What do you miss most about the early days of the Internet?

[Axle Grease]

I miss the Usenet culture prior to AOL unleashing a torrent of imbeciles upon it.

 

[jauffins]

Sense of discovery was fantastic, and there's something to be said for having an unfiltered Internet connection where your ISP (Ala Time Warner Cable) doesn't intentionally slow down certain types of content (I.e. all video streaming) simply to coerce you to buy their crappier television service you don't want.

 

[romainB]

Discovering internet porn

 

[captaincranky]

Discovering internet porn

Yeah but, the trouble there was you could only hint at lewdness with a resolution of 1024 x 768. It doesn't start to get really smutty until you hit at least 6 MP. (3000 x 2000).

On a more technical note, Nikon's 1st consumer DSLR, the 6 MP D-70 wasn't released until 2004, a scant 12 years ago. Film scanning had its limitations, and internet bandwidth simply wasn't up to the task of transmitting larger images. So the pictures you'd find were usually scaled to the most common monitor resolution of the period, 1024 x 768.

Today, the undisputed master of "boor-nography", Peter Hegre, is using a studio back at about 10,000 x 7500! Dear God, I certainly wish he'd give it a rest.

 

[gordonj]

I miss downloading a nude picture and it rendering to the screen a strip at a time. Five minutes later it was an office high-five as we reached the good bit.

 

[captaincranky]

I miss downloading a nude picture and it rendering to the screen a strip at a time. Five minutes later it was an office high-five as we reached the good bit.

Yes but today, you can download a set of 120 in the same amount of time. (give or take). I predict that 10 years from now, printers will incorporate "scratch & sniff" panels, and you'll no longer have to guess when you "get to the good part".

 

[lazer]

I miss sitting there like a dodo waiting for a page to load....

 

[The Owl]

The lack of facecrap and twitter I.e. the days when people actually talked face to face or picked up the phone now bearing in mind I started my web life with a 14,400 USR modem and a DX 4 x 100 jez those were the days

 

[wizardB]

1:War Dialing
2:Cult of the Dead Cow
3:BBSes
4:Warez

 

[The Owl]

Don' have to miss warez if you know where to look although a lot has moved to private boards

 

[wizardB]

I know it's the pages and site hidden in corporate servers that I think I miss the most.