What do you remember about the earlier days of the internet?

These sounds
[youtube=https://youtu.be/gsNaR6FRuO0]

Better than now. 30 minute commercial with 5 minutes music.

I started using the internet in 1998 at the age of 8-9. Our teacher showed us how it works and how you can literally connect and get any information out of it. We used to remember the names of certain websites or domains to access those. I didn’t learn about google search till I was 12. I used VLC media player to download videos of terminator and transformers and it was fun, but tbh I wouldn’t trade today’s internet for anything else. It’s very helpful to me and for the stuff I do at work.

Winamp skins/visualizations and IRC channels.

MSN before the Google hegemony.

Compuserve.
Loungesuit Larry
.

Napster I think it was called where you could download music and stuff.

I used to be a fido hub for mail. 8 hours to sort it.

I remember finally getting dial up at around age 11. I would have to download ONE song while I was in bed, because (1) it took that long to download it, and (2) no one used the phone during that time. If someone so much as lifted the phone, the internet was out.

in early days email addresses were hard to get unless you worked for a .gov or .edu organisation.

Domain names were even harder, especially .com because the internet belonged to some higher life-form which disapproved of it being used for anything commercial.

vargonmud and pine

frontdoor etc

vlc player was very popular

netscape

doom over sfx

trs-80

I don’t really remember much tbh I started developing actual memories around 2002 and I do remember drawing on some kinda “painting” program lol and I used to play Bratz and Barbie games.

Ironically people were smarter and the conspiracy disease was isolated to crazy uncle Joe.

My brother gave me a computer that had no internet & could only play a few CD-ROMs.

Yahoo was cool once.

Bulletin Boards

I never had Internet until I started college in 1996. The campus and dorms had high speed Internet but when I moved to an apartment I had just dial-up. I had just dial-up after college too from 2000-2003. Those were the days of sometimes taking a minute or more just to download a simple file or image. And downloading a video was a “start it and then go do something else while hoping it succeeds” ordeal lol.