You had to wait 30 minutes to wait for all those unicorn gifs to load, so I'd say it wasn't as fast as it could've been :D
The amazing part was that everyone had a homepage at some point, where they put content online about topics that they thought was worth sharing.
Even girls in school had a website with sparkling rainbow gifs and a guestbook, and some pages about topics they liked... like smallville series character details, some cake recipes or games that they played. Oh boi have I read way too many things about dragons or vampires in historic literature.
Those websites were usually hosted at all those ad driven freehosters like geocities or funpic, so they sometimes injected their own ads to fund the hosting costs.
But honestly, I'd take the old version of the internet any time again over the dumpster fire that is social media propaganda and coordinated/incinerated defamatory shitstorms these days.
The internet was a welcoming place for everyone, where people shared what they loved with others. The internet was a nice place. And then, the facebook and the chans happened, and everything kinda went to shit.
I remember it took about 20-30 minutes to download an mp3 in the dialup days. Most websites were in the kilobytes because everyone was on dialup. Also keep in mind most screens would have been 640x480, so it's not like you were getting high res images.
I remember waiting like a whole night to download an MP3. When I tried to play it the next day, my laptop was so old and slow that it couldn't play the MP3 without stuttering :D
Depends on the amount of gifs people were placing on their website :D We only had a 56k modem at the time. The Browser was provided by the ISP at first due to lack of dial-up software that supported the German ISPs, so it was loading all kinds of injected stuff from the ISP, too.
But yeah, I agree with the general sentiment that websites usually loaded way faster if you were using e.g. IE3 on purpose because it didn't load all the stylesheets and images.
Interesting there's a section on Borat at the bottom there - I'm pretty sure I've never heard of this (let alone the lawsuit) and I was reading about it, seeing the photos, thinking he was surely an influence on the character. Not sure what to make of that.
The amazing part was that everyone had a homepage at some point, where they put content online about topics that they thought was worth sharing.
Even girls in school had a website with sparkling rainbow gifs and a guestbook, and some pages about topics they liked... like smallville series character details, some cake recipes or games that they played. Oh boi have I read way too many things about dragons or vampires in historic literature.
Those websites were usually hosted at all those ad driven freehosters like geocities or funpic, so they sometimes injected their own ads to fund the hosting costs.
But honestly, I'd take the old version of the internet any time again over the dumpster fire that is social media propaganda and coordinated/incinerated defamatory shitstorms these days.
The internet was a welcoming place for everyone, where people shared what they loved with others. The internet was a nice place. And then, the facebook and the chans happened, and everything kinda went to shit.