Do you remember the early days of the Internet?
Or are you a young whipper-snapper who doesn’t remember the old days when the Internet DIDN’T EVEN EXIST?
Yes, it’s true!
And today you’re about to get your mind blown by some folks on AskReddit who remember what the Internet was like in the early days.
Take a look at what they had to say!
1. I remember!
“Signing the guestbook on sites.
And putting a counter on your own website and refreshing the page a whole bunch of times.”
2. There you go!
“Passworded website chatrooms where the password was in the HTML source so it was accessible by anybody that could do more than left click.”
3. Yahoo!
“Yahoo was a list of websites, then became a major search engine, then dominated email, maps, message groups, chat, instant messenger, news, dating… now it barely survives.”
4. Back in the day…
“”It is now safe to turn off your computer.”
My friend’s computer his dad built him in the ’90s had his name in italics after that message.
I thought his dad was some kind of hacker.”
5. Frustrating.
“Having to type the entire d**n url.
And look out you if you got anything wrong!”
6. Not again!
“Having to disconnect if someone had to use the phone.
I think getting kicked off the internet when my friends would call our house in the late ’90s took years off my dad’s life.”
7. Here it comes.
“Slowly watching the image you wanted to see load one line at a time.
It took forever…and ever…”
8. Crazy to think about.
“Amazon used to only sell books.
I remember the rampant suspicion for purchasing anything through the internet, Amazon included.”
9. Wow.
“Getting early access to this new thing called Gmail.
It was invitation only.”
10. Turn it down!
“”Congratulations! YOU’VE WON” ads.
Used to scare the mess out of me.
And somehow I always had my speakers turned up too loud when they popped up.”
11. They were cool!
“When screensavers were actually a thing (flying toasters, etc.) and it wasn’t just another word for wallpaper.”
12. A long journey.
“The first thing I can remember is that weird dancing baby video.
We’ve come a long way…”
13. Down the rabbit hole.
“Back in the year 2000, a guy calling himself John Titor and describing himself as a “time traveler” from the year 2036, showed up on a couple of UFO/conspiracy (of the more innocent X-Files style kind, not the hardcore political kind we have now) forums and had this elaborate backstory about how he traveled through time, the sorta post-apocalyptic state of the world in 2036, and so on.
His reasoning for traveling through time was to retrieve an old IBM portable computer from the year 1975, because he needed it to debug legacy software that they were still running in 2036. He said he worked for a government “time travel” agency but given the fact that he was sent through time to get old hardware from the 70s to debug currently-running software, my guess is that he really worked for the IRS.
Also, his time machine was a specialized “temporal displacement” device housed in the back of a converted 1966 Chevrolet Corvette. Because of course it was.
Either way, the backstory was richly detailed, very cool, and definitely better written than anything hollywood usually puts out–even if it was likely a total hoax. I thoroughly enjoyed going down the rabbit hole back then.”
Now we want to hear from you.
Let us know what you think about this in the comments.
We’d love to hear from you!
