Web pages didn’t exist. I remember when Netscape began and it was such a surprising idea. We would use telnet talkers, which basically meant opening a telnet session and entering an IP address which you had written on paper, and there were all of these people there, mostly from a university, that you would talk to. I still have several as friends 30+ years later. It was super benign by and large, although there were sex telnet talkers that were sometimes full of pedophiles if you didn’t realize it. Nobody has the Internet at home unless you were in higher education, but there was what was called Freenet, which like it sounds was free internet, which you could only connect to for small amounts of time each week, and it was a question of whose modem got in first. It was super binary and full of ASCII art that was a marvel.

Later when web based social media became a thing, we migrated to Livejournal, and as far as I’m concerned everything that was good about social media ever was there for a brief shining moment, and I still have friends from there and we know EVERYTHING about each other. Nothing has ever replaced those deep friendships. Before it got enshittified it was an absolutely beautiful place. I’m convinced that the earliest Russian forays into weaponized disinformation happened there because it definitely helped give birth to the crunchy parent movement, with mild vaccine disinformation (pre Wakefield), unassisted birth (the wildly dangerous birth stories I’ve read!), and silly things like claiming shampoo was bad and how you should clean your hair with cider vinegar, or things like extreme breastfeeding. I think it was Russia’s first steps into seeing what the west would buy into being manipulated with, and it was extremely successful. The Russian government bought Livejournal as a propaganda tool, thinly veiled by a company called SUP, and used it to disguise what they really do. Reply All did an episode about Russia disinformation on Livejournal.

One of the earliest things I can remember was encountering a thread on the forums of nuklearpower.com (home of the 8-Bit Theater webcomic) that simply asked, “Religious people, why do you believe in God?” and that was the first time I ever had ever encountered atheist perspectives or questioned what my parents taught me. At the time, there was very much this idea of, “Nobody ever changed their mind from an internet argument” but the internet exposed me to a lot of different views that I would never have encountered otherwise (see also: queer people).

Other than that, I used to gather around with friends to browse icanhazcheezeburger and failblog and stuff. I stayed up late grinding levels in RuneScape. Newgrounds and flash games were a big thing. Some of my friends were into 4chan in the early days when it was more about edgy shock humor than straight up Nazis. There was social media like MySpace and Facebook but I had no interest in them bc I was a nerd. There were a lot more random little websites that passed around by word of mouth.

I used to go to internet cafes to look for cheats for video games. Pretty much all I ever used the internet for back then. Don’t remember many other sites but I do remember a website where you slaughtered the teletubbies in various ways, like dismembering them or slicing them in half with meat saws.

After that, my first social uses of the internet were MySpace, a forum for metal and alternative music called MakeSomeNoise (named after a magazine that came out in my country) and the chat rooms on The Offspring’s website.

I remember downloading grainy Quicktime video files from people’s homepages. We didn’t need YouTube then and we don’t need it now.

I was 1980 maybe 1981 and we all went to a classmate’s house to watch a computer test. Her dad worked for Bell Labs. They placed an order for groceries that the store delivered.

In 1992 I waited for three days to download a single picture off a telescope and knew this was the future

Playing MUDs on JANET (not exactly the internet but close enough). We played late at night on university computers knowing that this wasn’t really what either the computers or JANET were supposed to be used for but it was still great.

For me was using AOL free internet CDs cause we had to pay providers for time online…we used to walk around neighborhood looking for AOL CDs to get online and get to chatrooms pretending we were adults. After a year or so I had a real experience when Internet started to get popularized so I created an email account, an ICQ acc and downloaded a song from this website.

Piczo websites

Chatrooms on ilse.nl

Simple webpages.

No ads.

Dial up noises.

Altavista was the search engine. Astalavista was the search engine for pirated material.

“Get off the internet, I need to call grandma!”

And literally not knowing which websites exist out there and having no search engine to look em up

America Online. Chat rooms. A/S/L? Beware sexual predators.

flash games

youtube funny animations, minecraft classic gameplays, roblox screaming people on youtube, furry fandom on discord and reddit too, furry youtubers, furry community, i would make fan games of fnaf and post them on a website called gamejolt, i got my first online boyfriend at 14 on discord but it sucked because he was 26

Compuserve back in like ‘91.

Prodigy, then AOL, then real internet. Also eWorld, which was like AOL but for Mac users. It was kinda pointless.