One memory that sticks out is sneaking to the computer and loading up RuneScape. I waited about 10 minutes for it to load, then immediately felt guilty and shut the web browser before even logging in. Back then you had to pay for how much data you used so I hope it didn’t cost too much

I remember e-mail providers having low storage, maybe 1MB max and getting e-mails frequently deleted by said providers after not logging in after a certain time.

Using MSN and yahoo chat rooms were a fun way to meet people. I remember there being rooms on Yahoo (were they called conferences?) just for people to have singing sessions.

Locally, almost everyone with a computer and dialup had MSN messenger installed, so plenty chatting with classmates after school on there.

I vaguely remember being subscribed to yahoo groups for fan and local interests. They were a good way to be kept informed.

Surfing the web was fun. I never knew what I would find next.

Oh and Neopets.

My first brush with the internet was in 2000. We had our family computer in the living room. Our dial-up ISP was Funcow. The local newspaper had a little section where they talked about fun websites to visit (family-friendly of course) and we would check them out in the evening. I know that Google existed but we didn’t use it - we had AltaVista, then Yahoo. These were also website directories - basically lists of websites grouped by topics. So if you didn’t find what you were looking for on one website, you’d try the next one, and so on. And the websites themselves were basically made by hand in html. To stand out some people threw in lots of little animated icons garish colors, weird website layouts, background music that couldn’t be turned off… It was 100% amateur and unpolished, and much much MUCH more diverse than today’s internet. But slowly, massively popular websites and tools started to dominate. Microsoft had a huge presence through Hotmail, MSN.com, and MSN Messenger. But Yahoo Messenger had video chatting first (IIRC). There were fansites about everything under the sun but no Wikipedia so researching any given topic in depth was a mammoth, tedious task. In 7th grade I wrote a research paper on ferrets and referenced about half a dozen websites but only collected about two sentences worth of useful information from each - so research was still heavily reliant on books and libraries. Speaking of libraries: that’s where almost everyone went for free internet. Schools and colleges also had computer labs with free internet and woefully inadequate content filters. It was crazy. It was awesome.

I mostly spent my time on Livejournal, or reading large family adoption blogs. As a result I have friends with 27 and 39 kids respectively. Blogging was so sweet then and so therapeutic. Facebook ruined everything.

Newgrounds (still exists!)

Homestarrunner (still exists!)

Neopets (also somehow still exists!)

Websites for advertising movies was a thrilling new phenomenon.

Search algorithms were much more primitive, but due to the public internet being basically much, much smaller, it was faaaar easier to find basically random people’s personal sites (before the term blog even came around), discussing a niche topic.

At the same time, a whole lot of sites were still disseminated by word of mouth, person to person, or maybe via email. Running a TV ad for a website was basically a gigantic gamble for early sites… only those with huge amounts of money could even attempt it and it often just outright caused the whole enterprise to fail if you had moderate or little funding.

We did not have touch screen mobile devices with full keyboards, we had SMS T9 texting, which (like pagers before them) led to shorthand (lol is probably the best example) and a good deal of early internet lingo.

There was no ability to basically constantly post some kind if personal update to your personal site or eventually MySpace as is now the norm with modern tech and social media, so people that post usually put a good deal more thought into it.

Forums. The old net used to be far, far more based on communities in forums. Far less emphasis on basically mundane, every day posts about your life and opinions, and more centered around actual discussion of topics or issues.

Oh right of course: GameFaqs.

Back when you could only use the internet if no one else was using a phone in the house, waay before 8 hour in depth video guides explained to you how to do everything in a game…

We had to print out guides with chapter headings written in ASCII art, and it was quite common to be seen as giving up or cheating if you needed a guide to complete a mission or unlock some secret.

Oh and if you think lag is a problem nowadays in online games, try playing an FPS where most people have a ping around or over 200, constantly rubber banding all over the place, yourself included.

Or getting desynced in Starcraft for 30 seconds, every 5 minutes, basically every game.

In the late 1990s I was at university using their OC-48 lines. So I had a share of a ~2GBit connection while most of the people were lucky to get 56k.

In the dorms, everyone was assigned an IP address but most people still didn’t have their own computers. So my roommate and I convinced a bunch of other people on our floor to give us their IPs - and our RA was also a Network admin, so he was able to facilitate. We ran a web server, forums, Quake and Team Fortress (1) servers (Clan Clam for folks that remember Quake Clans), and some very private file servers. All running on found hardware.

The speed was so fast compared to most folks that it was a bit like having a data related super power.

The Internet was…Weird. it was way more anonymous and way less centralized. You didn’t just check Reddit or Lemmy or YouTube, you had a favorites bar. You would go down the list and check 4 different flash websites, 3 forums, and some news/entertainment article sites.

And friends would constantly tell you new sites you had to check out. And webcomics. You would find a webcomic and read it from the start, then add it to your weekly update list.

It was also peak gross Internet. You would always be wary of links friends would send. Goatse and lemon party were guaranteed to be hiding in one.

Everyone had their favorite flash game site. Simple, one player games that you did just for fun. No achievements or social element besides sharing the link with a friend.

I was on the younger side so it was mostly flash game and animation sites. Homestar runner, albinoblacksheep, miniclip, addicting games, runescape.

Early YouTube was the best

Google could actually find you things.

The first page of searches was almost never brimming with corporate shit, but very Web 1.0 looking niche websites.

Browser based games were all the rage.

I don’t know, I was too busy playing Starcraft.

Man, I’ve been using the internet since 1994. Back then I started with CompuServe. Think like AOL but more beige. It had an instant messaging system and email and a portal with various pages on different topics. But you could also use a browser, like Mosaic or Netscape, to browse the internet. I used Alta Vista and Excite and Yahoo as search engines. There were also personal website that people wrote in basic HTML and hosted on Geocities and communities on specific topics would create webrings to link these sites together. We also used apps like Gopher and Usenet Newsgroups.

And before that it was BBS, bulletin board services, which were computers managed by strangers and you would just call them with your phone line modem using a terminal software and their system would pick up and establish a connection if it was available. You could access messages, emails, upload or download files, and some have you access to the internet if you were lucky.

Sites like match.com were such a target rich environment in placed like San Francisco and NYC, that you could score 2/3 dates a day if you wanted to. No cap. It was the wild west. It was glorious. Napster/Limewire meant you were never without music if you didn’t want to be. Movies/TV downloads weren’t available in quantity yet, but music was flowin.

Back in the AOL CD via postal mail days, the Internet was the AOL home page. News feeds, email, dumb games, chat rooms, message boards… and rotten.com for everything else.

Personal websites were a thing. Web design was in its infancy and tools were pretty basic so every site looked different and artisanal. Fiddle with HTML in notepad, upload by FTP on some cheap host and there you are. There were webrings and guest books to connect with each other. I started corresponding with the woman who became my wife because she signed my guest book :)