Feeling nostalgic? Weren’t around in the 90s but wonder what it was like? ProtoWeb has you covered! Over on his YouTube channel [RetroTech Chris] shows you how to browse the web like it’s 1995.
The service that [RetroTech Chris] introduces is on the web over here: protoweb.org. The way it works is that you configure your browser to use the service’s proxy server, then the service will be able to intercept your browsing activity and serve you old content from its cache. Also, for some supported sites, you will see present-day content but presented in the format you would have seen in the 90s. Once you have configured your browser to use the ProtoWeb proxy you can navigate to http://www.inode.com/ where you will find a directory listing of sites which have been archived or emulated within the service.
In his video [RetroTech Chris] actually demos some of the old web browsers running on old hardware, which is a very good recreation of what things were like. If you want the most realistic experience you can even configure ProtoWeb to slow down your network connection to the speed of a 56k dial-up modem. There are some things from the 90s that we miss, but waiting for websites to load isn’t one of them!
We had a look in our own archive to see how far back we here at Hackaday could go, and we found our first post, from September 2004: Radioshack Phone Dialer – Red Box. A red box! Spicy.
Thanks to [Teejay] for writing in about this one.
“There are several things we miss, but waiting for websites to load isn’t one of them! ”
I’d love to experience your fantasy Internet where web sites don’t load 500MB of garbage and have 18 different scripts with mandatory delays and check-ins before loading all the actual site elements you are there to view.
There are sites that I don’t have alternatives for that take over a minute to load the text elements I want to read.
Enshitification is insane…
“It works fine on my machine”
–Web Developer
You’re forgetting about the ~100 tracking sites that are being contacted. ;)
Seriously, not everything was slow back then.
And 56k wasn’t the absolute standard, either. In mid-90s, 14k4, 28k8 and 33k6 were common modem speeds.
There were plain HTML sites at the time and browsers had the behavior
to load/display pictures on demand, rather than doing it automatically.
If you wanted to see them, you had to click on them first.
Ideally, the pictures had alternate titles (plain text) that would take the place if pictures weren’t loaded.
That way, the website stayed perfectly in tact in terms od formatting.
To give an idea, a humble personal homepage of the time did fit in under 1 megabyte.
On an 880KB Amiga floppy or a 360KB 5,25″ DOS diskette!
And the welcome page with a simple, LZW compressed GIF could require less than 5 to 20 KB, maybe.
Even with an 28k8 modem it had loaded in a few seconds.
Because many websites were basically just the equivalent to plain ASCII text files with HTML tags thrown in, after all.
I’m probably telling the obvious here,
but young people who haven’t witnessed 90s web don’t know that.
Also, there’s a big difference between early 90s and late 90s web!
Early web wasn’t yet about GeoCities, funky GIF banners and psychodelic colors. That was 1996-1999!
No. Before ca. 1996, the web was still largely “university style”.
You had primarily people at schools and universities having casually accessing the internet.
Via proper permanent connections such as T1 lines rather than dial-up.
That’s why a lot of web pages/sites were still being done with Unix in mind, so to say.
Sure there were ordinary users on our average, underpowered PCs running Windows 3.x, System 7 and plain DOS, even.
Or Amiga/Atari ST, even. Or Acorn Risc PCs..
But university still was the domain of early internet/web related stuff.
I’m mentioning this, because universities and research fascilities have been
among the first who got internet access in the 1980s.
The public wasn’t allowed to have access to it until early 90s, when it was being opened to everyone.
Thus, through their historical position, education sector had an certain defining influence on the early internet/web.
That’s why some websites had used weird Unix mono bitmaps, for example. Such as PBM/XBM.
(Though GIF and JPEG pair were the standard. GIF existed as GIF87a and GIF89A, btw.
GIF later got optional aspect-ratio information, animation support, transparency etc. )
In additon, students -and people of higher education in general-,
were probably among the first type of people being aware of the internet in first place.
Ordinary people were rather used to calling BBSes or popular online services (CompuServe, Prodigy, AOL etc).
PS: Sorry for the long comment, I wasn’t being able to word it properly.
I didn’t mean to steal the show or something, but I thought people should think about these things.
Because early web wasn’t our typical year 2000 experience with Internet Explorer 5 on Windows 98.
Just like the days of Windows/386 were very different to those later years of Windows 3.1, when Windows got popular.
This site has screenshots of early websites from before 1996.
https://www.webdesignmuseum.org/gallery
They speak for themselves.
Nice ref to RiscPC!
Thanks. ^^
Fun that their server list includes Quake/Unreal/Half Life servers. A touch surprised the ready-to-run browsers are Windows-only when the branding is centred on a Mac and macOS, but it’s such a wonderful community project I’m not even going to pretend I’m upset about that.
I don’t know about the rest of the folks that were young adults in the 1990’s, but I sure as heck don’t miss browsing the web of that era. Browsing on Netscape on a Pentium-100 with a 14.4k modem is an intense lesson in patience. BBS-ing at that speed was decent (until you needed to do a file download, which only took about 1 hour per megabyte, provided the phone line didn’t glitch your connection), but trying to browse the web was a joke, even back when such machines were still considered “state of the art”.
Other than the “neato” factor, I don’t miss it for a moment.
There’s a reason we have nostalgia channels, because people always think the march of progress left something behind.
It’s not so much how was online but who was online at that time, and there’s no emulator to bring that back.
Hmm, I suspect the bottleneck was the 14.4K modem, the poor P100 was twiddling its thumbs most of the time ;-) !
+1
I remember that in 1996 we had a 486 and a 33k6 “Trust Communicator” data/fax modem.
Not sure if it was state of the art, but it was sold new in stores in ’96.
14k4 baud was fine for a fax modem, however. No kidding.
Speeds of 9k6 and 4k8 (!) were still common in the fax world at the time.
So maybe the user had a fax modem that also could do data, too?
Just not with newest modulation/compression techniques.
They were all fax/modems at the time. At least that was true of every one I remember using or seeing advertised back then.
My poor P100 was full of bottlenecks, but it was leaps and bounds better than the 386DX33 I was running only a year or two previous to that.
Respect to those who love retro-computing, but I’m not one of them.
Most of the time in the early/mid 90s we didn’t use “the web” (HTML 1.0 was 1996!), we used Usenet, Gopher, and Archie.
Hi, back in the day things were wild! :)
HTML and HTTP had drafts that were in use before the finalization of a standard, so there’s a bit of confusion.
Refering to HTTP/1.0 as a real standard happened years later (finalized 1996?).
Back then many servers were using a draft of 1.0, rather.
Such as: HTTP/1.0 (1993 draft)
HTTP 0.9 was the simplest version (just GET command).
Hm. A quick search revealed that 1996 had HTML 3.2 already.
I also remember QuickTime plug-ins and Real Audio..
Which makes sense to me, considering that the pre-historic Minuet DOS browser suite was pre-HTML 2 and was last updated in 1994.
In those two years some progress must have been happened, after all.
Sega Saturn also had some HTML3 support, which was from mid-90s.
The old Sega website was from 1996, too.
Anyway, I don’t mean to be pedantic or to correct you.
By mid-90s, everything was mixed, everything was new.
Some users were on HTML v1, v2 or v3.x browsers – or Gopher, Usenet etc.
Then different countries or places were on a different technological level, as well.
I guess it wasn’t before Netscape Navigator when average users kept upgrading their browsers over and over again. 🤷♂️
Before 1996, many niche browsers were still in wide use and users didn’t look down upon them just because they were made a small team.
Choosing a browser was like choosing your favorite terminal program, maybe.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_web_browsers#Historical
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minnesota_Internet_Users_Essential_Tool#Features
https://web.archive.org/web/19961219233159/http://www.sega.com/
https://segaretro.org/NetLink_Custom_Web_Browser
Just a few data points. HTML was publicly available in 1991. HTML 1.0 was released in 1993, and by 1995 HTML 2.0 was released. Yahoo! and Infoseek were formed in 1994 (the first search engine companies).
I think in the latter half of the ’90s most people started getting exposure the www, but things were definitely happening sooner than you post implies.
Dial-up modems explain one of Microsoft Exchange’s odd Send/Receive buttons. At the time, we’d all be paying for a phone call by the minute (or by the second), so you’d want to package up email downloads and uploads into one call.
The logical way to do that was to collect all the replies that you had ready; send them and once done, you’d immediately download any emails you had received in the meantime. Then you’d reply to those (and/or write some new ones) and repeat the process. The Send/Receive button saved you a click.
Except I didn’t use Exchange. I started out with a Supra 28.8k modem hooked up to my Macintosh LC II with TCP/IP and internet apps obtained via the Adam Engst: Internet Connection Kit book (the cheapest way to get on the internet in the System 7.1 era). It came with Eudora Lite 1.3.1, which I found a delight!
These days it’s a weird anachronism, because one always thinks of mail apps being ready to receive an (old-school) email whenever they’re sent and sending an email later.
Due to the PC located directly above the title I spent a few moments trying to figure out why “pro-tower” was being mis-spelled. “Proto-Web” may have put the message across more quickly.
RetroTech Chris here! Glad you featured ProtoWeb, it’s a fantastic addition to the Internet. I use it fairly often together with Retro SHOUTCast to stream music during my workdays. The ProtoWeb team continues to do an amazing job with ProtoWeb and are always adding new features!