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IRC when it was truly big and building your own homepage at Geocities
It being much less busy with the general populace and corporation
E-mail pen pals. I made friends from all over the world, it was a great way to get to know other people and their culture. Writing huge e-mails about where you're from and what life is like where you live. Because you usually only write one every couple of days, it was something to look forward to.
I guess social media kind of ruined that part, why write to someone when you can just post it for the whole world to see.
I miss flash games.
I miss the HTML chats. It was like a whole world to explore.
@Provider Search. Can't find anything these days. I get so frustrated with the results being completely irrelevant and or obvious ads. I used to get 100 pages of results and have to narrow my search with operants like AND or "specific phrases". I used to feel like I had all this knowledge at my fingertips if I could just word it right. Much of it is still out there, I'll just never find it
This Tumblr post has some helpful links
https://www.tumblr.com/myalgias/721490730516922368/cea-tide-ladyshinga-im-sorry-friends-but
I remember the pre-facebook era, it was about the same as now just less visually appealing. Ads were worse; they were able to redirect people to pay per view (on your phone bill) sites without notice; if you had a windows pc viruses could literally be installed by visiting a website; installing crackz was a gamble of wether you were infecting your pc or actually getting o play a game; downloads took an entire night and a day for an album; albums actually were sold per song; songs cost money; YouTube didnβt exist so TV was god; we called Friends via landline and listend to them to walk down the stairs as their mother held the apparatus in their hand, waiting to be relieved from her duty. That and most of my now bosses made most of their money scamming people and their competitors. Itβs much more civilized now - trust me
I remember just the sheer wonder and awe. The raw thrill of exploration.. It hadnt been corprotized yet, So there wasnt any real ads or anything. Just a vast existence that felt like raw, unexplored territory, every keystroke unveiling a new and wonderous world hidden just behind the next hill.
Websites had visitor counters, which further enforced the thrill of exploration when you stumbled upon a website that had a visitor counter in the single or double digits. Discovering the bleeding edges of human civilization, where a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a percent had dared to tread.
The raw exhilaration of it all causing time to seemingly stop for you, until you realize 36 hours has past in the blink of an eye, and suddenly crash for 12+ hours of sleep.
There is no magic to the web anymore. Its just..a utility. Boring, and sterile. Dangers more from the corporatization and ads thananything else. Changing constantly only in the pursuit of shifting trends expressly and only for the purpose of improving metrics.. because getting 30,000 hits that'll never come back looks better than 5,000 people that regularly engage.
God fucking hell I'm depressed as fuck now.
Visit counters! That was such a big thing for a while.
And does anyone remember web rings?
Webrings were so great. Never knew where it was gonna take you next.
A great way to discover new websites before search engines were a real thing.
God I wish I could go back 30+ years and experience the fresh and innocent internet again.
but at least my depressions increased, so I got that going for me.
IRC and playing Warcraft βonlineβ by dialing my friendβs house. One time we messed with a telnet client. That was neat.
You guys remember pMachine (evolved into ExpressionEngine)? That shit blew my mind when I got it installed. No more Adobe Pagemaker.
Did anyone else play digimon quest to save the net? That was one of the first online games I played on dial up.
@Provider Written recipes where you didn't have any images or photos and didn't have to scroll down 14 pages of life story.
Just require a list of ingredients (using metric weights as only about 2 countries in the world use spoons and cups as a measure and every cook has scales), followed by a list of actions with time and temperatures where required.
Before the internet, there was this thing called Fidonet which is a BBS that also allowed transferring files. It was such amazing technology at the time. You had your computer connect to the network using an acoustic modem and then at 300 baud you were on a very early version of a peer-to-peer network.
I loved all the creative free geocities and angelfire websites other people made for their cyberpets and fandoms.
Java chat applet embedded in niche websites