I was born in 1993 but part of me wishes I was born earlier so I could experience the 90's as a young adult. Every time I read a story about the internet and general tech culture of the 90's, I see it as very new and chaotic but I also get super jealous that I was only 3-5 when all this went down.
I was born in 1984, and I feel incredibly lucky that I grew up at the tail end of BBS's and the start of the dialup era. Things were changing blindingly fast, but it was still small/niche enough that you still had a strong sense of community, hackers dominated, not companies, and we all had this feeling like we could do anything.
Even the broadband era was great, too. For me, it was the mid-2000s when everything really starting going off the rails (Facebook + iPhone, mostly).
Being born in 1981, the mid-2000s feel very weird to me too -- partly being in grad school in that time (and so somewhat isolated from the broader world) and yeah the rise of cell phones.
Born in 1988. Things were cool until around 2007, at that point everything great about the internet rapidly started dying off, though at first it seemed kind of exciting that it finally seemed to be getting global recognition, it was really the beginning of the end.
I was just a kid for most of the 2000s, but I was a user of the internet since way earlier than I should probably have been. Around that time is when I remember it kinda declining too, the forums that I frequented started getting closed down and my classmates uploaded photos with me in them to this newfangled "Facebook" thing, which horrified my "never say your real name on the internet" sensibilities.
If there's anything I have learned over my life, is that the idea that there was a previous exciting period that I missed out on -- even if it is true! -- is a surprisingly large impediment on finding the current exciting thing, and living to experience it. I spent a long time thinking I kept missing the boat, only to eventually shift my perspective so that I could spot the signs earlier, and find a similar boat that was just leaving.
In 1993, we didn't have closet laptops and old pocket supercomputers taking up space/up for grabs.
Computing was expensive. Communicating with a computer was even more expensive.
I was a kid with a BBS back then. I had parents who were very, very tolerant of an enormous phone bill, until that one time when I discovered the free-to-use-but-long-distance dial-up Internet service that was then known as cyberspace.org.
Shit changed a lot in my world when that four-digit phone bill showed up, and it stayed changed for quite a long time afterward.
The pre-WWW Internet did have some neat stuff going on, but meh. As much as I like to lament on the downfall of things like Usenet, I think we're in a much better spot for communicating and learning using these machines and networks than we were ~30 years ago.
(I do wish things were more local today, like BBSs usually were, but...)
It was a fairly limited subset of people who experienced any of this anyway. I made adulthood in the 90s and barely knew the Internet existed. My parents didn't get a computer with a modem until my senior year of high school and it was in the kitchen, shared with everyone else in the family, and couldn't be used online at the same time anyone was using the phone since it used the same line. It took six hours to download a single 400 x 400 pixel porn image.
On the other hand, when high speed connections separate from the phone line became a thing and vBulletin and phpBB and what not proliferated and there were a whole lot of still small but at least somewhat widely used and representative places to socialize online without corporate ad giants tracking your every move, for a few shining years, that was pretty nice. Maybe 1999 to 2005 or so. It was a pretty weird moment we'll never get again when I could meet multiple primetime television actresses on Internet dating sites, when any earlier, they wouldn't have been online at all, and any later, they'd have professional social media managers and would get inundated with so much spam they couldn't sift through it even if they wanted to.
For a very, very brief time, the Internet was reasonably widespread and used but also still kind of authentic and not completely poisoned by fully-automated crime and ad companies.
I downloaded (non porn) images over a 2400 modem in the old days. Was more like a half hour than six hours. May have been .gif which made it smaller.
I was a teenager in the early 90s. Yes, there were some great times like LAN parties with full PCs and a house full of your friends. The hacking culture was fun, because it was so new and not so commercialized yet.
However, you would probably be bored after an hour or two with the limitations on everything.
We could play a Doom, Warcraft, and Descent for days. Netwars in between for kicks.
Honestly the BBS / chat system scene of the late 80's / early 90s was way better, it was kind of sad that the Internet ultimately murdered it.
Even forums were good in the 2000s, before the masses centralized onto Reddit.
I miss the chronological discussion, instead of the echochamber Reddit's voting system encourages/enforces.
The thing I miss the most from forum is someone starting a discussion with a post of their own. Then other people replying, and those replies having the same hierarchical level. Sure, it was annoying to read people doing quote to quote but it felt more like people was discussing together instead of side by side.
Nowadays all we have (even here...) is the Slashdot discussion style that almost obligatory starts with a link to an external source, and hierarchical comments that segregates the discussion.
I miss forums where people had personalities. Here, we’re all just talking to Hackernews because there are too many users for there to be individuals. On phpbb forums, you could bounce arguments back and forth and come up with a model of how a person thinks, so you’d be able to understand what biases people are bringing in to things.
There were big boards like Something Awful, which did have enough users to become non-distinct. But that site was intentionally stupid and the context-free discussion was part of the joke.
Now, all online chat is context free, and we’re all shallow and stupid everywhere.
> On phpbb forums
It wasn't a phpbb thing, it's a size thing. It was basically every message board style format for all time before that too. Including any usenet group that was under a certain size, which was most of them.
Even on Something Awful, people had large custom avatars and signatures that made them more distinct (who remembers winampdb?) so you recognized prolific users, instead of a small, gray user name
I think that's not the issue, the issue it's the mandatory karma based sorting.
In Usenet you had threads as in Slashdot/Reddit, but on scoring you were on your own tastes.
There was a much stronger community aspect in those days. The locality helped. It was easier to meet your fellow nerds, living in the local calling area. I miss the BBS days.