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Today we’re going to take a fun trip down Memory Lane with the fine folks of AskReddit!
And they’re going to help take us back in time to the early days of the Internet which seem like a distant memory these days.
Let’s see what these folks had to say about the good old days!
1. I miss those days…
“Having your own webpage that you hosted for free on Geocities or Angelfire or Yahoo homepage or something similar.
When I was a kid, everybody had their own “website” which was usually just a landing page with a hit counter, some pictures and photos, an mp3 of their favorite song and some general musings, maybe an about section or a blog if they were serious about maintaining it. They were always slapped together with the most basic HTML editors with godawful formatting and infested with banner ads and popups.
I actually really miss those days, because the modern social media sites are creatively bankrupt and hosting your own website and actually making it good has become a more complex affair than it used to be (it’s still around, but lacking the same charm).”
2. Weird stuff.
“Weird little squares with blue and red on them that would sort of take the place of graphics until the graphics would actually load.
The text would be visible but the graphics wouldn’t be there yet.”
3. Remember them?
“Webrings.
You go to a site, often a geocities site, for something you are interested in and see a little arrow at the bottom of the page; this arrow will take you to another site on the same topic.
If you are crazy/diligent enough, you will eventually return to the first site.”
4. Be sure to spell it out.
“When a TV show would say to check out their website at “h t t p : / / w w w .”
Having to spell it out every time.”
5. Get on the highway.
“When it was called the “information superhighway.”
In sixth grade I wrote an article for the school newspaper contending that it should be called the “information toll road” since it cost $10 a month for 5 hours of use.”
6. Oh yeah!
“Netscape Navigator
AOL sending discs through the mail offering 500 hours of free web access
Alta Vista
Ask Jeeves.”
7. Big trouble.
“Fun story, I was the first kid (that I’m aware of) to try getting online. I used the free disc. My parents kept saying, “and you’re SURE this is a free service?” “Yes, totally Mom/Dad. Look, here’s the paperwork!”
The problem was that I was in a small mountain town and the closest AOL connection was about 300 miles away. So I racked up like 120 hours of long distance telephone calls at a time when long distance telephone was NOT cheap. It was something ridiculous like $600 in early 1990s dollars.
I very much got in trouble.”
8. Overnight job.
“FTP, Gopher, Mosaic, running download jobs overnight hoping that the multikilobyte download from overseas running at 100 bytes/seconds didn’t crash.”
9. Gotta save some money.
“Using offline mode on browsers to get back to some webpages while you were disconnected to save money.”
10. How do we get there?
“Mapquest.
Now we just have Google navigation and Apple maps.”
11. Set it up.
“Manually setting TCP/IP settings to connect to a local dial-up internet provider.
BBS boards.
Telnet
Modems which you placed the actual handset of a corded phone on top of to connect to the internet.”
12. No mistaking that sound!
“The Internet dial up sound.
And yelling at anyone picking up the phone when you were online.”
What do you think about this?
Let us know in the comments.
Thanks a lot!
