Prior to the internet condensing into just 5 or so websites, what do you remember fondling about being online?
I remember winning a raffle contest on the old Terraria forums and getting to pick my own title (instead of just New Member, Member, Well-Known Member). Of course, since I was like 13, I picked a random collection of letters that only I knew was an acronym of my signature on said forums.
My fondest memories of being online predate having web access!
I grew up in a remote corner of Kansas. BBSs were the thing in the 80s and 90s, and maybe CompuServe. But everything was a long-distance (expensive!) phone call. I had various hacks to get Internet email. Via a wonky FidoNet gateway was the best for awhile; my system dialed up a BBS in the middle of the night (cheaper rates!), quickly exchanged mail, and hung up.
Then I got a UUCP feed. Similar concept, but then I could also get… USENET! (Not the binaries people think of now, but discussions.)
Eventually I got into Free Software: FreeBSD and Linux. I remember going to a computer lab in a college in summer when it was empty with a large stack of floppies. I’d download Debian installer disks via FTP on about 6 computers at once, write them to disks, and repeat. Woo!
Finally PPP became available in my area. Affordable Real Internet at home! I promptly put up a personal website (ISPs gave those out standard at the time), ran my UUCP stuff over the Internet, etc. I remember the thrill of being able to access news sites. From Kansas! For Free! And then there was RealAudio even. And maybe even RealVideo, if you were super lucky.
A lot of libraries were set up with telnet access to their card catalog - how cool was that, seeing what’s there and even renewing my books from home!
Then I moved to a city and got myself a 128Kbps ISDN line. That was hopping! I could run a live SMTP server myself - no more UUCP. Somewhere around that time, Slashdot popped up as a popular site. I also used Mapquest to get – and PRINT OUT – driving directions. Then you started having search engines - AltaVista, Excite, etc. And Deja News - the Usenet indexer - was one of the best ways to find technical information. Sort of like a “site:reddit.com” search now.
When Amazon became a thing, that was cool. No more driving 40 miles to a bookstore!
Eventually I got a job at a University, and my desktop machine ran Linux. It had an un-firewalled public IP, so I promptly started hosting my Linux-related website on it.
Oh, and did I mention IRC? (Chat rooms)
But you’ll note, I named the websites last. My fondest memories weren’t really about websites. They were about communication and community. I never really liked web forums (“I can use my own client for email and Usenet, and get all of the groups in one place; why should I register 20 different accounts for forums that will go down with the server admin gets bored of the project?”).
Actually, they still aren’t. I mean, websites are USEFUL - like, say, Google Maps or OpenStreeMap. But do I have fond memories of Google Maps? No, not really.
Fediverse, man… this is community. I like that. I like my Mastodon instance. I’ll probably grow to like Lemmy too.
The irony of the web is that it opened up so much more rich expression than text did, so much so that nobody ever mentions the word “multimedia” anymore. And yet, because we are awash in rich expression, it all blends together to be sorta unremarkable, because that is the world we are in now.
So many great memories!
I remember daydreaming about the day everyone would have an email address! It seemed so fat-fetched, the concept of meeting someone and exchanging email addresses. I had dial up for many years, and I also dreamed about having a permanent connection. I would think, “Imagine, you receive an email and you get notified in real time that it arrived! No need to dial up and fetch emails via POP3!”
In 1999 my parents got a dedicated connection via cable, so I set up a Linux server on their house. Back then the computer would get a real, unfiltered, IP address, so I started running my own email service. 24 years later and I still have the same domain and run my own mail service, though on the cloud these days.
A couple years ago there was a post going on Gemini asking How you were using the Internet in the 1991-1995 and 1995-2005? (sic), the replies are super interesting.
I identify with all that completely! I remember thinking it was really cool when we started to see websites in TV ads and things. My perspective may have shifted since… hah.
I actually posted a reply to that same prompt here: https://changelog.complete.org/archives/10417-the-pc-internet-revolution-in-rural-america It talks about the unique challenges of being in a rural area, as well as discusses cost quite a bit.
That was such an amazing read! Thanks for sharing that!
Personal webpages, where people basically wrote about themselves, their hobbies, etc
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I’m pretty sure that’s technically still Web2 you’re talking about, but I remember back in the day I would sometimes go to cracked flash game sites to play flash games with cheats (I was like 8)
The police still haven’t caught me
My memory probably is more of early Web 2; I was born in the late 90s, so I suppose I missed the really wild west days.
Flash games were great though; it seemed like every company that even slightly catered to people under 30 had a website with some game on it.
Yeah, some of them were baller and now lost to time. Like Nickelodeon had an Avatar: The Last Airbender 3D penguin sledding game, man I would love to be able to play that again
Before “good” search engines existed there was a sense of exploration hopping from weird site to weird site. Because there were no rules people would really put a piece of themselves into their websites. They would just be little virtual islands dedicated to one subject or another that the author found interesting.
discovering that 3-D animated email GIF that was the mailbox with the word 'email" that revolved around it. i added it to my geocities site immediately!
ah, simpler times…
Fondest memories are of using mIRC late in the night while listening to WinAmp.
That really whips the llama’s ass.
“Badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger, mushroom mushroom!”
Ebaumsworld right?
Badger Badger was made by the creator of Weebl and Bob. It found its way onto Ebaums no doubt, but he had his own site, weeblsstuff, that had a bunch of stuff.
One of my favourite possessions is my Cat Face pendulum clock!
Are you talking about one of these?
https://i.pinimg.com/originals/f2/08/5e/f2085e10d2bfc9e1735701b18c3527cf.jpg
We gave one of them to my cat loving sister in law and the removed gave it away to a friend. Like, if you didn’t want it I would have taken it. I’m still salty if you can’t tell
No, but my mum did buy me one of those when I asked her to get me the CatFace one lmao. Even though I gave her the specific link. Ended up having to buy it myself.
This is CatFace, and like I say the clock face is his giant cat head. Then his little dangling body is the pendulum.
apparently Jebora lets you upload images directly.
Stickdeath, Yahooligans, Geocities/Angelfire/Tripod, and of course MSN Messenger. I still use the notification sound from MSN as my text tone on my phone. Just feels right.\
That and traditional Web Forums. They’re still around obviously, but not quite the same as they used to be.
Hmm… I still have printed out some correspondence from prodigy bbs focused on SNES game genie codes for FF6, which is probably the earliest physical artifact / memory.
I also remember the very first two times I interacted with IRC, which on time #1, I picked a random nick from mechwarrior and talked to someone. Then, on time #2, i couldn’t remember and picked a new nick from mechwarrior, and person I talked to had no idea who I was and I didn’t remember the name either. That one really stuck “identity” into my consciousness.
Another strong memory would be my homemade, geocities webpage with a starfield background and midi/tracker music player loaded, “under construction” sign on page, and text about FF7’s sepiroth. lost to time, though.
Outside of that… phpbb and other random forums, irc culture especially for music creators with things like one-hour compos for tracker tunes as a way to write anything, shit or not. good stuff.
Also, early MMO games had really neat emergent behavior and it was fun to see how the social aspects played out. I think that’s … adjacent to web 1 stuff and MUDs. So, in Ragnarok Online, low-level acolyte classes had few ways to level but they could us their heal spells offensively against undead monsters. The best way to do this was against high-level undead things, and there was a place (glastheim churchyard) that had a safe location to rest and restore mana. Well, higher-leveled priests would electively go there and party up with folks purely because the higher-leveled priests had a spell to “increase mp regen” for party. effectively, they’d party a bunch of lower-leveled folks, sit in safe space, and repeatedly cast the spell when it ran out. that’s it.
later, the game added non-undead to the zone, as well as an mvp / boss spawn. kinda rude, tbh. but i loved all the social spaces folks would gather around to be safe and regen health/mana between leveling sprees. newer takes on MMOs miss that.
Starfield backgrounds were obligatory! I remember spending hours in Paint Shop Pro’s pattern mode trying to make sure my white and grey pixels repeated nicely: not so busy as to look like noise, but dense and random enough to hide the repetition.
The engineer at my college TV station telling me about this world wide web thing and me saying “Sounds cool but I don’t think it’ll replace gopher”.
I found this website when I was like 13 and thought it was pretty cool. I spent most of my time bull shitting on ultimate guitar forums before it got shutdown and sputnikmusic
http://www.realultimatepower.net/index4.htm
It looks like the homepage is broken but everything else still works
holy cow that’s the funniest thing I’ve seen all week. What a world we used to live in
My memory might be faulty but I just remember every other website was dedicated to Quentin Tarantino.
I remember reading gamefaq guides on very pbscure ds games that I loved to play but was very bad at.
I remember my classmate printing half a rim of a ps1 game walthrough from gamefaqs because he can’t be online all the time since the modem uses the phone and his family can cut the connection simply by lifting the phone receiver.
Webpages that could get created in 5 minutes without a super fancy editor and excessive coding - good times!
