k modems, the line maxed out with just a few animated GIFs.
I hated waiting for the kind of bits to load which just whizz in now. Still, boffins have managed to code things exponentially more draining to exercise the muscles of today's PCs.
It feels peculiar to look back on the kind of thing I still consider new and revolutionary. Shouldn't feel it's almost always been here but it starts to. (And it would with lucky kids taking for granted that school homework takes minutes to research now. The hardest bit's now copying it down without looking pasted from Wikipedia.)
And so to close...
No Web in the '80s. But we never felt deprived though, especially as kids when only blocky games and flickery low-res clips were enough to dazzle.
I 1st got online thanks to the Sega Dreamcast.My 1st flat, 1st monster phone bill to boot and since then gone through numerous PC's (and suffered numerous Trojans, keyloggers etc), then went online gaming with PS3/360, browsed web via tablets etc etc.
Speeds are obviousily far greater, but i'm sick of firmware updates, day 1 patches, fair usage policies, paying to game online, B.T spending truck loads on sport, so line rental charges going up from start of 2014 and them not upgrading rural telephone exchanges.I live 500 ft from my exchance, yet stuck with an upto 8 Meg line.Fiber optic? fat chance say B.T
It's getting it backwards to feel the need to blame the exchange. With great technology comes great responsibility - which manufacturers abuse by wasting the powers they can't think what to do with.
So one good reason I'm a retro gamer is that nobody is able to limit my Atari or Commodore experiences in any way. I don't want any retro games unplayable because their online umbilicals were cut the year before.
Though if Sony or Microsoft kill the secondhand market, bedroom hobbyists will only resurrect it with hacks and cracks which limit this kind of crap.
...Though such wickednesses have now been reversed, for future retro fun. Hooray for the me of 2020. But given the uproar, I honestly believe people care more about that than restrictions of the freedoms which properly matter.
c64 format 1995 - that takes me back..The internet was just taking off then too and most people didn't even have it. One thing that has changed these days is it's harder to get your music creations heard as they get swallowed up in the tail end... Way back before even myspace first started I put some of my music on the net using simple HTML language that I got from a book in the library and I even got quite a following in downloads and early internet radio shows. Then I deleted my page and rebooted on myspace about 3 years ago and didn't get hardly any hits - seems every man and his dog is making music these days and posting it on the net. Not a bad thing it just points how few people were actually posting their creations on the net about 15 years ago..
If it wasn't for RKO and Amiga remix I'd doubt whether I'd have bothered making music at all these days...
Takes me back too, funnily. I'd had it shown me at school and was vaguely interested but 1995 was when I first got my teeth into the Web, at college. That was when it first got good anyway, with easy browsers and just enough stuff to look at. I used Netscape Navigator and (I think) Lycos and spent my time downloading Commodore pokes, while my mate was obsessed with Monty Python. Aaaah, how it expanded our horizons (by giving us lots more of what we always looked at anyway).
I still have the screeds of paper churned out by that poor little dot matrix, with some sniffy student asking if I'd heard of the rainforests by maybe sheet 25.
Then I got my own machine by maybe '99, when they were good enough for CD making as well as cheap colour scanning and printing, with me finding ever more pokes and just in time for the furtive pleasures of Napster. (Mind, it was still the local library supplying me, at least, with a few more collection-completing CDs. Thanks, Berkshire District Libraries. Though, Ssssssshhhh. And you know, the CD blanks then were that good that only one or two don't work, 15 years later.)
But bunging my own stuff up came around the time of Youtube starting and my own broadband, for truly cheap connections and webspace. And my own place to have the studio in. But by then, like you, I found that when anyone was capable of doing it, everybody was.
