• Simulation6@sopuli.xyz
    1·
    2 hours ago

    I worked at a company pre-internet that had an Arpanet connection. I started working there as a Cobol programmer and thought this was magic. I later got to set up a dial -up uucp network to customer sites. I think I still have some 300 baud rabbit ears I used to monitor systems from home.

  • Gerowen@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1·
    2 hours ago

    It had the best loading animation with the comets flying by. Much better than IE rotating and becoming the planet earth. This was back when you actually had to wait for pages to load.

  • Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    1·
    2 hours ago

    Yes.

    I even remember using Gopher which was the closest there was to HTTP and Browsers before they were invented.

    (Also, don’t get me started on FTPmail).

    And no, even with the enshittification of the last decade or so, I would still not call those “the good old days”.

    Now, get out of my lawn you wipper snappers!

  • rekabis@lemmy.ca
    14·
    8 hours ago

    I have used the same web browser, in terms of ideology, codebase, and heritage, for nearly a third of a century, now.

    NCSA Mosaic -> Netscape -> Phoenix/Firebird/Firefox.

    I now hew more to alternates such as LibreWolf and Floorp, but I still run Firefox EME-Free as my default.

  • Treczoks@lemmy.world
    17·
    14 hours ago

    Yes, of course. We also had a notebook (these paper-based thingies, not a digital one) in the terminal room where we collected interesting web site addresses back then before Altavista and bookmarks.

    • asdfasdfasdf@lemmy.world
      3·
      7 hours ago

      I had a Popular Science magazine that included the 50 coolest websites you should visit. That was mine. I still get hit with so much nostalgia about it. They were legit so cool that they still put most websites I see nowadays to shame.

      • Treczoks@lemmy.world
        2·
        3 hours ago

        Of course. alt.binaries.pictures.erotica - not an internet address in case you wonder, but a NNTP group. Yes, we had social media back then, just not with Nazis, bots, and ads.

        • DefederateLemmyMl@feddit.nl
          1·
          2 hours ago

          Yes, we had social media back then, just not with Nazis, bots, and ads.

          We did have plenty of usenet trolls and usenet wars.

          • Treczoks@lemmy.world
            3·
            3 hours ago

            Most bulletin boards like fidonet existed in parallel with the internet, and even used internet bridges to transfer mail and files across long distances where a dialup connection could not be used.

            NNTP actally was quite network agnostic, the messages did not care about the means of transport. I actually handled a NNTP link back then via floppy disk.

  • laranis@lemmy.zip
    19·
    19 hours ago

    Ok, going to scream into the abyss here…

    I had Netscape on my 486DX2-66 with a 33.6 modem. Win 95, along with ICQ, mIRC, some NNTP reader I can’t recall… You get the picture.

    Everyone I’ve told this to thinks I must have been out of my mind. But for a period of time that I recall as months I had some sort of phenomenon where Netscape would stop loading a web page (could take 10s of seconds, you know) unless you MOVED THE MOUSE. Continuously. The animated “N” on would freeze and if you didn’t move the mouse the page would just be blank, or partially loaded. Move the mouse, it resumes. Stop moving the mouse, it stops. I used to have to move my mouse in figure-eights, cajoling the machine to not give up and keep downloading.

    You’ll think I’m crazy, too. But when I share this story I keep hoping someone, somewhere had the same experience. And maybe, someone who knows what was going on will chime in on some obscure IRQ conflict in Windows along with some optimization used by Netscape in one iteration caused this bug for a brief moment in time.

    • nova_ad_vitum@lemmy.ca
      2·
      7 hours ago

      I’m pretty sure I had that same mouse movement thing happen. That was a deeply buried memory until you mentioned it .

    • zebbedi@lemmy.world
      10·
      18 hours ago

      On linux /dev/random will use inputs such as mouse movement to generate random data. If a program needs random data for something such as encryption it will seemingly hang whilst it generates enough. This isn’t good on servers without an active user so you configure it to use /dev/urandom instead. Perhaps windows had similar back in the day.

    • SpaceCowboy@lemmy.ca
      7·
      11 hours ago

      Nah… Netscape Navigator Gold was peak. Netscape Communicator was too bloated and took forever to load. Sure it had an email client, HTML editor, etc. but these should have been separate programs, not all built into a single thing. The original mozilla browser was also this way until Phoenix Firebird Firefox pulled a browser out of the bloated mess.

    • Psythik@lemm.ee
      7·
      9 hours ago

      Agreed. 1999-2000 was also peak internet for me. Netscape, Napster, Neopets, Newgrounds, and Nick.com (and StarCraft multiplayer). It didn’t get any better than that.

      • fulcrummed@lemmy.world
        6·
        12 hours ago

        Limewire… downloading all your favourite songs, wait no… typing in names of any song you could think of in hopes you’d find it. Then you did find it and it turned out to be the same damn song you can’t stand with the file misnamed. A whole generation grew up confused about who sang their favourite songs, and found constant frustration in waiting like 12min (on a great day) for Smells Like Teen Spirit to download, only to find they got Weird Al Yankovich’s parody instead… like 4 times in a row from four different files. Ahhhh memories.

    • brookdale05@lemm.eeEnglish
      5·
      16 hours ago

      Ah yes web 2.0 was also a thing. I remember.

      I’ll never forget watching pictures roll in line-by-line on dialup back in 1995 or so.

    • 9point6@lemmy.world
      23·
      22 hours ago

      I remember thinking Netscape was way cooler than IE based purely on the throbber animation

        • pyre@lemmy.world
          7·
          14 hours ago

          in case you didn’t know: the animated icon (usually the cursor) that indicates background processing is called a throbber.

    • dual_sport_dork 🐧🗡️@lemmy.world
      17·
      22 hours ago

      I’ve seen that some dude on here has the Netscape throbber (for Gen Z: that’s what the animated doohickey in the corner that shows your page is still loading and your computer has not frozen is called) as his profile icon.

      Maybe you’ve just summoned him up, Beetlejuice style.

    • imvii@lemmy.caEnglish
      12·
      20 hours ago

      Going from Netscape 1 to Netscape 2 which supported animated gifs. What a day that was!

  • hedgehogging_the_bed@lemmy.world
    8·
    22 hours ago

    I sure remember the HOURS it took me to download that sucker on my 14.4kb modem. I was blessed by the gods with a parent in the computer industry even then so we had a 2nd phone line that I could monopolize for a day of agonizingly watching and praying not to lose connection again.

    • hedgehogging_the_bed@lemmy.world
      3·
      22 hours ago

      Yes, if all had been perfect it should have only taken about an hour but dialup internet was ditzy and unreliable so I spent a huge chunk of that weekend getting a full download.