The Internet I Grew Up With Doesn’t Exist Anymore 28 ▲ Christian Cleberg 56 days ago · 17 min read3373 words · Tech · hide · 4 comments Table of Contents 1. Introduction 2. 2001: The Family Computer 3. 2004: Exploring the Web 4. 2007: Living There 5. 2012: When Everything Started Changing 6. 2026: Logging On Today 7. The Internet I Miss 8. Closing 1. Introduction The internet; what can I say? It's the driving force behind nearly the whole world today - economies, countries, communities, and more run solely on the internet these days. However, it wasn't always this way. Once upon a time, the internet didn't even exist. When it did, the internet was a place. It was a place you went. You selectively chose to visit the internet, based on your own free will. If you wanted to visit a chat room, or perhaps preview a fancy new Flash game, you visited the internet for a few minutes in the evening before going back to your family or friends. This has changed dramatically in the last 20-30 years. Today, it's 2026 and woven into nearly every part of daily life for the majority of the Earth's population. Let's do a quick checklist… Log in to reply on the Fediverse. Comments will appear here. Good grief, it's you @Treppenwitz@sfba.social 56 days ago [-] The irony of this being posted on Bubbles, exactly the kind of thing the author claims doesn't exist anymore. cmc @cmc@c.im 56 days ago [-] @bubbles The final section of the post addresses this :)It's not that it doesn't exist anymore - sites like Bubbles and plenty of personal sites do exist and are great fun! - but the experience of fighting through the crud to carve out a corner of the internet has become a battle or a chore, rather than the default experience. Good grief, it's you @Treppenwitz@sfba.social 56 days ago [-] @bubbles There's a one-sentence caveat, sure. But the main attitude is defeatist, ceding power to Facebook et al. eucaryote @eucaryote@piaille.fr 55 days ago [-] I dialed to BBSs before I knew Internet existed. Black terminal, street art ansi graphics, sysops randomly starting a chat with you, a sense of local community, and yet, some global reach. Logging to BBS at 1am in my parents' basement felt like living in a cyberpunk dream world. When I discovered Internet is was the overly academic (before ~1995) then overly commercial (~1995 onward) bland network that killed BBSs, replacing my gorgeous ANSI terminal with boring cliparts, Times New Roman and Arial. Internet always has been a turd.
