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Cake day: July 29th, 2023

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  • Well, actually thinking about you would have to split the 1995 internet into the internet and the world wide web. I actually spent a considerable amount of time on usenet - this of course being back when it was more than alt.binaries. Probably around then I also discovered MP3s, and the main way I had of getting a hold of those long before the days of Napster was public FTP sites. With any luck, when I found a good one there would be others mentioned in the greeting and/or some sort of readme that I could then go check out. I could also try snagging them on usenet, but the server my ISP ran didn’t really put much effort into making sure the binaries groups had any sort of decent retention, but every once and a while I could snag something. I also still had access to AOL, but I don’t recall doing much in their client other than checking email.

    In any case, that was all outside of the WWW. As for the WWW I remember using to do things like look up guides to video games I was playing, and other fun stuff like looking up Star Wars and Star Trek fan sites. It was more of a toy for me - for things like getting news, looking at the weather, or researching things I tended to go to “traditional” sources. Honestly, the whole every website had had animated gifs, blink tags, MIDI music, and horrible background images is more a meme than anything else. Sure, that’s not to say there weren’t sites like that, but even so that was more of a late 1990’s-mid 2000’s thing (coughMySpacecough). In 1995 most things still pretty simple. In 1995 trying to get too fancy would result in your site taking a while to load at 14.4k (a single MP3 took forever), and would grind the average PC (something like a 486 with 4-8MB of RAM) to a halt.

    As for cars, I agree with the OP is the 1990’s is when the typical new car took a big leap in terms of quality. What they lack is the cool factor that cars from the 60’s have. Things have gotten better since then in general, though I’d argue that some things like usability and ergonomics have taken a hit.


  • Do you really remember the internet back then? Of course it wasn’t enshittified, there were only dozens of people online. And it really depends on what you mean with enshittified, the designs were horrible and polluted, sure it didn’t had ads, but realistically even a page with adds nowadays is more readable than most websites back then, with tiling images background, gifs everywhere and interesting font choices.

    I’m sure that the vast majority of stuff you do online today wasn’t available in 95, so yeah, it might have become “enshittified” but it also became usable, and a shitty usable thing is better than a pure useless thing in my book.

    Do you remember the internet back then? Sure, there were some truly terrible websites around back then, but most of the internet wasn’t like what MySpace looked like a decade later.

    Is it though? Most cars from the 90s are in dumpsters by now, they consumed so much gas that it simply wasn’t worth keeping them. And by the 90s cars had already started using electronics so they don’t even have the appeal that a purely mechanical car from the 60s brings to the table. Also again with the affordability probably wasn’t all that much better than now, where you can probably get a used car for very cheap.

    As someone who was around back then, the quality of 90’s cars were far better than the 70-80’s cars that preceded them (in general). By the 1990’s a lot of issues that plagued the early electronics in cars (late 70’s-80’s) had been sorted out, things like fuel injection became standard, the quality of paints improved drastically - 1990’s cars didn’t rust out nearly as bad as cars from previous decades. Of course most of these cars are gone now - the newest 1990’s cars are over 25 years old at this point, but it’s still not uncommon to see them driving around. Much more so than seeing cars from the 60’s-70’s driving around in the 1990’s.