If it were 1999, most people would still be browsing the web on their US Robotics 56k modem (at best). This page is about 1 MB of assets (500kb gzip compressed if your browser supported it) , so it would have taken at least a minute just to finish loading.
b3ing 2 hours ago [-]
No tabbed browsing and if IE crashed it locked up Windows 95/98 with it. No 2fa, no comment spam, and Java applets that froze the browser for 10-30 seconds. No content creator bs just people making fan pages just for the heck of it before Wikipedia gobbled all that information
rootusrootus 5 hours ago [-]
Still pretty prevalent at that time, definitely, but DSL was definitely a thing by the time 1999 rolled around. I even had pretty fast DSL for the time -- 640 kbps.
But otherwise totally agree with the critique. Modern connection speeds have enabled a huge amount of bloat. I grew up when 1200 baud modems were the latest rage, and patience when downloading was a hard requirement.
NDlurker 5 hours ago [-]
I lived in rural North Dakota and had dial up until 2005. It really sucked the last couple of years.
aworks 2 hours ago [-]
I lived on a suburban street a mile from the Stanford campus that didn't get broadband until 2003. I would go to the local copy center to rent an hour of computer time to edit my blog.
gnabgib 2 hours ago [-]
Ok.. so broadband in 1996, route-able (unique) IPv4 broadband in 1997 (177.1..), route-able satellite internet in Nigeria in 2002 (it sucked when it rained). Your Stanford proximity apparently didn't help.
boudin 7 hours ago [-]
Closer to 2 as it was rarelly running at full 56kb/s.
Although, being patient was part of the experience as well
Loughla 7 hours ago [-]
I was a lot more careful about clicking things when it took a full minute to load. Now I know that it'll be open in less than a second and I can leave immediately if I need to, so there's WAY less thinking beforehand.
5 hours ago [-]
drfloyd51 6 hours ago [-]
When I found my first tabbed browser. Netcaptor. It changed everything. Open in new tab. Open in new tab. Open in new tab.
Go back to the first tab which has finally finished loading. Consume.
derefr 4 hours ago [-]
It's funny to think back, as I've just recently installed a browser extension to do the opposite (i.e. to prevent "open in new tab" tabs from doing any work until I foreground them.)
Today, my computer's memory is far more constrained than its network bandwidth. I find it very easy to accidentally open tons of tabs very quickly (esp. from the HN front page!) until suddenly the browser is swapping and everything's slowing to a crawl trying to process all those new page DOMs.
And yet, even when it doesn't choke the computer, I find no real benefit to preloading pages in the background any more. At least on my connection, the page load time after I focus a tab is almost imperceptible.
How things have changed!
Ferret7446 4 hours ago [-]
There are quite a few sites that take more than a second to load even now. Should be a war crime, but alas
msla 6 hours ago [-]
Also, tabbed browsing was still a couple years off for most people, although some browsers got there earlier than others:
> In 1994, BookLink Technologies featured tabbed windows in its InternetWorks browser.[citation needed] That same year, the text editor UltraEdit also appeared with a modern multi-row tabbed interface. The tabbed interface approach was then followed by the Internet Explorer shell NetCaptor in 1997. These were followed by several others like IBrowse in 1999, and Opera in 2000 (with the release of version 4 - although an MDI interface was supported before then), MultiViews October 2000, which changed its name into MultiZilla on April 1st, 2001 (an extension for the Mozilla Application Suite[11]), Galeon in early 2001, Mozilla 0.9.5 in October 2001, Phoenix 0.1 (now Mozilla Firefox) in October 2002, Konqueror 3.1 in January 2003, and Safari in 2003. With the release of Internet Explorer 7 in 2006, all major web browsers featured a tabbed interface.
Also, Opera had a Multiple-Document Interface from the start, so 1995 or so. That's not "tabs" per se but multiple mini-windows inside the main window; much the same "Hey, I can have multiple things open!" deal
My point is, you think more about clicking a link when it'll monopolize your whole UI and you can't just stash it in a background tab or mini-window.
7 hours ago [-]
mdb333 7 hours ago [-]
so true, re: patience
I was just thinking back the other day about BBS days and how frustrating a busy signal could be, or connection time limits, etc.
icedchai 6 hours ago [-]
I got my first cable modem in 1998! All sites were still built for dialup, so everything was incredibly fast.
vunderba 5 hours ago [-]
Nice! We were one of the first families on the block to have a 33.6 kbps modem, and were the envy of every filthy peasant who still had a 28.8 back in the day.
icedchai 4 hours ago [-]
My first dialup modem was 1200 baud, back in 1987! I remember it taking an hour to download a game from a local warez BBS. My first modem to establish an Internet connection (SLIP) was 9600, sometime around 1993! Time flies...
jghn 5 hours ago [-]
This comment reminded me of the early days of Ultima Online. I was on a high speed campus connection with a ping time of ~5ms to my server. Given most players were on a 28.8/56k modem with ping times ~300ms, it was an amazing speed difference. I could walk, not run, faster than other people riding horses at full speed.
Needless to say, I got accused of cheating quite a bit.
t-3 6 hours ago [-]
Some sites were fast. Some sites had pictures and it took long enough to load that I would sometimes make a sandwich while waiting.
icedchai 5 hours ago [-]
Not with cable (3 megabits down, 128kbits up!) Almost everything was fast.
krapp 5 hours ago [-]
I literally remember watching images load line by line.
I know nostalgia for the old days is de rigueur especially on HN but I definitely do not want to go back to that.
walthamstow 5 hours ago [-]
I told a coworker born in 2001 about this and he could not believe his ears
krapp 4 hours ago [-]
We dither on the shoulders of giants.
acheron 5 hours ago [-]
Same! I got called “LPB” in Quake 2 a lot.
chairmansteve 5 hours ago [-]
"This page is about 1 MB of assets".
And it could easily have been 10 KB.
vunderba 4 hours ago [-]
Now now. Don't be so tightfisted with the bandwidth. You know what they say, "People will hate you Steve, if you're too sting-ee!"
No shade! I went and checked out of curiosity, since it looks like we’re both using Astro as a static site generator.
Most of my articles are pretty media rich and weigh in between 1-2 megs. I do try to be pretty conscientious about asset compression (mozjpeg, h264 for video, etc.). I'd love to switch over to AV1 but I've heard compatibility on older devices is spotty.
alex1138 6 hours ago [-]
Yeah, but you know something? Flash worked damn near perfectly even on potato connections
vunderba 5 hours ago [-]
I know flash had its downsides - but messing around with Macromedia Flash to make stupid little animations back in the day was so fun.
Plus Silverlight made Flash seem like a dream.
jakedata 7 hours ago [-]
Just go to fark.com, a lingering glimmer of light from before the dead web. They are still aggregating human curated news and hosting reasonably civil discussions.
Then buy a Totalfark subscription so they don't need to bend over backwards to show more ads just to keep the lights on. See ya there!
zugi 5 hours ago [-]
Fark is farking great! Though its old-school HTML doesn't flow so well on mobile.
Can we get the best of 1999 with the best of 2026? Probably not...
2 hours ago [-]
jakedata 5 hours ago [-]
m.fark.com looks pretty good on my phone.
rglover 5 hours ago [-]
Just a stylesheet away.
ranger_danger 4 hours ago [-]
I would like to relive my fark memories but I only get endless captcha loops on it now :(
zahirbmirza 7 hours ago [-]
How can we solve this problem, of the current state of the internet, without reverting to the compromises of the past? This has been on my mind for a while. The layer of trash some companies have built over the internet has been ruinous.
jjulius 6 hours ago [-]
>How can we solve this problem, of the current state of the internet, without reverting to the compromises of the past?
In order to actually have and maintain a healthy balance of life and technology, such compromises are required.
joshuablais 7 hours ago [-]
I theorize it is going back to the protocol layer. The "web" for most people is a bunch of social media frontends.
NetOpWibby 1 hours ago [-]
I think the current web is sick and will never get better.
I propose building a new stack, without ICANN and friends (Verisign is raising .com prices yet again). I'm planning to build it[1] at some point, just working on other foundational stuff at the moment.
Cozy corners, webrings, and Gemini/Gopher is where I see the spirit of the old web alive and well.
Yeah, it's quite sad where we landed. Circa 2004-2006 while the internet was mostly open and accessible I mentally grouped "the internet" into two buckets. There was the real web plus usenet plus email and then there was "facebook" with its weird garden wall and exclusive invites or some such shit. I didn't think of facebook as being "on the web" even though they used the http protocol. It was highly unusual then to have any web content behind a registration wall.
So hardly anyone considered facebook to be a part of "the web". It was its own weird duck. Twenty years later and most people only frequent this "weird" part of the internet - this limited ensemble of paid and unpaid walled gardens.
bandrami 5 minutes ago [-]
Similarly Twitter; I signed up in I think 2007 and only used SMS for the next several years until they finally stopped it. Once I switched to the web/app version I was frankly appalled.
bobanrocky 58 minutes ago [-]
Your statement of ‘hardly anyone considered facebook part of the web’ is incorrect. Facebook became popular a bit after the Web had become quite mainstream. The idea of signing up for online services was not foreign to most of these folks. Now, AOL/Compuserve and such were more considered as non web.
hdgvhicv 6 hours ago [-]
That applies to aol, msn, compuserve etc, not to Facebook which you only ever accessed via http from a browser.
abraxas 6 hours ago [-]
Yeah, those didn't count either. AOL and compuserve were not even available outside the USA in the late nineties. With AOL I'm quite sure nobody considered them to be a part of the web. Their pages didn't have URLs early on but AOL "keywords" instead. Compuserve also weren't using http I believe. It was some kind of commercial WAN that was pitched as a competitor to the internet, no?
zabzonk 5 hours ago [-]
> AOL and compuserve were not even available outside the USA in the late nineties
yes, they were, in the UK at least. speaking as a compuserve user.
6 hours ago [-]
6 hours ago [-]
pjmorris 6 hours ago [-]
I feel like 'Party like it's 1999' could become the slogan for a movement. Sure, the tech was a little less convenient, but overarching control was also less hard-wired into everything.
pragma_x 4 hours ago [-]
It even comes pre-packaged with a theme song.
pjmorris 2 hours ago [-]
I confess that I had this in mind.
Is it time to start running LAN parties again?
tptacek 4 hours ago [-]
This is going to come off glib, but I don't think you can believe any of this having actually used the Internet of 1999. As is so often the case, there are lots of real annoyances and offenses behind the sentiment, but still, the Internet of 2026 is vastly better than that of 1999. The amount of things you're just one quick search away from right now would break the brains of a 1999 netizen. We were still required to buy paper books for all sorts of routine knowledge work tasks.
chromacity 4 hours ago [-]
Dunno. The internet was definitely smaller, but it was also largely uncorrupted, so you could literally just email a random university professor or an industry expert and get answers to dumb questions.
And today, if you want to learn something the right way, you probably still should buy a book (or, I guess, pirate an ebook). I don't think you can really learn much from YouTube influencers and the like.
tptacek 4 hours ago [-]
I respectfully respect the premise that the choices are "paper books" or "Youtube influencers", though I'll note we didn't have Gilbert Strang's 18.06 course back in 1999 either.
I'd also note that the Internet of 1999 was loaded with spam, bursting at the seams with it, so much so that it was actually a big deal when ~30 months later Paul Graham wrote a post about Bayesian filtering.
jjulius 2 hours ago [-]
>Id also note that the Internet of 1999 was loaded with spam, bursting at the seams with it...
[gestures wildly at all the bots in 2026]
GaryBluto 6 hours ago [-]
I'm not opposed to the message but it perplexes me the amount of people who bemoan the loss of the "old web" and then use a web page comprised of massive modern frameworks to deliver said message.
NetOpWibby 1 hours ago [-]
People clamoring for the old web are almost never talking about slow speeds or XHTML, they're talking about the FEELING of being on the web.
kungfuscious 5 hours ago [-]
A lot of these recommendations seem prudent. I especially like the idea of POSSE for using social media without actually using it (every time you open a site to post is an opportunity to be ensnared). Completely stripping the browser from your smartphone is a bit extreme and excessive for me, but doesn't invalidate the other reccomendations.
kyledrake 6 hours ago [-]
> On your router, you can and should setup blocklists for various malicious and nefarious domains, advertisements, adult content, etc. This is not “1999-esque” in practice, but is a requirement for the modern web.
I worked on a Geocities archive restoration. There was a boat load of porn (including illegal porn), malicious domains, spamvertising, malware, predators, political extremists, etc on the 1999 web, and you can find all of it within the raw Geocities archive that was made before it shut down. The idea that the old web was some kind of pure place of innocence is a weird and factually inaccurate take. If anything, the late 90s web was more dark than it is now, perhaps in part because nobody had any idea of how to police anything on it and things like PhotoDNA didn't exist yet.
If anything, my work on 90s site archival has taught me that the web has always been a place with a lot of dark places, and the narrative that the old web was some sort of pure innocent place that became evil is not matched by evidence.
It's just as plausible to me that the general "misbehavior" of humans on the internet hasn't changed all that much, but that we have, frankly, adopted a more puritanical and intolerant approach towards it. Nobody was talking about getting rid of Section 230, carding people for 18+ before they could use IRC (or install an operating system, what the actual fuck is wrong with you California), and Congress wasn't dragging evil Geocities CEO David Bohnett into grilling sessions where they were accusing him of hooking kids on digital cigarettes. Perhaps it would be wise to have a little nostalgia for some of that too.
marginalia_nu 6 hours ago [-]
It's worth keeping in mind how much more fringe the web used to be. You were almost by definition a bit of a deviant if you spent significant time online in the '90s and early '00s ("nerd" was a pejorative). People who found no acceptance in the physical world many times found like minded people online, which sometimes was a good thing and sometimes unfortunate.
> If anything, my work on 90s site archival has taught me that the web has always been a place with a lot of dark places, and the narrative that the old web was some sort of pure innocent place that became evil is not matched by evidence.
No argument there. That said, I think the big difference between the 1990's and today is that everyone knew the nefarious places and people existed but, for the most part, you actually had to seek it out. I am not suggesting that it was hard to find. Perhaps the worse of the worse was easier to find. On the other hand, it wasn't quite the same thing as algorithmic feeds. For example: I absolutely refuse to view anything remotely political on some sites (including reputable news sources or material that is clearly satire) since that is the surest way to be fed extremist crap. How far those feeds will 5ake me, I simply do not want to know.
alex1138 6 hours ago [-]
Hey Kyle! Neocities is great
kyledrake 6 hours ago [-]
<3
Terr_ 7 hours ago [-]
To me the what we wanted/got distinction is something like:
1. A kind of capital that is widely available, so that people could exercise control and agency with machines that do what you want them to do for your own needs.
2. A distribution tool controlled by mega-corporations as they decide what you should be able to see or have.
pixel_popping 7 hours ago [-]
OpenAI will love this article, noM nom nom
t1234s 7 hours ago [-]
The best was the FTP search feature from alltheweb.com. You could find almost any software you needed.
petee 4 hours ago [-]
Are there any decent webrings left, or newly existing?
globalnode 4 hours ago [-]
Turn off javascript and use a text based browser? What? May as well not use the internet.
01nate 5 hours ago [-]
One minor 'gripe' for lack of a better term, is that I feel like a push to go backwards in technology is a bit misguided. I feel like a lot if people see ads and trackers, then look to older protocols like Gopher/Gemini/IRC (or at least 'inspired' by older stuff like Gemini).
The issue isn't javascript, it's ads/trackers/algos/slop. I feel like tracker/ad/algorithm free static site on the status quo of http, or something newer like IPFS, is worlds better than trying to use arbitrary restrictions on something like a Gemini capsule.
deadbabe 5 hours ago [-]
I think it’s time to give up on the old web.
What made the old web cool, is that it was the first time we can communicate with so many random people in far away places digitally and share information through cool web pages.
That novelty has mostly died now. Communicating with people in distant lands is mundane now. And there is little new things to share that we haven’t already seen or heard before.
So what’s the point of the web now? Maybe the internet will become purely a utility for exchanging data for infrastructural and business purposes, and the idea of using the internet as a source of entertainment or recreation will fade away.
It would be nice to retreat back to an analog world, where the internet still exists, but only as a layer of glue in the background that orchestrates multiple technologies that power our world, and nothing more.
krapp 5 hours ago [-]
Tons of people still use the internet as a source of entertainment and recreation. Just because you're too jaded to care doesn't mean the rest of the world is.
takihito 3 hours ago [-]
[dead]
Rekindle8090 1 hours ago [-]
[dead]
thot_experiment 7 hours ago [-]
I don't know if I'm crazy but I think social media is pretty okay at the like, core building and enhancing social networks thing.
Instagram is probably my most used one these days and I love seeing my friend's stories and I don't think I've parsed more than a handful of ads in the last 2 or 3 years that I've been an active user, probably a few tens of hours wasted with dumb reels, not a bad cost at all imo. I have probably 400 irl people and 200 internet accounts I follow. It doesn't have the charm and honesty of navigating a webring or whatever, but the friction is so low so I get to see a lot of stuff my friends, acquaintances and especially just people i'm peripherally in community with share that I probably wouldn't otherwise.
I miss the old internet for sure, but I'm not convinced the current situation is as horrible as people say.
5 hours ago [-]
Rendered at 03:39:42 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
But otherwise totally agree with the critique. Modern connection speeds have enabled a huge amount of bloat. I grew up when 1200 baud modems were the latest rage, and patience when downloading was a hard requirement.
Although, being patient was part of the experience as well
Go back to the first tab which has finally finished loading. Consume.
Today, my computer's memory is far more constrained than its network bandwidth. I find it very easy to accidentally open tons of tabs very quickly (esp. from the HN front page!) until suddenly the browser is swapping and everything's slowing to a crawl trying to process all those new page DOMs.
And yet, even when it doesn't choke the computer, I find no real benefit to preloading pages in the background any more. At least on my connection, the page load time after I focus a tab is almost imperceptible.
How things have changed!
> In 1994, BookLink Technologies featured tabbed windows in its InternetWorks browser.[citation needed] That same year, the text editor UltraEdit also appeared with a modern multi-row tabbed interface. The tabbed interface approach was then followed by the Internet Explorer shell NetCaptor in 1997. These were followed by several others like IBrowse in 1999, and Opera in 2000 (with the release of version 4 - although an MDI interface was supported before then), MultiViews October 2000, which changed its name into MultiZilla on April 1st, 2001 (an extension for the Mozilla Application Suite[11]), Galeon in early 2001, Mozilla 0.9.5 in October 2001, Phoenix 0.1 (now Mozilla Firefox) in October 2002, Konqueror 3.1 in January 2003, and Safari in 2003. With the release of Internet Explorer 7 in 2006, all major web browsers featured a tabbed interface.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tab_%28interface%29
Also, Opera had a Multiple-Document Interface from the start, so 1995 or so. That's not "tabs" per se but multiple mini-windows inside the main window; much the same "Hey, I can have multiple things open!" deal
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Opera_web_brows...
My point is, you think more about clicking a link when it'll monopolize your whole UI and you can't just stash it in a background tab or mini-window.
I was just thinking back the other day about BBS days and how frustrating a busy signal could be, or connection time limits, etc.
Needless to say, I got accused of cheating quite a bit.
I know nostalgia for the old days is de rigueur especially on HN but I definitely do not want to go back to that.
And it could easily have been 10 KB.
https://www.audioatrocities.com/games/lastalert/index.html
Most of my articles are pretty media rich and weigh in between 1-2 megs. I do try to be pretty conscientious about asset compression (mozjpeg, h264 for video, etc.). I'd love to switch over to AV1 but I've heard compatibility on older devices is spotty.
Plus Silverlight made Flash seem like a dream.
Then buy a Totalfark subscription so they don't need to bend over backwards to show more ads just to keep the lights on. See ya there!
Can we get the best of 1999 with the best of 2026? Probably not...
In order to actually have and maintain a healthy balance of life and technology, such compromises are required.
I propose building a new stack, without ICANN and friends (Verisign is raising .com prices yet again). I'm planning to build it[1] at some point, just working on other foundational stuff at the moment.
Cozy corners, webrings, and Gemini/Gopher is where I see the spirit of the old web alive and well.
---
[1]: https://dap.sh
So hardly anyone considered facebook to be a part of "the web". It was its own weird duck. Twenty years later and most people only frequent this "weird" part of the internet - this limited ensemble of paid and unpaid walled gardens.
yes, they were, in the UK at least. speaking as a compuserve user.
And today, if you want to learn something the right way, you probably still should buy a book (or, I guess, pirate an ebook). I don't think you can really learn much from YouTube influencers and the like.
I'd also note that the Internet of 1999 was loaded with spam, bursting at the seams with it, so much so that it was actually a big deal when ~30 months later Paul Graham wrote a post about Bayesian filtering.
[gestures wildly at all the bots in 2026]
I worked on a Geocities archive restoration. There was a boat load of porn (including illegal porn), malicious domains, spamvertising, malware, predators, political extremists, etc on the 1999 web, and you can find all of it within the raw Geocities archive that was made before it shut down. The idea that the old web was some kind of pure place of innocence is a weird and factually inaccurate take. If anything, the late 90s web was more dark than it is now, perhaps in part because nobody had any idea of how to police anything on it and things like PhotoDNA didn't exist yet.
If anything, my work on 90s site archival has taught me that the web has always been a place with a lot of dark places, and the narrative that the old web was some sort of pure innocent place that became evil is not matched by evidence.
It's just as plausible to me that the general "misbehavior" of humans on the internet hasn't changed all that much, but that we have, frankly, adopted a more puritanical and intolerant approach towards it. Nobody was talking about getting rid of Section 230, carding people for 18+ before they could use IRC (or install an operating system, what the actual fuck is wrong with you California), and Congress wasn't dragging evil Geocities CEO David Bohnett into grilling sessions where they were accusing him of hooking kids on digital cigarettes. Perhaps it would be wise to have a little nostalgia for some of that too.
No argument there. That said, I think the big difference between the 1990's and today is that everyone knew the nefarious places and people existed but, for the most part, you actually had to seek it out. I am not suggesting that it was hard to find. Perhaps the worse of the worse was easier to find. On the other hand, it wasn't quite the same thing as algorithmic feeds. For example: I absolutely refuse to view anything remotely political on some sites (including reputable news sources or material that is clearly satire) since that is the surest way to be fed extremist crap. How far those feeds will 5ake me, I simply do not want to know.
1. A kind of capital that is widely available, so that people could exercise control and agency with machines that do what you want them to do for your own needs.
2. A distribution tool controlled by mega-corporations as they decide what you should be able to see or have.
The issue isn't javascript, it's ads/trackers/algos/slop. I feel like tracker/ad/algorithm free static site on the status quo of http, or something newer like IPFS, is worlds better than trying to use arbitrary restrictions on something like a Gemini capsule.
What made the old web cool, is that it was the first time we can communicate with so many random people in far away places digitally and share information through cool web pages.
That novelty has mostly died now. Communicating with people in distant lands is mundane now. And there is little new things to share that we haven’t already seen or heard before.
So what’s the point of the web now? Maybe the internet will become purely a utility for exchanging data for infrastructural and business purposes, and the idea of using the internet as a source of entertainment or recreation will fade away.
It would be nice to retreat back to an analog world, where the internet still exists, but only as a layer of glue in the background that orchestrates multiple technologies that power our world, and nothing more.
Instagram is probably my most used one these days and I love seeing my friend's stories and I don't think I've parsed more than a handful of ads in the last 2 or 3 years that I've been an active user, probably a few tens of hours wasted with dumb reels, not a bad cost at all imo. I have probably 400 irl people and 200 internet accounts I follow. It doesn't have the charm and honesty of navigating a webring or whatever, but the friction is so low so I get to see a lot of stuff my friends, acquaintances and especially just people i'm peripherally in community with share that I probably wouldn't otherwise.
I miss the old internet for sure, but I'm not convinced the current situation is as horrible as people say.