The Internet has lost its original purpose

[Shut Up Legs]

Remember back in the '80s and '90s when the Internet used to be a collection of freely-available facts? When most web pages, with any halfway-decent ADSL router, would load in a few seconds? That time is over. Today's Internet contains web pages with

• links to way too many advertising and/or web tracking services, e.g. doubleclick.net and its variants google-analytics.com, etc. These make even relatively simple web pages take minutes to load, sometimes.
• annoying features such as popup windows, or popups that don't show as windows, but somehow animate over the top of the web page you're trying to view. Yes, there's software to block these, but it shouldn't be necessary.
• malware: there are people whose mission in life seems to be to inconvenience other people by maliciously spreading software designed to cripple computers. Sometimes they don't even have a reason for it.
  
• spam: the Internet equivalent of pushy street spruikers.
• loss of privacy: all the big companies have invaded our privacy, e.g. Google, Facebook, etc. We can of course take various measures to block these unwanted intrusions and protect our privacy, but again it shouldn't be necessary, and never used to be necessary in the early years of the Internet.

OK, rant over .

 

[classic33]

The internet originally had a purpose?

 

[vernon]

Gotta move with the times Victor.

Bin your modem and Mosaic and try something a bit more modern

FWIW I was using the Internet when it was text only and the spamming of usenet was a pain in the butt in the unmoderated newsgroups.

Freely available facts? With archie and veronica you were at the mercy of informations sources being bothered to index their content,

web addresses were of the type 168:23.121.56 - hardly memorable

Graphical browsers only became mainstream with Mosaic roundabout 1992 and even then archie and veronica were the dominant search tools.

File transfers - certainly as long as you used ftp and configured your modem to use the correct protocol x-modem, y-modem, ascii etc.

Early web sites were dire, poorly formatted and poorly implemented.

I'd not go back to the wild frontiers of continual innovation, compatibility issues and a rapidly changing set of standards. Things have settled down and I'm more than content with the current offerings.

I remember the pains of getting hardware, software and the Internet to co-operate with each other - configuration could be a nightmare. That's not so today.

 

[TheDoctor]

The internet originally had a purpose?

Other than porn (and CycleChat, obviously!)

 

[Cubist]

But in terms of evolution, having the opportunity to see lots of videos of cats is a great leap forward

 

[Shut Up Legs]

The internet originally had a purpose?

Definitely:

• http://www.answers.com/Q/What_was_the_original_purpose_of_the_internet
• https://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20110618105757AA7qEwl
• http://www.internetsociety.org/internet/what-internet/history-internet/brief-history-internet
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Internet
• http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2000/09/000904125555.htm

 

[DaveReading]

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m5z5U_xd8EU

 

[stephec]

But in terms of evolution, having the opportunity to see lots of videos of cats is a great leap forward

Especially if they're on skateboards.

 

[jefmcg]

Original internet didn't include the web. Stay off http, and it's still pretty nice out there.

(or, that's not really true. But the internet was pretty old by the 1980s)

 

[Wafer]

Yeah I remember the Internet in the 90s, no adsl, Web pages took ages to load, before Google search was atrocious, it already contained a load of crap, geocities, trolls....
In some respects the same as it is now but now there's more of it and it generally runs faster....

 

[Accy cyclist]

I've only had a computer for about 7 years so i can't remember the early days. I'm surprised the internet was running in the 80's i thought i was way later.

 

[vernon]

I've only had a computer for about 7 years so i can't remember the early days. I'm surprised the internet was running in the 80's i thought i was way later.

Monochrome monitors, text only, accessed through ASCII terminals or Lynx browsers, text based commands, impenetrable to all but the congnescenti but at the same time much better than the widely used BBS systems and their asynchronous communication.

Does anyone remember using Wildcat, CItadel, PCBoard, Searchlight and Spitfire based bulletin board systems and being at the mercy of Fisonet and Echo relaying for the propogation and reception of messages?

Happy days?

 

[jefmcg]

The internet has been around since the 60s. The world wide web since the early nineties.

(eg, you could get email in the mid eighties, but couldn't visit a web page until you got your hands on something like lynx (1992) or if you were lucky enough to have a WIMP system, Mosaic, 1993

 

[vernon]

The internet has been around since the 60s. The world wide web since the early nineties.

(eg, you could get email in the mid eighties, but couldn't visit a web page until you got your hands on something like lynx (1992) or if you were lucky enough to have a WIMP system, Mosaic, 1993

Arparnet was around from the sixties.

The Internet came into being in the early eighties.

Most folk wrongly think that WWW/HTTP is the Internet.

 

[jefmcg]

I stand corrected. I only got onto the internet in the mid eighties. Didn't even have a website until the mid-nineties.