Godspeed, Web 1.0
Before we got the Internet we deserved, we had the information superhighway! It opened up the world to us.
I’m lucky, because I remember before The Internet was ubiquitous. Back in the 90’s, it was possible to go out with friends and for your parents to have literally no idea where you were. The Net was something we switched on when we wanted it, and switched off when we were done. It wasn’t capable of following us around. We could — and did — say stupid stuff online and it didn’t come back to haunt us.
That Old Internet is gone, now, but sometimes I like to think about it. Perhaps, you’d care to join me and share my memories of Web 1.0?
There were specific times of the day when we could use the Internet. It ran over the phone line, sending analogue signals that you could hear if you picked up the receiver, and so nobody could use the phone at the same time as being online. It blocked incoming calls, too, giving callers an ‘engaged’ signal.
To get online via the phone, we had these boxes called “modems” (modulator/demodulator) that transformed binary computer signals to pulses that could travel over a standard phone system (POTS: Plain Old Telephone System then PSTN: Public Switched Telephone Network). The phone lines weren’t fibre optic, it was just copper carrying electricity down to the nearest BT junction box. It sounds primitive, and it was, but it was also reliable. That whole “five nines of availability”, AKA 99.999% uptime, came from POTS.
The BT box was a green (officially “General Post Office Green”) bin, about yay high and about a foot deep. They appeared on streets every few hundred metres. That’s where your phone line went — when under repair, you could see the phone engineer working on spools of wires inside. We still have something similar, but now its full of fibre optic cables and lacks that chique 1970’s styling.
Once you’d checked that nobody wanted to make a call, and nobody was expecting a call for an hour or so, you could fire up the PC and dial-up to the Internet.
Windows 95 and 98 were our systems of choice then. You’d have a “Wizard” helper tool in Windows that would configure how to connect to The Net. You told it where your modem was plugged in, what number it should dial and what speed it would use.
The speed was literally how fast the modem should chirp and squeak down the phone line. This had to match what the computer on the other end, the Internet Service Provider, was expecting and it had to match what your PC serial port was set to.
The Wizard would do its magic, and after a few moments of clicking and whirring over the speakers… the modem would complete it’s connection and we’d be surfing the digital information superhighway! Our PC was now talking to another machine over the phone line, and through it the world was now at our fingertips!
The best type of modem you could get was a 56.6k baud modem. This meant that it could squeak down the phone line at a rate of 56,600 bits a second. Equivalent to about 6.9 kilobytes a second, or 400KB per minute.
If a file was 6 megabytes — such as an mp3 — it would take about fifteen minutes for it to download… and that was assuming nobody accidentally picked up the phone and interrupted your Internet connection! If that happened, we normally had to disconnect and start again.
At the heady speeds of 400KB a minute, what did that mean for The Net we inhabited? For starters, it meant three things:
- Websites were lighter: fewer graphics, almost no video, only short audio clips.
- Video meant using specific tools like RealPlayer, which could effectively stream sound and video from a RealPlayer source somewhere off in the world to our machines at a tolerable quality… but still with a lot of buffering and a very small image.
- Everything was a lot more single-purpose, because there wasn’t the capacity for most things to do more than 1–2 things at once!
The PCs of the time were also more limited. Screens would be 800⨉600 or 1024⨉768, but rarely larger. Most of us still used CRT (Cathode Ray Tube) displays, rather than flat LCD or TFT screens.
The CRT was a heavy, bulky beast. It worked by firing electrons at a phosphorous-covered screen in a scan-line — starting at the top and working down. The glass screen was slightly curved, so it could catch the edges of the scan-lines. It would also periodically build up electromagnetic static, and there was a ‘degauss’ button on most CRT monitors that would discharge this static by making the screen go “BOM!” and the image wobble for a moment or two.
The PCs themselves were heavy, and by today’s standards not very powerful. The Intel Pentium III processor was cutting-edge, and (depending on model) ran from 400MHz to 1.4GHz. It was also single core, single-threaded… which meant the machine could literally only do one thing at a time.
Windows would try to trick you into thinking you were doing multiple things at once, but in reality you weren’t. It was just quickly swapping out what “one thing” was getting done so it looked like several things were happening at once. See the Dining Philosophers.
For comparison, my now out-dated iPhone 13 Pro runs at between 2GHz and 3.2GHz across six processor cores. That’s equivalent to twelve 1999 PCs, if they could somehow all work together.
The average hard disk was 500MB — 1GB. Enough space for probably two DVD quality movies. Windows gobbled up quite a bit of that, and whatever was left over was shared between the documents we had and our programs.
These limitations of speed, concurrency and processing power meant that software just couldn’t do as much, and that meant websites were very much limited in what they could ask a web browser program to do!
The capabilities available to website developers then were limited by the kinds of machines visitors had, the speed at which they connected to the Internet and also what sort of software they used.
Microsoft was, once, a dominant player in this market and savagely wrecked other web browsers. Its own Internet Explorer 4.0 was a prelude of what was to come when it started bundling Internet Explorer 6.0 (2001) with Windows, effectively crushing all competition and landing the corporation squarely in the US Federal Courts for anti-competitive practices.
Genuinely, we used to think Microsoft bundling Internet Explorer with Windows was the worst example of cut-throat big business behaviour. Man, we were naïve.
The web wasn’t standardised much, then, and what sort of experience you got on a website depended whether you used Internet Explorer, NetScape or (in 2002) Mozilla — which would later go on to become Firefox. The site might display nicely, or its layout might be all over the place and unreadable.
If you didn’t want your website to break, you kinda had to keep it simple. Text, images and not much else. Even SSL (https) wasn’t common then: it was standard for websites to serve all their data unencrypted, unless it was to do with shopping — and even then, not always!
You might ask yourself “what did you get up to on this place? It seems pretty boring!” It’s a fair question — and part of the answer lies in its novelty and its ability, new to us, to connect us to other people in other parts of the world. That was an amazing concept.
Back then, most people weren’t online. It was becoming popular, but it was by no means uncommon for people to have never used the Internet, or to not have an email address.
Because the Internet was slow and simple, we tended to do things that worked on simple interactions — literally like “I say A” and then other people couple reply with what they thought. Bulletin boards, UseNet and journalling very common, along with early webmail systems like Yahoo! Mail and Hotmail.
I think the most important thing I can impress upon you, best beloved, is how beautifully anonymous all of this was. Most websites were run by hobbyists or by companies experimenting with the web. When we signed up for a webmail account, nobody checked who we were. When we wanted to join a bulletin board system, we could pick any username we wanted.
Even when companies like DoubleClick horned in on advertising, the majority of our actions online still didn’t get exported in toto into big corporate databases just to better serve us adverts. DoubleClick largely monitored banner-ad performance and, later, purchase habits. Nothing like the Big Data mining tools that would later be used even existed, and wouldn’t exist for years. The tech just wasn’t there to study us in that level of detail.
Facebook wouldn’t launch until 2004, and didn’t really start growing until a few years later. Google didn’t start leveraging their data in earnest for ads until 2008. Twitter didn’t launch until 2006. Instagram not until 2010, and wasn’t bought by Facebook until 2012. TikTok launched in 2016.
Circling back to DoubleClick, none of those companies had the powers then that they do now. The tech wasn’t there to feed them the immense amounts of data they now guzzle, and they didn’t have the tech to sift it even if they had it.
As a result… we weren’t products.
Normally, we would only be online for an hour or so in a day. We had to explicitly switch on a PC and dial-up to the Internet before we could do stuff. Let’s you and I have a look at what that hour often looked like.
Once connected, the first step was usually to catch up with any emails. Friends from school or notifications about stuff on websites we liked were most common — newsletters, digests and alerts. So-and-so replied to your post on this website. Here’s a summary of new discussions on this website. Here’s a newsletter of discounts at this online shop.
If we didn’t use webmail, which was free-but-feature-limited online email accounts accessible via a website, then we had an email address provided to us by our ISP — the same people our modem called-up to connect online. Something like Outlook Express would let us connect to these email accounts and download any waiting messages.
With email up-to-date, then it was time to check in with our communities. We self-selected them, based on stuff we liked and based on vibe. These were mostly run by hobbyists, and allowed new members to register and post/reply to messages.
Because we self-selected them, we tended to abide by whatever the accepted behaviour was. The communities policed themselves, in that way. If someone said or did something that was unacceptable, the other users would usually warn them. Similarly, whatever arguments we might get into with other community members, we always had whatever the community was about to fall back on.
After September 11th, myself and others got into blinding arguments with reactionary conservatives in the USA over the invasion of Iraq and the war against the Taliban in Afghanistan…
…But, whatever else happened, it was a bulletin-board community about Transformers, and we always had that to bond us. Whatever happened, we all liked robots turning into cars, thought Optimus Prime was the best and could reminisce about toys we used to have. It bound us together.
Because we self-selected our circles, we were always exposed to different people but moderated by a shared interest. Anime was still niche in the late 1990’s, and so regardless of your creed or outlook if you joined a bulletin board about Gundam Wing yaoi fan-fiction — as I did — you knew everyone had that thing in common.
This meant permanent falling-outs were uncommon. These places were like groups of friends hanging together, with a common lexicon, shared community history and shared subject interest.
Once we’d replied to anything we wanted to reply to, or started new topics about whatever was on our minds, we might spend a few minutes shopping. Amazon sold books, CDs and videos. eBay was an online flea-market where you could, legitimately, sometimes find rarities and bargains. Blackstar offered second-hand VHS, for the more obscure shows that wouldn’t be released in a Big Box Set on DVD for decades yet. Niche shopping sites like Aestheticism sold bootleg copies of (then) obscure anime movies such as Ai No Kusabe.
If we didn’t want to buy stuff, then there were games like Cosmo’s Conundrum: a combination instant-messenger and general knowledge quiz show! Sadly, I can’t find any images of it… it’s too long departed. It even offered real money as prizes to the best trivia champions! “Cosmo” was the mascot — a space monkey in a little UFO — who would pose rounds of multiple-choice general knowledge. In between rounds, we could chat with other people in the “rooms” we were grouped into.
Well, the fun was done so this could be when we’d look to log off… or it could be the moment when an instant messenger program popped up a notification! We could chat back and forth in real time with friends all over the world with ICQ, MSN or AOL.
Everyone had their favourite, so some friends you’d chat to with ICQ (“I-Seek-You”):
Others preferred the MSN Messenger from Microsoft:
And still others preferred AOL:
Even Yahoo! got in on the game:
We didn’t have this stuff on our phones, because we didn’t have phones capable of running it! In the UK, SMS-capable mobiles only really took off at the turn of the Millennium. You could only use these things on your PC, and only while connected online over the phone!
Naturally, the other big use of the Internet was researching and reading. You could find hobbyist websites about all manner of things, or you could look up more technical information. If there was nothing you wanted to do otherwise… then it was time to log-off.
We’d disconnect from the Net, and the phone line would go back to being usable again — including receiving incoming calls. Maybe we’d leave the PC on and play a game like Tomb Raider, Final Fantasy VIII or RollerCoaster Tycoon. The games didn’t use the Net — and this meant that they had to actually be finished and work! There was no way to patch them after!
Possibly, depending on school, we might even fire up the CD-based Microsoft Encarta encyclopædia and get some homework written… in Word 97, of course!
In the end, it would all finish the same way: we’d switch the PC off. That was a thing we did. No email, no alerts, no friends popping up. The PC went off… and that was that.
I think the thing hardest to explain to anyone who didn’t grow up with this is just how innocent it all seemed. The Internet just didn’t feel like that big of a deal in the real world, since it didn’t follow us around. It was still exciting and fascinating, but when we were done, we turned it off.
What we did online didn’t really go anywhere — God knows I said and did some stupid stuff back then, but thankfully unless a super-bored hacker wants to waste their time and happens to be very lucky, I don’t think any of it will ever be seen. It’s just gone. It was on private servers that don’t exist anymore, it was on databases who’s hard-disks long ago crashed permanently and on back-ups that have long, long since been wiped. Now it would all be stored permanently in a Big Data profile about me.
Nothing we did then could really hurt us. It was a big, magical, interesting world of other people and their thoughts that we could explore.
We never imagined anything like what we have now. All things being equal, I really miss the Old Internet. I suspect that, if our world is going to survive, we may need to hand back some of the Web 2.0 and 3.0 advancements for a bit of what we had with 1.0.
