My favourite memory is also one of my funniest.
When I first got my computer Hotmail was the e-mail of choice. Everyone had to have a Hotmail account, it let you use MSN Messenger!
I didn't write down the spelling, and as a 12-13 year old I typed in "hot male dot com"
Coincidentally that was also one of the first times I realised I'm probably not straight.What I mostly remember is the sense of hard work and discovery.
In the mid-to-late 1990s, after the internet became a public phenomenon, but before it totally dominated our lives, spending time on the web felt very different than it does today. There was no publicly-accessible index of websites, search was in its infancy, and link aggregators as we know them today just didn't exist. For the first time, you didn't need to be a tech-savvy person to experience the WWW, but it was still pretty incomprehensible to most people, who didn't understand what the internet was for.
New "homesteaders" developed websites on free hosts like GeoCities/Tripod/Angelfire; the former host organized itself into "neighbourhoods" of sites because we still thought about the internet as a physical space. Web rings served as pilgrimage routes that connected websites together, irrespective of domain or host, into self-selected communities. They organized around subjects/themes, like Lemmy communities, subreddits, hashtags, etc. are today. They emerged around the same time as public bulletin boards which, for people who were not familiar with BBS, were also a transformative technology, and also the source of life-changing memories.
I am so privileged to have been around to explore the early internet.
Primitive search engines often allowed you to browse websites by topic. You could click on stuff like different music or film genres, specific movie or book titles, or celebrity names, and youd be presented with a list of all websites on that topic.
Since it was the early internet and everyone had multiple personal geocities or angelfire sites, you'd churn up pages upon pages of results for everything. Each search engine produced vastly different results, so you could waste a day on Alta Vista, then go to Excite and do it over again, finding a bunch of different stuff.
I'd spend hours opening websites for shitty (and some surprisingly excellent) bands from all over the world. A handful even went on to real life notoriety.
My biggest flex along those lines is I became a huge fan of AFI in 1992 or 1993 because there were some folks in California writing about the punk scene, and they came up a lot. Sometimes somebody would host 30 second .wav files recorded from a live show or whatever. It was a cool time to be young and excited about music.
Before getting home Internet access, my "online" world was BBSes. Local BBSes, of course, because we couldn't dial long distance without repercussions. My favourite demogroup was Future Crew and I hated that it took months (or sometimes never) to get their releases on our local BBSes. Even with Fidonet, a lot of BBSes would only sync with remote nodes a couple times a month to save money, so it was slow going.
I remember a few days after we got home Internet access, I was eating breakfast and I suddenly had a thought. Wait...doesn't Future Crew's BBS run an FTP server? I think I saw them mention that in one of their nfo files. If they have an FTP server, I could just...connect to it. Like, directly, myself, from my house.
The implications of this were so strong that I started shaking. I couldn't finish my breakfast.
I ran downstairs and booted up the computer and typed in
ftp.mpoli.fiand...there it was. Future Crew's home BBS was just available for anyone in the world to connect to. I navigated around a little bit and found a song I hadn't seen before on any of the local BBSes. I started the download, and it worked, and a blazing 3kB/s. I remember I just started crying at the implications of what a worldwide network meant.From back before you accessed all your sites by using a search engine and instead you typed whatever that thing was and then ".com" (e.g. you wanted info on Cocoa Puffs, you would go to cocoapuffs.com) into your URL bar (yes, before that bar was a unified search/URL bar). If you mistyped or spelled something wrong, you would get porn almost every time. And then that porn would take over your whole computer. Even if you closed your web browser, it was your desktop background now. And trying to change it back didn't work. And you basically just had to restart your computer because your OS was completely compromised until you rebooted, then it would go back to normal after the reboot.
I loved just browsing the web and looking at random sites. Back in the late 90s, everyone made websites for anything they wanted. The internet wasn't consolidated into just a few big sites then, there were personal websites for literally everything.
There were even meme websites... like in the sense that the sites themselves were the meme. For example, there was a website "Mr T ate my balls", and then there were a ton of other similar sites like "Chewbacca ate my balls" or "sailor moon ate my balls".
If I wanted to find info about a specific TV show or something, there were likely multiple fan sites set up that were dedicated specifically to that show.
It was such a different experience from the internet today. I kind of miss it.
Fan message boards where people actually loved what they were fans of. Now you go onto the internet to talk about that show or game you love and it's nothing but people shitting on your joy.
The dial-up tone. I used to be able to gauge how good the connection was going to be by the tones, as it would fall back to slower speeds if it could not connect at the highest speed. That tone meant connecting to the "world at large" for me.
It was like 92 or 93 and my dad brought home a computer and didn't know what it could be used for so they just let 7 year old me mess around on it. My year older cousin told me that we could use it to talk to him using instant messaging. When I showed my parents they were blown away.
Also when I realized the computer they bought had bundled with it DOOM. That was great!
I'm not sure if this is considered "early internet", but it was StumbleUpon. There was always something interesting. You could browse interests and see other users who liked them. I looked at the Farscape category and a few people had added it. I sent a message to one of them who had a few other similar interests and we became pretty good internet friends. Turns out she was a Brazilian girl. We had nearly daily chats on MSN messenger for a couple years. Every once in a while I remember her and hope she's doing okay. I still find it crazy that I was able to connect with another Farscape fan all the way down in Brazil in the early 2000s.
Illucia: the town of Final Fantasy. This was a Final Fantasy fan site, but themed as a town from a Final Fantasy. This isn't a town ripped out of a particular game though. Illucia was an entirely original town with original art created by fan Tatsushi Nakao.
Before the release of FF7, it was themed after a town from the 16-bit era of Final Fantasy. To navigate the town, the user was presented with a clickable server-side image map, where clicking on different buildings in the town would take the user to a page on the site that was thematically appropriate to the building.
Quick aside: a history lesson on image maps. Image maps were a technique that allowed for a single image to be linked to multiple different places based on where the user clicked it. In the later years of image maps, the web site developer ("webmaster" to use the period-appropriate nomenclature 😜) could define the different clickable areas in HTML and the browser would handle requesting the correct URL based on where the user clicked. This is a client-side image map. Before browsers had this capability though, browsers would instead send the clicked coordinates to a server-side script — often written in Perl, I think — which would translate the coordinates and send back the corresponding page.
Anyway, after the release of FF7, Illucia was reworked in that style. I believe in this iteration, the user would interact with it by using the arrow keys to walk an actual character avatar around the town and enter various buildings rather than clicking on a (relatively) simple image map.
Just like the FF series did, the site sorta lost its luster for me at that point. Final Fantasy had gone from an ensemble cast of quirky but warm characters and brightly colored pixel art to a blue and gray mess of blurry, pre-rendered environments and low-poly brooding characters that looked bad at the time and aged even worse. I pretty much stopped visiting, but I still fondly remember those old pixel art days of Illucia.
Sadly, I haven't been able to find any trace of it online anymore aside from one brief mention in another online article. If anyone knows of anything, please send it my way!
Beseen internet chatrooms, ICQ, every website was someone's personal project, they just made it for fun. Yahoo messenger pool games and online chess. Php message boards and the communities that formed around those.
The early internet was so slow that everything was text based. Talking to other people was the primary form of interaction and nothing was really monetized. Everything was just there because it was nerd shit and people found homes, and communities, and belonging. It was real world values on a screen, not the influencer driven, 30sec video affiliate links shallow, corporate conglomerate that it is now.
That's why I appreciate the fediverse. It feels like real people just playing with technology and talking to each other.
All the awesome flash games. Wasn't super early but there are 3 games I loved but don't remember the names of them...
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build a rocket bit by bit and try and fly it higher each time as your fuel runs down. Eventually you get into space. 2D.
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you are a penguin, it's a ski slope distance game. Get power ups and go further each time. I think you have a hang glider thing. 2D.
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A paper plane distance thing by Microsoft Xbox where you throw it through a window and there's sounds of kids playing. 2D.
Also Monkey kick-off. Another fave.
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Pshhhkkkkkkrrrrkakingkakingkakingtshchchchchchchchcchdingdingding
Roleplaying in AOL chatrooms. I remember joining this group who roleplayed as vampires and hanging out in the "local tavern." I was only 9 and in hindsight half of what people were doing was hooking up, but it made me love writing.
Later on, I really enjoyed LiveJournal and staying up way too late reading fanfiction with my friends on AIM/MSN messenger.
Early Google. When AskJeeves fizzled away but SEO and ads hadn't taken over.
- Numa numa yay
- Flash games
- Homestar Runner (look at da emails)
- Neopets
- RuneScape
- Reddit when it was actually for nerds
The sound of a Pentium computer booting up.
Learning DOS commands from an actual book I borrowed from a neighbor.
The first days of learning programming.
The sound of a dial-up modem while falling asleep on my desk waiting for a connection at a high usage hour (11 PM) when everybody was trying to get in on a lower tariff.
Downloading code for 3D demos - they were called "4k intros" (the challenge was to make the most complex graphics in only 4 KB), and changing equation parameters without any clue of what they do, compile and see the effect. That's how I learned. Good days.
Prehistorik 2 with a "latest generation sound card" Creative Sound Blaster on cheap speakers.
Coding in Pascal (and later Delphi) my own tools / projects while listening to 80's music in Winamp.
Being patient to download an mp3 in multiple sessions during 3 days, only to realize it's a different song with the same name but by another singer.
Ripping CDs and cataloging your collection in Where Is It?
Hearing "who is the fox?" in an internet cafe room while playing Carmageddon.
Magazines with demo CDs, like PC Gamer.
The AltaVista search engine.
Parties where 5 people had to bring their 1GB HDDs so there would be enough music diversity. Of course, using Winamp visualizations as disco lights.
The early days of YouTube, spurred our own shitty video making within our group of friends. OG Neopets and Habbo Hotel were peak socializing with strangers on the internet. MSN allowed me to actually talk to people I knew in a way that was harder to do in person, helped me form relationships I wouldn't have normally had.
chatting on IRC channels
Collecting AOL CDs to get free minutes. Downloading risque photos on 56k and having your mom pick up the phone and kill your download halfway through. Fun times.
Early chat rooms were really fun, everything was fresh and people were excited with all of the potential and there was no overwhelming corporate bullshit.
Voraciously reading gURL.com. Got me into zine and riot grrl culture, and helped me actually learn about my body and sex in a positive way despite growing up in a conservative home.
In the 90s, before the social media and Google existed, it was customary to create your own home page. My page was about koalas. I was really into koalas. I had a crush in the digital art class, and she made her page about Hanson (a boyband). I remember feeling jealous about the attention they were getting hehe.
I made my own website with Microsoft Frontpage. Complete with "under construction" gifs and a visitor counter. I remember constantly refreshing to see if the visitor counter went up. It only ever did when I visited it.
Used to have a ton of fun with Frontpage, used to make simple games and stuff with it. I think I still have some saved on floppy disks.
I spent a disgusting amount of time with MOOs in the 90s. Diversity University, RiverMOO, BayMOO, LambdaMOO. MOOs differed from MUDs in that you could program rooms and objects yourself, and they were more chat and exploration than MUDs which were mostly RP and combat. MUDs are still around, but the only MOO still up is LambdaMOO.
You could search for something, anything, and you would get results for what you looked for. Now it's just ads or some bullshit you weren't even looking for.
Newsgroups and livejournal.
This was in one of the first emails my dad ever got. We had the video saved to our desktop and would bug our dad to show us "the bear video" over and over again.
Warcraft II on battle.net (and modem games with my friend up the street before that!)
Watching flash animations and playing flash games on Newgrounds.
One of my first internet experience was on a forum for a kid tv channel. There was a point system where posting a message would give you a point and certain amount of points would grant you ranks. I discovered that sending private messages also counted and clicking space repeatedly when submitting a message would multiply the message and the points. I am sorry to whoever received thousands of mps every single day back then but I had a lot of fun increasing that rank.
That may also explain why I still like incremental games nowadays
John Titor. I wish he'd come back and fix things
My first experience with the internet was using a Unix shell account that I used to dial into using "Telix for DOS". For browsing I had Lynx, for mail PINE, and for IRC it was some client called "irc" and so on. This was in the early 90s, maybe 1991 or 92.
Everything was text only, dial-up with 9600 baud, and it was glorious because before that all we had was BBSes (which were even more glorious in some ways actually).
The Netscape loading logo was pretty cool, and of course it took a while to load every page!
A bit later than what I'd call the early internet, I'd say my favourite memory was winning a Super Soaker CPS 2500 when I was 13.
How early is early / does early have to be?
My gaming clan.
If it has to be before that, I guess the multiplayer "text" browser games?
I started using the internet later than some, but finding YTPs and fan-made video game blooper videos on early YouTube. I though they were the funniest things in the world, still do to some extent looking back on how weird and experimental they could be. I'm still recovering from having my sense of humour melted at a young age lol
Dialing up to Prodigy to try and do homework with info from the Internet, but just using Microsoft Encarta instead.
I'd played Doom with people on networked computers in college, but that wasn't really "internet". But right at the end of the 90's when we started getting online game servers was great. Being able to play Unreal or Battlefield 1942 with random people from anywhere was amazing, and very addicting. Servers would have like 8 or maybe 16 player slots. More than that and lag would make the games unplayable. You'd keep refreshing the server lists looking for an open slot with a low ping, and join in. Actual early internet wasn't terribly exciting. Pretty much just text only, maybe some tiny graphics, since download speeds were unbearably slow.
Posting to a Usenet newsgroup to inquire about a research paper I was interested in, and having the author snail mail me a printed copy of the paper. The power of community blew my mind.
I can't remember the name of the game, but there was this flash powered tank game that I spent hours on during middle school. Oh, and interactive buddy...that game was a trip with its scripting engine!
AOL keyword NICK
Sending an email to a colleague in the states and being astounded that he replied instantaneously. 😳
There's a lot - MSN, forums in their hey-day, Geocities, the days when almost every ISP had free web hosting, long-form letter style emails being a common means of communication, email newsletters, etc. etc.
But three particular things come to mind:
R.E. League at Reality's End (https://www.realitysend.com/) - like many children in the 90s-2000s, I was obsessed with Pokemon. This guy made a web-based Pokemon RPG, with all the usual stuff (battles, badges, etc.) BUT with puzzles and amazing writing. What's more, anyone could make a website and be their own gym leader, WITH BADGE, with just a little code from Reality's End. It. Was. Awesome. Still around, kind of, but most of the fan-made gyms are looong gone, and I'm not certain you can create a new user for the main site stuff anymore. Edit: OMG I WAS WRONG, you can still make new accounts! Nostalgia time! For anyone wanting to try this, see: https://www.realitysend.com/league/gssignup
[Town Redacted]MP3.com - As a young teenager I lived in a small city with a disproportionally lively music scene. This website had recordings from local artists of all genres, and started me off on finding all ages shows [this was also still thriving, I don't see that many posters etc. for these anymore]. Met a ton of other kids, listened to a lot of good music, and it became a 'cool kid' feather in my cap. Also, in a roundabout way, was a catalyst for me discovering pot (listen to music and click on link for the band's webpage -> get into a discussion in their guestbook with a member of a different, all teen girl punk band -> start chatting with members of this band often -> band smokes me out for the first time at a show for the band we met over, which was also my last night in town before moving)
The Pojo.com Forums - Again, Pokemon obsessed kid. Loved Pojo for TCG stuff, but it also introduced me to fanfiction. I wrote my own fanfics that were well received, which gave me a lot of confidence about writing in general. Also met some cool people here, and for nostalgia's sake I find myself Googling usernames I remember sometimes.
My first Internet connection was based on GPRS and I remember images taking ages to load and loading in chunks. Moreover the connection kept interfering with the surround audio system and sometimes I would hear noises similar to the dial up modems.
I also remember the first times I tried using eMule (is it still up and running?): I was searching for the video song "Elevation" by U2 but I was unaware of rule 34; you can imagine what I actually downloaded.
So many!
MS Comic Chat and their weird VR Chat, the former was always very lively and a great introduction to the world of IRC, the latter was just experimental and trippy.
Usenet and finding lively discussion, flamewars and so much porn and spam under one roof.
Instant Messengers like ICQ and AIM being the lifeblood of the social world.
I think the thing I miss the most is that there was so much to discover and discovering it was very much a word of mouth thing, you had to find links from friends, follow webrings and pointers from sites that made it onto Altavista and Yahoo (or astalavista for the less legit stuff), now everything is consolidated onto a handful of platforms, it feels less open than ever.
An old browser strategy game called Archmage, run by a company called Mari, if I remember right. You accumulated turns over time, and then you spent your turns casting spells, summoning armies and attacking other players for land. All text based, but with a fair bit of complexity.
MUDs too. I played on one called Elsweyr, that was a good time.
The "download complete" Godzilla roar using the GoZilla! download manager. And using WinAmp to play my newly downloaded mp3's.
making a geocities with friends
Definitely Chatrooms 👌
Downloading a file and after hours of downloading it gets stuck at 99%
Probably that happy zing you got whenever anyone signed your guestbook on your homepage.
Earliest thing I remember was, as a kid of maybe 6 or 7, my family got internet installed (circa 95/96), and I found an early Pokémon fansite (via Yahooligans, most likely) that listed all 150 Pokémon and the "meaning" of their names (ie Hitmonchan and Hitmonlee are combinations of "hit" and Jackie Chan and Bruce Lee respectively). I was of course only just learning to read, so it took me a few visits to the website to read though every entry, but I was so stoked to see such engaging content on this new "internet"-thing
I remember buying a very specific blacksmith vise from someone on a forum where I spent a lot of time.
I never really discussed with herb specifically on this forum except to arrange the sale but when I met her it was like meeting a friend.
She was in a meet with other people from this forum the week before, she told me about the projects they had and gave me extra pieces of exotic wood and Damascus steel that she made with another member for me to work with.
We didn't knew each other at all be the fact that we belonged to the same online community was enough for us to be instantly friend.
The owner of a site called zug dot com wrote a lengthy and hilarious essay on his treatment for an anal fissure. There were MS Paint illustrations of the procedure.
I was enthralled but also learned a lot about using humor to discuss situations that a person would otherwise be ashamed of.
BBS, ftpmail, archie, veronica, news, mail !! tons and tons of information never before available to me..
AIM! My entire junior high would be up all night chatting away. I figured out my mom's password on her power Mac, and hid out in her office lol. It was so fun and novel at the time.
My dad trying and failing to dial out and connect to AOL italia to send his sister an email. I have no idea how much he paid for the service and the fact that local calls still cost money and I'm not even sure AOL was local, but it was so slow it took forever to send anything. Forget pictures.
"You got mail"
There was this guy on an old forum named "budsmoka" that once very shittily spray painted a cannabis leaf on his ps2
Creating my own Proboards message boards and discovering Alien Adoption Agency.
Probably watching an old Ed Edd N Eddy fan animation I found on yt that I cannot find a trace of anymore, or just the old yt shit post videos in general. That, or things like getting on Nitrome or any other site to play flash games. Mutiny on Nitrome was one of my absolute favorite flash games and one I never beat since I was still young.
I wasn't born back then, but it would have been the fact that search results weren't total crap like today: only reddit seems to offer decent results if you don't want sites like wikihow to come up... I wrote a more elaborate blogpost partly about it.
Having my own email address, making a website and pirating a metal album
The AOL kids home page with all flash games. I played a lot of the tom and Jerry blueprint game.
I was a big MST3k fan back in the day. When it was on Sci-Fi, they had a MST3k-themed site called "Caption This" where it took screengrabs of whatever was on the channel at the time and you'd crack jokes about it.
It doesn't sound that interesting now, but if you're familiar with the show you'd see the appeal.
Also having to wait five minutes for a single JPEG of boobs to show up. Really helped teach a person patience.
Discovering that Burning Man exists. I'd never heard of it until I followed a link from Boing Boing and my head exploded.
BonziBuddy destroying the family computer.
Newgrounds most definitely. And as an earlier poster stated, muds. Specifically MUME. Oh man many hours have been spent playing that game
The dancing Spider-Man gif.
When there were dedicated websites to silly gimmick/songs like Hamster Dance, Boogie Blocks, etc.
It's not that early, but eyezmaze.com (which apparently still exists) was one of those sites I found one day and regularly played on for years.
If you want to get a feeling of the old internet, look here: https://search.marginalia.nu/explore/random
To be clear, those are not (only) old sites, but a lot of them feel like the old web.
Configuring my UUCP connection to provide my BBS users with « electronic mail ».
being on prodigy chat and seeing people posting "LOL" and i was like, what is that
I fondly remember spending hours and hours in the T-Online BTX, which looked something like this: https://www.spiegel.de/fotostrecke/btx-jubilaeum-so-sah-der-internet-vorlaeufer-aus-fotostrecke-34503.html
There was this chat "village" themed based around Asterix & Obelix. I think it was the first chat I ever used, so it was magical. My older sister would mostly chat, while I watched. I still remember her handle from back then: Gutemine.
We later found out the chat cost 5ct/min (or 5 Pfennig per minute?)
Going to an internet café, filling a CD-R to the brim with whatever I could fetch in 1 hour, and enjoying whatever I brought on my very offline home computer for the next week
