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Comment by dirk94018

4 days ago

I remember that. A few weeks later ran a script to count all the websites on the Internet.. 324 at that time.

21 comments

dirk94018

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LeoPanthera  4 days ago

Was your script the very first web crawler or did you just have a list?

  • reconnecting  4 days ago

    I'm also curious because I remember that the first time I used the Internet (not internet, as it is nowadays), I had to buy a paper book with categorized links to websites.

    Connecting... Waiting... It was slow, both because of dial-up kbit/s and ping to websites, and every page felt like you were literally sending a request to another part of the planet. It felt like that was actually happening, and it was very different from what we experience now.

    But most importantly, there were zero funds/VC in that Internet. Only very niche websites, zero online services, even email was difficult to obtain and felt like a real privilege. Only the fact of being connected made everyone feel not a stranger.

    I kind of miss that Internet, but I'm grateful that once I was part of it.

    • us-merul  4 days ago

      There’s a page “Robert’s comments on Tim’s MIT trip” that says:

      “I hope this does not offend Brewster, but I hope, probably in vain, that the commercialists will stay out of the Web world. Selling information is like selling air and water to me, though of course you need to pay the people who provide the information. Your comment already points out some of the bad side-effects of selling per access, or worse, tariffs per type of information or per item! Like: today's newspaper is 10CHF because there is this item in it which everyone wants to know about.”

      Interesting too that an article on the front page the other day was about microtransactions for news.

      1 reply →

    • 1vuio0pswjnm7  3 days ago

      "I'm also curious because I remember that the first time I used the Internet (not internet, as it is nowadays), I had to buy a paper book with categorized links to websites."

      I was looking at one of these books the other day called "The Internet Yellow Pages"

      In the early 90s McGraw Hill published a book with this title

      I found a version published by Que (Pearson Education) from 2007 (I suspect there may even be later editions)

      That's 14 years into the public www

      This was right before the iPhone

      I never used these books. The best resources I remember were lists of sites published via FTP

      Some of the nostalgia is still easily accessible via textfiles.com

      I still use the internet in much the same way I did when I was first connected through a university. UNIX-like OS, no graphics, 100% command line

      The main difference between then and now for me is the hardware and bandwidth

      Everything is so much faster

      IME, generally any slowness today is due (directly or indirectly) to the commercialisation ("monetisation") of _traffic_, e.g., ads, tracking, or having to use Tor to avoid all the nonsense

      Originally the idea of commercial use of the internet was to sell products and services (excluding "advertising services"), not to sell and "monetise" _traffic_

      Internet subscriber bandwidth is now used by companies for free to perform data collection, surveillance, telemetry, mostly undetected by the subscriber

      For example, the majority of "Big Tech" revenues do not come from selling products and (non-advertising) services but from performing data collection, surveillance and "ad services". Even popular subscription software that predated the web, e.g., MS Windows, is engaged in data collection, surveillance and ads/tracking as a "business". Apple, once a traditional hardware company, is engaged in this activity as well

      1. I have been doing some information retrieval experiments and the speed can be mind-blowing

LowLevelKernel  4 days ago

Wow. Which year was it?