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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This site is under construction gif of guy with shovel
Geocities, angelfire, tripod!
Yup, even own personal using HTML
“Badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger, mushroom mushroom!”
That was a banger! Then go over to zombo.com for the chillout
The earwormy gateway drug to the world of Weebl and Bob.
“Mmm… Pie”
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.
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
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…
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.
Fondest memories are of using mIRC late in the night while listening to WinAmp.
That really whips the llama’s ass.
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.
When search was bad, finding something cool on the internet felt like finding buried treasure.
I’ll always remember Illucia: The Town of Final Fantasy. It was a Final Fantasy fansite started by some college student (I assume since it was hosted on some university’s web hosting; maybe UC Santa Barbara?) named Tatsushi Nakao in the early 90s. The page greeted you with original art of a pixelated Final Fantasy style town. You could click on various buildings to go to sections of the site. It felt like a place, and it was fun to explore.
I remember the Quake web community in the mid 90s — a bunch of web sites, sometimes linked together and sometimes not — all with Quake-related content. Large portal sites would organize around interests, and they would seek out smaller sites about niche parts of that interest, bringing them into the fold to offer hosting and services. PlanetQuake is the one I remember most around Quake. The PlanetQuake site was a place you’d go to get the latest Quake news, but then they also hosted more niche sites.
The first practical “programming” I ever did was in Quake macros… and that’s probably a major part of why I have the career I have today. There was a whole site dedicated to Quake macros (probably hosted on PlanetQuake, but I can no longer say for certain) that helped me get started and even helped me along when I got stuck.
I recall another site which I believe was called the House of Mouse which existed solely to extoll the virtues of the keyboard/mouse control scheme for Quake. When Quake was released, the prevailing way to control a shooter was with the arrow keys on the keyboard. Doom guy wasn’t able to look up or down, so the mouse wasn’t necessary. (You could control Doom with the mouse, but moving the mouse forward caused Doom guy to walk forward. It was a terrible way to play!) Hence the need to convince people to play with the mouse and keyboard.
I miss the early web. Smaller communities like this, Tildes, and Mastodon give me those same vibes again.
I just miss websites that didn’t move crap around as they loaded, so when you go to click on something it moves out from under your mouse (and sometimes makes you click on something else).
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I remember playing the heck out of http://ambar.darklights com
It was a text based strategy game, people used to break the game using math to compute for the optimal best combinations of troops to land ratio. I wasn’t very good at it but i enjoyed it.
Omg forum signatures.
I remember on one forum I visited, people would do these “scavenger hunt”/puzzle things, where they would encode some sort of clue in an image in their signature. Like in the corner of the blue background, there’s a grid of pixels of slightly different shades of blue, and if you treat the lighter blues as 1s and the darker as 0s, and decode it as ASCII, it’ll give you a URL to another image, which has another clue, this time a math puzzle, etc…The first person to “solve” the signature would DM the answer, and they would edit the signature with a leaderboard of usernames who solved it.
And people would get crazy creative with it! It was a lot of fun.
That sounds like a blast! I had so much fun making my own signature and exploring what people had done with theirs.
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”.
