I remember browsing the internet was much more of a networked thing. If you want to know what it was like you could take a look at Wikipedia, where you still can get lost in a never ending deeper web of links. However WikiPedia is a very cleaned up version of the early web. It lacks animated .gifs for sure.
But the difference with Wikipedia was that people would maintain a Links section full of interesting stuff and people would join web rings for various subjects, interlinking vastly different sites. Finding information often happened through Yahoo! (AltaVista was there too but it was lacking the quality of handpicked results) through a tree based discovery system, to continue through whatever you could find through links on an interesting page. Exchanging links was something that really frequently happened.
It resulted in an internet where you just kept clicking and discovering and digging. Sometimes also frustrating as browsers lacked tabs and I would navigate all links one by one by loading it and going back. I would forget how I arrived at a certain page sometimes because it was so deep and I never found the breadcrumbs again.
> If you want to know what it was like you could take a look at Wikipedia, where you still can get lost in a never ending deeper web of links.
I would have said TVTropes, but the core point is the same.
I remember having to restart my computer, because IE lacked tabs and Windows would let you open so many instances of it that the whole OS ground to a halt.
It's weird to think that now, in the absence of Google, I couldn't find my way from anything to anything else.
But the difference with Wikipedia was that people would maintain a Links section full of interesting stuff and people would join web rings for various subjects, interlinking vastly different sites. Finding information often happened through Yahoo! (AltaVista was there too but it was lacking the quality of handpicked results) through a tree based discovery system, to continue through whatever you could find through links on an interesting page. Exchanging links was something that really frequently happened.
It resulted in an internet where you just kept clicking and discovering and digging. Sometimes also frustrating as browsers lacked tabs and I would navigate all links one by one by loading it and going back. I would forget how I arrived at a certain page sometimes because it was so deep and I never found the breadcrumbs again.