r/oldinternet

Electricity comes from a power plant, water comes from a treatment plant, and natural gas comes from a refinery. What about the internet?

The Internet Pattern Book is an ongoing effort I've been working on to develop an archive and sortable resource to showcase tilable backgrounds used in early web design. To date, it contains 253 patterns that you can browse and download by style or color. These are taken as background assets from various defunct sites on Geocities circa the 2000s.

During the HTML era of web design, repeating background assets known as tiles were used frequently to minimise bandwidth. These used simple but elegant principles about patterns and tessellation to create the illusion of a fully illustrated background. Over time, their use declined, but their whimsy typifies the design of the early Internet, 9x/iMac desktop wallpapers, Geocities and Angelfire user pages.

You can find a web version at https://internetpatternbook.neocities.org/.

What are your views of how the internet has progressed?

I think in general millenials and xennelials are in a unique position in this regard. They grew up with the internet. Older people may have also been using the internet since its beginning, but it is different because they were already adults.

Do you remember the mid to late 90s, Windows 95, the first operating system for many people, going on paint for the first time=mid blown. Or, those colored big round mac monitor/computers. Remember AOL 28.8 and 56.6 free dial up trial CDs? Being cut off when someone picked up the phone? Internet explorer and netscape navigator? Geocities? HTML websites with view counts on them? Ask Jeeves? Yahoo in all its glory? Then "guys there is this new search engine it is even better than Yahoo it is called google". Cool and interesting/unique websites (unlike now when there are only a few websites everyone goes to). The little gifs that seemed so revolutionary and technologically advanced at the time? Wordart titles? Microsoft Clippy? Morpheus and Napster? And on a darker note, the internet was not regulated so even children ended up on websites like ogrish.

Then around the turn of the millenium, windows XP came and it looked so colorful and cool and experimental (frutiger aero anyone?), with optimism of the new millenium and people were feeling like technology would significantly advance. Do you remember the original msn messenger? And how it progressed throughout the 2000s? The feeling when your best friend or crush would sign in with the sound on the bottom right of the screen? Later on the nudge feature and animations. Some may have used yahoo messenger. Also pidgin allowed you to use microsoft and yahoo interchat. Remember when opening a gmail account was based on invites only and people felt special for having a gmail account?

Remember Kazaa, then bearshare/limewire? Then bittorrent? Waiting an hour to download a song? Remember Yahoo Launch music videos before youtube? Remember those bars at the top of your browser that would be installed by spyware? Remember spybot search and destroy? Websites like funnyjunk and ebaumsworld. You kicked my dog. End of Zeh world. Flash games like Candystand minigolf.

Then in the mid 2000s Wikipedia and Youtube came. Then the original youtubers, Charlie candy mountain, salad fingers. Original youtube pranksters replacing candid camera. Internet forums. Myspace was the first social media.

Late 2000s/early 2010s was start of things like f7u12 and 4chan. Windows 7 have come out and it was a better version of windows XP: better functionality while also looking even nicer/cooler. Smart phones became mainstream, and more people started using their phone for internet. Omegle had just come out. It was still good, it coincided with end of msn messenger so you went from chatting with real life friends to strangers. Memes started exploding. Took an arrow to the meme. Reddit was still for "nerds". Facebook became mainstream. People were still downloading songs from youtube.

By mid/late 2010s reddit became mainstream. Windows 10 came and had good functionality but did not look as cool as windows xp/7, it was more minimalist. Many things in society began to lose color and become minimalist too around this time. Internet forums had all but ended. Facebook started being replaced by instagram. Everybody used whatsapp to chat. Most people shift to using internet on their phones rather than desktop/laptop. The main way to listen to songs was streaming. Youtubers became less creative and started parroting each other, and hyper-famous youtubers became a thing. Children started watching cartoons on ipads and youtube rather than television. In general everything became centralized, a few corporations run the internet. Flash ended and so too did flash games. Now, you need to download an app to play games, and it would typically be on your phone, not desktop/laptop. Some stores even force you to download an app for basic functionality. Some cars even started to require online subscriptions to use features of the car. People's homes began incorporating internet, like Alexa. People's lights, laundry machines, etc.. became connected to the internet. Also, around this time internet began to become more censored, for example even liveleak eventually shut down and there is no alternative.

And the pandemic further solidified the changes described above in mid/late 2010s. And AI replaced google search.

Which era did you like best? I think the mid-late 2000s was a nice balance of practicality/technological advancement while still being novel/experimental. And I liked the desktop era in general compared to smartphone era also because it was before social media. I also liked internet forums more than reddit.

Ended up messing around and making something similar.

This is a customized profile

https://preview.redd.it/rlghe99cmfzg1.png?width=1885&format=png&auto=webp&s=f5834a8edb858841e5e2c4e3a5d4f0b6da90befc