• huiccewudu@lemmy.ca
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    1 year ago

    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.

    • KuchiKopi@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      This is spot on. Discovery. You never knew what door you were opening and where it would lead you.

  • TamlinWanklins@sh.itjust.works
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    1 year ago

    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.

  • duncesplayed@lemmy.one
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    1 year ago

    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.

  • hrimfaxi_work@midwest.social
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    1 year ago

    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.

    • patchymoose@lemmy.ml
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      1 year ago

      Great band, and their stuff from the 90s is completely different from the style they ended up being known for later.

  • Dandroid@dandroid.app
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    1 year ago

    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.

    • richneptune@lemmy.fmhy.ml
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      1 year ago

      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!

  • Zarxrax@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    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.

    • ArtVandelay@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      I remember going to Jeff’s code page to look up cheat codes for My computer games. It really was a different time

    • Temple Square@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      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.

      • Zarxrax@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        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.

  • GadgeteerZA@lemmy.ml
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    1 year ago

    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.

  • porkins@sh.itjust.works
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    1 year ago
    • Newgrounds
    • Homestar Runner
    • AIM
    • Yahoo chat rooms
    • MUDs
    • Not internet, but Leisure Suit Larry holds a special place in my memories.
  • falinter@midwest.social
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    1 year ago

    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!

  • theUnlikely@sopuli.xyz
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    1 year ago

    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.

    • EveryMuffinIsNowEncrypted@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      1 year ago

      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.)

  • wokehobbit@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    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.

  • lawrence@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    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”.

    • Kelsenellenelvial@lemmy.ca
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      1 year ago

      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.