My pick would be, dealing with the ‘wild west’ atmosphere. That being, before cyber bullying laws existed, you had bunches of people getting off scot-free with telling you to off yourself or call you a list of derogatory terms.
mistyping goggle instead of google would fill your pc with malware.
edit - are cyberbullying laws really that strong? plenty of derogatory terms thrown around today.
Ah yes, the good old days of “can you help me, my internet is slow” and you find half a page of Internet Explorer toolbars.
They’re only as strong as long as there’s persistence. But, that doesn’t mean that when it is used, it won’t have an affect. People have been getting arrested and charged for alluring people to kill themselves online. Whereas, back then, it felt like quite an uphill battle because everyone would’ve just told you to block the person or close the IM window.
needing to disconnect so your parents could make a phone call.
This. Downloading a bunch of songs on Napster on dial up at a max of 3.5 kb/s download speed, each song taking 15-20 minutes on average to finish downloading, and right around 97% on the one you really want it’s “GET THE FUCK OFF THAT DAMNED INTERFUCK NOW GODDAMNIT I GOTTA CALL MILDRED!”
2 1/2 hours later you get to go back and restart downloading Limp_Bizkit_-_nookie_4kbps_mp3.exe like you originally intended.
Remember the time before we had HTML5 or worse, Flash?
Flash is bad enough. But what about Shockwave? Java? Or Java 1.4 (that was a big update IIRC). A whole slew of different ActiveX plugins to download/install/debug each time you wanted to visit a different webpage?
Javascript back then was so primitive you couldn’t even do XMLHttpRequests, so that necessitated the use of rich plugins to deliver a better browsing experience. But it was incredibly non-standard and non-consolidated.
You’ll pry “Slime Volleyball” away from my cold, dead, fingers. Also Minecraft, which I believe was as Java applet first. Also Robocode.
So many good Java things in that old web…
You’re making me remember codecs.
Remember when DivX finally unified us upon MPEG2 and that codec just worked? Forget Youtube videos, I’m talking just making videos in general usable on the internet.
Kids these days don’t even know what they’ve missed. Non-standard video formats. Ugggh. With everyone smoothly using mp4 or AV1 these days, life is so much better.
Today, Flash can be played using a browser extension, written in Rust, that translates the Flash code into WebAssembly (Wasm). This can also be embedded in a web site; this is used by e.g. https://homestarrunner.com to play old toons & games.
First Gmail and then Google Maps were amazing. In a world where webpages looked like ass and any interesting technology required a plugin, those two apps were mind-blowing.
When someone in my lab told me about Gmail, I thought it would be a janky mess. How could a web page be good? But it was. It was great. It felt almost like a native app.
Then Google Maps came around. After MapQuest, I was expecting goofy tiles and weird hot spots to click on. Nope. They hit it out of the park again. Zooming in and out was… fluid.
Those were good days.
XMLHttpRequest had to be invented before GMail could exist.
But yeah, Gmail was the first online webapp that I personally used that extensively used XMLHttpRequest (aka: Javascript’s function for “automatically fetch more data from the server”)
Before that point, you wore out your F5 key waiting for new emails. Gmail comes out and “magic”, the new data just arrives because Javascript is hitting the F5 key in the background for you.
File-sharing services for buccaneering purposes in the early 2000s didn’t have previews. So if you wanted to, say, buccaneer some video erotica, you’d be going just on filenames, which might not be accurate.
Aaaand you just downloaded some child porn. Oops.
you had bunches of people getting off scot-free with telling you to off yourself or call you a list of derogatory terms.
Looks at Twitter and Facebook…
Uhhhh… Who’s going to tell them that’s still a really big issue? lol
Back in the day everything was kind of worse. The tech, the UI, having to use Java and Shockwave before even Flash was a thing let alone HTML5. Having everything spread out and in hard to locate sites. Which was kind of fun at first, but it got old. Mainly for me, it was the speed and the UI. So many things were incredibly unintuitive, we look back and remember the good ones and forget all the shovelware that was absolutely atrocious. OH! And BonziBuddy. That fuckin’ BonziBuddy…
