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.That last sentence made me crack up
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.
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 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 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.
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!
- 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.
I miss the flashgame boom and runescape being on Miniclips top 5 games.
Joe cartoon!
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.
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!
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.
- Numa numa yay
- Flash games
- Homestar Runner (look at da emails)
- Neopets
- RuneScape
- Reddit when it was actually for nerds
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.)
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.
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.
