Wanted to ask you about this article, how do you remember the early days of the internet (I was sadly too young at that time). Do you wish it back? And do you think it can ever be like that again? I would be very interested
MSN Messenger, Angelfire, Geocities, marquee tags, flame gifs.
And forums, of course. Music forums, mostly. The dopamine hit when you posted enough to achieve the next “rank”. Scrolling flame text in your signature.
I was 9 and had a cringy fan website for my favourite band. I used it to practice HTML and JavaScript (which blew my mind). HTML frames were the subject of a holy war at the time, so I had separate versions of the homepage, one using frames and one without. I would spam the (very few) visitors to my site with alerts and prompts.
Every now and again I would get random emails from (real) people around the world asking me to check out their band or their website etc. And most of the time they were actually good (by my standards at the time).
There was also, of course, the dreaded click which indicated your connection had been lost, most probably because someone had picked up the phone. So you’d have to reconnect and listen to that screechy dial-up sound.
AOL Voice: “Goodbye!”
“MOOOOOOOOOOOOOM! HANG UP THE PHONE!”
oh-god-oh-god-oh-god… FRAMES. I had forgotten all about that shit show. It seemed to bring out the Bigendians and Littleendians in everyone. So much screaming. Frames, man.
Off the top of my head, I miss that games used to have LAN play built in, and you could use apps like Kali to play ipx games over the Internet with a built in community
In 3 letters:
“a/s/l?”16/f/Cali
Always.
Which always meant 35/m/detroit basement
But those guys were fun to talk to nonetheless.
And then you would openly answer that you were ten. And then a 16yr old would offer to date you on Runescape.
I actually really miss topic-oriented chat rooms. I know they don’t seem to be liked/used at all whenever a site adds the ability, but back during AIM they were really the coolest.
I thought it was so fun to just go see what kinds of rooms someone had opened that day, or sit and listen to people. I could talk to complete strangers about my hobbies and we would even learn from each other, and often continue talking for months to a year.
I wasn’t exactly allowed to have friends, or in fact even speak to non-family, so the ability to socialize like that so often in my free time and then eventually come to know regulars at a favorite forum meant everything to me.
This was also way before all this shit, when (at least in my neck of the woods) being as clear and civil as possible, accepting nuance, and providing viewpoints/links were considered far more important than “whoever incites the mob first doesn’t get doxxed.”
I credit what debating skills I have entirely to the amount of time spent lurking on the forum and watching two specific users fight each other every time they met.
You should get on discord! It’s like the instant messenger of our youth but with more features. You can find a discord for every hobby.
I’ve been on discord for almost a decade, lmao. Appreciate it. Unfortunately, my experience with “a discord for every hobby:”
• Two thousand general servers. Your theme is 18+, furry, 6th grade goth/weeb, or all three.
• Remainder don’t have a description, or don’t have a name/description that’s at all explanatory.
• Whatever server you do join will either start out snubbing the newcomer (dealing with that now), will already be dead (half my list), or WILL, without question or exception, die in 6-12 months (the other half).
The last time I went looking for hobby groups, the only server in existence I could find for one of my favorite games seemed active as hell, and was entirely in a language I wouldn’t be able to converse in. I’m still upset like a year later.
I also think, generally, it hits a spot that’s close to that, but it’s not quite that, in large part for the server lifespan thing. They’re expected to be more stable, but because of that, joining them feels like a bigger commitment than popping into a random AIM chat for 2 secs. Leaving one is a big statement.
I’m curious whether this might be a reason places just end up as a husk instead of seeing new blood like a revolving door like one would have expected.
There’s a whole server-specific atmosphere sometimes, some of them have miles of updating rules and other have none. I joined one semi-recently that had a trigger board paragraphs long and while I would be fine with any one of those individually, I was amused and horrified to find the specific combination of member-submitted triggers left me completely unable to talk about my life.
90% of my existence, past and present, was upsetting to someone, and all I could do was talk about birds or something and send extremely careful memes while I waited to be yelled at.
Everyone’s known each other for a while but the standard format REALLY doesn’t lend itself to in-depth discussion as much as it does to chatting, which pushes the subject higher out of sight. Meaning the usual scenario is a place for a bunch of longtime friends to get together and talk, as long as they’re talking about absolutely nothing of import. Which is fine for a good while.
Creating threads is a thing now, but I’ve never seen anyone use them aside from to harass a user or see what they did, and no one wants the amount of threads a forum typically has, crammed into a discord menu.
I’m not aiming for slander, if I couldn’t stand it I wouldn’t have been in it for so long. But it really is the bastard love child of forums and chat and the combination carries some drawbacks if you’re hoping for either one.
Ah yes. Back when people were entirely willing to dox themselves in a chat room with a bunch of strangers, in the hopes that maybe you could engage in some “cyber.”
I’d hardly call it doxxing, especially since you lied like 95% of the time about at least one of those things lol
I certainly don’t miss all the exploits, viruses, and general lack of security. Security and privacy online are very recent. Back in the day, everything was transmitted in plain text and browsers and extensions were full of holes that were easily exploited. Your computer could get a virus just by opening a webpage.
Yeah in like 2010 or 2012 I discovered an old laptop with windows 98 on it. I put it in network and went to a rather known website which delivered warez (cracks) with old internet explorer to experiment and just by loading the page you could tell this windows installation was gone. IIRC correctly the screen was instantly flooded with windows message boxes and shit. I anticipated and unplugged the Ethernet cable in like 2 seconds. Laptop froze and never booted up again.
I miss the dial-up sound. I can’t really put into words why. It was like looking at a progress bar I guess.
I also miss hosting, just because it was the few things I could organize without having to like…organize I guess. Like the group just needed someone who could figure out how to get it to work.
Like the other guy said, written FAQs. Used to go onto gameFAQs all the time. I still go there sometimes, though it’s only really useful for old games now.
I dunno where everyone is getting all this ad-less crap from. This was before adblock and even before a lot of spyware/malware protection was implemented. Modern ads still aren’t as aggravating as getting Windows System Alert ads. And that stuff could be put onto your PC so easily…
I always liked the dial-up sound. I don’t know why it’s so often reviled. Yes, it sounds like multiple minutes of demonic screeching being played backwards, but it was my demonic screeching. It was the sound that meant you were about to have fun.
Traversing web and ftp sites by simple, progressive, suffix removal from the address. Sometimes very interesting what showed up that way. Security was spotty, an afterthought often.
Its not super early but I miss the big days of Flash Games. A plethora of passionate games all at your fingertips. My heart goes out to all the developers that made that possible.
Look up flashpoint. Bring your nostalgia to life.
Does it run in Firefox?
Its a separate program. Basically flashpoint is an archive portal. Or you can download the whole x number of TB yourself.
Any Stick RPG players out there? Xgen Studios had quite a few classic flash games.
USENET
Specifically, alt.hacks, which concerned ways to simplify computing (as it was called) tasks - or everyday life tasks, too.
Especially the ob-hack.
There was a rule that to stay on topic, every post had to have a hack of some sort. An obligatory hack, or “ob-hack”. So a fun sort of footnote to postings quickly evolved, as follows:
"…and that’s how a bill becomes a law, and why so much of the Internet has already been privatized.
ob-hack: connect the turbo case button to the enable/disable pins on an option card to reclaim the IRQ or interrupt."
“You the man now dog!”
When you jumped on to chat (IRC) you didn’t get pressured into upgrading to nitro (Discord)… IRC is still around but all the nice free networks have been decimated in acquisitions and other things… there are still a lot of great Niche communities if you look hard however.
90s, slow (56kb/s) and expansive (4$/h) connection, PC was an instrument to do a single specific search at day without distractions. That’s all. Game change was the subscription to monthly plans and speed up to 2mb/s.
Salad Fingers and Flash games. Always a fun time. Diablo til 1AM then ripping the power chord out suddenly when mom screamed, “Go to bed!”. Power chord was also ripped on jump scare videos. Lazy daisy in a lemonade swimming pool and I blow smoke out my ears.
AOL chat rooms with strangers. Meeting my step-sister online first. Learning what a stuck up bitch she was as early as the response, “glasses???”
Downloading crazy shit on Limewire. Ruining computers. Also my mom sitting up for hours on message boards, for boy band fan clubs. Me getting a Livejournal and making friends with a lot of shit that in retrospect was wildly inappropriate for a teen. Also making up shit about my brother in Livejournal that my family would read and act upon. Oops. Sorry bro.
Also that angry note he left me after taking the blame, “I know what websites you’ve been to you ‘Playboy’ you.”
Anyway, I put on my robe and wizard hat.
It used to be much more decentralized, peaceful, not-for-profit. No systematic tracking (No GA.js). No affiliate/Google Ad infestation.
Individual users had their own small, cozy, hobby websites, not for monetizing - purely writing about whatever they were personally interested in, not trying to increase page views. A lot of good, pure, text-based websites, which perfectly worked without JavaScript nor cookies. Early webmasters were able to type clean HTML directly and fluently using a plain text editor, not depending on centralized platforms, so page load was super-fast, not bloated.
Individual users themselves owned the Internet, so to speak; were not owned by centralized platforms.
@Provider
I miss Listerv culture. I grew up with mimeographed APA fanzines, and mailing lists were the most pure implementation of that kind of community on the Internet.Seemed like any interest, no matter how obscure, had a welcoming Listerv community online. If you knew how to find it.
So many of these responses about the “early days of the internet” are talking about websites.
Does WWW really count as “the early internet?”
Good grief I’m old.
I mean, what do you want? People to talk about dialing into bulletin boards?
@Dubious_Fart Technically not the internet, most of them… but YES!
Now where did I put that list of FidoNet nodes…
