I don't take your meaning. You think compared to what we have in 2008, the web of 1996 didn't suck? I was connected directly to the backbone (I ran an ISP), and I agree with him.
By 1996 you had actual webpages you could visit. IQ tests. News sites. Hotmail. But it was still difficult to tell professional content from amateur stuff. Conspiracy theory and Internet trolling were fresh and interesting and the blink tag was in wide use. And port 80 wasn't the only game in town still: there were still lots of independent BBS that had interesting content and where TELNET was king.
So what if you weren't online all the time. The communities that existed expected asynchronous access. You could grab lots of content and download it for use offline. There were brilliant software applications and games ready for the taking: DOOM had left Wolfenstein in it's wake? Online was liberating. Online was brilliant. It still is.
The web in 1993? I don't remember NCSA Mosaic in 1993, I think I first used that app in 1994 in the lab at UW in Seattle. It was installed on a machine running X Windows, I think it was a DEC terminal. Before Mosaic I can remember an ftp site in Sweden that had a lot of photos. Downloading a photo of the space shuttle with Fetch and then opening it up a second later on the Mac IIsi with the 12" monochrome monitor and being pretty blown away by being able to do that so fast. I had a modem at home and could dial in to the UW Switch (via a friends student id number) with my external ViVa 9600 baud modem that I got for $75. That was a big improvement over my first modem, an external ViVa 2400 baud job that I paid $130 for. The early web was sparsely populated, photo.net wasn't born yet and Philip Greenspun had a nice site "Travels with Samantha" and that had some good advice on scanning your slides with Kodak PhotoCD technology, and then how to remove the magenta cast in Photoshop. AOL always sent out free discs, so after the UW access dried up (my friend graduated) I used that free access (17 hours of free access!) and then got a dial up account from Eskimo North in Seattle. Later found out about nocharge.com free dialup. MUD games were cool back in 1991 when all there was was rn and irc and ftp.sumex-aim.stanford.edu for entertainment.
Mosaic was released in 1994, but Lynx was available by 1992. But yeah, in 1992 most of the action was in ftp sites. They were already a lot better than the local BBSes where I lived, though.
By 1996 you had actual webpages you could visit. IQ tests. News sites. Hotmail. But it was still difficult to tell professional content from amateur stuff. Conspiracy theory and Internet trolling were fresh and interesting and the blink tag was in wide use. And port 80 wasn't the only game in town still: there were still lots of independent BBS that had interesting content and where TELNET was king.
So what if you weren't online all the time. The communities that existed expected asynchronous access. You could grab lots of content and download it for use offline. There were brilliant software applications and games ready for the taking: DOOM had left Wolfenstein in it's wake? Online was liberating. Online was brilliant. It still is.
