Early Internet History

I already answered you question here

What really changed was that there's a generation now who literally never experienced a life without the internet. These are also the people who post all of their private shit on public social media thinking nothing bad could happen.

COME GATHER ROUND PEOPLE
WHEREVER YOU ROAM

AND ADMIT THE WATERS AROUND HAVE GROWN

Email was the first catalyst. In the beginning, it behaved like instant messenger, in that both parties had to be online at the same time for it to work. Eventually, a way to store and open email came about and that made it easier for people to communicate through the system. After that the development of HTTP is undeniable. The fact that Sir Tim Berners-Lee gave it away is still remarkable.

The first people to get it were people like my family. Admittedly, we were wealthier. My old man had one of the first cell phones installed in his car for $2,000. It was the size of your mother's purse. The thing that really got "normie" online was America Online. I would chat with friends on it and your screen name was probably the first iteration of a MySpace/Facebook type of existence for normies.

>internet before normalfags
Privacy is good

>internet after normalfags
Privacy is bad, you're a conspiracy theorist.

desu desu

Yep. Remember when youtube was like 'DO NOT TELL US YOUR REAL NAME YOU DO NOT WANT TO BE DOXXED' but today you can't play a video without logging in with your real name?

Obviously they didn't say doxxed.

>Veeky Forums in 2007
>post a pic of your front yard, someone will recognize it and dox you and ruin your life

>Veeky Forums in 2018
>/soc/ exists

>internet before high speed internet in flyover country
/b/

>internet after high speed internet in flyover country
/pol/

What was the growth like between 2004 and 2009?

Flyover country still doesn't have high speed internet like cities do. Plus, most /pol/acks seem to be young urbanites.
t. lived in flyover country for a few months last year

Pretty bad.

>implying you needed high speed internet to browse Veeky Forums
It's probably one of the most bandwidth friendly websites

The typical /pol/ack isn't a flyover, but some half nigger in NYC or LA.

Back when operating systems were actually user friendly.

Speaking of Anime Desktops Windows 7 was probably the best because they had these mini diashows of anime pics you could have on the right side

Wrong

No, I mean pretty bad in that it bought way too many people to the site. Obviously the numbers between 2004>2009 were huge.

It used to be about connecting people and their ideas. Now it's all about connecting people, sharing their shitty memes, and selling them stuff.

It was very slow, nothing but text and a few small grainy low res pics.

in high school in 1996 when I first went on the internet, 80% of the kids in my class were on AOL and talked to each other in AIM and we used to email all our friends (always using the "reply all" option of course).

It was something cool that you did for a few hours a night on your family's desktop computer sitting next to the kitchen.

I see the 1st and 2nd exodus to 8ch in that graph, neat

Yeah, there wasn't really much interaction among strangers until myspace came out...mostly you emailed and AIM chatted with your friends in school

>what is mirc

You don't but hen you have dial-up it's harder to become a heavy internet user.

>mirc
Don't know, never heard of it

no

You're obviously a youngfag then. mIRC was extremely popular in the 90s and early 2000s

born 1980, never heard of it. what was it?

>Normies flocking to the internet.
>I first started using the internet when i was 12 in 2000, and let me tell you it was vastly different than it is today.
I already saw this happening even as a kid in the early 2000s when everyone in class had each others' screen names and would spend all night chatting on aim. People complain that everyone spends way too long bullshitting on facebook or instagram but those early messengers were the early form of that same shit.

It used to take forever loading an image to jerk off to

That was relatively private though.

Fuck, lowercase mirc threw me off since I remember it as IRC.

Nigger you were born in the 80s but never heard of the most popular IRC client?

>implying the death of online communities wasn't the spread of internet use in 3rd world countries

>3rd world countries
You mean like the USA?

I was working for a Turkish company at the time (2000s) and we were still apprehensive about internet and e-mail. So much so that internet and e-mail was banned in the workplace. (sort of like how your boss frowns upon you going on Facebook.)
Fast forward, trip to Sweden. I had an e-mail account back then (as did we all) but it was not associated with work. I give the swede my business card, and ask for his. I then ask why he doesn't have his e-mail on there and he replies "we don't do e-mail."
Now fast forward to a trip to America where the first leg of our trip was in Washington. While walking around outside, I distinctly remember seeing a shoe store that had its name/logo, and beneath it, the fuckin website url. That moment was a turning point for me, and the America trip as a whole was a turning point for the company cuz we started company e-mail after the America trip.

>What really changed was that there's a generation now who literally never experienced a life without the internet.

I just find that so wierd.

>who were the first people outside of academia to start using the internet

The only real answer to that specific question the way it was formulated is hobbyists and people who liked to mess with computers despite not working or studying that field.

I'm not old enough to remember the Internet during the late 90s but I do remember that the people I most I saw use the internet during the mid-2000s and up even until the late 2000s were anime and video game enthusiasts. People with weird fetishes, ocultists or people with an amateur-level interest and knowledge of computers.

Deviantart in like 2001 brought in a ton of amateur artists, and Youtube in 2005 also started bringing in tons of amateur filmmakers.

Basically for the longest time the Internet was a place for weird people and nerds to hang around, and even tho someone is going to call me a newfag or some other shit for saying that it is unironically and undeniably the truth.

/pol/ literally has more Mexicans, blacks and other foreigners than hillbillies in it. The hillbilly board is /k/.

No idea but when I partied with W.T. Snacks at magfest earlier this month I had an intense dissociative decade and a half long flashback of accumulated history wash over me in that moment. So I've been thinking on this plenty recently lol

It's rly subtle but the internet is less wonder and fantasy virtual world and more extension of real world these days if that makes sense.

When I first was able to use internet at 8 years old I used to chat on the only pokemen website with a chatroom.. Amidst maybe 10 pokemen sites total. And it was japanese

Actually

20 years ago the internet felt like it were 40% English, 20% Japanese and 20% German in language. It felt smaller, oddly.

I don't have the chart handy, but if you compare internet traffic distribution in the 2000s vs the distribution now you'd understand why it felt so comfy.

Basically back then most of us used a couple of sites at most like right now, but only a couple hundredth people at most shared the same common sites, there were thousandths of small sites and we mostly stuck to ours, as oppose to now where there's billions of us sharing literally just a handful of sites.

I find it fascinating because it mimics the real life trend of populations slowly moving in closer together and forming huge cities instead of disseminated villages.

never used IRC, but I did see Transformers (1986) in the theaters with my dad.

dumb frogposter

Luddites in Europe? Or just slow as fuck?

Not everyone jumped on the Internet train immediately. Our office was very scared of information being stolen, information leaking, and the way we did business was fine so...

It's just a matter of humans trying to adapt.

If you can go back to the year 2000 would you anons?

Yes

>These are also the people who post all of their private shit on public social media thinking nothing bad could happen.
I find that stranger then the generation that never used the internet.

>What really changed was that there's a generation now who literally never experienced a life without the internet.
What is so wrong about this. I was born in '99 and am very grateful for this gift of unlimited knowledge at the press of a button my God has given me. My generation is much more educated than all the previous ones and will go on to do great things.

I'm 19 and remember the happiest time of my life being a child without the internet. Now it's everywhere and everyone is miserable and pathetic because of it. Don't get me wrong, the internet can be good, but people need to use it in moderation. I feel sorry for my siblings for never knowing a time before social media.

>Exactly

You're a complete retard if you think messenger was the same shit, messenger was private, you add just a few people and no one could check you out with a google search, you didn't have to "prove" anything or to have hundreds of photos with your friends to prove you're a normal person, I was born in 95 and experienced that hell in its full form because Facebook exploded when I was 13-14 during the first years of HS and every boy and girl had his all social life of lack thereof on the internet, you know how mean kids in that age range can be and how they're obsessed with how many friends etc you have, facebook amplified this tenfold

Access to unlimited knowledge is not access to unlimited intellect and wisdom.

Most of this "unlimited knowlege" is cancerous memes, false and bias pseudo scientific/sensationalist crap and the like. In the words of MLK Jr. "Our technology is outpacing our morals. We have guided missiles and misguided men."

b8

I feel that man. Social media made everyone 1000 times more shallow and cruel when it first came out. It's not as bad now, but everyone basically is just fucking miserable instead..

The internet was widely available 19 years ago. You have lived your entire life with the internet available, (regardless of whether your poor family and shitty public school provided it to you.)

Nobody was saying there's anything wrong with that.

I got dial up in like 2004 and didn't have internet till like 2008. I mostly played flash games and didn't get into social media until 2012. Perhaps it's cuz I live in the middle of the woods in a pretty sheltered town so your prolly right, but my point still stands.

I drew the line when companies started asking for my private Goybook account during job interviews. Fuck off niggers, I don't even really have one.

It's really about the commodification of it
With the internet you can commodify literally the entirety of human existence. Social interaction? Sellable. Dating? Sellable. You could always sell things that helped those aims (buy this and everyone will love you!/you'll get pussy!) but now you can literally sell the ability to do these things.

NOT YOUR SEKRIT CLUB

2000? I'd go back to 1990.

>tfw I've been phoneposting since 2012
>tfw I've been lurking on my PSP even before that

>muh flyovers are /pol/
Nah, most /pol/fags are kids living in big cities who get spooked cause of muh negroes and mexicans or some bullshit
Also we do not get high speed internet

I think a lot of what was lost was also in that mods had a lot less "fun" with us.

Mods used to be like Old Testament or ancient gods. They were insane, and the appearance of any doing anything sent us damn near sacrificing offerings to their inscrutable wrath. Now they just enforce the rules as written. Which allows casuals to infiltrate, and then not lurk enough to naturalize into the particular board's culture before posting.

I mean, for god's sake, we're accepting MAL and animesuki as valid sources for information on anime now. It doesn't matter if they always were, but you didn't SAY it, and if you did, you got called out for it.

Yes but mainly so I could invest in various companies and sell high later.

Anyone who revered the mods was a faggot cuckold to begin with. I'm thinking you were a mod yourself with this idiot attitude.

Mods pls ban
Show us thy power and smite this heretic

The Mods are dead. Only Satan remains.

>Implying satan is not a mod.

youtube.com/watch?v=gsNaR6FRuO0

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>Death of online communities
>spread if Internet into 3third world countries
Why? How?