Everyone was nice to each other and followed unwritten rules in communication. :)

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.

The sound of a Pentium computer booting up.

Learning DOS commands from an actual book I borrowed from a neighbor.

The first days of learning programming.

The sound of a dial-up modem while falling asleep on my desk waiting for a connection at a high usage hour (11 PM) when everybody was trying to get in on a lower tariff.

Downloading code for 3D demos - they were called "4k intros" (the challenge was to make the most complex graphics in only 4 KB), and changing equation parameters without any clue of what they do, compile and see the effect. That's how I learned. Good days.

Prehistorik 2 with a "latest generation sound card" Creative Sound Blaster on cheap speakers.

Coding in Pascal (and later Delphi) my own tools / projects while listening to 80's music in Winamp.

Being patient to download an mp3 in multiple sessions during 3 days, only to realize it's a different song with the same name but by another singer.

Ripping CDs and cataloging your collection in Where Is It?

Hearing "who is the fox?" in an internet cafe room while playing Carmageddon.

Magazines with demo CDs, like PC Gamer.

The AltaVista search engine.

Parties where 5 people had to bring their 1GB HDDs so there would be enough music diversity. Of course, using Winamp visualizations as disco lights.

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.

I was a big MST3k fan back in the day. When it was on Sci-Fi, they had a MST3k-themed site called "Caption This" where it took screengrabs of whatever was on the channel at the time and you'd crack jokes about it.

It doesn't sound that interesting now, but if you're familiar with the show you'd see the appeal.

Also having to wait five minutes for a single JPEG of boobs to show up. Really helped teach a person patience.

Vbulletin boards and general forum sites before the likes of Facebook and Reddit got big. Made a lot of friends on there.

Neopets was great as well. Loved the minigames.

One of my first internet experience was on a forum for a kid tv channel. There was a point system where posting a message would give you a point and certain amount of points would grant you ranks. I discovered that sending private messages also counted and clicking space repeatedly when submitting a message would multiply the message and the points. I am sorry to whoever received thousands of mps every single day back then but I had a lot of fun increasing that rank.

That may also explain why I still like incremental games nowadays

In the 90s, before the social media and Google existed, it was customary to create your own home page. My page was about koalas. I was really into koalas. I had a crush in the digital art class, and she made her page about Hanson (a boyband). I remember feeling jealous about the attention they were getting hehe.

The owner of a site called zug dot com wrote a lengthy and hilarious essay on his treatment for an anal fissure. There were MS Paint illustrations of the procedure.

I was enthralled but also learned a lot about using humor to discuss situations that a person would otherwise be ashamed of.

I remember buying a very specific blacksmith vise from someone on a forum where I spent a lot of time.

I never really discussed with herb specifically on this forum except to arrange the sale but when I met her it was like meeting a friend.

She was in a meet with other people from this forum the week before, she told me about the projects they had and gave me extra pieces of exotic wood and Damascus steel that she made with another member for me to work with.

We didn't knew each other at all be the fact that we belonged to the same online community was enough for us to be instantly friend.

From back before you accessed all your sites by using a search engine and instead you typed whatever that thing was and then ".com" (e.g. you wanted info on Cocoa Puffs, you would go to cocoapuffs.com) into your URL bar (yes, before that bar was a unified search/URL bar). If you mistyped or spelled something wrong, you would get porn almost every time. And then that porn would take over your whole computer. Even if you closed your web browser, it was your desktop background now. And trying to change it back didn't work. And you basically just had to restart your computer because your OS was completely compromised until you rebooted, then it would go back to normal after the reboot.

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

Roleplaying in AOL chatrooms. I remember joining this group who roleplayed as vampires and hanging out in the "local tavern." I was only 9 and in hindsight half of what people were doing was hooking up, but it made me love writing.

Later on, I really enjoyed LiveJournal and staying up way too late reading fanfiction with my friends on AIM/MSN messenger.

Early Google. When AskJeeves fizzled away but SEO and ads hadn't taken over.

AlbinoBlackSheep & YTMND. Geocities.

Good God those sparkly pixel dolls that you could pick outfits for and customise too. Small me was obsessed.

Posting to a Usenet newsgroup to inquire about a research paper I was interested in, and having the author snail mail me a printed copy of the paper. The power of community blew my mind.

Configuring my UUCP connection to provide my BBS users with « electronic mail ».

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.

I wasn't born back then, but it would have been the fact that search results weren't total crap like today: only reddit seems to offer decent results if you don't want sites like wikihow to come up... I wrote a more elaborate blogpost partly about it.

• Newgrounds
• Homestar Runner
• AIM
• Yahoo chat rooms
• MUDs
• Not internet, but Leisure Suit Larry holds a special place in my memories.

Finding out that I can download & emulate NeoGeo games on my potato PC early 2000 :)

Creating my own Proboards message boards and discovering Alien Adoption Agency.