Google 20 years old.

[Chippy_Tea]

Unfortunately i am old enough to remember the early days of the internet when search engines didn't exist and you had to type anything you wanted to view into Internet Explorer and hope you got the web address right, as the internet (in the early days) became popular newsagents started to sell magazines full of stuff you may want to view with the URL's so you could view it which made life a bit more bearable then along came the early search engines.

Does anyone here remember life before google?

Check out the list in the link at the bottom, i remember and used these prior to Google taking over the world.

Yahoo! - Born in 1994

WebCrawler – Born in 1994

Lycos – Born in 1994

AltaVista – Born in 1995

Ask Jeeves (now Ask) – Born in 1997

Google – Born in 1997

http://www.thehistoryofseo.com/The-Industry/Short_History_of_Early_Search_Engines.aspx

.

 

[Covrich]

Lycos I remember that one with the dog

Yeah when I started on the internet it was always yahoo or altavista people used

The browser battles were IE and Netscape navigator, never used my computec CDs either as I went straight for freeserve.

 

[Clint]

20 years old and never made a penny....

 

[Chippy_Tea]

freeserve.

That takes me back i also used Freeserve.

For those wondering what we are on about -

It was on 22 September 1998that the high street electrical chain Dixons announced that it was launching a free internet provider called Freeserve. The existing players - Virgin, AOL, Compuserve and so on - scoffed at the idea that you could run an ISP without a subscription fee. But the people behind Freeserve reckoned they could build a profitable business if they could grab a share of the telephone charges.

Within six months, Freeserve had a million subscribers, and the other ISPs were scrambling to replicate its model. By the summer of 1999 it had become Britain's first dot com to float on the stock market. In the spring of 2000 it had two million subscribers - compared to BT's 400,000 - and it entered the FTSE 100. At that stage Freeserve was still making big losses but its value climbed to an extraordinary £9bn - more than its parent company Dixons. More even than the Bank of Scotland, which in the year before it joined Halifax to form HBOS, made a profit of more than a billion pounds.

Read in full - http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/technology/2008/09/freeserve_and_ten_years_of_boo.html

 

[jceg316]

I remember the days before Google, back then the internet was far more wild west, where **** would be advertised on a pc game cheat code site, and email chain letters went round unbroken since 1836. I also remember fighting with my sister, I wanted to use the internet but she wanted to speak to her friends, and we had only 1 phone line.

 

[marshbrewer]

Aaaahhhhh, browser wars, altavista, Usenet using Agent, 56k X2 modems, kilostream lines, happy days.....

 

[Chippy_Tea]

I wanted to use the internet but she wanted to speak to her friends, and we had only 1 phone line.

How annoying was it when you tried to phone home and the line was engaged for hours as someone was using the modem.

 

[Chippy_Tea]

, 56k X2 modems, happy days.....

I can remember online gaming with a ping of 100+ you wouldn't entertain it now but in those days being able to play a real person in a shooter was amazing and you would put up with any sort of crap connection and ping to do it, kids today don't know how lucky they are.

 

[Norfolk79]

How annoying was it when you tried to phone home and the line was engaged for hours as someone was using the modem.

Or you were downloading something and somebody would pick the phone up and make the modem hang up and you’d have the start the download again

 

[prog99]

Internet Explorer.. I remember downloading mosaic and all the bits of the network stack on windows 3.1 to access the web. Summer 1994 from memory. We had internet access in uni before then but it jus pre-dated the early web pages.

 

[Petrolhead]

I started by connecting to a mainframe with an acoustic coupler and sent my programs to be entered by punch card operators......

 

[prog99]

Which is almost how I started. Our uni was a bit poor and had a scheduled dial up connection to a bigger one to send & receive emails. It was quicker for me if I needed any files to phone a friend who would then email them to me from his posh uni.

 

[Clint]

Heard on the radio last night in work that soon PS4 gamers will be able to join online games played on Xbox and vice versa...

 

[GerritT]

Directory services! No search machines but browsing through ever deeper directories to get an overview of the thing that MIGHT be what you were looking for!

 

[Chippy_Tea]

Clint they have discussed this before, I don't see the point as I don't see who gains from it.

 

[DizzyDazz]

I have a vague recollection of using Compuserve in 1992 for email and BBS sites and I'm still in contact with a lady living in Australia from over 20 years ago when we were researching on a Genealogy BBS.
The internet was a very male environment...

 

[Norfolk79]

I remember our local library having a service where you could dial in using a modem and their software to renew a book "online" without having to actually go to the library!

 

[Burtie]

At Uni in 1989 the JANET (Joint Accademic NETwork) ruled.. You get your own email address (ending .ac.uk) and you can talk to any other similarly like minded 'nerd'.. Your mates were keen to share their friends email addresses and you just emailed people you didn't know simply because you could.. FSP (FTP's sexier partner)... Nothing was visual then, until you decoded the GIFs and JPEGs :)

 

[marshbrewer]

So what we're basically saying is this forum is full of old farts?

 

[mjjordan]

Yep, I suppose so, by the way, what is a computer?!!
I do remember a young lad busily trying to enthuse me with the idea that he was communicating with another dept of the company 200 miles away by typing something on a television thing in the office......