Computing in the 1990`s was much different to the experience we have today. The software we used like Internet Explorer and Netscape was not very secure. Running Windows `95 or `98 did not give a great deal of security compared to a modern operating system. The Internet was the wild west before Google came along, everyone would use Yahoo search to find what they were looking for. Not to forget all of the Geocities pages, such as fan sites for Actors and anything else that Internet users were interested in. The sites could be gathered together into clusters, this meant that related websites could be divided into cities, depending upon the content of the website. Most of them looked like this. But it was fun to create a website and put content on it. There was even a host of counters that would tell you how much traffic the website was getting for bragging rights. Another website from the 90`s was AOL. and the constant barrage of AOL CD`s in the mail. There must be billions of them still around. Apparently it cost 300 million US dollars to mailbomb all of those trial CD`s to homes.
But the only problem with the old Internet was the preponderance of malware and websites with pop-up ads. Of course this is not so much of a problem, unless you go to torrent websites that have ads that pop up when you click the page. I hate that. One thing that is disheartening is the loss of LAN parties. In the old days, people would rent a building and then set up all of their machines in it and play games in a social environment. Now everyone plays online. We do not even use game stores anymore. Steam has taken over. You can read a review of a game before paying and downloading it. Playing online is easier for people, just find a server with a good ping and join, and I guess that friends do get together and enjoy online gaming, but it is not as social. Since it is not actual face to face gaming, this does attract trolls, there is a certain amount of anonymity involved in online gaming and this attracts the type of people who enjoy griefing and teamkilling. Especially on servers that do not have active admins. But this can be fun if you are stuck in a base where there are teamkillers and you manage to escape, then the thrill comes from evading detection.
The Internet in the 1990`s also required a dial-up modem to connect to the Internet. This used a modulator-demodulator to convert binary data to signals that would travel over a phone line. And this ran up the phone bill. If you connected long-distance, i.e to join a BBS, this would be very expensive. But a Bulletin Board System was a good way to get online without a ISP account. You could download files and updates this way. But expensive. I am grateful the Internet does not look like this anymore https://19818-presscdn-pagely.netdna-ssl.com/wp-content/uploads/b4f/c7/76dc1bf279e7b10ce293a98539196795.jpg. Life in the 1990`s before broadband was not that bad, there were magazines that supplied CD`s with a countless array of software on them that would normally take way too long to download on dialup, like Linux distributions. Nowadays, we can download a 4 gigabyte Linux distribution like Fedora 25 in no time. But this would be inconceivable in 1995. Thank god for progress.
