An Ode to the Old Internet
2025-08-08
Disclaimer: I've written all this from memory. It may contain factual errors and other inaccuracies! Also, I'm mostly talking about WWW here, not the internet in general.
I've been making homepages since I was around 13 years old back in the mid 90's. This was only a few years after I tried to make games in QBASIC and later, develop games in DOS using DJGPP (neither which amounted to much). Writing HTML, on the other hand was easy. I quickly got the handle on it and was eager to tell everyone about its wonders!
I put up homepages about all the stuff I cared about: Games I liked (I had a Warcraft 2 shrine at one point, the wallpaper was the "grass" tile), anime (fanart, fansubs), and homepages just for the sake of it (often with little to no actual content, but a lot of quirky 90s webdesign).
At first, I used my ISPs free 5 MB (yes, 5 megabytes) webspace. I didn't like the URL, which had a "tilde" in it for some reason, and soon after, I discovered Geocities and moved everthing there. I might have had homepages on other hosts as well just for the heck of it.
When I turned 18, I started experimenting with actual domain names and paid webhosts, and ended up writing my own CMS in PHP. I didn't make as many homepages as I used to, never fully got into "blogging" either. I remember when "blogger.com" launched around 2000. It felt restrictive and less creative.
Writing PHP got me into CS and I got a degree—well, two actually. It launched my career in software development which I am thankful for today.
What the old internet did well
So what was so great about the early to mid 90s internet aka the "World Wide Web"?
No advertisements
At least in any organised and pervasive fashion. You wouldn't really need an adblocker because there wasn't much to block until the late 90s, and even then, they were much less obtrusive than today. Some were even fun!
They started as simple banners at the top of the webpages. The later at the bottom as well. People even put banners on their own homepages. First, at part of a "link exchange" network to drive traffic between hobbyist homepages. Later to earn a bit of cash. We were so naive back then. Ads weren't seen as anything harmful at all. Google didn't really exists as anything but a small search engine, and didn't really become mainstream until around 1998-2000.
No videos
Yes, the early internet was (almost) without videos. Videos didn't become a standard of HTML until much later.
Sometimes you would find pages with live streams showing a street or a monument, or just someones backyard. Actual video with content was rare (unless you looked at adult stuff). And it always required a browser plugin before it could be viewed. And it was always a different plugin and it always sucked.
Even with broadband (which in my case was an ISDN connection with 128 kbps), we are talking about videos with a framerate of 15 fps (at most) and a resolution of a GameBoy. 90% of the time you spent on the video, it would be buffering. For practical purposes, the internet was without video content for 99% of its users.
Today, searching a tutorial, you often realize that your only option is to skip through dozens of YouTube videos because no one bothered to write a simple article explaining the steps. I hate that. I enjoy video content for certain things, but hate have it permeates everything now.
No algorithms!
Well, I'm not going to pretend I enjoyed trawling through endless search results in "Alta Vista" because the first 10 pages didn't return anything related to my search query. Google really was great at first, using their "page rank" algorithm to make it easier for me to find stuff.
Algorithms back then were not: - Engineered to decide what you are interested in. I still formed my own search queries! - Making a profile of me so advertisers can target specific ad campaigns at me.
Those are the things that made the use of algorithms evil.
Despiting hating Alta Vista, I did really enjoy all of the following: - Trawling through human-moderated categories in Yahoo and dmoz. - Clicking around in web-rings finding new interesting homepages. - Perusing the links section of a personal homepage to discover new content.
You didn't always find what you were searching for, but the internet was still young. This before the content mills, the gen-ai content slob, the SEO spam, and all the scam trying to trick you into buying crypto.
Things I don't miss about the old internet
Just to balance things out a bit, here are a handful of things I don't really miss about the old internet. - Having to wait a few minutes for a website to load (having only a 56K modem for many years might have been part of my problem). - Flash. Sure, the games could be fun, but Flash embedded as a part of the web design was not. - Java Applets. Yuck. I'm saying that as a Java developer (since Java 1.4). - Having to install plugins in your browser to enable specifics parts of some obscure website was never a great time. - Browser incompatibilities. Great thing today is that everyone justs uses Chromium, so there are no incompatibilies anymore. Well actually, that's pretty bad also.
Going forward
I'm so happy that the "small web" is blossoming again and people are starting to discovers the joys of creating homepages and interacting through small communities. I'm still new to all of this, but I'm going to advocate for this corner of the internet for many years to come in any way I can.
In my ideal world, the small web would have all that made the old internet great, without all the AI slob, SEO spam, content mills, and just generally without search engines that care more about targetting you with ads than filtering out all the crap. This is going to take time. Maybe this part of the internet will always stay small and niche. Maybe that's okay, but everyone deserves to know about the alternative.