The "cognitive control" of tech companies is underpinned by a much more concrete technical control of the devices.
would those users have had devices over which they had administrative control in the past though? Perhaps for software to eat the world, and for hardware to get distributed far enough that it could, a percentage of the world had to forego administrative rights when getting that hardware.
I suppose those who miss it can still get it, although yes, for how much longer is a question.
All this to say, we're both right and wrong in feeling this way lol
going back to gopher or text-only browsers feels like admitting defeat tbh. we can still build incredibly fast modern apps if we just stop treating the users hardware like an infinite resource for adtech. you dont need massive frameworks and client--side bloat to make something good.
Do you know anything about the Browser Wars? People literally had to put up images telling you which browser to use if you wanted to actually experience their website the way it was intended. Otherwise, it was just broken. [1]
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/19/business/as-consumers-rev... (sorry for the tracking code, but this is a "gift" article and it was the best source I could find on popup ads)
The assault on your attention is way worse these days, it's just (mostly) contained to the viewport.
Now almost everyone has pressure to find new revenue streams and maximize income while Google and Facebook have sucked up most of the revenue, so you see more and sleazier ads everywhere and sites which rely on you reading or watching are on a much more aggressive treadmill trying to constantly give you new things to see ads on so the experience is more frenetic.
It feels not unlike how in the mid-20th century people left work at work when they went home and only extraordinary circumstances would result in phone calls home, etc. whereas in this century it’s just expected that everyone carries a smartphone and checks email/Slack. More efficient in some ways, for sure, but a lot of stress ground out of people for no extra compensation.
People forget that the internet used to be a place you went. It was entirely separate from our analog lives. You sat down, you fired up the machine, and your screen became this portal cut right into the universe. The juxtaposition between that visually-stunted, industrial-grade gray interface and the shocking immediate global access we suddenly had... it was the everything. The UI wasn't 'boring'. It was the clunky machine whose buttons you pressed (literally) to touch the world.
Today it's all hyper-lubricated feeds, and scammy-shiny UI trying to hijack your dopamine. But back then, the machine worked for you. It was a tool for discovery. A fucking frontier.
I've been trying to build a shrine to that precise feeling, to see if I can grab the modern web and force it to face it's beautiful glorious past - to that specific gateway-to-the-world, electronic frontier feeling. Just a small set of experiments. Incomplete as a monument to the totality of it. Merely a partial body of work, trying to express what it felt like to be there. I built a Win98/1999 environment: https://win9-5.com/desktop.html to browse the web from a (abominatively) multi-tab Netscape re-imagining. It runs a live, remote modern browser session inside a pixel-perfect 98 shell. Forcing the modern web through that dial-up era lens... it’s evocative + modem sounds. The aim is to remind you what it felt like when the web was a boundless horizon, not a walled garden of weirdo nimby's and microstates and regulatory capture etc etc etc. Sometimes I catch a flash of that fire again using it. Sometimes...
Interesting perspective
I have been using text-only browsers continually since the mid 90s (no lynx after 1999)
As such, I never "went back" to using the text-only browser as I have always used one, but as graphical browsers became worse I used them less
The customised text-only browsers I use today are 1.3 and 2.0 MB. I can compile them in seconds on underpowered computers
The so-called "modern" browser is [rapidly-expanding size] MB, not was easy to customise via editing the source code and takes substantial resources plus time to compile
Today, most www use for me is text-only. I am consuming information not graphics. I prefer textmode to X11 or the like
I avoid making HTTP requests to remote servers with graphical, Javascript-enabled browsers
I prefer using TCP clients and TLS forward proxies for making HTTP requests (at least one forward proxy now even has its own TCP client)
I use the text-only browser to read HTML files
For example, yc.htm is a file I create each day that contains all HN submissions where discussion is still open
Today yc.htm is 12 MB and there are 7268 stories
Using tiny command line utilities I wrote, the HTML in yc.htm is processed to CSV and added to an SQLite database. The unique domain names, today about 3704 of them, are extracted from all item URLs in yc.htm and DNS data is obtained via 1-3 pipelined lookups, each over a single TCP connection. The DNS data is then processed and inserted into an SQLite database
The TLS forward proxy stores the DNS data in memory so that I do not have to make any remote DNS when accessing the www
The yc.htm file can be opened in a text-only browser but I would not attempt it in a graphical one. The text-only browser feels more robust, less likely to stall or crash. I prefer the text-only formatting
By not using a graphical browser I would not say I am "admitting defeat". I have full control over HTTP headers, I only retrieve the data I want, I never see any ads, I do not send data to trackers or telemetry collection points
On the other hand, using a graphical browser does feel like "admitting defeat" as by doing so I allow "web developers" to destroy all preferences I have for how and when I want data retrieved and presented. If I allow the graphical browser unfettered access to the internet, and allow it to run unreviewed Javascripts, I lose all control over DNS and HTTP requests. For me, the experience of using a graphical browser where I have no such control is slow and painful, a horrible "user experience"
I do not see using "old" software as "nostalgia". I see it as being practical. "New" software generally sucks
The loss of "user agency" as some call it only occurs if one uses a so-called "modern" browser and runs Javascript. The seizure of user agency is accomplished by getting people to use a particular "user agent" that is controlled by online advertising companies (e.g., Google) or their business partners (e.g., Mozilla). If we called this a "choice" perhaps some readers might disagree. But so-called "Big Tech" have consistently argued that people "choose" Big Tech's "user agents" that, via their design and "default settings", effectively remove user agency for the majority of people who use them
Gopher and Gemini are simple scripts, so is the actions plugin, but I have my own written in 'rc', a shell borrowed from Plan9 and a bit improved (readline keys, history).
For audio/video I just spawn mpv+yt-dlp in the spot.
Correction: s/TCP/HTTP/
I also use a separate TCP client from the TLS proxy author
Then buy a Totalfark subscription so they don't need to bend over backwards to show more ads just to keep the lights on. See ya there!
This website is using a security service to protect itself from online attacks. The action you just performed triggered the security solution. There are several actions that could trigger this block including submitting a certain word or phrase, a SQL command or malformed data. What can I do to resolve this?
You can email the site owner to let them know you were blocked. Please include what you were doing when this page came up and the Cloudflare Ray ID found at the bottom of this page.
Can we get the best of 1999 with the best of 2026? Probably not...
And today, if you want to learn something the right way, you probably still should buy a book (or, I guess, pirate an ebook). I don't think you can really learn much from YouTube influencers and the like.
I'd also note that the Internet of 1999 was loaded with spam, bursting at the seams with it, so much so that it was actually a big deal when ~30 months later Paul Graham wrote a post about Bayesian filtering.
[gestures wildly at all the bots in 2026]
Online community and connections are very valuable, and I also get genuinely interesting e-mails from random people. Usually someone who has read something I wrote, and want to discuss it. I also send out random e-mails, and my experience is that many people will answer, if you write to them about something they care about.
Personally, I prefer the Internet of the 1990's. Part of that was the novelty and excitement. That led to a lot more experimentation. Part of that was the accessibility of the information that did exist. There was less wading through crap to simply find something, and the useless stuff that did exist tended to be easy to detect. (A lot of it was simply: I have an ambitious idea for a website but, Under Construction!) Most of all, the diversity was easier to access.
Today's Internet is much more polished and much more is available. Yet a lot of it is also siloed behind accounts, paywalls, or is a profit project rather than a passion project. That's not to say there is anything wrong with profiting off of good work, but there is a lot of people putting up low quality junk either because they don't realize how much effort is involved or because they are trying to make a quick buck.
That's ignoring software bloat, super-heavy web frameworks, social media's addictive algorithms, user tracking & what have you.
I download books from libgen and print them out. Printed books will never be replaced.
Truly, I think you’ve over the target here. I think it's more than just being young. It was the transition from an analog life to a 'cosmic' one. We are the bridge generation! I remember waiting for a Zine or a Phrack manifest, or for an image to waterfall down the screen. It wasn't 'inefficient'—it was a frontier.
People comparing the 'load times' and 'inconveniences' are kinda missing the point. I grew up with a telephone. Remembered my friends' phone numbers. Then the interenet exploded down those phone lines. And the world was changed forever. From my desk, I could touch the world. A world i Had never seen. And it could all come to me...And I was reading about other people having similar experiences, similar excitement. There was an excitement in the air, except it wasn't in the air - it was in the space we all shared - that space that came down those wires, over those modems, with that distinctive siren-like mating call. It was the fucking 90s and the Internet came online. You had to be there. It was incredible. You have no idea if you didn't live through it.
That feeling of connection. Somehow it's tied up in the aesthetics for me, too. The juxtaposition between that aesthetic combining poverty-of-content with the compared-to-modern "visually stunted" aesthetics, compared with the shocking immediate global access of the analog to "cosmic" transition, somehow symbolizes it precisely and strongly for me. But the part that isn't conveyed (tho I try), is how I felt at the time. The graphics are the finger pointing at the moon. You had to walk that path, you had to have been there.
I tried to recapture that specific 'gateway' feeling in a Win98 demo: https://win9-5.com/desktop.html. I used modern sound and RBI to try to recapture the feeling of using the web when it was 1999. It's evocative, if you were there. Playing with it, sometimes i get a sense boundless horizon again. But then it flashes and is gone. That fire that I felt of excitement and expanse at that time is an endless source of inspiration for me. I long to somehow recreate an experience that gives it form, so others can know.
I love your Windows 98½ project, that dialup sounds so good to me haha!
I'm finally at a point where I can see a viable path towards a spatial internet ("metaverse" has been ruined by Facebook). I can't wait to start building it.
Today is Friday. Send out a group text right now. Saturday evening. Bring whatever. We'll order pizza, it'll be a good time. Make it happen.
Logistically: One was specifically focused on the CDROM era. Any game that shipped on CD or came out roughly 1995-2005 was fair game, and the organizers mentioned a few by name that you might want to pre-install. The other was anything-goes, networking optional; I brought a TI 99/4A and a handful of cartridges, and it was very popular, apparently that grabbed a bunch of folks right in the childhood, in between rounds of Quake.
The only thing missing was the Josta. RIP.
Related possibilities:
1. Dust off some DVDs and a DVD player, pop some popcorn and watch a movie or two. Explore the extended editions, commentaries, alternate scenes, etc.
2. Dust off some CDs and a player and jam. My 2008 Honda has a CD player, I'm not restricted to streaming Spotify through a Bluetooth adapter :)
3. Dig up an N64 console, Goldeneye, the friends you played against back when, and order some pizza.
4. Go find a local bookstore, new or used, and buy a book.
I'm sure there are a dozen ideas I'm not thinking of, feel free to plug them in.
1999 was during the dotcom bubble, Internet Explorer 4/5 was the leading browser, Yahoo! the leading search engine, pop-up ads everywhere, it was also the beginning of Flash, for the better and for the worse. Residential broadband existed, but dialup was still the norm.
I don't really miss it, despite growing into it. It was an important transition period, but it was slow, lacking in content, small and yet too big to create a sense of community, and also just as full of ads as it is now. There were good sides compared to now, but I still take today's internet. The early 1990s (before the eternal September) looked nice, but I didn't get to know it.
I definitely absolutely miss open instant messaging platforms. The days of XMPP and open clients. Trillian and Pidgin specifically.
I loved having a single app for all of my messages across all of the networks I talked to people on. Nowadays everyone is on FB Messenger, Instagram DMs, iMessage, WhatsApp and Google Chat. All of them have separate apps; all of them are loss leaders; all of them are closed.
(I tried Beeper. Loved the idea but didn’t invest time in it since it was always two lawsuits away from me getting “An update on Beeper” email.)
I guess I also miss content existing for content’s sake. Early YouTube, Quora, Reddit, etc. People helping other people...well, usually, anyway. Nowadays everything is growth-maxxed. It's all about engagement. Text-only websites would have never been born in this iteration of the Internet, and that's sad.
They should just summarise and timestamp every video for everyone, but it would tank engagement and ad revenue.
We're all afraid of dying and we all wish we were 25 years younger. That's how I translate nostalgia when I read it. By any objective metric, the world is better than it's ever been, technology is better than it's ever been, and it's all continuing to get better.
I get that the world is doing great by some basic metric like 'number of people starving', and that is fantastic. But the world really feels off to a growing number of people - me included - in modern America.
Those guys in Sudan or blue whales beg to differ.
And while aesthetically it was more early 90s than 1999, it filled me not only with nostalgia, but also with some optimism for the future of the Internet. Something I haven't felt in a while...
I remember the 90s when we had to "go" online, when the digital was apart from the analog and we kept online and offline separate. I remember simpler sites, not as many ads, I remember a time before "feeds".
However, for the life of me I can't remember exactly when it started to suck. It might be that I was busy with other things in life, but still it leaves me with an unsettling feeling. Maybe it was around the arrival of home broadband? The end of Orkut (community based social media)? The advent of algorithmic feeds?
So hardly anyone considered facebook to be a part of "the web". It was its own weird duck. Twenty years later and most people only frequent this "weird" part of the internet - this limited ensemble of paid and unpaid walled gardens.
Although, being patient was part of the experience as well
I was just thinking back the other day about BBS days and how frustrating a busy signal could be, or connection time limits, etc.
You gotta love the subtle religious hooks leading to Christian apologetics elsewhere on the site; back in '99, and especially these days, that stuff was often enough more overt. But maybe renaming the piece to Using the internet like a Born-Again Worshipper is both more honest and accurate. ;)
The mid-to-late 2000s are perhaps closer to what the author is looking for.
They worked pretty well actually, AFAICR. Internationalation was a bit sketchy in some cases though.
> computers crashed constantly
You did need to be careful with Windows 98, for sure, but it wasn't that bad. Also, if you put in some elbow grease you could install Linux, which didn't crash (but had limited support for peripherals and for the latest graphics cards, and almost no games).
> the ability to actually search for useful things was limited
It is arguably more limited now than it was then, since commercial search engines did not manipulate the results as much.
The biggest thing I grabbed then was an overnight bulk-downloading session from animewallpapers.com, made possible by using GetRight. It had a download queue, as well as the "GetRight Browser" which presented the links on a html page as files to select, or other html pages as directories to view.
If any program complains it needs network connectivity for offline features, it goes into the Recycle Bin.
I put the laptop into airplane mode, to block any updates that might unceremoniously reboot it and wreck my layout. Figure if I needed to be on Teams in the meantime, I've still got a phone for that.
Airplane mode already exists, it's _wonderful_ for this, and I should use it more often. If I'm not actively internetting, just toggle that and the distractions can wait.
1. A kind of capital that is widely available, so that people could exercise control and agency with machines that do what you want them to do for your own needs.
2. A distribution tool controlled by mega-corporations as they decide what you should be able to see or have.
I worked on a Geocities archive restoration. There was a boat load of porn (including illegal porn), malicious domains, spamvertising, malware, predators, political extremists, etc on the 1999 web, and you can find all of it within the raw Geocities archive that was made before it shut down. The idea that the old web was some kind of pure place of innocence is a weird and factually inaccurate take. If anything, the late 90s web was more dark than it is now, perhaps in part because nobody had any idea of how to police anything on it and things like PhotoDNA didn't exist yet.
If anything, my work on 90s site archival has taught me that the web has always been a place with a lot of dark places, and the narrative that the old web was some sort of pure innocent place that became evil is not matched by evidence.
It's just as plausible to me that the general "misbehavior" of humans on the internet hasn't changed all that much, but that we have, frankly, adopted a more puritanical and intolerant approach towards it. Nobody was talking about getting rid of Section 230, carding people for 18+ before they could use IRC (or install an operating system, what the actual fuck is wrong with you California), and Congress wasn't dragging evil Geocities CEO David Bohnett into grilling sessions where they were accusing him of hooking kids on digital cigarettes. Perhaps it would be wise to have a little nostalgia for some of that too.
No argument there. That said, I think the big difference between the 1990's and today is that everyone knew the nefarious places and people existed but, for the most part, you actually had to seek it out. I am not suggesting that it was hard to find. Perhaps the worse of the worse was easier to find. On the other hand, it wasn't quite the same thing as algorithmic feeds. For example: I absolutely refuse to view anything remotely political on some sites (including reputable news sources or material that is clearly satire) since that is the surest way to be fed extremist crap. How far those feeds will 5ake me, I simply do not want to know.
For us bridge-generation kids, that sound is probably etched like vinyl. Quiet room, 2 AM, and then that thrum, shreek and hiss. I literally missed it, whatever the next thing was. Whenever "modems" became obsolete. It was sad. It was the audio reminder, the signal hanging in the air, of the literal lifeline out of your analog bedroom and into a cosmos filled with electricity, buzzing with knowledge and light.
For me, half the experience of that era was purely sensory. The clunky physical sounds of the machine doing the heavy lifting to connect you... the clunky graphics....the need to wait...the gradual adjustment to the pace of life and the "gentle introduction" these "reduce speed" effects had to the threshold moment that that was, were somehow the right gentleness to take the world on such an epic journey.
I have labored a lot to recapture that feeling. Across many projects. Idk why exactly, but there was something so hopeful and exciting about the internet at that time. And I know it's worth remembering. Like a precious flame you have to protect from the rain, I guess. Check out this one: https://win9-5.com/desktop.html
Just a small set of experiments to see if I can grab that feeling. The modem sound evoke the vibe. Browsing the modern web with it is a little strange, if you can do that "in the gallery watching the walls between the paintings" kind of mind-job and not focus too much on the web portal content (which is designed to always suck you in, even framed retro like this).
> the moment I find something that crosses my desk which starts with “it’s not this, it’s THIS”, I immediately click off and move on.
He follows it by his very own "It's THIS, not this" statement:
> I want real people, real creators, and real content in my feed, not LLM slop.
The Machine must have learn it somewhere I guess.
The issue isn't javascript, it's ads/trackers/algos/slop. I feel like tracker/ad/algorithm free static site on the status quo of http, or something newer like IPFS, is worlds better than trying to use arbitrary restrictions on something like a Gemini capsule.
Also, everything from https://wiby.me.
I compiled some old web meta links here: https://outerweb.org/blog/web-discovery.html
We didn't do that: capitalist interests did.
I wouldn't say you need technologies from yesteryear to achieve that. Or rather, you don't need an old browser to not be on Facebook, Instagram, Youtube and so on. Just visit _other_ sites, with your new browser. But I would recommend beefy adblocking and tracking-avoidance - uBlock Origin [1] and EFF Privacy Badger for example - or even disabling JS if you want the more static old-school feel. NoScript is a browser add-on which does this for Firefox or Chromium-based browsers: https://noscript.net/getit/
[1] : uBlock Origin is no longer supported on Chrome and Chromium-based browsers, since they've limited the already-limited extension capabilities with 'manifest v3'.
And without javascript most of the security/privacy issues that make domains require HTTPS-only to prevent MITM attacks simply disappear. When you aren't automatically executing random programs that random places send you the web can be a lot more fun, silly, and with a lot less fragile continuing maintainence required.
What made the old web cool, is that it was the first time we can communicate with so many random people in far away places digitally and share information through cool web pages.
That novelty has mostly died now. Communicating with people in distant lands is mundane now. And there is little new things to share that we haven’t already seen or heard before.
So what’s the point of the web now? Maybe the internet will become purely a utility for exchanging data for infrastructural and business purposes, and the idea of using the internet as a source of entertainment or recreation will fade away.
It would be nice to retreat back to an analog world, where the internet still exists, but only as a layer of glue in the background that orchestrates multiple technologies that power our world, and nothing more.
Without that context, it all falls flat, I agree.
I've considered trying to make a speed-of-light-ping-limited BBS that can _only_ be connected to by actual-locals, but reality is harder. (And the moment it got popular, nefarious actors would just rent or compromise a box in-radius.)
Instagram is probably my most used one these days and I love seeing my friend's stories and I don't think I've parsed more than a handful of ads in the last 2 or 3 years that I've been an active user, probably a few tens of hours wasted with dumb reels, not a bad cost at all imo. I have probably 400 irl people and 200 internet accounts I follow. It doesn't have the charm and honesty of navigating a webring or whatever, but the friction is so low so I get to see a lot of stuff my friends, acquaintances and especially just people i'm peripherally in community with share that I probably wouldn't otherwise.
I miss the old internet for sure, but I'm not convinced the current situation is as horrible as people say.
