Silly (in retrospect) Internet Misunderstandings

Anyone remember things they thought about how the Internet worked that looking back at now seems silly ?

I remember when I first learned what an "HTTP Referrer" was, I used to think that the referrer would contain the last page I was looking at even if I used a bookmark to go to the new page, so I always closed my browser window and opened a new one when I wanted to go to another site.

It's sort of funny in retrospect, I don't use bookmarks anywhere near as much as I used to anymore.

I remember in 1998 or 1999 thinking that the companies I worked for would always have LOTS and LOTS of money.

I remember the first time I used email, even though it was on 56k dialup I was amazed how it went fast instead of taking a few days like regular mail.

I remember i made two email accounts and sent lot of emails to myself just to see whether it fails at anytime........

I remember thinking that Netscape 3.0 Gold was the browser to end all browsers. I remember sitting through entire days waiting for the 8MB updates to download on 33K modem and being happy when it was finally installed.

I never really thought about how internet worked... I just used it because it was hear... my worries then was games

I remember discovering that you can share the C drive in windows XP and thinking that I was some sort of hot shot hacker or something. I actually used the C$ hidden share as a prank once in college. I wrote a little batch file that would create lots and lots of text files, hundreds of them, and put them all on the desktop of the remote computer. Then the guy I did that to got revenge on me with sub seven.....

I remember thinking fixed width pages looked cool. Not.

Sorry, I couldn't resist that DM

Hahahah! You got me on that one.

When I was a little girl, I though sneezing infront of your PC it would catch a "virus" and once you connect to the internet it will spread to other PCs. More of stupid than silly. ^^

the internet was so horrible..
I remember signing up for xoom pages and had all these pics on it, and now it is gone!

(anyone know how to get the stuff back?)


I think 90% of the first internet I used was on bnet for diablo lol

You could try the Wayback Machine http://www.archive.org/index.php

Yeah was messing with that, I forget how the account urls were set up.. hmm trying to remember.

thanks google..
http://members.xoom.com/mcrawford was an example, lets see.. i doubt wayback would archive individual pages..

I don't know. I started university in 1993. There was a 24/7 unix computer lab where you could use the word processors to type up essays. Then someone showed me a ncurses program there we could send messages with, since you had to set up an account to use the computers anyway. That was "elm", I believe the first email client, and it was a hit with a lot of students since things like lists, etc, were already well developed. No one had quite heard of the www tho.

Then the next year the first Netscape browser came out, and also WebCrawler (!!) the first mainstream search engine. Maybe it was just the initial mystery of it, but in general I think the web in 1994-97 was much more interesting than it is now because

1) there was little to no commercial content

2) pages were much less "generic"; lots of people had homepages they did themselves, since learning html was easy, about all kinds of crazy tish you would NEVER see published or distributed anywhere else. But there were no "blogs" or templates, etc -- you made a page. It was great.

3) there was more focus on actual content, ie, text*, since the transfer rates were so slow. Of course, everything looks better today, but it is also very easy to make something that has little to no real content look substantial, which back then you could not really do that.

* well, images can totally be content too, but I think my meaning is clear here -- camperjohn's old page (general-discussion/the-second-website-ever-made-t100589.html) is a great example, all content, no BS.