The generation born after 2000 is called "founders". They have no idea what life is without the Internet. However, older people have also begun to forget. Life gallops at such a gallop that we, who are older, have already forgotten what Runet was like in our early years, when the parents of some founders had not even met yet. We decided to be a little nostalgic here, and we invite you to remember how the Russian piece of the network looked like about one adulthood ago and how people used the Internet in general.
We will not refer to the times before historical materialism, that is, to the 1990s, for beauty we will dwell on the year 2000. Before the appearance of these smartphones of yours, there were still 7 years left, and mobile phones for the most part looked something like this:
Remember all those creepy cases that people used to put their mobile phones in and hook them onto their belts?
In those years, we went out to the Internet for a walk from ordinary computers, as in the first picture of the post. WiFi? Do not make me laugh. In the apartments of many Russians, a dedicated Internet cable was not even stretched out (you can write a novel about local providers of those years). Modems gave us the happiness of joining the World Wide Web, and the real bandwidth hung around 30-40 kilobits per second. Take a calculator and calculate how long it took to download an mp3 file of five megabytes with such a crazy channel (if there were no disconnections).
By the way, in those years, many of us paid for the Internet ... by the time of use. Yeah, the longer you climb the sites, the more you pay. It was cheaper at night. Therefore, the most advanced ones started downloading entire sites at night. Quite a feasible task for those times, even despite the heartbreaking modem speed.
Where did a person go in Runet in 2000? The social media boom was still a few years away. Few people even knew about LiveJournal:
And we communicated mainly in ICQ (especially advanced - in mIRC) and on chat sites, the largest of which was "Crib":
But still, the main life was in "ICQ" - without any irony and exaggeration, the people's messenger. There was a whole subculture of dating establishments in ICQ, their account numbers were printed on business cards, and for "six-digits" (six-digit account numbers), people laid out a lot of money. By the way, I still remember my nine-sign by heart, and I met my future wife in ICQ (she was looking for a new interlocutor by a suitable nickname).
Most of the portals and services known today simply did not exist. The most popular search engines were Rambler and Aport:
Please note that in the upper right corner it was possible to select the page display encoding. And it was really in demand.
Those who did not want to use the bourgeois mail service Hotmail, the most popular in the world at that time, mastered the young mailers hotbox.ru and mail.ru:
For entertainment, we went to the sites "Anecdote", "Kulichki" and "Fomenko":
But the “Maxim Moshkov Library” hasn’t changed at all all these years, so if you want to see the canned dinosaur of web design live, then go to lib.ru:
Advanced citizens preferred news sites to television and newspapers:
This is how the Internet lived in our country in a year with three zeros. For the upcoming birthday of Runet, we are preparing a big study and we want to ask you, what sites did you use in those days? There is not much, just 4 questions.
Only registered users can participate in the survey. , you are welcome.
How long ago did you start using the Internet?
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3-5 years ago
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6-10 years ago
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11-15 years ago
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16-20 years ago
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More than 20 years ago
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Do not know
1578 users voted. 32 users abstained.
Which of these Internet resources did you visit when you first started using the Internet?
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Altavista.com
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Anekdot.ru
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Aport.ru
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Bash.org
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Fomenko.ru
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Krovatka.ru
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Lib.ru
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Livejournal.com
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Mail.ru
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Omen.ru
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Rambler
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Yandex
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Yahoo!
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Google
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Wikipedia
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Webplanet
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Kulichki
1322 users voted. 71 user abstained.
Which of these online resources have you stopped using?
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Altavista.com
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Anekdot.ru
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Aport.ru
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Bash.org
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Fomenko.ru
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Krovatka.ru
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Lib.ru
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Livejournal.com
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Mail.ru
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Omen.ru
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Rambler
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Yandex
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Yahoo!
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Google
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Wikipedia
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Webplanet
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Kulichki
905 users voted. 198 users abstained.
What resources do you miss?
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Altavista.com
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Anekdot.ru
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Aport.ru
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Bash.org
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Fomenko.ru
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Krovatka.ru
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Lib.ru
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Livejournal.com
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Omen.ru
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Webplanet
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Kulichki
424 users voted. 606 users abstained.
Source: habr.com