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The early internet was so human and genuine.
(lemmy.world)
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this post was submitted on 04 Jun 2025
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90's internet was awesomer. It was simple and chill and small. We hand-wrote our silly little HTML pages and freely published our email addresses. I once mailed some random person a check to pay for a piece of shareware. They were the true halcyon days of the internet.
I was playing with some old UNIX software, and in the help text the dev said they were collecting foreign currency and asked people to send postcards with foreign currency, listing their full name and personal address. It was last updated in 1995.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shareware#Postcardware
What software?
A collection of games called "flying" which despite the name is a pool/billiards/curling/air hockey sim.
I had it mentioned on a Cathode Ray Dude YouTube video and wanted to try it, which led me down a bit of a rabbit hole. As far as I could find it never got ported to Linux? But it's still in the FreeBSD repositories. So I spun up FreeBSD on a VM but couldn't get it working because it refuses to launch on X if you have more than 8-bit color, and I was having a hell of a time launching X in that mode. So I downloaded a copy of FreeBSD 4 from around 2000 and got it to run.
I'm not that "way back when everything was better" person, but I agree.
Nothing was monetized mid-2000s? That sentence, while still an exaggeration, would have made sense 10 years earlier. Also "ragebait and attention seeking" were rampant on these "forums focused on discussion".
I remember reading through an archive of some pre Eternal September forum argument about Aliens being a shitty, overrated movie.
You know. Aliens. Uncontroversially one of the best movies ever made.
I think the difference is that nowadays it feels like this isn’t quarantined to specific forums or usenet communities. We’ve all dealt with people IRL who use Twitter in 2025 and those people are absolutely cooked beyond belief.
<blink>!!!I miss
<marquee>myself.As quiVadisHomines says, too, the ~~90's~~ '90s net was a simpler time; but I think that was because it was well-backed by schools and even then mostly unknown -- September Effect notwithstanding.
Is it capitalism or just the tribe-too-large problem? Both, where we're not united enough to socially correct the behaviour that would be knocked down sooner with a smaller group?
Anyway, I miss the enforced simplicity of no-images/rare-images Usenet, and how it highlighted the writing and the ideas.
It's beyond me to dream up a suitable Usenet replacement, but I know for sure that FB, IG, Lemmy, they're solving a different problem.
IMO there's "the Internet before Canter and Siegel" and "the Internet after Canter and Siegel".
On the pre C&S Internet, not only was nothing monetized, there was a sense that even having an ad for something commercial was against the culture. The downside was that the pre C&S Internet was small, slow and limited.
Overall, I think the 2025 Internet is much better than 1994. But, there were certainly things to appreciate about an Internet without ads, without algorithms trying to win the attention economy, etc.