I've been reminiscing alot lately about my early forays into the internet. Now I realize everyone will have a different idea of the ideal time of the internet, and we could argue 'till the beavers come home on when that was, but for me, it'd be late 90's-2000's as that's when I really started using the internet.
I have fond memories of back when the internet was not yet a staple in everyones lives, and was a place to be accessed occasionally and deliberately. To access the internet back in the late 90's I had to tie up the family phone line and therefor had restrictions on how long i'd be able to be connected for. Sometimes i'd get lucky and be able to chill in the wired for hours, other times i'd be begging to get a half hour so I could look up some Mortal Kombat 3 cheat codes. The internet was a place I visited and explored, but not a place i lived. It felt vast and mysterious, much more so than today, even though today the internet may contain many more webpages and much more information, for some reason today the internet feels much more contained (and i have my thoughts on why).
I used to get home after school and head straight to the family computer (usually located in the kitchen), to fire up MSN messenger and surf the web. I had such fun just communicating with people over the internet, mostly people I knew irl at first, but eventually forging friendships with other netizens who shared similar interests. Those truly were the halcyon days for me. I was young, had no 'sponsibilites, and the world was my oyster-tree, and believe me, I was plucking those oysters by the dozens. I had some great times chatting with my friends online, talking shit about people we mutually disliked, raving on about niche stuff we both enjoyed, etc. Screen names and status messages were the ultimate form of expression back then. People actually sent and engaged with chain-letters. It was truly a different time.
In the earliest days of me surfing the web, most the content i looked for was tv, music or video game related as those were basically my only interests at the time. There was no google, i'd search with ask jeeves or yahoo mostly, and search engines were still hit and miss. A lot of navigating the web was done through webrings and topsite lists. Webrings were a pretty cool thing, where websites would link to similar websites creating a group, or a ring. They would have a banner at the bottom of their site, listing the name of the webring and it would have a back, and a next button, and usually also a random button. There was no hierarchy to the webring, it was a just a ring of somehow connected or friendly sites. Because of this being such a common way website were discovered, nobody worried about things like SEO. The websites were simply built in the webmasters image. Back then, just coming across a cool site for a show or video game you liked was a big win, you'd explore the site and bookmark it to come back later and see if anything had changed. These were the days before the commercialization of the web, when you were more likely to be coming across sites built by individuals as a labour of love. There was no money in it for them, and in fact those individuals had to pay money (and time) to create and maintain those sites. Perhaps that was what made them so good, they were being made without the motivator of money, and purely out of interest. It was all shrines and fandom, with people creating websites dedicated to their favorite interest, whether that was an artist, a show, a video game, or even a single character or person! The internet truly felt like a place people went to express themselves and share their interests with the world. If you had a niche interest, you could find others who shared that interest, which may have been impossible to do irl if you lived in a smaller city or rural area. For many people, it would have been the only time they'd ever connect with people who shared in their niche interest.
Back in the late 90's, early 2000's, the internet had still not yet been homogenized and sanitized. Web design was truly the wild west, with marquis and blinking text, lots of gif images, frames in websites, and plenty of browser compatibility issues. There was a war going on (casualty = Netscape), and we were navigating it. Every website looked different, unique, with all sorts of nooks and crannies to explore. There was no templates being used, people were building (mostly) from the ground up. The randomness you could accidentally discover was epic, and man do I miss that. Common elements across many types of sites I remember are things like hit-counters, flaming under-construction gifs, bleeding dividers, space backgrounds or tiled backgrounds, soundboards, and guestbooks. All stuff you dont really see anymore. Examples here: https://www.cameronsworld.net
Everything used to be so golden. So unique and expressive. People created thier own spaces to express themselves and expressed themselves fully. It was a great contrast to today, when people all flock to the same five or so websites and express themselves within the confines of a corporations terms of service. I read a news article the other day about a bunch of people who had their facebook accounts deleted and those people were crying out about all the memories and whatnot they lost.. and all I could think was, why didn't you OWN your memories? Why did you simply post to a corporations private site? Did you not have other copies of your photos and whatnot? Did you not understand that facebook is NOT a public site? It's private and they can do whatever they want. Read their terms of service and their privacy statement... It's sad.
Here's some randomness reminiscent of days past for your enjoyment:
https://killing-machine.neocities.org/
https://webhamster.com/
https://webring.theoldnet.com/
If you want to have fun exploring some old school sites, try out this search engine and hit the random button a few times: https://wiby.org/
Well, that's about all I got to say on it right now. Just some thoughts and nostalgic memories of times past. I'll just say one last thing I guess: We can all still create our own spaces on the internet. Get outside the confines of the walled gardens of the large tech companies and explore a bit, you dont need to post where the most people are. Create your own space and let people find it, the internet feels much bigger that way.
Peace.
The Halcyon Days of The Old Web
The Halcyon Days of The Old Web
..:kezla:..