Everyone was nice to each other and followed unwritten rules in communication. :)
The amount of people I had to plonk on Usenet tells a different story.
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.
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
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.
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 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.
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
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.
I miss old school Neopets a lot!
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.
All the awesome flash games. Wasn’t super early but there are 3 games I loved but don’t remember the names of them…
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build a rocket bit by bit and try and fly it higher each time as your fuel runs down. Eventually you get into space. 2D.
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you are a penguin, it’s a ski slope distance game. Get power ups and go further each time. I think you have a hang glider thing. 2D.
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A paper plane distance thing by Microsoft Xbox where you throw it through a window and there’s sounds of kids playing. 2D.
Also Monkey kick-off. Another fave.
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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.
~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
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!
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
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.
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 (.ra, maybe?) files recorded on a crappy tape recorder or something from a live show or local radio station. It was a cool time to be young and excited about music.
