If it were 1999, most people would still be browsing the web on their US Robotics 56k modem (at best). This page is about 1 MB of assets (500kb gzip compressed if your browser supported it) , so it would have taken at least a minute just to finish loading.
No tabbed browsing and if IE crashed it locked up Windows 95/98 with it. No 2fa, no comment spam, and Java applets that froze the browser for 10-30 seconds. No content creator bs just people making fan pages just for the heck of it before Wikipedia gobbled all that information
Closer to 2 as it was rarelly running at full 56kb/s.
Although, being patient was part of the experience as well
I was a lot more careful about clicking things when it took a full minute to load. Now I know that it'll be open in less than a second and I can leave immediately if I need to, so there's WAY less thinking beforehand.
There are quite a few sites that take more than a second to load even now. Should be a war crime, but alas
When I found my first tabbed browser. Netcaptor. It changed everything. Open in new tab. Open in new tab. Open in new tab.
Go back to the first tab which has finally finished loading. Consume.
I would open links in new windows instead. By the time I got done reading one forum thread, the 5 others would be loaded.
It's funny to think back, as I've just recently installed a browser extension to do the opposite (i.e. to prevent "open in new tab" tabs from doing any work until I foreground them.)
Today, my computer's memory is far more constrained than its network bandwidth. I find it very easy to accidentally open tons of tabs very quickly (esp. from the HN front page!) until suddenly the browser is swapping and everything's slowing to a crawl trying to process all those new page DOMs.
And yet, even when it doesn't choke the computer, I find no real benefit to preloading pages in the background any more. At least on my connection, the page load time after I focus a tab is almost imperceptible.
How things have changed!
Also, tabbed browsing was still a couple years off for most people, although some browsers got there earlier than others:
> In 1994, BookLink Technologies featured tabbed windows in its InternetWorks browser.[citation needed] That same year, the text editor UltraEdit also appeared with a modern multi-row tabbed interface. The tabbed interface approach was then followed by the Internet Explorer shell NetCaptor in 1997. These were followed by several others like IBrowse in 1999, and Opera in 2000 (with the release of version 4 - although an MDI interface was supported before then), MultiViews October 2000, which changed its name into MultiZilla on April 1st, 2001 (an extension for the Mozilla Application Suite[11]), Galeon in early 2001, Mozilla 0.9.5 in October 2001, Phoenix 0.1 (now Mozilla Firefox) in October 2002, Konqueror 3.1 in January 2003, and Safari in 2003. With the release of Internet Explorer 7 in 2006, all major web browsers featured a tabbed interface.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tab_%28interface%29
Also, Opera had a Multiple-Document Interface from the start, so 1995 or so. That's not "tabs" per se but multiple mini-windows inside the main window; much the same "Hey, I can have multiple things open!" deal
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Opera_web_brows...
My point is, you think more about clicking a link when it'll monopolize your whole UI and you can't just stash it in a background tab or mini-window.
I just opened multiple copies of the browser; I'd have 5 or 10 running most of the time on my 98se box. It's where I got my habit which I still use today, of opening outlinks as I read the page, so they can load in the background, then once I finish the content of this page, I'll go skim those to fill in context.
It meant I cared _less_ about page load time, even on dialup, because they were happening in other windows. I could happily tolerate a 2-minute load time as long as the first page took more than 2 minutes to read.
so true, re: patience
I was just thinking back the other day about BBS days and how frustrating a busy signal could be, or connection time limits, etc.
Still pretty prevalent at that time, definitely, but DSL was definitely a thing by the time 1999 rolled around. I even had pretty fast DSL for the time -- 640 kbps.
But otherwise totally agree with the critique. Modern connection speeds have enabled a huge amount of bloat. I grew up when 1200 baud modems were the latest rage, and patience when downloading was a hard requirement.
I lived in rural North Dakota and had dial up until 2005. It really sucked the last couple of years.
I lived on a suburban street a mile from the Stanford campus that didn't get broadband until 2003. I would go to the local copy center to rent an hour of computer time to edit my blog.
Ok.. so broadband in 1996, route-able (unique) IPv4 broadband in 1997 (177.1..), route-able satellite internet in Nigeria in 2002 (it sucked when it rained). Your Stanford proximity apparently didn't help.
I was raised by cheap boomers that would never pay more than the absolute minimum for anything, no matter how shitty the option, and most of my friends lived way out in the country. Paying $40/month for DSL or cable internet was off the table, because the library ran a free dialup ISP, so thats what we used even though their line was almost always busy. The cheap ass modem wouldn't reset the line correctly either, requiring someone to physically pull the phone cord out and back in the modem, otherwise the line wouldn't hang up, so redialling on a busy signal required physical intervention. (At some point, I recall my mom's friend/neighbor convincing her to pay $99/year for a dialup ISP that connected the first time.) I moved off dialup when I got a fast food job in 2005.
Luckily, we had web accelerating proxies like OnSpeed[1] back in the day that would compress web pages (including lossy image compression) so if you were one of the poor sods still on dialup (like I was), it was a lot more bearable.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OnSpeed
Oh neat, I'd never heard of them. Almost feels like a spiritual predecessor of CDNs, serving optimized assets from existing websites via their servers.
I had cable internet in 1997; it was wonderful in it's unmetered¹ symmetric 10Mbs glory.
1) wasn't supposed to be unlimited but the ISP didn't bother to mesure it until sometime in 2000
I knew dial up for a little while but I was lucky to have been on broadband for a couple of years already in 1999.
This early access + a 4x SCSI CD burner made me one of the 2 official warez provider at school. I was even taking orders from parents of friends.
We used dialup until 1996, when we got a 10mbps cable internet connection, newly available in our 20k population town. We have never had a slower service plan than that since.
Questioning this, because I worked with a sysadmin who was in an @Home/CableLabs DOCSIS beta region at about that same time, and we all envied him of course. That was in San Jose, CA.
So what's the real story behind your piddlly little town getting bleeding edge cable internet service? (Or was it somewhere like Los Gatos?)
Firstly, you’ve spelled “megabits” wrong.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bit_rate
Secondly, that 10 Mbps was only your downstream signaling rate.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_signaling_rate
Was your upstream via analog dialup?
"This page is about 1 MB of assets".
And it could easily have been 10 KB.
Now now. Don't be so tightfisted with the bandwidth. You know what they say, "People will hate you Steve, if you're too sting-ee!"
https://www.audioatrocities.com/games/lastalert/index.html
I got my first cable modem in 1998! All sites were still built for dialup, so everything was incredibly fast.
Nice! We were one of the first families on the block to have a 33.6 kbps modem, and were the envy of every filthy peasant who still had a 28.8 back in the day.
My first dialup modem was 1200 baud, back in 1987! I remember it taking an hour to download a game from a local warez BBS. My first modem to establish an Internet connection (SLIP) was 9600, sometime around 1993! Time flies...
And if the sysop had upgraded to 28.8 while you were still on 2400, you were probably persona non grata for tying up the line for so long!
Some of the most popular boards had minimum connect speeds; if you couldn't connect at at least 9600 or 14.4k, it would immediately hang up on you, for this reason.
This comment reminded me of the early days of Ultima Online. I was on a high speed campus connection with a ping time of ~5ms to my server. Given most players were on a 28.8/56k modem with ping times ~300ms, it was an amazing speed difference. I could walk, not run, faster than other people riding horses at full speed.
Needless to say, I got accused of cheating quite a bit.
Some sites were fast. Some sites had pictures and it took long enough to load that I would sometimes make a sandwich while waiting.
Not with cable (3 megabits down, 128kbits up!) Almost everything was fast.
I literally remember watching images load line by line.
I know nostalgia for the old days is de rigueur especially on HN but I definitely do not want to go back to that.
I told a coworker born in 2001 about this and he could not believe his ears
We dither on the shoulders of giants.
Same! I got called “LPB” in Quake 2 a lot.
and 1MB is "small" for the modern web!
No shade! I went and checked out of curiosity, since it looks like we’re both using Astro as a static site generator.
Most of my articles are pretty media rich and weigh in between 1-2 megs. I do try to be pretty conscientious about asset compression (mozjpeg, h264 for video, etc.). I'd love to switch over to AV1 but I've heard compatibility on older devices is spotty.
Yeah, but you know something? Flash worked damn near perfectly even on potato connections
I know flash had its downsides - but messing around with Macromedia Flash to make stupid little animations back in the day was so fun.
Plus Silverlight made Flash seem like a dream.