The Internet - Mid 90's Web Culture

Let's jack into the 'net, surf the Information Superhighway and go visit the global village in this video taking a look at mid 90's Internet culture. Come and see what all the fuss was about before the dot-com bubble even began and people were still trying to work out how to make us of a globally connected network of computers. The concept was so new we still didn't have a consistent name for it.

Features a selection of amusing adverts from the time period and some simulated 56k and T1 period accurate Internet surfing from within Windows 98 using the Protoweb Proxy which lets old machines connect to "The Internet" via the Wayback Machine.

Originally this was going to be a more technical look at 90s web technology, but I got far too distracted experiencing the early Internet again. It's fascinating how the speed of the Internet completely shaped the way it was used. Today people will socialise online or even use it to occupy their time. Back when the Web was new it was expensive - as you'll see from my £200 phone bill! - and going online was a deliberate act. You would plan where to go, what to look at and make a list of things to do. Once that was done, you'd disconnect.

To speed things up we would often disable images when browsing so the text could load faster!

Credits
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Contains TV adverts and clips from the following
BT Anytime - British Telecom
1993 CNN Report
Tomorrow's World 1994 "Are you ready for the Internet" - BBC
Freeserve advert from Channel 4
The Computer Chronicles - The Internet 1993
Hayes Modem
Windows 98 presentation where the machine blue screens when plugging in a scanner
Kids' Guide To The Internet - Diamond Entertainment Corporation 1997

Links
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Blog Post - ...

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[makepool]

I did not pay for WinZip, nor WinRAR.

[SanguineBrah]

I remember the only internet capable PC in our house was my dad's home office computer, which was in his bedroom. We were on some sort of plan where we got free calls at weekends, so I would wait all week until Sunday morning when he went to church, then I would swoop in and download as many Doom wads and freeware games as I could manage before ferrying them up and down the stairs on a single formatted AOL floppy with the write protect hole taped over. Sometimes I had to use one of those file splitter tools to break them into 1.44mb chunks. I spent a lot of time on Planet Quake, Game Hippo and Home of the Underdogs.

[arronshutt]

I joined the internet with Demon Internet in 1993 with a 14K modem. First browser was Lynx on DOS, and then Mosaic V1.0 on Windows 3.1. Used to spend a lot of my time on IRC using the irc client for DOS as it was the only one available at the time. And yes, I remember the £200 internet call bills connecting via dialup. And this was the age of pre-USB, so you had serial connectors connecting it all together. And PKZIP was a thing back then. I did have a paid copy as I remember having labelled disks back then. And the guy who wrote it (Phil Katz) died an alcoholic which surprised me as he made lots of money. As for games, there was DOOM and Quake, but also System Shock (the original) in 1994 which was quite hard to play but it had a really engaging story. And it was quite scary. Best we could do until we started getting decent 3D graphics cards..possibly a future "ancient internet history" episode on how we went from text based displays in the 1980s to PC 3D graphics we have today? 🤔

[ditzykunoichi]

thank you for the nostalgia trip, i miss the old internet

[cusemoneyman]

I got so drawn into this video that I was surprised when it ended!

[jesusisunstoppable]

56k modems were Never 56k.
Same for 28 and 14.

[CoconutPete]

13:15 "they were worse than Bing" 😂

[jeremiahblum]

In the 90s they invented AOL technology to connect us to the interwebs and deliver endless spam and flame wars

[TroyFletcherKeyboards]

I miss the slow, intentional internet.

[Sb]

Wew, I haven't heard the phrase "T1 Line" in a long time, Lolz.
I still like the simplicity of pure HTML, that is about as instant loading as possible, unless you had to disable images. HTML, jpg, animated GIFs and txt files abound. Things were still measured in the Kilobytes. You know, I first got a computer in like 2002, an old Gateway with Win98 SE. I still remember the specs. I also had my own PCI wifi card! An Airlink 101 that we bought at Fry's Electronics. I even had a hand-me-down Palm IIIe. Man those were the days.

[jeremiahblum]

I'm reasonably certain I used that exact photo as my wallpaper for a while when I was doing telephone tech support in the late 90s...

[OmegaWolf]

Ah! The fun of dialing into my ISP at 28 kbps, downloading email on Outlook Express and using IE 5 with JavaScript and ActiveX fully enabled. No wonder my poor computer was always crashing and freezing...

[edgeeffect]

I always found it funny that not one single computer nerd ever said "information superhighway"... but journalists, politicians and advertisers couldn't stop saying it.

[mccrh]

Brings back a lot of memories 😊 But in Canada, we had Cable Modems @ 220 kbs and they were always on. Spent more time on IRC, Hotline, News groups, then browsing the net. When I was browsing, I used Web crawler and Dog Pile search, both still work to this day 😊 Gaming in the 90's was alot of modem to modem game play, with games like Doom, Warcraft, Duke 3d, EST. If over the internet games usually used a client app like Quake World, which I spent tons of time on 😉 Alot of time while downloading, I would pop open Warcraft or other games, with some tunes using Win Amp, Never a problem 😃 If you used the right config and Apps in the 90's the experience was always good 😃

[rolvs]

I played quake over 14.4 modem. Worked ok when we got it working. Good times!

[wintutorials]

I miss internet without all the generated slop. And when the internet was for the nerds

[runezunn]

Internet in the 90s: When someone d/c'ed you all because they had to use the phone 😂
Ahh, what times indeed.

[sigmaroll]

Keep making this content great research

[robmcleod]

I first got internet in uhh 1999. Thanks to a law passed in NZ in the 80's, local dialling was free so i only had to worry about ISP charges. I think i was paying something like $14.99/month for 10 hours and there was a per hour rate after that which i forget. "I'll only use it for a bit of emailing" I thought.. as soon as i could get a "permanent" connection, i did. At that time, that was a second phoneline to my house that i paid my mum for on top of the internet bill. Yay 24/7 56k interwebs!

[drcherepanov]

My first modern was 14k4 US Robotics with 7 hours of Internet included and 35USD on my balance. I was supposed to use them within a month and pay $35 if I wanted to extend my subscription. In the end of the month I figured out that provider cannot drop the line, so I've got few more hours free. The problem is that there was nothing to do. I had much more fun in fidonet. It was Russia, Siberia, sometimes in 98-99