My favorite one was the calculator that is fully functional, but also resets to boobs after a few seconds
Miss my geocities page
I still have that!
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.
This is spot on. Discovery. You never knew what door you were opening and where it would lead you.
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.
I still have (and use) a Hotmail account that I created before Microsoft bought Hotmail.
That last sentence made me crack up
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.fi and...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.
Everyone was nice to each other and followed unwritten rules in communication. :)
Super curious how old you are, we got aol in about 1991 and chat rooms were.. Not like that lol
Well I'm not an American so I have not used AOL-services.
The nature of chat rooms is the same everywhere, that's why I'm curious how old you are. If you were on the internet in the 80s,when it was just basic message boards and stuff then yeah, people were much more civil because it was a very small community.
a/s/l?
Age, sex, location
No, no. The correct response is always 19/f/cali.
This is why no-one ever wanted to chat with me!
The amount of people I had to plonk on Usenet tells a different story.
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.
Great band, and their stuff from the 90s is completely different from the style they ended up being known for later.
Newgrounds
Homestar Runner
AIM
Yahoo chat rooms
MUDs
Not internet, but Leisure Suit Larry holds a special place in my memories.
Leisure Suit Larry
Ken sent me
It takes leather balls to play rugby
Lubbers
Every so often I'll see a link to Newgrounds and I'm shocked it's still around every time.
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 this one. Before broadband internet was common a number of us would download our Linux ISOs from questionable websites in our university computer lab and then take our files home on floppy or zip disk. I remember once my friend got trapped in a number of popups which claimed to have pictures of "Britney Spears Nude!!!" and I loudly asked him "what does 'Britney Spears Nude' mean?" in the full lab and then watching him panic close down everything.
Golden days!
~15 years ago my friend's mom was trying to go to "dicks sporting goods", commonly referred to as just "dicks". She types in "dicks.com" and was not pleased with the result. Looking now, it seems they bought the domain so it will redirect to dickssportinggoods.com
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.
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.
I remember going to Jeff's code page to look up cheat codes for My computer games. It really was a different time
what's frustrating is that many of those websites are still there. but when I use Google to try to find them, they don't show up in the results. not that they are buried on like page five of the results. they literally don't show up anymore.
Yeah, google results suck these days. It just usually shows you a bunch of different pages from 5-10 sites, many of which are just blog spam or require you to sign in to actually view the content.
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.
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 miss the flashgame boom and runescape being on Miniclips top 5 games.
Joe cartoon!
"Are you crazy man, you pissed off super fly. Bonsai!" And "oh man you DO suck!" Is in my regular vocabulary thanks to joe cartoon.
That frog in a blender is such a classic
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!
That Dialup sound.
Newsgroups.
The kick I got out of posting up my own crappy page with lots of annoying images and gifs (Geocities ftw!)
Lol, watched a lot of Simpsons but had never seen that!
Definitely ICQ. The best instant messenger, revolutionary for its time. It was reliable and had many very nice features. Then, Microsoft came with its shitty MSN Messenger, and it marked the end of an era.
And Geocities of course. I still remember the address of my "personal home page".
I still remember my ICQ number after like 25 years (21773913).
2744548! I still log in once every few years to see all my contacts who are offline!
40961596
I remember when there was a whole bunch of competing IM platforms, and apps like Adium and Trillian that would let a person manage multiple platforms in one app. I also remember being ahead of the curve and leaving that client running 24/7 so people could message me whenever and I would get it when I got home. Too far ahead though, mostly because IM wasn’t ubiquitous enough so there was like 3 people that I’d actually interact with regularly. Then IM kind of disappeared when text messaging took off, and finally came back when smartphones meant you could get those IMs anywhere.
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.
I would say the height of StumbleUpon would be the late 00s through the early 10s, so not the early Internet. I think a better term would be "the early-middle Internet", if anything, if we're to assume today is the middle Internet (which I personally think is fairly reasonable).
(Assuming by "Internet", we're only referring to the Internet as it has existed in the Age of the WWW.)
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.
So many great memories.. My favorite would have to be chatting for the first time. It was an amazing experience being able to type to someone in real time and get a response back.
I feel nostalgic any time I think about the ICQ uh-oh sound
All the awesome flash games. Wasn't super early but there are 3 games I loved but don't remember the names of them...
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.
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.
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.
the second one is learn to fly
chatting on IRC channels
My roommate could tell you the number the modem was dialing by listening to it. Mystified to this day at how many hours that took to matter. (He also OCed his rig by submerging all possible hardware in a bin full of oil, so maybe it was symptomatic of his favorite pastime.)
Good God those sparkly pixel dolls that you could pick outfits for and customise too. Small me was obsessed.
Man I remember ytmnd being sooo popular with my WoW guild in 2005 lol. God I miss those days, but I know anyone who was there does.
Zombo.com !
I *hear you can do anything at zombocom
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.
BBSes :) Because it was fantastic that we could dial eachothers computers and just share files and chat. Before that every computer were an island.
I feel the same with the fediverse now. The tech can create communities where people can talk without big tech being involved.
BBSes were pre-public internet, not part of the internet. The connected ones were a separate network in and of themselves. I ran a WWIV BBS in the late 80s to early 90s that had its own networking system allowing communication, and even file sharing between instances. It was pretty sophisticated for the time, but hella slow over my 14.4k modem.
WWIV did migrate to using the internet for connection, and maybe others did as well. Perhaps that's what you were considering with this comment?
Yeah I know, I was not answering the question properly here. In my head I was thinking "best thing about computer communication" I guess. I didn't run a bbs on the internet, but I did before it. :)
Best thing about the internet was being able to find what I was looking for, before corporations wanted to monetize everything.
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.
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.
Playing Quake over dial-up on one of the first ISP-owned Quake servers in Australia.
Fun times...
LPB detected, lol just messin
Lol - in the days of dial-up, even being on a local server wasn't immune to shit lag.
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.
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.
Miniclip, Albino Blacksheep, and Yahoo! Games were basically all I did on the internet in elementary to middle school. I was a savage at yahoo pool/billiards
Did you ever go to candystand.com? Basically the king of flash/shockwave games.
Memory unlocked
Damn I forgot all about that. addictinggames, kongregate, lazylaces, shockwave, joe cartoon, fucking neopets, habbo hotel...
I probably did at some point but the name doesn't stick out to me
My grandmother basically lived inside Yahoo! Spades, even joining organized tournaments
Usenet Newsgroups before they got overrun by spam bots.
Such great discussion with interesting personalities back then!
Nobody trying to "build their brand".
If they were famous, it was because they contributed something good, like consistent reviews or deep dives of stories/movies/TV.
Finding out that I can download & emulate NeoGeo games on my potato PC early 2000 :)
Also not necessarily my own memory, but getting to listen to albums made of up songs my dad would find on limewire
Every song ever made is either by Eminem or Weird Al, and I refuse to believe otherwise.
(Actually, for any long-standing data hoarders out there who retained filenames for limewire downloads - you know what would be fun? A playlist of songs based on the limewire-attributed artist.)
Warcraft II on battle.net (and modem games with my friend up the street before that!)
Hah! That was definitely something that arrived in the "family" email that we all thought was just the funniest shit we had ever seen. Weirdly similar circumstances.
"Oh, look! An eagle!" Has lived rent free in my head for over 20 years now lol.
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.
Never heard of them. What did the acronym stand for?
MUD stands for "Multi User Dungeon". They were online, text-based RPGs. Think ZORK, but multiplayer and online. Precursors to MMORPGs, but free.
MOO stands for "MUD Object Oriented" due to the object oriented nature of the programming language used in room and object creation. They mostly ditched the combat and role playing for exploration, education, and user interaction. Sort of like IRC, but taking place in a virtual, text-based space.
MUD's - text based mmorpgs
I spent so many hours on MUDs in the BBS days
Arctic dikumud was my jam. I think it's still around.
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.
It was all about getting on a good web-ring. I had a few sites across Geocities, Tripod and the like, but getting on a good web-ring brought the best traffic. Don't forget to put a visitor counter on the page, and a cursor trail will impress everyone. This advice brought to you 25 years too late.
Hehe of course I had the visitor counter! It's essential like the under construction text/gif! I think my main page reached nearly three digits in its' life time, and I was happy about it. These days I get that many likes on a single post in social media at good days.
Sending an email to a colleague in the states and being astounded that he replied instantaneously. 😳
Newsgroups and livejournal.
John Titor. I wish he'd come back and fix things
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?
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.
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.
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.
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
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!
Sierra on line. They made some website with different sections to visit like a theme park. I really enjoyed Quest for Glory and thise types of computer games so I was excited for Sierra to make a website like that.
Also, asl?
18, F, Cali always
I joined when it was rebranded the ImagiNation Network (INN). Played Red Baron and Shadow of Yserbius. Ahh memories.
The realm
Configuring a TCP to PPP socket so I could dial in to my college account. I always like getting things to work more than the end result. Like I have more memories of editing autoexec.bat and comfig.sys files than actually playing the games that helped me boot up.
If you aren't a selfhoster maybe you should be :)
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.
I remember it being dark blue when I used it back in the 90s though.
GeoCities and spending a whole summer playing Microsoft Ants! on my dad's computer.
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.
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.
AOL keyword NICK
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).
I use Mutt and Lynx on a Linux box just to remember the good old days. I have a text-mode Mastodon client too, a little difficult to navigate, but it kinda replicates the old IRC feel.
I do have an IRC client, but I'm not patient enough to remember the keybindings to switch channels. Lol.
Vbulletin boards and general forum sites before the likes of Facebook and Reddit got big. Made a lot of friends on there.
Neopets was great as well. Loved the minigames.
I admin-ed my own vBulletin board around 04-06. The script itself cost about £90 back then. It was so great though. Small community of like-minded people all chattng. It was like a slow-Discord or a more intimate Reddit.
I installed a ton of extensions for people to play Flash games at one point too.
One day I accidentally forgot to pay hosting and the site vanished. Lost it all. Never bothered relaunching.
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.
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.
making a geocities with friends
The many NSFL sites that you could very easily end up on, if you didnt take a small amount of care to avoid
NSFW rather than NSFL, but sooo many children learning things when going to whitehouse.com for a project on the U.S...
This is how I learned about top-level domains.
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.
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.
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
Downloading a file and after hours of downloading it gets stuck at 99%
Definitely Chatrooms 👌
Discovering that Burning Man exists. I'd never heard of it until I followed a link from Boing Boing and my head exploded.
There was this guy on an old forum named "budsmoka" that once very shittily spray painted a cannabis leaf on his ps2
Probably that happy zing you got whenever anyone signed your guestbook on your homepage.
BBS, ftpmail, archie, veronica, news, mail !! tons and tons of information never before available to me..
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 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.
Search was such a crapshoot prior to Google, you’d have to try two or three search engines which all had very mixed results. Often it was easier to just ask someone a question on a forum if you had a tech problem. Early Google was a different beast, nothing else was as fast and direct for results.
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.
"You got mail"
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.
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.
To be clear, those are not (only) old sites, but a lot of them feel like the old web.
Eyezmaze ❤️
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.
Having my own email address, making a website and pirating a metal album
The "download complete" Godzilla roar using the GoZilla! download manager. And using WinAmp to play my newly downloaded mp3's.
BonziBuddy destroying the family computer.
Dialing up to Prodigy to try and do homework with info from the Internet, but just using Microsoft Encarta instead.
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.
Creating my own Proboards message boards and discovering Alien Adoption Agency.
Staying up till 2am to play BRE (Baron Realms Elite) on a local BBS. 2am because that was a time I could dial in without the line being busy.
I also played a little LORD (Legend of the Red Dragon), but BRE was my favorite.
Check out bbsemu if you wanna relive that. I know they have LORD for sure, and it’s a really quick setup - unlike the old BBS software.
Thanks for the suggestion, I did not know about that. It will be fun to relive those old games.
Newgrounds most definitely. And as an earlier poster stated, muds. Specifically MUME. Oh man many hours have been spent playing that game
Configuring my UUCP connection to provide my BBS users with « electronic mail ».
I bought an Internet connection and read from a computer magazine that I'm able to connect to an FTP server for downloading files. (I don't think I needed it for anything, I was just curious of the new technology.) I remember that when I connected to the server, it displayed instructions that one should use "cd x/y/z" to change to a subdirectory, instead of separate commands "cd x", "cd y", "cd z", to save network bandwidth.
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
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?)
being on prodigy chat and seeing people posting "LOL" and i was like, what is that
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.
How everyone who knew how to had their own personal homepage.
I love https://www.cameronsworld.net/. I wish websites were still made like this.
Thank you for that!!! What a delight. "Hello Ladies" is my favourite bit. 😍👹😍
What am I looking at here lmfao
cameronsworld.net. Pay attention.
Geocities circa 1998
My favorite one was the calculator that is fully functional, but also resets to boobs after a few seconds
Miss my geocities page
I still have that!
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.
This is spot on. Discovery. You never knew what door you were opening and where it would lead you.
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.
I still have (and use) a Hotmail account that I created before Microsoft bought Hotmail.
That last sentence made me crack up
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.Everyone was nice to each other and followed unwritten rules in communication. :)
Super curious how old you are, we got aol in about 1991 and chat rooms were.. Not like that lol
Well I'm not an American so I have not used AOL-services.
The nature of chat rooms is the same everywhere, that's why I'm curious how old you are. If you were on the internet in the 80s,when it was just basic message boards and stuff then yeah, people were much more civil because it was a very small community.
a/s/l?
Age, sex, location
No, no. The correct response is always 19/f/cali.
This is why no-one ever wanted to chat with me!
The amount of people I had to plonk on Usenet tells a different story.
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.
Great band, and their stuff from the 90s is completely different from the style they ended up being known for later.
Ken sent me
It takes leather balls to play rugby
Lubbers
Every so often I'll see a link to Newgrounds and I'm shocked it's still around every time.
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 this one. Before broadband internet was common a number of us would download our Linux ISOs from questionable websites in our university computer lab and then take our files home on floppy or zip disk. I remember once my friend got trapped in a number of popups which claimed to have pictures of "Britney Spears Nude!!!" and I loudly asked him "what does 'Britney Spears Nude' mean?" in the full lab and then watching him panic close down everything.
Golden days!
~15 years ago my friend's mom was trying to go to "dicks sporting goods", commonly referred to as just "dicks". She types in "dicks.com" and was not pleased with the result. Looking now, it seems they bought the domain so it will redirect to dickssportinggoods.com
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.
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.
I remember going to Jeff's code page to look up cheat codes for My computer games. It really was a different time
what's frustrating is that many of those websites are still there. but when I use Google to try to find them, they don't show up in the results. not that they are buried on like page five of the results. they literally don't show up anymore.
Yeah, google results suck these days. It just usually shows you a bunch of different pages from 5-10 sites, many of which are just blog spam or require you to sign in to actually view the content.
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.
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 miss the flashgame boom and runescape being on Miniclips top 5 games.
Joe cartoon!
"Are you crazy man, you pissed off super fly. Bonsai!" And "oh man you DO suck!" Is in my regular vocabulary thanks to joe cartoon.
That frog in a blender is such a classic
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!
That Dialup sound.
Newsgroups.
The kick I got out of posting up my own crappy page with lots of annoying images and gifs (Geocities ftw!)
Idk, at the time I would have bought this if possible: https://youtu.be/UWzHkeBObw0
Lol, watched a lot of Simpsons but had never seen that!
Definitely ICQ. The best instant messenger, revolutionary for its time. It was reliable and had many very nice features. Then, Microsoft came with its shitty MSN Messenger, and it marked the end of an era.
And Geocities of course. I still remember the address of my "personal home page".
I still remember my ICQ number after like 25 years (21773913).
2744548! I still log in once every few years to see all my contacts who are offline!
40961596
I remember when there was a whole bunch of competing IM platforms, and apps like Adium and Trillian that would let a person manage multiple platforms in one app. I also remember being ahead of the curve and leaving that client running 24/7 so people could message me whenever and I would get it when I got home. Too far ahead though, mostly because IM wasn’t ubiquitous enough so there was like 3 people that I’d actually interact with regularly. Then IM kind of disappeared when text messaging took off, and finally came back when smartphones meant you could get those IMs anywhere.
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.
I would say the height of StumbleUpon would be the late 00s through the early 10s, so not the early Internet. I think a better term would be "the early-middle Internet", if anything, if we're to assume today is the middle Internet (which I personally think is fairly reasonable).
(Assuming by "Internet", we're only referring to the Internet as it has existed in the Age of the WWW.)
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.
So many great memories.. My favorite would have to be chatting for the first time. It was an amazing experience being able to type to someone in real time and get a response back.
I feel nostalgic any time I think about the ICQ uh-oh sound
All the awesome flash games. Wasn't super early but there are 3 games I loved but don't remember the names of them...
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.
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.
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.
the second one is learn to fly
chatting on IRC channels
My roommate could tell you the number the modem was dialing by listening to it. Mystified to this day at how many hours that took to matter. (He also OCed his rig by submerging all possible hardware in a bin full of oil, so maybe it was symptomatic of his favorite pastime.)
Pshhhkkkkkkrrrrkakingkakingkakingtshchchchchchchchcchdingdingding
AlbinoBlackSheep & YTMND. Geocities.
Good God those sparkly pixel dolls that you could pick outfits for and customise too. Small me was obsessed.
Man I remember ytmnd being sooo popular with my WoW guild in 2005 lol. God I miss those days, but I know anyone who was there does.
Zombo.com !
I *hear you can do anything at zombocom
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.
BBSes :) Because it was fantastic that we could dial eachothers computers and just share files and chat. Before that every computer were an island.
I feel the same with the fediverse now. The tech can create communities where people can talk without big tech being involved.
BBSes were pre-public internet, not part of the internet. The connected ones were a separate network in and of themselves. I ran a WWIV BBS in the late 80s to early 90s that had its own networking system allowing communication, and even file sharing between instances. It was pretty sophisticated for the time, but hella slow over my 14.4k modem.
WWIV did migrate to using the internet for connection, and maybe others did as well. Perhaps that's what you were considering with this comment?
Yeah I know, I was not answering the question properly here. In my head I was thinking "best thing about computer communication" I guess. I didn't run a bbs on the internet, but I did before it. :)
Best thing about the internet was being able to find what I was looking for, before corporations wanted to monetize everything.
I miss old school Neopets a lot!
They miss you too
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.
@lamentforicarus @5redie8 I wonder if we were in the same chatrooms haha
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.
Playing Quake over dial-up on one of the first ISP-owned Quake servers in Australia.
Fun times...
LPB detected, lol just messin
Lol - in the days of dial-up, even being on a local server wasn't immune to shit lag.
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.
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.
Miniclip, Albino Blacksheep, and Yahoo! Games were basically all I did on the internet in elementary to middle school. I was a savage at yahoo pool/billiards
Did you ever go to candystand.com? Basically the king of flash/shockwave games.
Memory unlocked
Damn I forgot all about that. addictinggames, kongregate, lazylaces, shockwave, joe cartoon, fucking neopets, habbo hotel...
I probably did at some point but the name doesn't stick out to me
My grandmother basically lived inside Yahoo! Spades, even joining organized tournaments
Usenet Newsgroups before they got overrun by spam bots.
Such great discussion with interesting personalities back then!
Nobody trying to "build their brand". If they were famous, it was because they contributed something good, like consistent reviews or deep dives of stories/movies/TV.
Finding out that I can download & emulate NeoGeo games on my potato PC early 2000 :)
Metal Slug!
Also not necessarily my own memory, but getting to listen to albums made of up songs my dad would find on limewire
Every song ever made is either by Eminem or Weird Al, and I refuse to believe otherwise.
(Actually, for any long-standing data hoarders out there who retained filenames for limewire downloads - you know what would be fun? A playlist of songs based on the limewire-attributed artist.)
Warcraft II on battle.net (and modem games with my friend up the street before that!)
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.
Hah! That was definitely something that arrived in the "family" email that we all thought was just the funniest shit we had ever seen. Weirdly similar circumstances.
"Oh, look! An eagle!" Has lived rent free in my head for over 20 years now lol.
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.
Never heard of them. What did the acronym stand for?
MUD stands for "Multi User Dungeon". They were online, text-based RPGs. Think ZORK, but multiplayer and online. Precursors to MMORPGs, but free.
MOO stands for "MUD Object Oriented" due to the object oriented nature of the programming language used in room and object creation. They mostly ditched the combat and role playing for exploration, education, and user interaction. Sort of like IRC, but taking place in a virtual, text-based space.
MUD's - text based mmorpgs
I spent so many hours on MUDs in the BBS days
Arctic dikumud was my jam. I think it's still around.
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.
It was all about getting on a good web-ring. I had a few sites across Geocities, Tripod and the like, but getting on a good web-ring brought the best traffic. Don't forget to put a visitor counter on the page, and a cursor trail will impress everyone. This advice brought to you 25 years too late.
Hehe of course I had the visitor counter! It's essential like the under construction text/gif! I think my main page reached nearly three digits in its' life time, and I was happy about it. These days I get that many likes on a single post in social media at good days.
Sending an email to a colleague in the states and being astounded that he replied instantaneously. 😳
Newsgroups and livejournal.
John Titor. I wish he'd come back and fix things
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?
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.
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.
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
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!
Sierra on line. They made some website with different sections to visit like a theme park. I really enjoyed Quest for Glory and thise types of computer games so I was excited for Sierra to make a website like that.
Also, asl?
18, F, Cali always
I joined when it was rebranded the ImagiNation Network (INN). Played Red Baron and Shadow of Yserbius. Ahh memories.
The realm
Configuring a TCP to PPP socket so I could dial in to my college account. I always like getting things to work more than the end result. Like I have more memories of editing autoexec.bat and comfig.sys files than actually playing the games that helped me boot up.
If you aren't a selfhoster maybe you should be :)
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.
Oh my god - I'd completely forgotten about that place! I just checked and it's stil alive: https://astalavista.box.sk/search/
I remember it being dark blue when I used it back in the 90s though.
GeoCities and spending a whole summer playing Microsoft Ants! on my dad's computer.
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.
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.
AOL keyword NICK
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).
I use Mutt and Lynx on a Linux box just to remember the good old days. I have a text-mode Mastodon client too, a little difficult to navigate, but it kinda replicates the old IRC feel.
I do have an IRC client, but I'm not patient enough to remember the keybindings to switch channels. Lol.
Vbulletin boards and general forum sites before the likes of Facebook and Reddit got big. Made a lot of friends on there.
Neopets was great as well. Loved the minigames.
I admin-ed my own vBulletin board around 04-06. The script itself cost about £90 back then. It was so great though. Small community of like-minded people all chattng. It was like a slow-Discord or a more intimate Reddit.
I installed a ton of extensions for people to play Flash games at one point too.
One day I accidentally forgot to pay hosting and the site vanished. Lost it all. Never bothered relaunching.
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.
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.
making a geocities with friends
The many NSFL sites that you could very easily end up on, if you didnt take a small amount of care to avoid
NSFW rather than NSFL, but sooo many children learning things when going to whitehouse.com for a project on the U.S...
This is how I learned about top-level domains.
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.
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.
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
Downloading a file and after hours of downloading it gets stuck at 99%
Definitely Chatrooms 👌
Discovering that Burning Man exists. I'd never heard of it until I followed a link from Boing Boing and my head exploded.
There was this guy on an old forum named "budsmoka" that once very shittily spray painted a cannabis leaf on his ps2
Probably that happy zing you got whenever anyone signed your guestbook on your homepage.
BBS, ftpmail, archie, veronica, news, mail !! tons and tons of information never before available to me..
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 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.
Search was such a crapshoot prior to Google, you’d have to try two or three search engines which all had very mixed results. Often it was easier to just ask someone a question on a forum if you had a tech problem. Early Google was a different beast, nothing else was as fast and direct for results.
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.
"You got mail"
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.
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.
Eyezmaze ❤️
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.
Having my own email address, making a website and pirating a metal album
The "download complete" Godzilla roar using the GoZilla! download manager. And using WinAmp to play my newly downloaded mp3's.
BonziBuddy destroying the family computer.
Dialing up to Prodigy to try and do homework with info from the Internet, but just using Microsoft Encarta instead.
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.
Creating my own Proboards message boards and discovering Alien Adoption Agency.
Staying up till 2am to play BRE (Baron Realms Elite) on a local BBS. 2am because that was a time I could dial in without the line being busy.
I also played a little LORD (Legend of the Red Dragon), but BRE was my favorite.
Check out bbsemu if you wanna relive that. I know they have LORD for sure, and it’s a really quick setup - unlike the old BBS software.
Thanks for the suggestion, I did not know about that. It will be fun to relive those old games.
Newgrounds most definitely. And as an earlier poster stated, muds. Specifically MUME. Oh man many hours have been spent playing that game
Configuring my UUCP connection to provide my BBS users with « electronic mail ».
I bought an Internet connection and read from a computer magazine that I'm able to connect to an FTP server for downloading files. (I don't think I needed it for anything, I was just curious of the new technology.) I remember that when I connected to the server, it displayed instructions that one should use "cd x/y/z" to change to a subdirectory, instead of separate commands "cd x", "cd y", "cd z", to save network bandwidth.
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
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?)
being on prodigy chat and seeing people posting "LOL" and i was like, what is that
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.
The dancing Spider-Man gif.
friv.com