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.

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b3ing 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

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

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rootusrootus 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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.

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NDlurker 5 hours ago | parent [-]

I lived in rural North Dakota and had dial up until 2005. It really sucked the last couple of years.

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aworks 2 hours ago | parent [-]

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.

	▲	gnabgib 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		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.

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boudin 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Closer to 2 as it was rarelly running at full 56kb/s.

Although, being patient was part of the experience as well

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Loughla 7 hours ago | parent | next [-]

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.

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5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

[deleted]

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drfloyd51 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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.

	▲	derefr 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		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!

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Ferret7446 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

There are quite a few sites that take more than a second to load even now. Should be a war crime, but alas

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msla 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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.

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6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

[deleted]

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mdb333 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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.

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icedchai 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I got my first cable modem in 1998! All sites were still built for dialup, so everything was incredibly fast.

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vunderba 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

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.

	▲	icedchai 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		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...

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jghn 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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.

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t-3 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Some sites were fast. Some sites had pictures and it took long enough to load that I would sometimes make a sandwich while waiting.

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icedchai 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Not with cable (3 megabits down, 128kbits up!) Almost everything was fast.

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krapp 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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.

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walthamstow 5 hours ago | parent [-]

I told a coworker born in 2001 about this and he could not believe his ears

	▲	krapp 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		We dither on the shoulders of giants.

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acheron 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Same! I got called “LPB” in Quake 2 a lot.

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chairmansteve 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

"This page is about 1 MB of assets".

And it could easily have been 10 KB.

	▲	vunderba 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		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

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joshuablais 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

and 1MB is "small" for the modern web!

	▲	vunderba 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		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.

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alex1138 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Yeah, but you know something? Flash worked damn near perfectly even on potato connections

	▲	vunderba 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		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.