Freaks And Geeks
It’s hard to believe the amount of change that the internet brought to the world. And it’s even harder to believe that the internet only became available to the public on a large scale in 1995. In that time, the internet has, in addition to revolutionizing the world as we know it, undergone a technical and cultural evolution from its early days, to what it’s become today.
Most kids these days are used to touch-screen technology and instant apps. However, internet modems used to make a deafeningly crazy startup noise, and tie up your phone line at the same time. Even though that wouldn’t be practical now, it was simply amazing back then. Here are some of the things people remember – occasionally not so fondly – about the early days of the internet…
Shock Value
Back in the years just before the web came forth into the world, it was all geeks and counter-culture freaks – and a much larger proportion of very technical people. No matter what topic the forum was about, there’d be coders active in the group. You’d have to turn over quite a few rocks to find a lot of those people now.
Things were pretty dispersed into niche locations back then. It’s evolved in weird ways. Social media influencers never would’ve seen that coming. Or online shopping becoming what it is. Or all the apps that are so amazingly easy to use. Or can be. It isn’t all for the worst; there’s been a lot of fascinating stuff developed over the years. However, niche sites can still be a great thing, too. Reddit user: TheUniversalSky
Copyright
I really feel like the early internet had way more terrible shock content – like graphic videos of people dying, or getting harmed in horrible ways – than it does now. I feel like people back then would also just troll one another by randomly sending those links to terrible videos they’d seen with just a “you’ve got to see this” type of message on them.
I think it’s because the technology was so new, and never before had terrible things like that been so accessible. I know shock content is still readily available on the internet now, and I don’t personally seek it out, but the sheer proliferation and scope of it back then accounted for an astonishing share of total internet content consumption. Reddit user: PTC36
Wild West
Copyright laws weren’t enforced all that much. In the late 90s, people could put up pretty much whatever they wanted on a website or a forum (or file-sharing network). Although you could only put up whatever the slow 56k connection speed could actually handle; downloading a few songs, or a 4-minute video, took hours and hours to actually finish sometimes.
So even though anything and everything was being shared online, the connection speeds were slow back then, so it was a pain in the butt. Then it got easier when DSL and cable internet became a thing. Also, way more people created their own websites, and got a nice amount of traffic easily. Now that social networking has taken over, personal websites are mostly a thing of the past. Reddit user: Awesomermac
Early YouTube
Do you mean the early days of the internet, or early days of the web? Pre-web, I ran a BBS for several years. I miss the excitement of being part of a small community that was onto something cool, and that almost no one knew about yet (or, in fact, dismissed or ridiculed), and the sense of community where you really all did know each other, and got to watch it all come to life.
Being truly part of something that we knew was big, but no one else seemed to realize it yet. The Wild West element was amazing, too – I was part of the early hacking/phreaking community, and that was a very special time. The web (and its maturity) brought many gifts, but it (obviously) hasn’t been universally positive. Oh, and ANSI art. I miss ANSI art. Reddit user: cosmictap
Personal Web Pages
All you needed was a person, a webcam, and a guitar. Those were my absolute favorite YouTube videos, and they’re all dated between 2006 and 2010 pretty much. There’s no intro, and no talking, and no monetization; it was just people belting their hearts out covering their favorite songs and sharing them, while random people were walking through the room – or, they’d mess up and start again.
Or there’d just be people rocking out in the background, or it’d be filmed with a party going on. The computer was always on a desk in a shared room in the house, so you always got a good view behind – it was like a little window into someone else’s life. No studio lighting or expensive backdrops, with those IKEA box shelves filled with light-up junk and sponsored whatever. Reddit user: cara27hhh
MSN
Searching for something and getting several results that were just people’s personal web pages, which they’d made because they liked the topic. I still remember searching for stuff about Star Wars action figures, and finding Wise Acres. There’s not much on the page now (the Star Wars stuff is all at rebel scum now), but it still has the old-timey internet look.
He also used to have a live webcam feed of him in his office; you could click a button, and it’d notify him, and he’d wave at the camera. I think we traded, or maybe I bought some action figures from him. Just stuff like that in general, when it was people making sites about their interests for the fun of it, rather than trying to build their brand or whatever. Reddit user: jimdandy19
Forum Culture
I remember MSN, the fact that you had to save every single gif anyone sent you manually, and that you could program which letter or number combination they’d get on your screen. It became a sport to have as many as possible. My girlfriends and I would start to say goodbye about five minutes before we actually had to go.
This way, we could mindlessly high-speed type all of our usual 40 glittery, shiny, and moving images of kisses and “love you” and XxXxxXX, and everything else under the sun. I really miss those times. Oh, and logging on and off again and again, so hopefully your crush would notice you were online, and reach out to you. Reddit user: Loesje2303
Boutique Websites
I miss the helpful forums that had a sense of community. I mean, you had to dig for it, but you’d find these forums where you could ask for advice on stuff (be it gaming, writing, movies, whatever), and they were like these little insulated worlds. Like picking up a rock and watching what all was underneath it, and it was this whole thing you’d never seen before.
There were big names that cycled around the forums, and everyone ended up knowing everyone else after a while. Now it seems every forum I enter is just a bunch of people yelling at each other. There’s no sense of community. There’s no need for it. People wander in for like two days, then vanish completely. I miss that community feel. Reddit user: Captain_Shrug
Logging Off
You don’t see smaller, independent websites much anymore. The average internet experience is now Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, Amazon, maybe Twitch. There’s nothing wrong with that, of course, but when I think back to the early web, before big tech companies got their hands on everything, it just seemed less streamlined. The internet’s been made smaller by people wanting to limit users to their content.
I used to go on a great website called student.com; it was very much early social media, but it felt nothing like Facebook – it felt more like somebody trying to create a community. The admins spoke to the users, not just about site stuff, but just general chat. It felt more like the Wild West – like there was stuff to explore. Now it’s just something to scroll down on your smartphone. Reddit user: Skryptix
Down The Rabbit Hole
This might sound needlessly convoluted, but I miss when there was a clear divide between being online and offline. When going online was something you had to commit to. You’d be writing a Word document, or playing a game or whatever offline, but would decide, “I want to go online now to look something up,” and would have to click connect.
The “always online” thing does annoy me a little. I remember buying Skyrim in 2011 (probably the last boxed PC game I ever bought) and being annoyed to find – when I installed it – that I had to open it through Steam. I figured Steam was a platform for playing online multiplayer games, so why would you need it for a locally installed single-player game? Reddit user: flameylamey
Window To The World
What I miss is how mysterious the internet could be, and how gullible we were. The internet felt like this strange underbelly of obscure information. First, you’re growing up in some little town in the middle of nowhere, and only know about Star Wars and Green Day. Then suddenly, you’re finding niche websites, and reading about all these obscure movies and bands.
You’d find dedicated fan sites that had deleted scenes from Alien that you’d never even known existed! You’d find bizarre paranormal websites, where every story felt so real and believable. Every low-res UFO and ghost picture could seem real. Every story was accepted as true. I read the Ted the Caver GeoCities page back then at 2:00 in the morning, and was totally convinced it was real. Reddit user: CountMecha
Kinder World
People have already mentioned IRC and chat rooms, but not specifically how it used to be; you’d go online and find people, not from your life/town/country, and you’d find them via shared specific interests and become friends who’d talk regularly, sometimes even as a community. I have a couple of decades-long friendships with people I’ve only met once or twice – or never.
Nowadays, Facebook slaps your real-world in your face; Twitter has every public figure you could want on it; Reddit comment sections might as well be tamer YouTube comments. And even if you find a place that’s like the old days, it’s still a signal-to-noise ratio of your whole online experience that’s not strong enough to work as it did back then. Reddit user: madrex
Niche Interests
People seemed a lot more kind and easygoing even in online gaming; it wasn’t as toxic or full of racial slurs and rage. Memes had a longer shelf life, too. Now meme’s last for like two weeks max, and then they’re old news/thought of as unfunny – like the “show me the way” knuckles stuff, which vanished as quickly as it arrived.
People just liked being able to connect with others from all over the world, and it was mesmerizing to just have a chat about the weather, or food, with someone living thousands of miles away. All of that is just taken for granted by everyone nowadays; there are just far too many angry keyboard warriors around now, who only enjoy themselves if they’re insulting someone. Reddit user: fabulin
Printing Press
I remember dial-up, Yahoo! chat rooms, emoticons (not emojis), and AOL. Also, the old Facebook and MySpace. Ah, nostalgia. I never experienced any of this for myself, but I did hear that it was a whole lot smaller, with more niches, and such. Forums were mostly good, and not dead places that are completely empty like today (for the most part).
So much crazy stuff would happen, and only people “in the know” (i.e., people online) would hear about it. A la: John Titor. Fun fact: John Titor predicted the rise of the internet and Wi-Fi in the early ‘00s. I missed the simplicity. You had to go on a desktop PC to go online. No iPods or phones or tablets. Reddit user: [redacted]
Forum Culture
What I miss is a kind of “golden age” when people would, yes, use forums (Usenet, etc.) for conversations, but also had a web presence that they themselves owned and curated. Now, I realize that people can still do that if they want, but back then, there was real infrastructure for that kind of thing. Stuff like webrings, and large, curated indexes (like Yahoo!).
It was like everyone had their own printing press, and access to information was heavily democratized. But then people decided they no longer wanted to own their own printing press. They wanted other people to own it, and put ads around their content, and decide which content the other people would likely wish to see, but they could promote your content if you paid them. Reddit user: Morphon
Forgotten Websites
I miss being able to discuss stuff on IMDb (before they shut their message boards off a few years ago, so random people can’t write opinions), or going to some random romantic advice forum, getting banned from that with a small group of other like-minded individuals, creating our own site, that site going downhill, and creating another and so on, until people started fading out.
I miss all of the forums, and that’s honestly the main reason I’m on Reddit. I never really used Reddit until about two years ago (and have since had a few accounts), but Reddit – with all of its niche sub-forums – feels like the old school internet/social media of the early and mid-2000s that I miss so much. Reddit user: BigBearSD
Pre-YouTube
Grooveshark! People uploaded whatever the heck music they wanted, and then other people listened to whatever the heck they wanted, with whatever playlists you wanted to make out of whatever music other people put up. It was absolutely awesome to be able to play around with. Especially with your brand new smartphone with unlimited data and streaming (since this is way back when).
Also, I think this is still kind of “earlier internet,” but I loved the heck out of YTMND.com, and no one seems to remember this site. I frequented that, and Bash.org, for a while; Bash’s still around, but the humor sometimes only makes sense to that time frame and earlier, because of the technologies people talked about (and on.). Reddit user: thewoodcharles
Internet Phone Book
Watching videos on the internet wasn’t a normal thing at all, and when you did, the quality was usually horrendous. I don’t remember watching a video on a website until 2002, but you could download them with Kazaa/Limewire before then. I got the internet at home in the late ‘90s, and stuff like internet journalism, discussion forums, and so on was barely in its infancy.
Usually, the only way you’d interact with a site was through its guestbook (which most websites had, as well as a visitor counter). The online culture was way different, too. The average age of users was much higher than it is now, and things were so much more civil compared to the wantonly rude and abusive nature of today’s internet. Reddit user: Jakabov
Dating
I remember when we bought a book called The Internet Yellow Pages or something like that, which was basically a phone book, but instead of phone numbers, it was the addresses of the most interesting sites on the internet. I think it’s crazy that at the time, the majority of functional and useful websites on the internet could be contained in a single 200-page volume.
That may still be true, but with different implications (if I were to make a list of functional and useful websites, it might only be a list of 10 sites). I wonder how many 200-page phone book-sized volumes it’d take to list every web page in existence, and how fast new volumes would have to be published to keep up. Reddit user: putnut01
Role-Playing
The biggest thing I remember was when internet dating was starting to take off. I was in my early-mid 20’s in the late ‘90s, and remember how internet dating couldn’t come soon enough, because I had absolutely no game in ‘real life.’ Back then, you had to settle for crappy, low-res scans of some girl’s high school yearbook photo.
And that’s if you were lucky, or an even worse low-res CMOS webcam-still, taken in a dark bedroom, since real digital cameras weren’t common yet. There weren’t any social media networks, so you couldn’t really ‘background check’ them, either before you contacted them or met them. There was a lot of rolling the dice when it came to meeting girls back then. Reddit user: AberrantCheese
Wrestling
I remember all of the old role-playing rooms in the arts section of the AOL chat rooms. What a trip! I remember the role-playing combat – the A/D attack/defense system, where if you had 20/20 AD (20 attacks and 20 defenses), it meant you were committed to writing at least 20 words in any attack or 20 words in any defense.
If someone attacked you, you had to write your defense role-play faster than they’d write another attack, or some crap like that, so you could “negate” their attack and turn the role-play around. Of course, there was way more to it than combat, but it was still a blast. I wonder if anyone around here participated in those old chats. I’m sure someone on Reddit was there! Reddit user: [redacted]
Brave New World
When I was into wrestling at age 12 or 13, there used to be wrestling forums where you created a character’s bio and posted two or three posts a week, as if you were the wrestler. You’d challenge other wrestlers, and they’d respond. The posts would be done out in full detail, from how the lights went during your entrance music to everything you said in the ring.
Then once a week, the guy who ran the site (and who had a character who ran the wrestling biz similar to Vince McMahon’s character) would write up a weekly card. He’d do a full detailed fight, and the winner would be based on whose post was more creative and interesting to read. There were all the usual titles, like world champion and hardcore champion. It was great. Reddit user: [redacted]
Trolling
The “newness” of it was great. Before internet commerce was a thing; when URLs were huge because they were in some back folder on a university server; and 14.4 modems ruled the cyber seas. When GeoCities started, it was the bomb to have your own little piece of the new territory. It was like being on TV, but for the masses.
And all of the information you could find out there, like finding a site (GeoCities or other) where someone with a passion for something would have all this information out there, or finding people with similar hobbies to you. Also, interlaced GIFs where you were never sure if whatever was on there was starting to get any sharper or not. Reddit user: did_you_read_it
Family Sharing
It has to be the level of trolling. People talk about trolling now, but we took it to a new level within about six months of having the internet. We were on AOL, pretty much one of the first batches of UK customers. They had their own chat rooms that weren’t ‘on the net,’ as you could only access them through AOL.
It didn’t take long to start winding strangers up and then, of course, pretending to be people that you weren’t. It was so easy to find someone gullible, and lead them on a merry dance for an hour or two; gradually making it less and less plausible, but belly laughing at those who swallowed it hook, line, and sinker. Those were great days. Reddit user: [redacted]
First Website
I had two stepbrothers during the early internet days, and the older one’s mom got a computer, and AOL. I remember the first time I dialed up. He started to IM his friends online, and my other stepbrother and I saw it as the absolute nerdiest thing in the whole world. We used to rib him constantly for doing it.
Back then, you were considered a severe dork if you used the internet for anything. Also, from the moment he got it, that sucker was glued to the computer for hours on end. Eventually, we got Warcraft 2 and then Warcraft 3, and it was over for all three of us. We had to rotate on one computer; we each had two-hour limits on there. Reddit user: [redacted]
Need For Speed
Getting a modem and internet service for the first time, and being able to send an email to my cousin on the other side of the world and instantly hear back from him, was amazing. eWorld –am I the only person in the world who still remembers that? Making my first website, together with my brother – it was a Star Trek: The Next Generation fan site.
Saving up all the money we got from taking care of neighbors’ pets and yards in the summer, and going to the MIT Swapfest to try and buy everything we’d need in order to have a LAN party – and then actually having LAN parties. I have fond childhood memories of the internet the way other women have memories of Barbies and ponies, I think. Reddit user: VividLotus
Early Blogs
I’ve been “online” for a long time, so I have lots of favorites. I was a sysop long ago, during the BBS heyday. I remember trying to get my BBS set up as a Fidonet hub. I miss my 486dx2/66. I remember the first time I saw an animated GIF. It was of Charlie Chaplin dancing on an AOL movie page.
I remember giving my friend a copy of an old DOS program called 1TO1. It was a dialer that called another computer, so two people could “chat” – basically, a dial-up notepad two people could use at the same time. I remember ordering an upgrade EPROM for my Zoom 24k modem – that rocketed me to the blazing fast speed of 28.8KBPS! Reddit user: darthphunk
Connection
I miss those early days, and it feels like everything was more impressive than what we have now. Of course, it was far from perfect, but I feel like that’s what made it so awesome. Again, I was so thankful for even getting a chance to play with other people, and now it’s the standard. Everyone made pages on GeoCities, and called it “their website.”
Getting 20 people to sign your guestbook felt like an accomplishment, and people made hilarious pages. Everyone would go to Death-Clock and check to see when they were going to die – lots of blogs popped up, and some hilarious websites. I’ll never forget ojobojo.com. It was a guy who just talked about everything. People would IM him on AOL, and then he’d post the conversations on the internet, trying to make the people look like idiots. Reddit user: Xecutor
Respectability
Being a teenager and getting into heated arguments on forums over inane topics was awesome. Because you knew you’d stick around and keep interacting with the same people, the ‘stakes’ were higher, and people would recall things you’d said from months or even years prior, etc. Other people would weigh-in, and you’d get all-out factional posting warfare breaking out.
In gaming, you’d log onto a server and play with the same people a few times, and then you’d add each other on MSN Messenger or ICQ. I have a handful of good friends that I still talk to today from this era. Modern internet, despite the fast connectivity, which’s never been better, feels much shallower than in the earlier days. Reddit user: varzatv
MSN Groups
Today’s internet feels too much like a suburban shopping mall. It’s crowded, expensive, and homogenized. Nothing is extreme in any way. You find the same stores, same food courts, same Muzak, and same products everywhere. Run or yell or act too rowdy, and security will escort you out. Yes, it’s nice and comfortable, it feels safe, but it’s boring and bland.
The internet at the turn of the century felt like a flea market in a very large port city. Something for everyone – a lawless frontier. Nobody called you out for anything, you could be true to your craziest self, and everybody understood that you were just having fun. Everybody indulged their most petty obsessions. Every click discovered a new universe. Reddit user: Penguin-Pete
AOL Servers
I was on MSN groups a lot of the time. I kind of do miss that HTML-style of making pages. Plus, the option of the list on the side was nice. You could make everyone in the group an admin, or just a select few. You could make sections devoted to different themes, and give them message boards. Very early on, it also had a chat-box option for members.
Also, I remember there was a sort of card or note sort of thing that let members add info on to the site if they weren’t admins. It wasn’t perfect, and had flaws. Likely it’d be very dated these days. But I still want something just like it back. Not sure if it’s nostalgia back to my teens speaking, or really missing something that no longer exists. Reddit user: [redacted]
UK Print Job
In the mid-90s, I lived with my mom in the Chicago suburbs. Sounds great, right? Well, we had AOL, which meant you had to dial-up to their server to get online (and it wasn’t really the internet, it was more like a walled garden). Back then, the Chicago phone company had toll charges for any calls made outside of your specific suburb.
AOL didn’t have any servers in my township of Palatine – the closest AOL server was one or two townships away. But I didn’t care, and so I would stay up to all hours of the night, playing on the internet. My mom would ream me when I ran up a $200+ phone bill each month just by using AOL’s service. Reddit user: regular_gonzalez
Internet Speed
Back in 1995, I got my first computer that had a modem at home, and got on the internet for the first time. I remember my best friend came over – he was obsessed with The Cure – and he made me go searching to find a complete discography (he’d heard a rumor that on the internet there existed a complete discography of The Cure on vinyl).
I found this UK site with this text file that was a discography of The Cure. I printed it out, and it ended up being something like 58 pages; it literary took hours to download and print. We were panicking because we thought we were making a long-distance call to the UK, and we COULDN’T STOP THE PRINT JOB. We waited for over three hours while the job printed out. Reddit user: ahydell
Safety
To give an idea of just how slow the internet was back then – I once reformatted a friend’s computer for her. I needed to install the driver for the scanner. It took me about 30 to 45 minutes to get to the page where it could be downloaded. Not because I couldn’t find it, but because that’s how long each page took to load.
Only after a page completely loaded could you click on your link to get to the next page. There was no Google to simply type in ‘driver for scanner ABC,’ you had to go to the manufacturer’s site and find it there. After I finally arrived at the download link and clicked it, we went to dinner at a restaurant 10 minutes away. We came back after eating, and the 2-MB files were still only halfway done. Reddit user: cptnamr7
Advertising
You had to think more, and it was more fool-proof. For example, if you wanted to put a picture of yourself online, you had to have a camera or borrow one, take the picture, go home and download it into your computer, upload it, and wait until it was done. This was way safer for teens than what we have now.
I’m sure that everybody was taking embarrassing pictures of themselves then too, but you just couldn’t put it online with a tap from anywhere. As an example, I had a girl in my class who was filmed at a party. It was 2005. The video was lost on someone’s old phone. Were this to happen now, her life would’ve been ruined. Back then, it stayed as a rumor, and maybe 20 people saw it. Reddit user: xcst
Forum Users
I miss the absence of advertising shoved in every orifice. I can’t randomly research anything now without getting aggressively targeted ads. Look, I was just checking out some pictures of the Appalachians. I don’t want to book a vacation in North Carolina at the present moment. Let me check up on my high school friends on Facebook in peace and quiet.
I feel like my favorite haunt has gotten over-commercialized. If the internet used to be like a big park with grass and trees and someone selling ice cream, it’s now a strip mall with a huge parking lot, and a bunch of billboards advertising the same brands as everywhere else. I know I’m getting middle-aged and cranky, but, yeah. Reddit user: BlueTuxedoCat
Concentration
Reddit is fine, but the internet as a whole is honestly so big compared to what came before that all the positive stuff I liked from 15 or 20 years ago is drowned out nowadays. You’d go to your favorite forum, where there were regulars, in-jokes, and mods/admins that people liked running the show. There were even trolls that people put up with one way or another.
I’m not going to go rose-tinted glasses here, because it also led to problems with mods/admins asleep at the wheel, meaning annoying catchphrases or disruptive users went unpunished for WAY too long. That’s not to mention the problem with elitism, where a handful of users were able to lord over the whole forum, and if anyone spoke out about them, their sycophants would drown them out. Reddit user: Noggin-a-Floggin
Video Loading Speed
We’ve had our senses blown out by information overload, and the corporations have successfully bought out enough talent to make really independent artists less than meaningless to most people. As an artist, this is a pretty darn harsh time to face the music. But face it we must. And I’m not even talking about myself alone in thinking this.
There are innovative and talented people sidelined by the sheer enormousness of the creative market. It’s not really that indie artists were in a much better place 20 years ago, but they were seen as the innovators they are, instead of as “failures” who “need more followers” so they can “monetize.” Innovation is constantly pushed into the box of “How can a mega-corporation benefit from this?” Reddit user: Maxeemtoons
Window To The World
You couldn’t go online before 6:00 pm, because it was very expensive. You went on after the phone rates went down for the evening. Frames were big. I used to use the AltaVista search engine, and I loved it because it kept your search at the side while you looked at what you’d searched for in the mainframe. I think I’d hate that now, though.
When video became a thing, flash cartoons were the bomb because they loaded up first and then played smoothly, although sometimes you had to drop the quality if your PC wasn’t fast enough. When streaming started, like YouTube, you selected your two to four minute video, paused it, and went off for a cup of tea or something while it loaded its blurry, low-res awesomeness. Reddit user: Rorkimaru
Newsgroups
It was freaking awesome for the time. Granted, looking back (especially all of you younglings), it looks like we were using rocks and plugging monitors into trees, but it was still freaking awesome. I remember purchasing my first x386 for like $1,400, and I remember waiting outside of Wal-Mart at like midnight for the first shipments of external 28.8k modems.
This period was when we were introduced to the world right from the comfort of our living rooms. I was in awe of AOL, and especially the chat rooms. God, I wasted so much time in those AOL chat rooms. I think I spent most of my time when I was 22 online (for $2.00 an hour, mind you). Reddit user: [redacted]
Most of what you see now, with 4chan, Reddit, and Tumblr, all derived from newsgroups. Newsgroups were the big thing back in the 90s, and into the very early 2000s (2000 to 2002). Most newsgroup subscribers used their email accounts to post or reply to posts on the newsgroup. Many of those newsgroups have since migrated to PHPBB message forums, or more modern sites.
As for chat rooms, most of those were hosted by a parent site or server, and only members of that site could join the chat rooms. You were required to have an account with the parent site, but the account included an email with the parent site’s server. So if you wanted to join an MSN chat room, you had to have an MSN or Hotmail email address. Reddit user: PatrickRsGhost