The Internet has lost its original purpose

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Dan B

Disengaged member
What the hell kind of connection are you on? TalkTalk?! No webpage takes more than a second or two to load here.
Mobile. From the top of a bus it's not uncommon for the phone screensaver to kick in before the average web page finishes loading.
 

CopperBrompton

Bicycle: a means of transport between cake-stops
Location
London
Mobile. From the top of a bus it's not uncommon for the phone screensaver to kick in before the average web page finishes loading.
Sounds like you need to upgrade network or phone or both ...

300baud if you were lucky :whistle:
I started with 110-baud, then 300, then a new-fangled dual-speed 300 / 1200/75 for this new Prestel thing. Then 2400-baud, which felt amazing, and 9600-baud which was crazy speed ...
 

Wafer

Veteran
What I miss about the 1990s internet is decentralisation. These days everything is Google or Amazon or Facebook or Twitter which means that (1) anyone trying to change that has network effects stacked agsint them; (2) most of the people even attempting (1) don't want to decentralise anyway, they want to replace the current chokepoints with their own

tl;dr I liked the net when it was built on protocols, not platforms

Yeah, it was so much better when, instead of using Google, you spent time on Alta Vista, Yahoo, Ask Jeeves and whatever other search engine and still couldn't find what you were after....
And with stuff like the whole Netscape/IE thing it was all about platforms then too. The ideal of web standards is still something of a pipe dream, but it's better than it was.
 

ColinJ

Puzzle game procrastinator!
Anyone miss the "bingy-boingy-screetchy" noise of a dialup modem?
No! :laugh:

I was off work for a week once and spent most of that time online. Doing anything took ages, and I paid by the minute. I ran up a £100 bill in less than 7 days! :eek:

Broadband made such a difference. I am looking forward to upgrading to fibre in the future and getting > 10 times the speed I get now, which varies from about 3 - 15 Mb/s.
 

Pale Rider

Legendary Member
It's developed into a giant shopping catalogue.

Getting information is quite hard and provenance is an even bigger problem.

The likes of wiki cannot be relied upon, although I accept most of what's on there is about right.
 

Glow worm

Legendary Member
Location
Near Newmarket
Viz magazine when the internet first appeared changed radically.......' We're on the Internet!! Send your letters to the usual address, marking the envelope 'The Internet Department'' ^_^
 

Dan B

Disengaged member
Yeah, it was so much better when, instead of using Google, you spent time on Alta Vista, Yahoo, Ask Jeeves and whatever other search engine and still couldn't find what you were after....
And with stuff like the whole Netscape/IE thing it was all about platforms then too. The ideal of web standards is still something of a pipe dream, but it's better than it was.
There have always been people trying to "embrace and extend" it, but the underlying standards have meant that hitherto they've failed. The IE monopoly was eventually toppled by Mozilla, and mozilla was possible because HTML and HTTP are open. 1990s search "portals" lost to Google Search, and Google Search also was possible because HTML and HTTP are open. These days ... try writing a search engine that indexes Facebook and see how far you get. Once you're big enough to be a threat they'll turn you off or buy you out
 
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