Geocities. That’s how I lerned HTML. Used their WYSIWYG editor and then tinkered with the code. Built several pages close to my interest, and even scored some free stuff from marketing early online retailers like CDNow.
Also spent a lot of time browsing other Geocities pages and contacting people with shared interest.
I was interviewed by Entertainment Weekly magazine because of my Geocities account haha.
I miss forums… Reddit got the hold on that genre now. Nothing, not even this Lemmy can rival it. People mention Tumblr and Quora as Reddit alternatives but hell no they’re not the same. Tumblr especially makes me cringe, seems so furry infected everywhere.
Downloading music… I was discovering so many cool bands by downloading shitty quality mp3s!
Even before filesharing, you could just type the name of a song with .wav or later .mp3 and there was a good chance someone had it saved on their personal site
Well not late 90s but pre 94 was the best times on the net. As for late 90s internet was not a commercialised mess of brands and much more fun.
Totally. I spent a lot of time on Prodigy bulletin boards.
Forums felt like a real community. Even crummy little forums like my home forum Supercars.net were teeming with life.
Discovering websites that had highly specific purposes.
Going down the rabbit hole of knowledge of a niche topic on websites alone. Now Wikipedia has most of the information about something in one page. Because information could be so fragmented then, you could spend hours just learning about a topic through people’s personal websites and forum posts.
The old internet still felt very hobbled together by people and their simple efforts. The new internet feels very big corporate. Lemmy kinda feels like a slice of the old internet sometimes.
The rabbit holes was big for me. I think it started changing after Google Reader and other aggregators came along, but before then you’d go from one site, which would link to another, then to another site, until after an hour you’d gone across a dozen or more different sites and you were on a completely different topic than what you started.
It still can happen in the current web, but it all feels alot less connected now, every website is like an island almost, no external Links and completely separated from any other sites. Before, finding new sites and content from a site’s ‘Links’ page was a big thing, I feel like that’s how I found alot of stuff. You would just bounce from one site to the next, read what they had, check the Links, see something else, bounce to that and repeat.
I really miss webrings. You’d discover the most absurd niche shit people were into. Especially since everyone seemed to have their own Geocities page or something similar. Nobody has one these days, as we all just use social media and big sites.
It really sucks. You just don’t get that these days now everyone is inside their own little bubble on the net.
There were no front pages like Reddit or Facebook.
Everyone had their own site and hosting was stupidly cheap.
You could host your own videos for very little. You didn’t need to rely on external services like YouTube.
You found websites by word of mouth or by links on the sites you visit. It was an age of discovery. It was awesome.
As content was self hosted there wasn’t any private censorship of content. And as it was cheap people weren’t desperately trying to monetize everything to stay a float.
It was so completely different it’s legit hard to explain.
If you hosted your homepage through your ISP or a site like GeoCities, there were no bandwidth charges and no storage limits. You could just make an FTP and upload every file you own if you wanted.
You could also you any jarring combination of colours, fonts, gifs, marquee tags, and anything that you desired with your geocities sites. There was no tyranny of design principles or minimal corporate webdesign.
The more animated gifs the better!
Wanting to talk to some people about a relatively niche topic, where I felt confused but had no one to work through my confusion with … learnt about Usenet, and quickly found myself talking to people from around the world about the topic.
For me personally, apart from the interactive data visualisation moment around D3 ~2015, and of course watching funny videos back before YouTube, the internet hasn’t really gone beyond that experience.
Hmm, the adventure of surfing the web? That forums and such were filled with nerds and quality advice. And the lack of monetization.
I remember (illegally) downloading lots of music, trying webbrowsers and them being super slow on my machine and of course pictures would load even slower. Alter (I think after the 90s were over) discovering Linux, reading forums and everyone was helping each other out. Or discussing detailed things and niche interests. And it had a distinct culture. A suggested/mandatory way of writing and replying so things would be organized and easy to follow.
I did read about Linux on the internet. But i wasn’t crazy enough to download something as gigantic as a Linux distribution with my limited DSL connection in the early 2000s. So I did go to my local Mediamarkt (German electronics store chain) and bought a copy of Suse Linux 6.4 which had a bunch of CDs that i used to install my first Linux system. The first time I installed linux from the internet was around the time Ubuntu was already big (I think i installed Breezy Badger then)
Yeah and there were also lots of PC magazines around then. I’m from Germany, too. I bought some Suse version with a similar version number as part of a (to me kinda expensive) PC magazine. Proceeded to wreck the bootloader, then delete most of the files on the PC by accident. Had to copy lots of things from my friends on the next LAN party to get everything back. Took me several attempts and re-installations to get a proper dual-boot. Mainly due to hardware woes. But it convinced me immediately. I’m a Linux user since then. I remember playing all the small games that were either on the CD or small enough to download. Like KTuberling(Kartoffelknülch), TuxRacer, some billiard and marble games, clones of arcade games, Sokoban… Every day a new enticing game to explore. (I was a kid back then.) And I also drew pictures, did the 10 fingers typing lectures and read a lot of books and documentation about the inner workings of Linux. And I was always interested in programming and messing with computers. I already had a C++ for Dummies book at that point. So eventually I got more into programming and constructing silly HTML pages. But I think that was early 2000s. And I remember playing lots of CounterStrike at that point. Just at friends places, because at home we still had dialup and it took us a bit into the 2000s until we got that PC that was able to run Windows 98, ME and then Linux.
Waiting for a BMP to load a few lines at a time before jpeg became ubiquitous!
As a Windows user in the 90s, I remember downloading Slackware. It took a long time for me to understand what it was and how to install it. The idea of a different OS that I could install on my PC was bizarre and not at all intuitive at the time to a computer novice.
I remember the first time I connected to the Internet and browsed Usenet back in the early 90s. I’m a soccer fan and it amazed me that I could read about soccer match results and news and opinions from all around the world.
Back then it was pretty uncommon for people to be assholes to each other online. We were all just amazed at how much information we could share and consume.
It’s important to understand that prior to the Internet the only comparable experience that even came close was going to a library and browsing the magazine rack. And that was neither interactive, nor timely in the way we have grown to expect in the Internet age.
Social media was so good back then. Livejournal was a total joy and I have my friends from there to this day. It was basically free therapy even if it was way cringe to read years later.
Trying to download porn in 160x160 with a 56k modem was so exciting. You never knew if that pixelmess would finish before you ran out of AOL freetime and had to find a new CD. Only missing the “being excited” part with all the instant gratification these days. Not the AOL part.
It used to take hours to find anything and it was so satisfying when I finally found it. Typically, I started the search and usually I would end up on a forum or a newgroup. Read for a bit, go back to the search engine with a refined term which leads me to another forum/newgroup/website. No way do I have patience for that today.
MU*s (MUSH, MUCK, MUSE; take your pick)
One of the more memorable moments was being on TOS Trekmuse when MacGyver, the owner of it (who worked for a studio), got some of the actual Trek cast to play their TV characters.
But beyond that, it was just pure fun playing those old Text based roleplay games. Sometimes the RP was serious, sometimes we were laughing hysterically in OOC chat, but it was always fun and it kept my typing, grammar, vocabulary and creative writing skills sharp. I miss it.
Usenet.
Another thing I remember from the early 90s was internets with a little ‘i’. I could call a number with my modem and connect to a private system that wasn’t interconnected with the big Internet. These were typically bulletin board systems (BBS). An extension of the BBS concept was the online service, like CompuServe and AOL. Eventually these online services started functioning as internet gateways and that is when the real fun started. Prior to that the Internet was only available to government and academic users.
