What I mostly remember is the sense of hard work and discovery.

In the mid-to-late 1990s, after the internet became a public phenomenon, but before it totally dominated our lives, spending time on the web felt very different than it does today. There was no publicly-accessible index of websites, search was in its infancy, and link aggregators as we know them today just didn’t exist. For the first time, you didn’t need to be a tech-savvy person to experience the WWW, but it was still pretty incomprehensible to most people, who didn’t understand what the internet was for.

New “homesteaders” developed websites on free hosts like GeoCities/Tripod/Angelfire; the former host organized itself into “neighbourhoods” of sites because we still thought about the internet as a physical space. Web rings served as pilgrimage routes that connected websites together, irrespective of domain or host, into self-selected communities. They organized around subjects/themes, like Lemmy communities, subreddits, hashtags, etc. are today. They emerged around the same time as public bulletin boards which, for people who were not familiar with BBS, were also a transformative technology, and also the source of life-changing memories.

I am so privileged to have been around to explore the early internet.

My favourite memory is also one of my funniest.

When I first got my computer Hotmail was the e-mail of choice. Everyone had to have a Hotmail account, it let you use MSN Messenger!

I didn’t write down the spelling, and as a 12-13 year old I typed in “hot male dot com”
Coincidentally that was also one of the first times I realised I’m probably not straight.

How everyone who knew how to had their own personal homepage.

Fan message boards where people actually loved what they were fans of. Now you go onto the internet to talk about that show or game you love and it’s nothing but people shitting on your joy.

Primitive search engines often allowed you to browse websites by topic. You could click on stuff like different music or film genres, specific movie or book titles, or celebrity names, and youd be presented with a list of all websites on that topic.

Since it was the early internet and everyone had multiple personal geocities or angelfire sites, you’d churn up pages upon pages of results for everything. Each search engine produced vastly different results, so you could waste a day on Alta Vista, then go to Excite and do it over again, finding a bunch of different stuff.

I’d spend hours opening websites for shitty (and some surprisingly excellent) bands from all over the world. A handful even went on to real life notoriety.

My biggest flex along those lines is I became a huge fan of AFI in 1992 or 1993 because there were some folks in California writing about the punk scene, and they came up a lot. Sometimes somebody would host 30 second .wav (.ra, maybe?) files recorded on a crappy tape recorder or something from a live show or local radio station. It was a cool time to be young and excited about music.

I made my own website with Microsoft Frontpage. Complete with “under construction” gifs and a visitor counter. I remember constantly refreshing to see if the visitor counter went up. It only ever did when I visited it.

Used to have a ton of fun with Frontpage, used to make simple games and stuff with it. I think I still have some saved on floppy disks.

Downloading a file and after hours of downloading it gets stuck at 99%

GeoCities and spending a whole summer playing Microsoft Ants! on my dad’s computer.

MUD’s - text based mmorpgs

Illucia: the town of Final Fantasy. This was a Final Fantasy fan site, but themed as a town from a Final Fantasy. This isn’t a town ripped out of a particular game though. Illucia was an entirely original town with original art created by fan Tatsushi Nakao.

Before the release of FF7, it was themed after a town from the 16-bit era of Final Fantasy. To navigate the town, the user was presented with a clickable server-side image map, where clicking on different buildings in the town would take the user to a page on the site that was thematically appropriate to the building.

Quick aside: a history lesson on image maps. Image maps were a technique that allowed for a single image to be linked to multiple different places based on where the user clicked it. In the later years of image maps, the web site developer (“webmaster” to use the period-appropriate nomenclature 😜) could define the different clickable areas in HTML and the browser would handle requesting the correct URL based on where the user clicked. This is a client-side image map. Before browsers had this capability though, browsers would instead send the clicked coordinates to a server-side script — often written in Perl, I think — which would translate the coordinates and send back the corresponding page.

Anyway, after the release of FF7, Illucia was reworked in that style. I believe in this iteration, the user would interact with it by using the arrow keys to walk an actual character avatar around the town and enter various buildings rather than clicking on a (relatively) simple image map.

Just like the FF series did, the site sorta lost its luster for me at that point. Final Fantasy had gone from an ensemble cast of quirky but warm characters and brightly colored pixel art to a blue and gray mess of blurry, pre-rendered environments and low-poly brooding characters that looked bad at the time and aged even worse. I pretty much stopped visiting, but I still fondly remember those old pixel art days of Illucia.

Sadly, I haven’t been able to find any trace of it online anymore aside from one brief mention in another online article. If anyone knows of anything, please send it my way!

AOL keyword NICK

BBSes :) Because it was fantastic that we could dial eachothers computers and just share files and chat. Before that every computer were an island.

I feel the same with the fediverse now. The tech can create communities where people can talk without big tech being involved.

John Titor. I wish he’d come back and fix things

I fondly remember spending hours and hours in the T-Online BTX, which looked something like this: https://www.spiegel.de/fotostrecke/btx-jubilaeum-so-sah-der-internet-vorlaeufer-aus-fotostrecke-34503.html

There was this chat “village” themed based around Asterix & Obelix. I think it was the first chat I ever used, so it was magical. My older sister would mostly chat, while I watched. I still remember her handle from back then: Gutemine.

We later found out the chat cost 5ct/min (or 5 Pfennig per minute?)

Collecting AOL CDs to get free minutes. Downloading risque photos on 56k and having your mom pick up the phone and kill your download halfway through. Fun times.

Early chat rooms were really fun, everything was fresh and people were excited with all of the potential and there was no overwhelming corporate bullshit.