AIM! My entire junior high would be up all night chatting away. I figured out my mom's password on her power Mac, and hid out in her office lol. It was so fun and novel at the time.
this post was submitted on 24 Jun 2023
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Asklemmy
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BBS, ftpmail, archie, veronica, news, mail !! tons and tons of information never before available to me..
Probably that happy zing you got whenever anyone signed your guestbook on your homepage.
Having my own email address, making a website and pirating a metal album
My dad trying and failing to dial out and connect to AOL italia to send his sister an email. I have no idea how much he paid for the service and the fact that local calls still cost money and I'm not even sure AOL was local, but it was so slow it took forever to send anything. Forget pictures.
Definitely Chatrooms ๐
Discovering that Burning Man exists. I'd never heard of it until I followed a link from Boing Boing and my head exploded.
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.
Creating my own Proboards message boards and discovering Alien Adoption Agency.
BonziBuddy destroying the family computer.
When there were dedicated websites to silly gimmick/songs like Hamster Dance, Boogie Blocks, etc.
Newgrounds most definitely. And as an earlier poster stated, muds. Specifically MUME. Oh man many hours have been spent playing that game
Probably watching an old Ed Edd N Eddy fan animation I found on yt that I cannot find a trace of anymore, or just the old yt shit post videos in general. That, or things like getting on Nitrome or any other site to play flash games. Mutiny on Nitrome was one of my absolute favorite flash games and one I never beat since I was still young.
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.
"You got mail"
It's not that early, but eyezmaze.com (which apparently still exists) was one of those sites I found one day and regularly played on for years.
If you want to get a feeling of the old internet, look here: https://search.marginalia.nu/explore/random
To be clear, those are not (only) old sites, but a lot of them feel like the old web.
Eyezmaze โค๏ธ
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.
I bought an Internet connection and read from a computer magazine that I'm able to connect to an FTP server for downloading files. (I don't think I needed it for anything, I was just curious of the new technology.) I remember that when I connected to the server, it displayed instructions that one should use "cd x/y/z" to change to a subdirectory, instead of separate commands "cd x", "cd y", "cd z", to save network bandwidth.
The AOL kids home page with all flash games. I played a lot of the tom and Jerry blueprint game.