this post was submitted on 04 Sep 2026
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What's before then then?
That would be the classical era of the internet, just after the baroque internet which in turn followed the renaissance internet.
If you go back further you'll find the internet of late antiquity, the ancient internet before that, then finally the pre-internet which we can only study through physical media since it was the era prior to the earliest known examples of the internet.
What percentage of people do you think had the internet in 1995?
The Internet in 1995 was an amazing place. You could find so many scholarly articles and weird funny sites, but every place to chat was full of creepy old men trying to meet kids. Which we thought was hilarious until we got a bit older and realized some of our friends were trying to meet them back. You'd accidentally find all manner of horrific shit, but there was information available. It wasn't all true but it was almost all honest.
Which is wildly different from today where it feels like almost none of it's honest. Even the stuff that's true is only selectively true and trying to manipulate us into a worse place.
In the nineties fox news was strong and we were already experiencing a lot of it's style of selective truth coupled with outright lies from other places, too. On the Internet at the time it was a lot easier to avoid that stuff.
Not 0? This chain is confusing. I guess a lot of you are young and me pointing out a truth really bothered y'all. Sorry gen Z.
The first public web browser was in 93. Get over yourself.
I can't imagine getting emotionally invested in something so meaningless, but OK. I'm over myself.
Well, you certainly seemed invested enough to act like a pedantic dickhead, adding nothing to a conversation other than pointing out how long you've been around and experienced you were in the internet before it was cool.
Lol what? You inferred all that from a couple of sentences? Yeah I'm the one with problem...
In the US it was about 8%, most other countries were lower. Just 5 years later, Canada surpassed 50% internet usage, with the USA not far behind. The pace of change over the 90s was astronomical; there were *no webpages in 1990!
So it absolutely makes sense to separate the "old internet" from what existed in the 90s.
The oldest people in Gen Z were 3 years old in 2000, so I don't think any of them are speaking about that old internet from experience.
Seeing 'early internet' I came here expecting a discussion about IRC, Usenet and Gopher, to be honest. 'Early internet' means pre-http for me.