What's your favorite Web 1.0 memory?
What's your favorite Web 1.0 memory?
Prior to the internet condensing into just 5 or so websites, what do you remember fondling about being online?
I remember winning a raffle contest on the old Terraria forums and getting to pick my own title (instead of just New Member, Member, Well-Known Member). Of course, since I was like 13, I picked a random collection of letters that only I knew was an acronym of my signature on said forums.
My fondest memories of being online predate having web access!
I grew up in a remote corner of Kansas. BBSs were the thing in the 80s and 90s, and maybe CompuServe. But everything was a long-distance (expensive!) phone call. I had various hacks to get Internet email. Via a wonky FidoNet gateway was the best for awhile; my system dialed up a BBS in the middle of the night (cheaper rates!), quickly exchanged mail, and hung up.
Then I got a UUCP feed. Similar concept, but then I could also get... USENET! (Not the binaries people think of now, but discussions.)
Eventually I got into Free Software: FreeBSD and Linux. I remember going to a computer lab in a college in summer when it was empty with a large stack of floppies. I'd download Debian installer disks via FTP on about 6 computers at once, write them to disks, and repeat. Woo!
Finally PPP became available in my area. Affordable Real Internet at home! I promptly put up a personal website (ISPs gave those out standard at the time), ran my UUCP stuff over the Internet, etc. I remember the thrill of being able to access news sites. From Kansas! For Free! And then there was RealAudio even. And maybe even RealVideo, if you were super lucky.
A lot of libraries were set up with telnet access to their card catalog - how cool was that, seeing what's there and even renewing my books from home!
Then I moved to a city and got myself a 128Kbps ISDN line. That was hopping! I could run a live SMTP server myself - no more UUCP. Somewhere around that time, Slashdot popped up as a popular site. I also used Mapquest to get -- and PRINT OUT -- driving directions. Then you started having search engines - AltaVista, Excite, etc. And Deja News - the Usenet indexer - was one of the best ways to find technical information. Sort of like a "site:reddit.com" search now.
When Amazon became a thing, that was cool. No more driving 40 miles to a bookstore!
Eventually I got a job at a University, and my desktop machine ran Linux. It had an un-firewalled public IP, so I promptly started hosting my Linux-related website on it.
Oh, and did I mention IRC? (Chat rooms)
But you'll note, I named the websites last. My fondest memories weren't really about websites. They were about communication and community. I never really liked web forums ("I can use my own client for email and Usenet, and get all of the groups in one place; why should I register 20 different accounts for forums that will go down with the server admin gets bored of the project?").
Actually, they still aren't. I mean, websites are USEFUL - like, say, Google Maps or OpenStreeMap. But do I have fond memories of Google Maps? No, not really.
Fediverse, man... this is community. I like that. I like my Mastodon instance. I'll probably grow to like Lemmy too.
The irony of the web is that it opened up so much more rich expression than text did, so much so that nobody ever mentions the word "multimedia" anymore. And yet, because we are awash in rich expression, it all blends together to be sorta unremarkable, because that is the world we are in now.
So many great memories!
I remember daydreaming about the day everyone would have an email address! It seemed so fat-fetched, the concept of meeting someone and exchanging email addresses. I had dial up for many years, and I also dreamed about having a permanent connection. I would think, "Imagine, you receive an email and you get notified in real time that it arrived! No need to dial up and fetch emails via POP3!"
In 1999 my parents got a dedicated connection via cable, so I set up a Linux server on their house. Back then the computer would get a real, unfiltered, IP address, so I started running my own email service. 24 years later and I still have the same domain and run my own mail service, though on the cloud these days.
A couple years ago there was a post going on Gemini asking How you were using the Internet in the 1991-1995 and 1995-2005? (sic), the replies are super interesting.
I identify with all that completely! I remember thinking it was really cool when we started to see websites in TV ads and things. My perspective may have shifted since... hah.
I actually posted a reply to that same prompt here: https://changelog.complete.org/archives/10417-the-pc-internet-revolution-in-rural-america It talks about the unique challenges of being in a rural area, as well as discusses cost quite a bit.
Personal webpages, where people basically wrote about themselves, their hobbies, etc
Geocities, angelfire, tripod!
Yup, even own personal using HTML
"Badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger, mushroom mushroom!"
That was a banger! Then go over to zombo.com for the chillout
The earwormy gateway drug to the world of Weebl and Bob.
"Mmm... Pie"
I'm pretty sure that's technically still Web2 you're talking about, but I remember back in the day I would sometimes go to cracked flash game sites to play flash games with cheats (I was like 8)
The police still haven't caught me
My memory probably is more of early Web 2; I was born in the late 90s, so I suppose I missed the really wild west days.
Flash games were great though; it seemed like every company that even slightly catered to people under 30 had a website with some game on it.
Fondest memories are of using mIRC late in the night while listening to WinAmp.
That really whips the llama's ass.
discovering that 3-D animated email GIF that was the mailbox with the word 'email" that revolved around it. i added it to my geocities site immediately!
ah, simpler times...
Before "good" search engines existed there was a sense of exploration hopping from weird site to weird site. Because there were no rules people would really put a piece of themselves into their websites. They would just be little virtual islands dedicated to one subject or another that the author found interesting.
I remember reading gamefaq guides on very pbscure ds games that I loved to play but was very bad at.
I remember my classmate printing half a rim of a ps1 game walthrough from gamefaqs because he can't be online all the time since the modem uses the phone and his family can cut the connection simply by lifting the phone receiver.
When search was bad, finding something cool on the internet felt like finding buried treasure.
I'll always remember Illucia: The Town of Final Fantasy. It was a Final Fantasy fansite started by some college student (I assume since it was hosted on some university's web hosting; maybe UC Santa Barbara?) named Tatsushi Nakao in the early 90s. The page greeted you with original art of a pixelated Final Fantasy style town. You could click on various buildings to go to sections of the site. It felt like a place, and it was fun to explore.
I remember the Quake web community in the mid 90s — a bunch of web sites, sometimes linked together and sometimes not — all with Quake-related content. Large portal sites would organize around interests, and they would seek out smaller sites about niche parts of that interest, bringing them into the fold to offer hosting and services. PlanetQuake is the one I remember most around Quake. The PlanetQuake site was a place you'd go to get the latest Quake news, but then they also hosted more niche sites.
The first practical "programming" I ever did was in Quake macros… and that's probably a major part of why I have the career I have today. There was a whole site dedicated to Quake macros (probably hosted on PlanetQuake, but I can no longer say for certain) that helped me get started and even helped me along when I got stuck.
I recall another site which I believe was called the House of Mouse which existed solely to extoll the virtues of the keyboard/mouse control scheme for Quake. When Quake was released, the prevailing way to control a shooter was with the arrow keys on the keyboard. Doom guy wasn't able to look up or down, so the mouse wasn't necessary. (You could control Doom with the mouse, but moving the mouse forward caused Doom guy to walk forward. It was a terrible way to play!) Hence the need to convince people to play with the mouse and keyboard.
I miss the early web. Smaller communities like this, Tildes, and Mastodon give me those same vibes again.
I just miss websites that didn't move crap around as they loaded, so when you go to click on something it moves out from under your mouse (and sometimes makes you click on something else).
I remember playing the heck out of http://ambar.darklights com
It was a text based strategy game, people used to break the game using math to compute for the optimal best combinations of troops to land ratio. I wasn't very good at it but i enjoyed it.
The engineer at my college TV station telling me about this world wide web thing and me saying "Sounds cool but I don't think it'll replace gopher".
"Dancing Babies" & "Flying Toaster" GIFs everywhere!
Stickdeath, Geocities, and of course MSN Messenger. I still use the notification sound from MSN as my text tone on my phone. Just feels right.
Meeting my ex wife on Livejournal. Was a paid member since 2001.
Hmm... I still have printed out some correspondence from prodigy bbs focused on SNES game genie codes for FF6, which is probably the earliest physical artifact / memory.
I also remember the very first two times I interacted with IRC, which on time #1, I picked a random nick from mechwarrior and talked to someone. Then, on time #2, i couldn't remember and picked a new nick from mechwarrior, and person I talked to had no idea who I was and I didn't remember the name either. That one really stuck "identity" into my consciousness.
Another strong memory would be my homemade, geocities webpage with a starfield background and midi/tracker music player loaded, "under construction" sign on page, and text about FF7's sepiroth. lost to time, though.
Outside of that.... phpbb and other random forums, irc culture especially for music creators with things like one-hour compos for tracker tunes as a way to write anything, shit or not. good stuff.
Also, early MMO games had really neat emergent behavior and it was fun to see how the social aspects played out. I think that's ... adjacent to web 1 stuff and MUDs. So, in Ragnarok Online, low-level acolyte classes had few ways to level but they could us their heal spells offensively against undead monsters. The best way to do this was against high-level undead things, and there was a place (glastheim churchyard) that had a safe location to rest and restore mana. Well, higher-leveled priests would electively go there and party up with folks purely because the higher-leveled priests had a spell to "increase mp regen" for party. effectively, they'd party a bunch of lower-leveled folks, sit in safe space, and repeatedly cast the spell when it ran out. that's it.
later, the game added non-undead to the zone, as well as an mvp / boss spawn. kinda rude, tbh. but i loved all the social spaces folks would gather around to be safe and regen health/mana between leveling sprees. newer takes on MMOs miss that.
Starfield backgrounds were obligatory! I remember spending hours in Paint Shop Pro's pattern mode trying to make sure my white and grey pixels repeated nicely: not so busy as to look like noise, but dense and random enough to hide the repetition.
Webpages that could get created in 5 minutes without a super fancy editor and excessive coding - good times!
My memory might be faulty but I just remember every other website was dedicated to Quentin Tarantino.
This was in 99 or so. I still didn't have internet at home, but my town had dial-up and cyber-cafés. There was this local TV channel dedicated to anime, and I would occasionally buy these cheap magazines with information about the anime of the moment (Sailor Moon, DBZ, Slayers, etc.). The magazine had links to fan shrines, and that's how I met a lot of people and got into the culture.
To write them, I'd compose an email at home, save it in .txt and then take it to the cyber-café in a diskette. There, I'd login to my inbox -- which only had like 2MB of storage and would fill very quickly! -- and paste the message and send it. If I got a reply, I'd save it in a file and read it at home.
Similarly, when I got into fanfiction, I'd have to skim the summaries, and the overall story to see if I might like to read it. I quickly learned to use Ctrl+F and my favorite characters' names. If I liked what little I read, I'd paste it into a file and read it fully at home.
I found this website when I was like 13 and thought it was pretty cool. I spent most of my time bull shitting on ultimate guitar forums before it got shutdown and sputnikmusic
http://www.realultimatepower.net/index4.htm
It looks like the homepage is broken but everything else still works
holy cow that's the funniest thing I've seen all week. What a world we used to live in
I was having an argument with a friend in early 2000s about when Lance Armstrong had won the tour de France. I was completely wrong, but I wasnt going to let that stop me. I copied all of the html from a site that had the stats I wanted. Pasted all of the code into a geocities, just edited one of the years to create the reality I wanted and then published the page before sharing it with my friend. He didn't buy it and I fessed up. He was impressed with the lengths I was willing to go to to win a dumb argument though.
That's magnificent! Your dedication is commendable lol
Omg forum signatures.
I remember on one forum I visited, people would do these "scavenger hunt"/puzzle things, where they would encode some sort of clue in an image in their signature. Like in the corner of the blue background, there's a grid of pixels of slightly different shades of blue, and if you treat the lighter blues as 1s and the darker as 0s, and decode it as ASCII, it'll give you a URL to another image, which has another clue, this time a math puzzle, etc...The first person to "solve" the signature would DM the answer, and they would edit the signature with a leaderboard of usernames who solved it.
And people would get crazy creative with it! It was a lot of fun.
That sounds like a blast! I had so much fun making my own signature and exploring what people had done with theirs.
The first time I stumbled into superbad.com and it clicked with me immediately like art sometimes does. Total recognition in an ineffable language. It's my first memory of a distinctly internet culture.
alt.fan.pratchett and specifically the sprawling, unending hedgehog song that exhausted every rhyme there is to be made about bestiality. (That man really earned his knighthood.)
The Star Wars Cantina. I hadn't even seen all the Star Wars films, but I somehow fell into this clunky HTML chat room, and managed to role-play along just well enough to feel part of a community.
Finding music. Discovering bands on mp3.com when that was a thing. Typing odd combinations of words into Napster to discover songs and artists I'd never have been exposed to otherwise and still love today. Buying digital albums for the first time and feeling something so personal and special about not having to go to a store and rely on what they have in stock or order from a website to have shipped in several weeks. Reading eMusic editorials and putting my credits to obscure reissues and international releases I couldn't possibly have found out about any other way. (Now it feels like every service wants me to listen to music that sounds like music I've already listened to. Bandcamp's editorials are my last oasis.)
I don't know about favorite but I will give my first memory:
This was at a time when our lab had X.25 terminal access (9600bps I think) to some Unix hosts that were on the Internet but we didn't have proper TCP/IP connectivity to the lab itself. I'd already used a bunch of terminal based stuff: Email, Usenet, IRC, FTP/Archie. At some point I downloaded Mosaic because I was vaguely aware of the buzz around it. I managed to compile it (or was it pre-built? I would have needed Motif to build it), fired it up, figured out how to open some local HTML files that came with it and I could tell that it was some kind of hypertext system. But it had no authoring and without proper Internet access the external links didn't work. So I didn't really get what it was about.
But I figured it out later on.
Oh I remember how cool it was when Mosaic landed. Web pages were so much cooler than boring 'ol Gopher or let alone FTP
Using GoZilla! to download .mp3s. I downloaded stuff just to hear the Download Complete roar. Lol
There was this “mmo game” website where during the battle you had 3 radio buttons to choose shooting left, center, or right. Then you had another 3 buttons to jump left, stay, or right. And it’d be 5x5 people teams and you had to aim the direction that person would jump to hit them. Each turn lasted a minute during which all 10 players would make their choices. Outside of the battle it also had inventory system, stores, money, and jobs. You essentially do a job that lasts 3 human hours, that gets you paid, and you use bill to get better gear to fight.
Extremely simple. No JavaScript. Just web page with radio buttons. I played that game all the time.
Searching Yahoo for fansites... I remember searching for Quest for Glory 5 and downloading multimedia and these cool wallpapers and then hopping onto the next fan site on the webring... Oh and signing the guestbook while the RealAudio plugin played music...
Back in 1995, my first night using the internet. I remember visiting websites by guessing their URL, since there were no search engines and I didn't know of Yahoo! yet.
I visited the Louvre (louvre.fr was an easy guess), and was amazed by all the photos of art that I could see! I also visited NASA (nasa.gov) and saw some satellite images, something that blew my mind.
It was a new world opening to me. I stayed awake til late, mesmerized by all the internet could offer. In those first years of using the internet I remember some nights that I would log off early because "there was nothing else to see".
Back in 1995 we had an "Internet Phonebook." Literally a 4 inch thick book which listed domain names and brief descriptions. This was before / just as the search engines we know today were taking off. Google was founded in 1998. Alta Vista and Yahoo! had only just been founded in '95.
I've seen those before!
I'm from Brazil, so we didn't have anything back then... commercial providers only started in 1996, so even if you wanted to use the internet you couldn't. Only universities had very limited access, and later some companies with ties to the government.
"The Doors" fans forum in the late 90s. I don't even remember what we talked about (it wasn't about The Doors most of the time) but I loved the people there. They listened and responded with kindness and patience. I made several friends there and even went abroad to meet some of them in person.
That's awesome! Most of my time on the Terraria forums was not spent talking about Terraria but just shooting the breeze with people.
Starting college, just met a bunch of new people and we discovered the prime number bear. We would obsess over keeping our computers on 24/7 to see who could get the highest score. https://alpha61.com/primenumbershittingbear/
Holy shit (pun not intended. OR WAS IT) that's still up‽ A true part of the Finnish internet heritage
IUMA - Internet Underground Music Archive. One of the first websites I ever saw, period. Circa 1994 on the Mosaic browser at my college library.
Way too much time in AOL and Yahoo chatrooms.
A/S/L?
Does Nickelodeon E-Collectibles count?
I used to spend a whole lot of time on the Winamp forums where the community was just top notch.
I met my first girlfriend on MSN Messenger. ICQ used to be great too.
The LEGO website
The Lego website was amazing! That was nearly the only part of the Internet I went on growing up.
