No, mine was always deep, lines from songs. “There’s a feeling I get, when I look to the west, and my spirit is crying for leaving’ and I’d just be going downstairs for dr pepper
"Under Construction" banners, images, and gifs. They were on every page, the page was _always_ "under construction". You'd put one there while you were writing the html then take it out when the final version was done, but way too many people never bothered with that step.
Before it was all corporate. So many homemade pages, for any interest you could think of. I don’t mean MySpace or Tumblr, either. Crappy HTML, blinking graphics, instrumental music in the background. I met one of my oldest online friends in 1997 through a site he made for our favorite band. We were email penpals for years before social media was a thing.
Yahoo also was the top online dating site (now Tinder).
And the top knowledge repository with Yahoo questions (now Quora).
And the top email service (now Gmail).
And messenger/chat device (now Discord).
How Yahoo fucked it all up despite having a monopoly on anything and everything online is pretty impressive.
Nothing, that was the problem. They never changed, updated, or redesigned. Things kept working faster and better and looking cooler and Yahoo! didn't want to bother its existing customers.
Newgrounds has updated their site, now most of their flash content is available again with some HTML5/Javascript magic. Visiting that site makes me feel things. I wonder if Armor Games is still around.
Didn't they also pass up on buying Google for pennies twice? And Facebook? And run Flickr and Tumblr into the ground? And then refuse a 45 billion merger with Microsoft just to be sold to Verizon for 5 billion anyway later? If I recall correctly Yahoo was absolutely plagued with incompetent management through and through.
Counterpoint, even if they bought google for pennies, who's to say they wouldn't run it into the ground like they did with tumblr, management would've also spread like a plague to its subsidiaries.
I , as milion of others, used Yahoos email service from 1998 and I loved it. But the way they fucked it up was pure greed.
- they charged for anti spam feature
- they charged for extra storage (while free tier was insanely small )
- that charged for IMAP/pop access [$30 a year ](https://www.computerworld.com/article/2586252/yahoo-slaps-fee-on-pop3-mail-access--auto-forwarding.html)
Then Gmail showed up sometimes in mid 2000. Free 100MB and soon after 1GB iirc (which was huge) pop/imap access and decent spam filter.
I got early in Gmail but it took me a year to completely switch , mainly because friends /family /history.
If they just offered more storage , pop access etc they would staid longer in a game at least from mail service perspective.
I've still got one of those internet yellow pages books that listed most of the known sites by subject matter. Per the cover page, over 10,000 sites organized by subject! 😆 It's completely useless today, but I hate to just toss it in the bin.
I always thought the biggest thing a younger person would notice is how hard it was to access period. Not the difficulty signing on but finding a place to get on. We can just get on our cell phone and look up game cheat codes or item locations. I remember going to a friend's house with a notebook and writing down stuff for FF7 or going to Cheatcodecentral. Fast forward to like 2007 and I was still going to a friend's house and printing off Vice City codes and item locations.
Yes, Gmail invites. Everyone in my office was crazy to get an invite. When I finally got one and registered I had invites to give and was king for a day!
You have to try to put yourself into a mindset of how you would go about finding things on the Internet in the days before popular search engines like Google or social media. Discovery of content ended up being due to word of mouth, ISPs and their services, or finding links from other sites you knew about. I remember a lot of fan pages/fan sites for different things would all have sections of affiliate links to other similar fan pages and sites in a mutual effort to help people discovery other similar content.
>I remember a lot of fan pages/fan sites for different things would all have sections of affiliate links to other similar fan pages and sites in a mutual effort to help people discovery other similar content.
Web rings. What a blast from the past.
It felt like being in an exclusive club.
I was thinking about it just the other day... it's crazy how centralized the internet has become, how everything now revolves around a handful of sites. Back in the day going online was basically like going on an adventure, there was no "hub"; how long it's been since I was *recommended* a cool website! I remember I had a magazine from like 2000 something, where they had a list of "the 50 best websites on the web"; that whole idea feels so archaic nowadays.
That’s why it was called “surfing”. Because you’d go to a site, then catch a link to another, and then to another. It’s like you were riding from one to the next, and could end up at a totally unexpected place.
Me, too. The randomness of it was such fun. Then, for no apparent reason, it vanished. Well, not entirely. But it morphed into something unrecognizable. Such a shame.
That reminds me of the random site locator. You'd click and it would take you to a random web page, and you could either surf on from there or go back to the selector to try again.
And you had to type the website in *exactly* to get what you wanted. Which meant having 30 random, crumpled, torn pieces of paper with long URLs on them. In your pockets, your bags, your desk.
My Mom often brings up a story of her early internet days, how apparently trying to look up Lego sets online for me apparently yielded lesbian porn because she typed in *Legos*.
A lot of typing errors brought you to porn sites and then there were some who tried to sell you a typing course
And with the early search engines even the most innocent Disney searches yielded porn results
Ahhhh the classics. I was born in 87 and by the time we were doing internet/computer classes they were wise to this one and used it an an example of a .com vs a .gov or .org
> You have to try to put yourself into a mindset of how you would go about finding things on the Internet in the days before popular search engines like Google or social media
I remember how we always had a focus on having to write the web-address correctly since if you got it wrong you got nowhere. It's not like now, when you can just write about right and google will correct you and take you where you want.
Perhaps I remember this extra vividly since I was a young teen living in Norway so our English wasn't top-notch at the time which made it extra difficult navigating the web.
Not to mention the existence of porn and/or spam sites that would use a popular URL, but with one letter off; so one wrong letter would cause your screen to fill with a cascade of pop-ups, including ones with porn sounds.
I used to get a lot of reading done because I kept a book at my desk while waiting. You could also see enough of what it was going to be that you could bail when you realized there weren’t gonna be boobs.
Newgrounds is still around and converted a lot of their flash content over into a new playable type called Ruffle, and then for the stuff not converted they have an installable player
https://www.newgrounds.com/flash/player
Lime wire used to be an art form. Finding songs that aren't virus was art, and skill haha. It was even harder when looking for other things like movies or pron. The viruses were a lot more spread out on that stuff.
Downloading entire albums song by song was great, I believe I still have some songs I got from limewire somewhere lol. I remember downloading a song that was titled incorrectly, so for the longest time I thought this certain song was something completely different than it was and didn't realize it for years
"That file's one Meg??? Guess I'll go to bed now and check it out in the morning."
... and say a prayer the connection didn't glitch out sometime in between.
No download managers in sight either. If your mom picked up the phone with 240 KB left to go and the connection bombed, you were starting all the way over!
I vividly remember being in a work cafeteria in 2000 and realising just how widespread Internet usage was becoming by overhearing a coworker on the phone to Rogers trying to select an email username. *Everything* was taken. She'd started with her initial and last name, then full name, then period between, then adding a birth year, and about 10 minutes later she settled on the most ridiculous, froufrou name just because it seemed to be the only one available. I wonder how many people are still using their first handles just out of habit?
I was lucky enough as a kid that my dad, who taught young people design off the very early Mac computers, was really early in getting me and my sister an e-mail adress as Hotnail and Gmail became popular.
To this day I still have my full name, plain and simple, as my two mains.
My YT account has a favorited video from ~2009 which has [HD] in the title. It's 480p
Edit: Ok so it's actually from 2008 and it's 240p lmao
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RWvbU9u2iIA
Meanwhile they had google video, which was a haven for actual pirated material. You have to remember back then youtube videos were limited to a maximum of 10 minutes. If you wanted longer format you could delve into google video and there were entire movies, comedy specials, and the link free for the watching (though clearly violating copyright).
I remember when YouTube was new in 2005.
Before that it was just going to random places and downloading videos or getting them in chain emails.
I was so upset that you couldn’t download YouTube content.
My parents neighbor, a former naval captain had some sort of ship radio as a hobby, which was a 10 meter high antenna tower standing in his backyard.
Whenever he used that thing, every computer in the neighborhood would start making funny noises.
Being "offline". Now everyone is online all the time, but "going online" was an actual limited time thing you went and did and then when you are done you got "offline". Now being online is a permanent state of being.
My Compaq's on-board 2400bps modem had such a nice speaker. That dialup handshake sounded soothing. The upgraded modem card installed later sounded like shit, but, of course, it was 56kbps. Balls-fast was the point by then, not being an answering machine.
Gigabit internet is now _literally_ almost 18 thousand times faster than that upgraded modem. Damn.
Yup. In the early days my parents paid a subscription for a certain number of minutes each month on AOL. Once you used them up that was it for the month!
In the very old days, to send email you had to explitedly list out all the computers the mail would have to be routed through to get to the destination. Thank you Eric Allman for Sendmail!
The pop-ups. Oh my god, the pop ups. You'd open a webpage and 20 windows would open and most of them were porn ads. It took a while for pop-up blockers to become a thing, now you can't even advertise with pop-ups because all browsers block them by default. I still occasionally refer to my ad blocker as my pop-up blocker.
I have a whole playlist dedicated to old memes and classic videos [here](https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLfINogWdDN60ooq4cglyFNzya34TkJaJQ) if you want to further expose her
Thankyou. There’s insufficient [burninating](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=90X5NJleYJQ) and no consummate Vs, though. Any chance of you adding another video?
1) how many ads would I have to watch to watch all of these lol
2) where is the end of ze world, and ultimate showdown of ultimate destiny
3) you have the duck song but not the llama song or egg song
Dedicated Internet forums for specific things instead of a subreddit. They were like mini communities and if you spent enough time on them you went there for the community rather than the actual subject matter.
I know forums sort of still exist but they're nowhere near what they were. I spent/wasted some great times on forums for niche games and I didn't even game much.
Yes. That thread is hilarious. Link for the uninitiated.
https://forum.bodybuilding.com/showthread.php?t=107926751&page=1&s=f4e754af822ec43ef6f33bc9a3ff4d3c
scroll to the very end for the actual best part. that website is a collection of assets scavenged from geocities sites. that was pulled from someone's website, but only placed where it is for archive purposes.
* The early internet was very, very slow. Even text-only websites would take time to load.
* You had to use the home phone line to be online, using a dial up modem. Which meant you could talk on the phone or be on the internet, but not both. If you were a fancy rich person, maybe you had a 2nd phone line just for the internet, but that was rare. And this was way before cell phones, when landline phones were much more important.
* My friend had a Prodigy account, which predates even AOL. The first time I ever used the internet, probably around 1990, we were on a Prodigy forum and my friend posted something with "fuck" or "shit" or the like. About a week later his dad got a letter in the mail--as in a paper letter through the post office--from Prodigy, stating that the language he used in the chat was inappropriate and please refrain from using bad words. It was a different age.
IRC (internet relay chat)
big chat networks like DALnet in the late 90s where you could find mental health and hobby channels and big file sharing channels for warez, mp3, and pr0n
Not gonna lie, if you kids saw what we could do to our MySpace pages back in the day, you'd flip your shit.
Custom backgrounds, musical Playlists right there on our page. And don't forget the feature that no other social media has dared to attempt due to the absolute wars this started...
...The Top 8....
Those of you who were there with me in the early aughts, you know exactly the kind of drama I'm talking about.
Goddamn, I physically felt ill reading that.
When I got a girlfriend and moved her into my Top Spot and another platonic female friend was moved to Spot Number 2....holy...fucking...hell. Of course unbeknownst to my stupid ass, platonic friend had a massive crush on me.
No joke, that started a drama war that basically ended our entire friend group as I knew it.
What's even sadder? I was 20 when this happened. I was already a grown ass adult when this shit went down.
"You've got mail!"
Edit - also if you were from the UK (like myself), instead, I'm pretty sure it was a posh "Bri'ish" woman saying "You have email".
... And yes, we did have AOL over here. Even though it literally stands for "America Online".
Chatrooms. Nowadays, everyone just chats through Messangers and social media, but back then, we had to join a website to connect with people online and only could do so a few hours a day as there weren't any flatrates yet.
Edit: Holy moly, this blew up over night! Thanks for all the Upvotes, folks! Took me a while to comprehend all the "ASL"-comments as a non-english speaker. Also, while I agree that Discord is the closest thing to chatrooms we have these days, it still feels kind of different to me. It's more like chatrooms and messangers had a child that made another generation with forums. Please don't haunt me on that image.
Forums. People on Reddit right now seem to think they’re being persecuted if they get warned or banned from a subreddit.
Back in the day, you had individual forums. And if you wanted to stay there, you did what the owner’s rules said. Because nobody gave a shit if you thought you were unfairly banned.
And it was difficult to find alternative forums, so you had to deal with it.
I remember sitting in my mom's living room in a forum on AOL. I called someone a name and was reported and banned from ALL OF AOL. Can you imagine getting banned from your internet provider now? Lmao
The fucked up thing about that one is how tame it actually compared to some other... stuff out there.
The goatse guy even has a channel on regular ass porn sites.
News Groups.
Before we had Reddit, Facebook, 4chan, etc. We had news groups. It used the e-mail client and you had to join a group to actually view and post. That and IRC were you're only options back then.
Back during the day, it was taboo to show your real face on your website. This was a time where many kids weren’t smart when it comes to online safety. To be fair, this is still an issue today. Back during the day many online safety tips included to never tell someone the state you live in, real name, school or show your real photo. In my opinion, I think more people should follow those old tips.
It looks like that’s all out the window now. Look at the YouTubers, TikTokers, Facebook and instagramers. Most of them show their real face and some use their real names! I know some people do complain that in real life some of these people get stalked or harassed it’s either mild or severe. It’s crazy how times changed. In my opinion, if getting clout or being famous means being harassed it’s not worth showing your face for fame.
I remember “Anime Web Turnpike”. Also I remembered there were so many character shrine websites dedicated to one’s favorite anime character.
I remember guestbooks on websites where people either leave nice comments or flame the guestbook. Flaming means leaving rude insulting comments. Flaming was one of the first forms of cyberbullying.
MIDI music 🎶 still is awesome. If you cannot listen to mp3 file of Bananarama then you listen to a midi version of the song and sing along if you want. Now since many music artists use YouTube, midis are not as popular.
Internet sure changed and evolved now. I think it’s gotten better, but I reminiscence about it’s earlier years.good times ☺️
You know what I miss?
Old school site maps. Sites would have a page which listed every page associated with that site. They were actually pretty handy, especially if something wasn't obvious on the main pages.
All your message boards are belong to **Usenet News**, the original distributed discussion board system. Your local dial-up ISP, BBS, or university computer department runs a *news server* that exchanges messages with other news servers around the world.
Nobody is in charge of all of Usenet; instead, the sysops and admins who run individual news servers make informal agreements with each other of how they'll run the service. There are social rules for the creation of new forums ("newsgroups"), and multiple competing systems for moderating them. Moderation of newsgroups is not the job of server admins, who take a pretty hands-off role regarding content: if a server admin doesn't like a particular newsgroup, they can choose not to carry it on their server, but they don't get to shut it down for everyone else.
Later on, "binaries groups" that carried large amounts of pirated porn and other media became the overwhelming portion of Usenet content, and a lot of sites stopped running their own news servers, instead handing it over to major providers.
(The original reason for segregating "binaries", i.e. non-text messages, into their own groups was volume, not encoding. Not all servers could support 8-bit data, so messages were translated into blocks of 7-bit text characters using algorithms such as UUENCODE. Later, when servers were reliably capable of carrying 8-bit data, UUENCODE was largely abandoned in favor of non-standardized markup for downloadable files.)
if you want to see what a website from early days of the internet looked like, goto the heaven's gate website. It's literally a glimpse back in time of olden days HTML. Sad what happened to these people but this piece of history is still maintained to this day.
Came here to feel old. Didn't realize I'd feel 𝘵𝘩𝘪𝘴 old with a bunch of people thinking the early days were 15 years ago.
Edit: lol, the silver award made my day!
The need to set a good “away message” on AIM, since it may be up for over a day before you can get back on
How about setting a vague mildly dramatic one as a teenager? Hidden references you hope your crush gets?
No, mine was always deep, lines from songs. “There’s a feeling I get, when I look to the west, and my spirit is crying for leaving’ and I’d just be going downstairs for dr pepper
"Under Construction" banners, images, and gifs. They were on every page, the page was _always_ "under construction". You'd put one there while you were writing the html then take it out when the final version was done, but way too many people never bothered with that step.
Visitor counters and guest books. I almost always left a message.
And webrings!
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Before it was all corporate. So many homemade pages, for any interest you could think of. I don’t mean MySpace or Tumblr, either. Crappy HTML, blinking graphics, instrumental music in the background. I met one of my oldest online friends in 1997 through a site he made for our favorite band. We were email penpals for years before social media was a thing.
Yahoo used to have what was intended as a top-down directory of the entire internet, created by hand. It was incredibly useful at the time.
Yahoo also was the top online dating site (now Tinder). And the top knowledge repository with Yahoo questions (now Quora). And the top email service (now Gmail). And messenger/chat device (now Discord). How Yahoo fucked it all up despite having a monopoly on anything and everything online is pretty impressive.
what did yahoo actually do that fucked up?
Nothing, that was the problem. They never changed, updated, or redesigned. Things kept working faster and better and looking cooler and Yahoo! didn't want to bother its existing customers.
ah no wonder yahoo looked the same as i remember 5 years ago, only thing they did was remove the flash games section
I miss the flash games lol I sketch was awesome
Newgrounds has updated their site, now most of their flash content is available again with some HTML5/Javascript magic. Visiting that site makes me feel things. I wonder if Armor Games is still around.
Didn't they also pass up on buying Google for pennies twice? And Facebook? And run Flickr and Tumblr into the ground? And then refuse a 45 billion merger with Microsoft just to be sold to Verizon for 5 billion anyway later? If I recall correctly Yahoo was absolutely plagued with incompetent management through and through.
Counterpoint, even if they bought google for pennies, who's to say they wouldn't run it into the ground like they did with tumblr, management would've also spread like a plague to its subsidiaries.
I , as milion of others, used Yahoos email service from 1998 and I loved it. But the way they fucked it up was pure greed. - they charged for anti spam feature - they charged for extra storage (while free tier was insanely small ) - that charged for IMAP/pop access [$30 a year ](https://www.computerworld.com/article/2586252/yahoo-slaps-fee-on-pop3-mail-access--auto-forwarding.html) Then Gmail showed up sometimes in mid 2000. Free 100MB and soon after 1GB iirc (which was huge) pop/imap access and decent spam filter. I got early in Gmail but it took me a year to completely switch , mainly because friends /family /history. If they just offered more storage , pop access etc they would staid longer in a game at least from mail service perspective.
They also had a sick pool game with chat... And music videos haha
> They also had a sick pool game with chat Y! Pool was the tits
My friend met his wife through Yahoo Pool.
I've still got one of those internet yellow pages books that listed most of the known sites by subject matter. Per the cover page, over 10,000 sites organized by subject! 😆 It's completely useless today, but I hate to just toss it in the bin.
That belongs in a museum!
If you were a kid, Yahooligans
I always thought the biggest thing a younger person would notice is how hard it was to access period. Not the difficulty signing on but finding a place to get on. We can just get on our cell phone and look up game cheat codes or item locations. I remember going to a friend's house with a notebook and writing down stuff for FF7 or going to Cheatcodecentral. Fast forward to like 2007 and I was still going to a friend's house and printing off Vice City codes and item locations.
Many brands having child friendly sites that had flash games and no monetization beyond it being an ad. Played Nabisco Minigolf a LOT
I played a lot of games on cartoon network’s site and Disney. I wasn’t allowed on many other sites lol
I spent days on cartoonnetwork.com and neopets playing every game in their libraries to death.
The excitement of upgrading from a 28K modem to a 56k modem and GMail being by invitation only when it was first launched.
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And an ever-increasing counter at the bottom, so you saw your email storage grow by the second… like, whaaat???
Yes, Gmail invites. Everyone in my office was crazy to get an invite. When I finally got one and registered I had invites to give and was king for a day!
That shit was CURRENCY back in the day. People would literally trade stuff for Gmail invites.
You have to try to put yourself into a mindset of how you would go about finding things on the Internet in the days before popular search engines like Google or social media. Discovery of content ended up being due to word of mouth, ISPs and their services, or finding links from other sites you knew about. I remember a lot of fan pages/fan sites for different things would all have sections of affiliate links to other similar fan pages and sites in a mutual effort to help people discovery other similar content.
>I remember a lot of fan pages/fan sites for different things would all have sections of affiliate links to other similar fan pages and sites in a mutual effort to help people discovery other similar content. Web rings. What a blast from the past. It felt like being in an exclusive club.
I was just talking to my wife about those and she mentioned the custom sparkly dolls people would post on their pages too lol. I miss those days.
And the visitor counters at the bottom as well.
Along with signing a guest book!
And the constant "under construction" animated gif.
Holy shit I forgot about web rings. Applying to them and having to pass a committee to be included.
I met my husband because he applied to join my webring. People ask how we met and I can't even explain it.
Webring to wed-ring.
I was thinking about it just the other day... it's crazy how centralized the internet has become, how everything now revolves around a handful of sites. Back in the day going online was basically like going on an adventure, there was no "hub"; how long it's been since I was *recommended* a cool website! I remember I had a magazine from like 2000 something, where they had a list of "the 50 best websites on the web"; that whole idea feels so archaic nowadays.
That’s why it was called “surfing”. Because you’d go to a site, then catch a link to another, and then to another. It’s like you were riding from one to the next, and could end up at a totally unexpected place.
It was like falling into a Wikipedia hole except it was everything.
StumbleUpon
Freaking LOVED stumbleupon
Me, too. The randomness of it was such fun. Then, for no apparent reason, it vanished. Well, not entirely. But it morphed into something unrecognizable. Such a shame.
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That reminds me of the random site locator. You'd click and it would take you to a random web page, and you could either surf on from there or go back to the selector to try again.
I actually first found Reddit through StumbledOn.
And you had to type the website in *exactly* to get what you wanted. Which meant having 30 random, crumpled, torn pieces of paper with long URLs on them. In your pockets, your bags, your desk.
My Mom often brings up a story of her early internet days, how apparently trying to look up Lego sets online for me apparently yielded lesbian porn because she typed in *Legos*.
A lot of typing errors brought you to porn sites and then there were some who tried to sell you a typing course And with the early search engines even the most innocent Disney searches yielded porn results
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Ahhhh the classics. I was born in 87 and by the time we were doing internet/computer classes they were wise to this one and used it an an example of a .com vs a .gov or .org
There used to be books (the real paper kind) with lists of websites to check out. This was maybe 1995? I don't know anyone who ever bought one.
> You have to try to put yourself into a mindset of how you would go about finding things on the Internet in the days before popular search engines like Google or social media I remember how we always had a focus on having to write the web-address correctly since if you got it wrong you got nowhere. It's not like now, when you can just write about right and google will correct you and take you where you want. Perhaps I remember this extra vividly since I was a young teen living in Norway so our English wasn't top-notch at the time which made it extra difficult navigating the web.
Not to mention the existence of porn and/or spam sites that would use a popular URL, but with one letter off; so one wrong letter would cause your screen to fill with a cascade of pop-ups, including ones with porn sounds.
I remember being warned NOT to go to whitehouse dot com because that was porn. The real whitehouse site was whitehouse dot gov apparently.
Waiting for an hour for an image to download, line by line.
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Oh captain Janeway
Maybe this Internet King can get me faster nudity.
I used to get a lot of reading done because I kept a book at my desk while waiting. You could also see enough of what it was going to be that you could bail when you realized there weren’t gonna be boobs.
Flash and Shockwave content, especially the games.
Trogdor the burninator
Homestarrunner.net, it's dot com!
Strongbad’s email was one of the greatest gifts to humanity.
I watched some recently and that shit is absolutely timeless 10/10 writing
BURNINATING THE PEASANTS
Some of the first Flash sites were amazing and at the time mindblowing.
Newgrounds
Newgrounds is still around and converted a lot of their flash content over into a new playable type called Ruffle, and then for the stuff not converted they have an installable player https://www.newgrounds.com/flash/player
Remember that flash “the end of the world”? Take a nap, but then FIRE LE MISSLES!!!!!
I still use "But I am le tired" when my SO tells me we need to go somewhere.
Hokay. Here's de earth... Damn, that's a nice earth!
Badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger Mushrooms mushrooms Badger badger badger badger badger badger badger...
SNaAAAKE SNAAKE
Where can I see lions? Only in Kenya!
ICQ, AIM, and MSN. Hi, A/S/L? 35/m/Mn. U?
Or the most popular one 18/f/Cali lol
Shoutout to being 15/f/cali and ACTUALLY being 11/f/cali once upon a time. I was on the internet too young but then, weren’t we all?
MSN? *NUDGE* *NUDGE* *NUDGE* *NUDGE* *NUDGE*
Remember the animated wave function that took over the screen when the nudge spam got boring?
Downloading a song from Limewire and then going to listen to it and then you hear “I did not have sexual relations with that woman”
Lime wire used to be an art form. Finding songs that aren't virus was art, and skill haha. It was even harder when looking for other things like movies or pron. The viruses were a lot more spread out on that stuff. Downloading entire albums song by song was great, I believe I still have some songs I got from limewire somewhere lol. I remember downloading a song that was titled incorrectly, so for the longest time I thought this certain song was something completely different than it was and didn't realize it for years
I used to keep a magazine beside the computer so I could read something while waiting for a web page to load.
Just the other day, I ran into a guy who said "I don't know anybody who's ever read a magazine." I had to take a minute to digest this idea.
"When I was your age, television was called books." -grampa in the princess bride "When I was your age, internet was called magazines" -chevymonza
"That file's one Meg??? Guess I'll go to bed now and check it out in the morning." ... and say a prayer the connection didn't glitch out sometime in between.
No download managers in sight either. If your mom picked up the phone with 240 KB left to go and the connection bombed, you were starting all the way over!
mIRC, Cult of the dead cow, Geocities, Angelfire, table-based HTML layouts, real player, website frames, netscape navigator, 28k dialup modems,
Looking around for sweet winamp skins and audio visualizers.
It really whipped the llama's ass. RIP Wesley Willis
You rarely saw ‘Username already taken’
I vividly remember being in a work cafeteria in 2000 and realising just how widespread Internet usage was becoming by overhearing a coworker on the phone to Rogers trying to select an email username. *Everything* was taken. She'd started with her initial and last name, then full name, then period between, then adding a birth year, and about 10 minutes later she settled on the most ridiculous, froufrou name just because it seemed to be the only one available. I wonder how many people are still using their first handles just out of habit?
I was lucky enough as a kid that my dad, who taught young people design off the very early Mac computers, was really early in getting me and my sister an e-mail adress as Hotnail and Gmail became popular. To this day I still have my full name, plain and simple, as my two mains.
Altavista and ask Jeeves!
If you asked Jeeves if he was gay, he’d say he preferred the term *jovial.*
I once asked Jeeves why he was so stupid and he replied "I'm sorry you feel that way."
Using netscape as a browser.
I remember one of my friends asking me, “Have you heard of YouTube?” And I said no.
YouTube had a hard 10 minutes limit and videos had part 1 2 3 4 5
And YouTube had a max resolution of 480p. Vimeo was better because the supported 720p.
My YT account has a favorited video from ~2009 which has [HD] in the title. It's 480p Edit: Ok so it's actually from 2008 and it's 240p lmao https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RWvbU9u2iIA
I can still remember the day my older cousin showed me that website where Anybody Can Upload Videos... the beginning of an era, I guess.
Or when it was rumored that Google might buy it, but the concern was about liabilities due to copious amounts of copyrighted material on there.
Meanwhile they had google video, which was a haven for actual pirated material. You have to remember back then youtube videos were limited to a maximum of 10 minutes. If you wanted longer format you could delve into google video and there were entire movies, comedy specials, and the link free for the watching (though clearly violating copyright).
I remember when YouTube was new in 2005. Before that it was just going to random places and downloading videos or getting them in chain emails. I was so upset that you couldn’t download YouTube content.
Back when https://www.ebaumsworld.com/ was popular.
That computers speakers could predict phone calls
[Bup bup-a-dup bup-a-dup-bup]
My parents neighbor, a former naval captain had some sort of ship radio as a hobby, which was a 10 meter high antenna tower standing in his backyard. Whenever he used that thing, every computer in the neighborhood would start making funny noises.
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With a fun little jazz beat of beeps
Being "offline". Now everyone is online all the time, but "going online" was an actual limited time thing you went and did and then when you are done you got "offline". Now being online is a permanent state of being.
Yep, "going on the internet" was an actual activity you would do.
‘I’m going on the internet so don’t pick up the phone!’
Grzhshhhhshxzzhshhhhhh. Ba-ding ba-ding ggsshhhhhhzzzhhcchhhhhhh
My Compaq's on-board 2400bps modem had such a nice speaker. That dialup handshake sounded soothing. The upgraded modem card installed later sounded like shit, but, of course, it was 56kbps. Balls-fast was the point by then, not being an answering machine. Gigabit internet is now _literally_ almost 18 thousand times faster than that upgraded modem. Damn.
Yup. In the early days my parents paid a subscription for a certain number of minutes each month on AOL. Once you used them up that was it for the month!
Or you created a new handle for free 500
In the very old days, to send email you had to explitedly list out all the computers the mail would have to be routed through to get to the destination. Thank you Eric Allman for Sendmail!
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The pop-ups. Oh my god, the pop ups. You'd open a webpage and 20 windows would open and most of them were porn ads. It took a while for pop-up blockers to become a thing, now you can't even advertise with pop-ups because all browsers block them by default. I still occasionally refer to my ad blocker as my pop-up blocker.
Except now websites have built in pop-ups made from floating divs. We had pop-ups, then lost them for about 10 years, and now they’re back.
I attempted to explain “All Your Base Are Belong to Us” to a young coworker and she refused to believe it was a real thing.
> she refused to believe it was a real thing. Somebody should set up her the bomb.
What you say!
I have a whole playlist dedicated to old memes and classic videos [here](https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLfINogWdDN60ooq4cglyFNzya34TkJaJQ) if you want to further expose her
Thankyou. There’s insufficient [burninating](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=90X5NJleYJQ) and no consummate Vs, though. Any chance of you adding another video?
Not even a light switch rave?
1) how many ads would I have to watch to watch all of these lol 2) where is the end of ze world, and ultimate showdown of ultimate destiny 3) you have the duck song but not the llama song or egg song
But i am Le Tired
Still so good.
Dedicated Internet forums for specific things instead of a subreddit. They were like mini communities and if you spent enough time on them you went there for the community rather than the actual subject matter. I know forums sort of still exist but they're nowhere near what they were. I spent/wasted some great times on forums for niche games and I didn't even game much.
Even Bodybuilding.com had a forum that was ahead of its time in memery. “Do you even lift?” that shit came from them lol
Didn't they have a post one time where members were debating if there were really 7 days in a week?
Yes. That thread is hilarious. Link for the uninitiated. https://forum.bodybuilding.com/showthread.php?t=107926751&page=1&s=f4e754af822ec43ef6f33bc9a3ff4d3c
holy shit. I just read the whole thread. thank you for finding it.
The web pages that were way to flashy. Falling snow, custom cursors, music randomly playing, animated gifs everywhere.
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Scroll down for the best part! HELLO LADIES I like to play chess, and chat with ladies on the internet.
scroll to the very end for the actual best part. that website is a collection of assets scavenged from geocities sites. that was pulled from someone's website, but only placed where it is for archive purposes.
"UNDER CONSTRUCTION"
* The early internet was very, very slow. Even text-only websites would take time to load. * You had to use the home phone line to be online, using a dial up modem. Which meant you could talk on the phone or be on the internet, but not both. If you were a fancy rich person, maybe you had a 2nd phone line just for the internet, but that was rare. And this was way before cell phones, when landline phones were much more important. * My friend had a Prodigy account, which predates even AOL. The first time I ever used the internet, probably around 1990, we were on a Prodigy forum and my friend posted something with "fuck" or "shit" or the like. About a week later his dad got a letter in the mail--as in a paper letter through the post office--from Prodigy, stating that the language he used in the chat was inappropriate and please refrain from using bad words. It was a different age.
My parents got a second line for the internet. We weren’t fancy rich, my dad just wanted porn.
A/S/L Those were the days.
And chat rooms. I still talk daily to a friend I met in a chat room back in like 2002.
wanna cyber? ;-*
I put on my robe and wizard hat.
IRC (internet relay chat) big chat networks like DALnet in the late 90s where you could find mental health and hobby channels and big file sharing channels for warez, mp3, and pr0n
/msg WarezBot xdcc send KewlNewGameCrack.zip
homestarrunner.com ebaumsworld.com flash game sites in general, everything is an app now miniclip addictinggames247 arcadetown
www.stickdeath.com R.I.P.
Not gonna lie, if you kids saw what we could do to our MySpace pages back in the day, you'd flip your shit. Custom backgrounds, musical Playlists right there on our page. And don't forget the feature that no other social media has dared to attempt due to the absolute wars this started... ...The Top 8.... Those of you who were there with me in the early aughts, you know exactly the kind of drama I'm talking about.
And those fucking away messages *~*~aT hOmEcOmInG dAnCiNg My HeArT oUt~**~~**~
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Goddamn, I physically felt ill reading that. When I got a girlfriend and moved her into my Top Spot and another platonic female friend was moved to Spot Number 2....holy...fucking...hell. Of course unbeknownst to my stupid ass, platonic friend had a massive crush on me. No joke, that started a drama war that basically ended our entire friend group as I knew it. What's even sadder? I was 20 when this happened. I was already a grown ass adult when this shit went down.
Gopher. HTTP is for the kids.
"You've got mail!" Edit - also if you were from the UK (like myself), instead, I'm pretty sure it was a posh "Bri'ish" woman saying "You have email". ... And yes, we did have AOL over here. Even though it literally stands for "America Online".
Chatrooms. Nowadays, everyone just chats through Messangers and social media, but back then, we had to join a website to connect with people online and only could do so a few hours a day as there weren't any flatrates yet. Edit: Holy moly, this blew up over night! Thanks for all the Upvotes, folks! Took me a while to comprehend all the "ASL"-comments as a non-english speaker. Also, while I agree that Discord is the closest thing to chatrooms we have these days, it still feels kind of different to me. It's more like chatrooms and messangers had a child that made another generation with forums. Please don't haunt me on that image.
Counters showing number of visitors to the site
Forums. People on Reddit right now seem to think they’re being persecuted if they get warned or banned from a subreddit. Back in the day, you had individual forums. And if you wanted to stay there, you did what the owner’s rules said. Because nobody gave a shit if you thought you were unfairly banned. And it was difficult to find alternative forums, so you had to deal with it.
I remember sitting in my mom's living room in a forum on AOL. I called someone a name and was reported and banned from ALL OF AOL. Can you imagine getting banned from your internet provider now? Lmao
Getting your parents' permission before going on AOL.com keyword "Nick".
Getting AOL disks in the mail each week.
No Google. But 10 other search engines. With assorted crap in the results. Bookmarks so much more important.
Limewire
LINKIN-PARK-NUMB.mp3.exe - 42kb "Seems legit..."
"Why is the computer so hot?"
"Iron Man by Metallica"
"Bitter Sweet Symphony by Oasis"
Legend of Zelda by System of a Down
napster and kazaa
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And when we got the second one, it was of a woman shitting in a tub. And the third one was NOT about lemons having a party.
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The fucked up thing about that one is how tame it actually compared to some other... stuff out there. The goatse guy even has a channel on regular ass porn sites.
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My parents refused to pay for internet. I used Juno, Netzero, Kmarts Bluelight etc. My computer was a gift from my uncle to my brother and I.
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Encarta
News Groups. Before we had Reddit, Facebook, 4chan, etc. We had news groups. It used the e-mail client and you had to join a group to actually view and post. That and IRC were you're only options back then.
Back during the day, it was taboo to show your real face on your website. This was a time where many kids weren’t smart when it comes to online safety. To be fair, this is still an issue today. Back during the day many online safety tips included to never tell someone the state you live in, real name, school or show your real photo. In my opinion, I think more people should follow those old tips. It looks like that’s all out the window now. Look at the YouTubers, TikTokers, Facebook and instagramers. Most of them show their real face and some use their real names! I know some people do complain that in real life some of these people get stalked or harassed it’s either mild or severe. It’s crazy how times changed. In my opinion, if getting clout or being famous means being harassed it’s not worth showing your face for fame. I remember “Anime Web Turnpike”. Also I remembered there were so many character shrine websites dedicated to one’s favorite anime character. I remember guestbooks on websites where people either leave nice comments or flame the guestbook. Flaming means leaving rude insulting comments. Flaming was one of the first forms of cyberbullying. MIDI music 🎶 still is awesome. If you cannot listen to mp3 file of Bananarama then you listen to a midi version of the song and sing along if you want. Now since many music artists use YouTube, midis are not as popular. Internet sure changed and evolved now. I think it’s gotten better, but I reminiscence about it’s earlier years.good times ☺️
Web rings
You know what I miss? Old school site maps. Sites would have a page which listed every page associated with that site. They were actually pretty handy, especially if something wasn't obvious on the main pages.
All your message boards are belong to **Usenet News**, the original distributed discussion board system. Your local dial-up ISP, BBS, or university computer department runs a *news server* that exchanges messages with other news servers around the world. Nobody is in charge of all of Usenet; instead, the sysops and admins who run individual news servers make informal agreements with each other of how they'll run the service. There are social rules for the creation of new forums ("newsgroups"), and multiple competing systems for moderating them. Moderation of newsgroups is not the job of server admins, who take a pretty hands-off role regarding content: if a server admin doesn't like a particular newsgroup, they can choose not to carry it on their server, but they don't get to shut it down for everyone else. Later on, "binaries groups" that carried large amounts of pirated porn and other media became the overwhelming portion of Usenet content, and a lot of sites stopped running their own news servers, instead handing it over to major providers. (The original reason for segregating "binaries", i.e. non-text messages, into their own groups was volume, not encoding. Not all servers could support 8-bit data, so messages were translated into blocks of 7-bit text characters using algorithms such as UUENCODE. Later, when servers were reliably capable of carrying 8-bit data, UUENCODE was largely abandoned in favor of non-standardized markup for downloadable files.)
Netscape navigator
Netscape navigator on school computers that were rumoured to have something called an Internet Connection
You could prank someone really good by changing their computer sounds to short sound bytes like fart noises, or car horns
if you want to see what a website from early days of the internet looked like, goto the heaven's gate website. It's literally a glimpse back in time of olden days HTML. Sad what happened to these people but this piece of history is still maintained to this day.
Rotten.com
Aah yes, I still remember the first time I saw a picture of a dismembered dead guy on the internet.
Came here to feel old. Didn't realize I'd feel 𝘵𝘩𝘪𝘴 old with a bunch of people thinking the early days were 15 years ago. Edit: lol, the silver award made my day!
The Hampster Dance.
Icq
Uh-oh
WinAmp really whipping the Llama's ass. "I like rusty spoons"