Old School Internets

Hey Scott,

I just posted something at a G.I. Joe forum (of all things) that's an off-topic thought that might or might not provide interesting fodder for the blog:

My wife and I got to talking tonight about how much the internet has changed just in the past fifteen years or so that we've been together.
At some point in the '90s, we had AOL accounts. I vaguely remember that... christ, the memories are VERY vague. Technology changes so quickly anymore that everything gets buried.
You wouldn't access a website through AOL, but instead there were dedicated AOL sites for things. Is that right?

 

I distinctly remember visiting the WWF site and hearing Vince McMahon's voice say "Welcome to the WWF on America Online!"
It's not like I hear Vince welcoming me to the WWE on Firefox today.
I read something interesting on The Week recently:
http://theweek.com/article/flipbook/223127/the-higher-costs-of-higher-education#12
Isn't dial-up dead?
posted on November 7, 2011, at 12:04 PM
3.5 million
Number of U.S. subscribers that still pay roughly $17.50/month for Aol's dial-up internet service, as of September, 2011
200,000
Number of new dial-up subscribers Aol signed up over the last year
50
Approximate factor by which the the typical U.S. broadband connection is faster than the typical dial-up connection
Sources: Net Index, Splatf
Is there a website where one can see what the web looked like fifteen years ago? I know people laugh about their old GeoCities pages, but even more utilitarian sites like Yahoo! or whatever have changed considerably.

I remember that a friend of mine used to write a weekly comic book-themed newsletter, and sometimes it would be 10 pages long... and that would crash my computer.
Most sites have so many graphics and videos and things that no connection could have handled them back then.
I feel like a damn Luddite anymore.
I realize this is a scatterbrained post, but now that I reflect on it, the internet has changed so much since I first started using it that I can't even get my ideas together about it.
Thoughts? Resources? Jokes at my expense?

Well, I came from the elitist world of computing science in university, where we’d access the burgeoning young internet via dedicated Unix terminals.  Or as my wife quips, “Dear internet with no pictures…”  So I don’t know much about the workings of AOL aside from everyone on RSPW getting supremely pissed off in September when newbies would flood the newsgroup, and then even more pissed off in 1995 when AOL gave access to their subscribers, none of whom knew how a newsgroup worked and most of whom were pretty clueless. 

That being said, there definitely is a time machine for the internet.  www.archive.org will allow you view whatever site you want basically at whatever time you want to see it.