I remember using the web on 25mhz computers. It ran about as fast as it does today with a couple ghz. Our internet was a lot slower than as well.
I remember using the web on 25mhz computers. It ran about as fast as it does today with a couple ghz. Our internet was a lot slower than as well.
> I remember using the web on 25mhz computers. It ran about as fast as it does today with a couple ghz.
I know it’s a meme on HN to complain that modern websites are slow, but this is a perfect example of how completely distorted views of the past can get.
No, browsing the web in the early 90s was slooow. Even simple web pages took a long time to load. As you said, internet connections were very slow too. I remember visiting pages with photos that would come with a warning about the size of the page, at which point I’d get up and go get a drink or take a break while it loaded. Then scrolling pages with images would feel like the computer was working hard.
It’s silly to claim that 90s web browsers ran about as fast as they do today.
It's not an accurate recollection at all. In 1990 a couple of us 12 year olds snuck into the university library to use the web to look at the Marathon website. It took 5 minutes to load some trivially-sized gifs and a tiny amount of HTML. They had a pretty decent connection for the day.
Web pages took a minute to load, now we're optimising them for instant response.
Browsing the web was slow, because the network was slow. It wasn't really because the desktop computers were slow. I remember our company having just a 64 kbit/s connection to the 'net, even as late as in 1997.. well, that was pretty good compared to the place where I was contracted to at the time, in Italy.. they had 19.2 kbit/s. Really big sites could have something much better, and browsing the internet at their sites was a different experience then, using the same computers.
This is probably me experiencing a simulacra but with that slow loading getting up to go get a drink workflow, each page load was more special. It was magical discovering new websites just like trying out new software by picking something up from those "pegboards" at computer stores.
It also was a simpler time, the technology was in peoples lives but as a small side quest to their main lives. It took the form of a bulky desktop in the den or something like that. When you walked away from that beige box, it didn't follow or know about the rest of your life.
A life where a Big Mac meal was only $2.99, a toyota corolla was $9-15k, houses were ~100k, and when average dev salaries were ~50k. That was a different life. I don't know why but I picture this music video that was included on the Windows 95 cd bonus folder when I think of this simulacra: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iqL1BLzn3qc
My clim is that the modern web is bloated.
I had t3 connections for most of my browsing which was faster than ethernet of the day - even by todays standards that isn't too bad. I avoided dialup if I could because it was slow. Even isdn was okay speeds.
> My clim is that the modern web is bloated.
Your claim that I responded to was that web browsers were just as fast on 25MHz CPUs.
> I had t3 connections for most of my browsing which was faster than ethernet of the day - even by todays standards that isn't too bad.
T3 speeds are very slow in today's terms. Even my cell phone does a couple orders of magnitude better from where I'm sitting.
There are a lot of weird claims going on in your posts. I think it's a lot of nostalgia coloring your views of how fast things were in the past.
the modern web is very bloted and to the actual experinece isn't much different. Of course some of that bloat does more, but much of it isn't
If you want to complain about the state of modern web, you can just do it. You don't need to spin up a story about how the old internet was faster than it actually was.
This is the same pattern you see in politics when people on all sides (even the nominally progressive ones) lie to each other about how great the olden days were, when in reality it's all about their dissatisfaction with the present day.
No, I think he’s right. I don’t recall the web being any faster today than it was thirty years ago, download speed excepted. The overall experience is about the same, if not worse, IMO.
Why would you make an exception for download speed? It was the reason why the internet was slow back then.
This is like saying Victorian Britain wasn't polluted, except for all the coal burning.
Wirths law in effect.
Yeah slow?
Try using a 2400baud modem, that was slow
I started on 300baud - but never accessed the internet from that so I won't count it in this discussion.
what a glorious time that was! now it's too easy to get stuck looking at the stream of (usually AI generated) crap. I long for the time when the regular screen break was built-in.
It crashed a lot more, the fonts (and screens) were uglier, and Javascript was a lot slower. The good thing was that there was very little Javascript.
> The good thing was that there was very little Javascript.
Because all of the complicated client side stuff was in Java applets or Shockwave :( Pepperidge Farm remembers having to wait 10 minutes for a GameBoy emulator to load to play Pokémon Yellow on school computers…
I cannot recall crashes being a problem.
I remember Netscape Navigator crashing, taking Solaris down with it. I could only imagine what it was like on Windows 9x. I don't want to imagine what Windows 3.x users endured. Windows 3.x was the OS where people saved early and saved often, since the lack of proper memory protection meant that a bad application (or worse, a bad driver) could BSOD the system at any time.
I once did an April Fool's spoof of netscape that displayed a wait cursor for 2 minutes then a bomb alert. For classic Mac, it was 90% accurate with only 1% the disk footprint.
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I remember using the web in the 90s. I often left to make a sandwich while pages loaded.
Try opening Gmail on one of those. Won’t be fun.