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.

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.

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.

The dial-up tone. I used to be able to gauge how good the connection was going to be by the tones, as it would fall back to slower speeds if it could not connect at the highest speed. That tone meant connecting to the “world at large” for me.

Before getting home Internet access, my “online” world was BBSes. Local BBSes, of course, because we couldn’t dial long distance without repercussions. My favourite demogroup was Future Crew and I hated that it took months (or sometimes never) to get their releases on our local BBSes. Even with Fidonet, a lot of BBSes would only sync with remote nodes a couple times a month to save money, so it was slow going.

I remember a few days after we got home Internet access, I was eating breakfast and I suddenly had a thought. Wait…doesn’t Future Crew’s BBS run an FTP server? I think I saw them mention that in one of their nfo files. If they have an FTP server, I could just…connect to it. Like, directly, myself, from my house.

The implications of this were so strong that I started shaking. I couldn’t finish my breakfast.

I ran downstairs and booted up the computer and typed in ftp.mpoli.fi and…there it was. Future Crew’s home BBS was just available for anyone in the world to connect to. I navigated around a little bit and found a song I hadn’t seen before on any of the local BBSes. I started the download, and it worked, and a blazing 3kB/s. I remember I just started crying at the implications of what a worldwide network meant.

I miss the flashgame boom and runescape being on Miniclips top 5 games.

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

That Dialup sound.

Newsgroups.

The kick I got out of posting up my own crappy page with lots of annoying images and gifs (Geocities ftw!)

Definitely ICQ. The best instant messenger, revolutionary for its time. It was reliable and had many very nice features. Then, Microsoft came with its shitty MSN Messenger, and it marked the end of an era.

And Geocities of course. I still remember the address of my “personal home page”.

All the awesome flash games. Wasn’t super early but there are 3 games I loved but don’t remember the names of them…

1. build a rocket bit by bit and try and fly it higher each time as your fuel runs down. Eventually you get into space. 2D.

2. you are a penguin, it’s a ski slope distance game. Get power ups and go further each time. I think you have a hang glider thing. 2D.

3. A paper plane distance thing by Microsoft Xbox where you throw it through a window and there’s sounds of kids playing. 2D.

Also Monkey kick-off. Another fave.

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

Beseen internet chatrooms, ICQ, every website was someone’s personal project, they just made it for fun. Yahoo messenger pool games and online chess. Php message boards and the communities that formed around those.

The early internet was so slow that everything was text based. Talking to other people was the primary form of interaction and nothing was really monetized. Everything was just there because it was nerd shit and people found homes, and communities, and belonging. It was real world values on a screen, not the influencer driven, 30sec video affiliate links shallow, corporate conglomerate that it is now.

That’s why I appreciate the fediverse. It feels like real people just playing with technology and talking to each other.

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So many great memories… My favorite would have to be chatting for the first time. It was an amazing experience being able to type to someone in real time and get a response back.

I loved just browsing the web and looking at random sites. Back in the late 90s, everyone made websites for anything they wanted. The internet wasn’t consolidated into just a few big sites then, there were personal websites for literally everything.

There were even meme websites… like in the sense that the sites themselves were the meme. For example, there was a website “Mr T ate my balls”, and then there were a ton of other similar sites like “Chewbacca ate my balls” or “sailor moon ate my balls”.

If I wanted to find info about a specific TV show or something, there were likely multiple fan sites set up that were dedicated specifically to that show.

It was such a different experience from the internet today. I kind of miss it.