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  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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!

  • 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!

  • 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.)

    • Numa numa yay
    • Flash games
    • Homestar Runner (look at da emails)
    • Neopets
    • RuneScape
    • Reddit when it was actually for nerds

  • Pshhhkkkkkkrrrr​kakingkakingkakingtsh​chchchchchchchcch​dingdingding

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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?

  • 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?

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