I was on the younger side so it was mostly flash game and animation sites. Homestar runner, albinoblacksheep, miniclip, addicting games, runescape.

It was amazing.

Relevant backstory: I was an introverted kid who grew up on the countryside with not a whole lot in common with my peers. I played football because that’s what my “friends” did. I was OK at it, but I never really felt any enthusiasm for it. I only did it because I didn’t know of any alternatives. I got along with most people, but I always got the impression that it was only because I was good at playing the part of someone who fit in.

I got my first PC in 1996. It was an outdated 386, but it allowed me to really get into the low level stuff an learn about it beyond the usual gaming aspect, and for that I am grateful. While my peers were more interested in whether their favorite football team would beat their least favorite team in some important and upcoming match, I was more interested in turning our sat TV dish to see what other satellites I could find. Yes, I know there were systems that did this automatically. We didn’t have that, but what we did have was a programmable card for decoding D2MAC, thus allowing me to view any TV channel that we received. I don’t remember which satellite we normally used, but after some trial and error, as well as looking up something on the internet at a friend’s place, I learned that my newly acquired signal was the Astra satellites. This is how I stumbled across Futurama a few years later.

In 1998 I got an up to date PC, and internet access. It was like a whole new world opened before me. Whatever information I wanted was freely available, and finding like-minded ones were easy. I was 15 at a time, and I still wasn’t allowed to stay online into the small hours. So I went to bed and pretended to sleep until my parents went to bed, so that I could get up and dial up undisturbed. I live in UTC+1, so this worked well, as most of the people I knew online was in the US. When everyone around me went to bed, my world was just beginning after a full day of pretending to fit in. Between midnight and 6 in the morning, dialup was free, so that’s when I could just stay online without having to worry about cost, or whether someone in the house would disconnect me (accidentally or otherwise) by picking up the phone. I dipped my toes into Ultima Online at this time too, but that was only a small part of my online life. In general, by bandwidth was too slow to really do what I do, but there was a whole lot of info, guides, and technical explanations available in .txt format. I also started playing with FreeBSD and slackware linux around this time.

Come 2001 and things were more or less the same, except that I had moved to a rather big city for studies. I got ADSL for the first time, and no longer had to pay for each online minute via dialup. The whooping 2mbit I had all to myself allowed me to start experimenting with running servers and services, in addition to poking and prodding the internet to see what was out there and available (you have no idea how insecure everything was back then).

It didn’t take me long to have access to various servers all over, legal or otherwise, so I could pretty much do as I pleased online, as it couldn’t be linked to me personally. I never used this access for anything disruptive or destructive. The only time I know that I caused something major was actually purely by accident, lol. I was more like the tapeworm you never knew was there, plus i was more interested in corporate servers. I mostly did it to learn more about how everything fit together.

I had a presence in almost all noteworthy internet communities, and while I wasn’t “famous” on the internet, i knew A LOT of people, as most of my life was online. Sure, I met like-minded people in the city, but nowhere close to as many people I knew online. There’s a non-zero chance that others in here knew me once upon a time. Hell, it happened on reddit last year where I told an anecdote and someone responded with “Hey, I remember this. Did you go by REDACTED back in the day?”

Due to various reasons, I decided in 2006ish to leave my old internet identity behind for both practical and legal reasons. Partially because that’s around the time when the lines between internet identity and real world identity began to blur. But I still miss the days before corporate interest ruined the sense of community one had in these small niche corners of the internet.

In the late 1990s I was at university using their OC-48 lines. So I had a share of a ~2GBit connection while most of the people were lucky to get 56k.

In the dorms, everyone was assigned an IP address but most people still didn’t have their own computers. So my roommate and I convinced a bunch of other people on our floor to give us their IPs - and our RA was also a Network admin, so he was able to facilitate. We ran a web server, forums, Quake and Team Fortress (1) servers (Clan Clam for folks that remember Quake Clans), and some very private file servers. All running on found hardware.

The speed was so fast compared to most folks that it was a bit like having a data related super power.

This is a little bit before, but a story worth telling (again).

In 1995, I got AOL. Of course, this was in the days where only dialup existed, and when AOL was not flat rate, but charged extra for any time spent online over 30 hours a month. I had some bills.

My 486 computer had a 14.4Kbps modem in it, which I decided I would upgrade to a 33.6Kbps. This was the fastest I could get at the time. Surely, I would enjoy this new superfast speed, right?

No, no I would not. I noticed that I was only ever connecting at 2400 - and this was when the “standard” for dialup was 14.4. AOL advertised 28.8 at the time, as I recall.

I tried all manner of modem strings to try and get my fancy 33.6 to connect to AOL at any speed higher than 2400, to no avail. I spent hours waiting in line in their “support” chat rooms (which I later learned were staffed by unpaid volunteers who may not have known anything about anything). Then I finally decided to try using the toll-free 800 number (which AOL charged a premium to use).

Bang, connected at 14.4Kbps. Back to my local number, 2400. … Wait what? Okay, then it’s not me, it’s them.

I did even more digging to discover that AOL only offered “high speeds” in certain metropolitan areas. AOL numbers local to me were not included in any of those, so I got 2400bps, because that’s all AOL would give. And by this time, the “standard” for dialup had jumped to 28.8Kbps.

All of those super high AOL bills from before (they’d since moved to flat rate unlimited) were exacerbated by “downloading art” at 2400bps.

I immediately went to the grocery store, bought a computer magazine, thumbed through it until I found a regular old ISP (Netcom), and called them on the phone to sign up.

Forums instead of social media, IRC/ICQ/AIM for chat, websites were much more static… unless using Flash, newgrounds full of Flash games.

FTP/IRC was source of media distribution until transitions to, bittorrent was new, and napster, limewire, kazaa were things. Newsgroups have existed for all time, but not really including them because less mainstream.

Windows would allow broadcast messages to just pop-up on your computer. Needed to implement your own firewall like Zonealarm, these things weren’t just default… computers kinds of just ‘directly’ connected to the internet without any appliance in the way at first.

Edit: Oh yeah, and Steam didn’t exist, so games were bought individually in boxes at stores, and valve games were like sharing your IP with friends, listing of servers… speaking of, early Counter Strike and stuff didn’t have any anti-cheat… if you added anti-cheat to your CS server when first coming out, people getting caught would be shocked, since they didnt know they could get caught, always in denial for ‘false positives’, and really find out who of your friends aren’t actually good and were just cheating all along.

You can catch a glimpse of what the websites were like using the web archive. A good starting point would be a popular web directory, like for example the Google directory from 2004.

Sites like match.com were such a target rich environment in placed like San Francisco and NYC, that you could score 2/3 dates a day if you wanted to. No cap. It was the wild west. It was glorious. Napster/Limewire meant you were never without music if you didn’t want to be. Movies/TV downloads weren’t available in quantity yet, but music was flowin.

Less central control, more diverse places existed, always felt like you were discovering new communities where people knew each other.

Anything you could think of, ANYTHING, had a community somewhere.

I remember e-mail providers having low storage, maybe 1MB max and getting e-mails frequently deleted by said providers after not logging in after a certain time.

Using MSN and yahoo chat rooms were a fun way to meet people. I remember there being rooms on Yahoo (were they called conferences?) just for people to have singing sessions.

Locally, almost everyone with a computer and dialup had MSN messenger installed, so plenty chatting with classmates after school on there.

I vaguely remember being subscribed to yahoo groups for fan and local interests. They were a good way to be kept informed.

Surfing the web was fun. I never knew what I would find next.

Oh and Neopets.

My first brush with the internet was in 2000. We had our family computer in the living room. Our dial-up ISP was Funcow. The local newspaper had a little section where they talked about fun websites to visit (family-friendly of course) and we would check them out in the evening. I know that Google existed but we didn’t use it - we had AltaVista, then Yahoo. These were also website directories - basically lists of websites grouped by topics. So if you didn’t find what you were looking for on one website, you’d try the next one, and so on. And the websites themselves were basically made by hand in html. To stand out some people threw in lots of little animated icons garish colors, weird website layouts, background music that couldn’t be turned off… It was 100% amateur and unpolished, and much much MUCH more diverse than today’s internet. But slowly, massively popular websites and tools started to dominate. Microsoft had a huge presence through Hotmail, MSN.com, and MSN Messenger. But Yahoo Messenger had video chatting first (IIRC). There were fansites about everything under the sun but no Wikipedia so researching any given topic in depth was a mammoth, tedious task. In 7th grade I wrote a research paper on ferrets and referenced about half a dozen websites but only collected about two sentences worth of useful information from each - so research was still heavily reliant on books and libraries. Speaking of libraries: that’s where almost everyone went for free internet. Schools and colleges also had computer labs with free internet and woefully inadequate content filters. It was crazy. It was awesome.

There were lots of little niche forums where you could find a lot of different perspectives. I remember as a kid going to nuklearpower.com, the home of the 8-Bit theater webcomic, and I found a thread in the forums about religion and it was kind of my first real exposure to ideas about it outside of what I’d been raised to believe.

Most early memes were lolcats or epic fails, and I remember going through pages and pages on cheezburger.com with my friends. There were also “demotivational posters,” like this was the height of comedy.

4chan existed and was pretty bad even then but it was more common for somewhat normal people to go there, they loved their slurs and gross out humor but it wasn’t full nazi, it was edgy teens. In general slurs and homophobia were a lot more common, but a lot of the edgy, “you can’t tell me what to do” energy was directed at the religious right, the “moral guardians” who wanted to take away your violent video games. The left was very weak and didn’t have the sort of cultural presence it has today, instead you had a lot of energy directed towards libertarianism, with Ron Paul being the anti-war, pro-weed candidate, and you had liberals with ACLU type values. Things weren’t cut as neatly along party lines back then.

Fewer people were on the internet back then. Lots of young people used it but not as many boomers. There weren’t as many big pillars like Facebook/Twitter/Reddit, there were more subcultures and you never quite knew what you’d find (for better or worse). Algorithms were a lot less polished and you didn’t have as much SEO, Youtube looked and felt radically different.

The indie game Secret Little Haven captures some of the feel of that time period of the internet, from the perspective of a transfem, it gets heavy but it’s good.

One memory that sticks out is sneaking to the computer and loading up RuneScape. I waited about 10 minutes for it to load, then immediately felt guilty and shut the web browser before even logging in. Back then you had to pay for how much data you used so I hope it didn’t cost too much

Man, I’ve been using the internet since 1994. Back then I started with CompuServe. Think like AOL but more beige. It had an instant messaging system and email and a portal with various pages on different topics. But you could also use a browser, like Mosaic or Netscape, to browse the internet. I used Alta Vista and Excite and Yahoo as search engines. There were also personal website that people wrote in basic HTML and hosted on Geocities and communities on specific topics would create webrings to link these sites together. We also used apps like Gopher and Usenet Newsgroups.

And before that it was BBS, bulletin board services, which were computers managed by strangers and you would just call them with your phone line modem using a terminal software and their system would pick up and establish a connection if it was available. You could access messages, emails, upload or download files, and some have you access to the internet if you were lucky.

Newgrounds (still exists!)

Homestarrunner (still exists!)

Neopets (also somehow still exists!)

Websites for advertising movies was a thrilling new phenomenon.

Search algorithms were much more primitive, but due to the public internet being basically much, much smaller, it was faaaar easier to find basically random people’s personal sites (before the term blog even came around), discussing a niche topic.

At the same time, a whole lot of sites were still disseminated by word of mouth, person to person, or maybe via email. Running a TV ad for a website was basically a gigantic gamble for early sites… only those with huge amounts of money could even attempt it and it often just outright caused the whole enterprise to fail if you had moderate or little funding.

We did not have touch screen mobile devices with full keyboards, we had SMS T9 texting, which (like pagers before them) led to shorthand (lol is probably the best example) and a good deal of early internet lingo.

There was no ability to basically constantly post some kind if personal update to your personal site or eventually MySpace as is now the norm with modern tech and social media, so people that post usually put a good deal more thought into it.

Forums. The old net used to be far, far more based on communities in forums. Far less emphasis on basically mundane, every day posts about your life and opinions, and more centered around actual discussion of topics or issues.

Oh right of course: GameFaqs.

Back when you could only use the internet if no one else was using a phone in the house, waay before 8 hour in depth video guides explained to you how to do everything in a game…

We had to print out guides with chapter headings written in ASCII art, and it was quite common to be seen as giving up or cheating if you needed a guide to complete a mission or unlock some secret.

Oh and if you think lag is a problem nowadays in online games, try playing an FPS where most people have a ping around or over 200, constantly rubber banding all over the place, yourself included.

Or getting desynced in Starcraft for 30 seconds, every 5 minutes, basically every game.

I think I got online around 1995 when I went to an internet cafe and paid my $4 an hour to see what the fuss was about. I think I bought a modem on the way home and I was hooked. Back then there wasn’t really even a search engine, you went to a portal page… then came basic search like altavista, excite then google.

There were tonnes of communities and web chats if IRC wasn’t your thing, then there was the wave of dedicated chat apps like ICQ, MSN Messenger etc

I have many fond memories of the internet before it became a vehicle for commerce