The Internet of Old

[Slim]

If you go nosing around, you can often find old webpages from the previous century still online - and they give a flavour of what the technology was like back then.

This page from the BBC site from 1999 is a case in point. The images are tiny, and compressed. And the width of the page as formatted takes up a small fraction of a modern-day web browser on a 4K screen, but it was of course intended to be viewed on a monitor that would typically have a resolution of 800x600, or perhaps 1024x768.

The screenshot is actual size. Notice that there's a "low graphics" option!

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/431705.stm

[Fishy]

I remember when my search engine of choice was altavista..

[The Picnic Wasp]

I shudder to remember my early dial-up days on my Gateway. What troubles me the most is that even though I had no PC training whatsoever, there were things that I should have been able to take a step back from and figure out. My memory lets me down about most of my early meanderings, so maybe I wasn't as bad as I think I was, but what stands out the most was when I stumbled across T-N-M-S. I had no idea what a forum was. It just seemed to be random pages on every mouse click with no coherent connection between them. I don't know when the penny finally dropped. I do remember clearly though when I finally managed to download One Little Victory in a single go. Quite an achievement after many failed attempts.

[pxr5]

I remember when my search engine of choice was altavista..

Hotbot and Excite too. No Google in those days. And before ebay, it was eswap and qxl, and music was, ahem, obtained with Kazaa, Bearshare....all over a shitty modem connection.

[Matt2112]

I remember when my search engine of choice was altavista..

Hotbot and Excite too. No Google in those days. And before ebay, it was eswap and qxl, and music was, ahem, obtained with Kazaa, Bearshare....all over a shitty modem connection.

Yes, and Limewire.  Which plagued your hard drive with trojans.