The Internet and its Development

or rather, de-development

The Internet has come a long way since its inception way back when (~1991). A little fun fact: Tim-Berners Lee conceived the internet to transfer data between computers/servers easier; beforehand, someone would have to physically walk between computers to transfer data while holding a form of storage (like a floppy disk). Overall, the internet has helped everyone around the world to more easily communicate with each other - just sending a message across the interwebs instead of walking all over. However, it's kinda strayed from its original intention...

In the 90s, getting online was kinda difficult - atleast much more difficult than it is now. This was because of a couple of reasons - dial-up was expensive and didn't allow you to be on the internet for a long time, dial-up was easily interrupted (by landline phone calls), a lot of people weren't used to modems and the internet itself (which is solved with the mid-2000s design shift) and computer resources were low. It was verrrrry uncommon back then to have a hard drive with a higher capacity than 100GB, let alone more than 256/512MB of RAM.

This limit meant that webmasters had to be very creative to express themselves under, like, zero resources (especially compared to today). This restriction combined with the newly developed concept of the internet kinda meant that there was a place for everyone across the endless cyberspace. As a result, specialised places like forums flourished along with personal websites (with GeoCities and AngelFire):

This era of the net is called Web 1.0 - it is defined by low resolutions, low-quality graphics, web-safe colours, etc, although with creative website designs. Such sites have had a lasting impression on the internet, both through nostalgia and archival - you can even still visit the site in the image today!!! The music widget doesn't work though unfortunately :'[ Anyway, back then it was extremely common that imagination was actually used. People made fun sci-fi sites, directories of information about their favourite topics (like stars/demons) - you could learn a lot by just taking a look at the site! They were also small as in the mid 90s, individual geocities sites had a limit of 2MB. Yeeeaaaaahhhhh... just 2MB. That can be kinda difficult to find into today, even with just a couple of images.

Very nerdy and geeky people also had a place to fit into: their forums. If you asked right, you have gotten a lotta help with some of your problems. On the other hand... they kinda liked to gatekeep. This wasn't a 'then-only' thing though - you can still see it in mini-forums on sites like reddit... yeah. I don't like making posts there myself. Things also cost a lot back then. You had to pay for pretty much all of your music, instead of just streaming it. And obviously, some people don't wanna pay the price to get their favourite music. I mean, I wouldn't have either (apart from MBR), but that's besides the point. Some of you reading this may remember programs like LimeWire and BearShare, and the '.exe's that came along with them. The massive lack in effective security/censorship on the web back then made it a very chaotic place - you could come across anything at any time, which made it very wild. The Wild Wild Web (woah!!!). You could kinda say that the internet at this point was pretty much just testing grounds for what to do and what not to do. After all, some of these tests were built into aesthetics over time.