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Unlike Gen Z kids, we Millennials never had Snapchat, our own smartphones, and 5G. We grew up with chat rooms, one PC per family, and dial-up internet. The early days of the Internet are starting to feel like something ancient, but the World Wide Web actually began in 1989. AOL and IRC were all the rage in the '90s, which makes them more than 30 years old.

The years of the early Internet had a lot of interesting phenomena. That’s why one Redditor decided to ask fellow Internet veterans: “What’s something ancient that only an Internet veteran would remember?” Mine is probably the old-school message boards, specifically the Dragon Ball Z-related ones. If there are any Internet veterans out here, let us know your picks!

Bored Panda reached out to the dean of technology at the triOS College and a self-proclaimed technogeek, Jason Eckert. He was kind enough to tell us more about what the Internet looked like at its inception and whether the concerns we have about it now were similar to the concerns then.

"The Internet was originally called the 'World Wide Web (WWW)' or 'Information Superhighway' in mainstream media when it first gained popularity, back in the mid-1990s," Jason Eckert tells Bored Panda. "It coincided with the massive rise of PCs in homes and businesses (both small and large) that previously never did much with computers."

Eckert says that the mid-1990s were a very optimistic time for technology in general. "We had two technology booms: the massive rise of PCs in homes and businesses for the first time, and the ability to connect them to the 'Information Superhighway,' a.k.a. the Internet."

The expert gave us a quick rundown of how the early internet worked. "People bought access to this Information Superhighway from Internet Service Providers (ISPs) so that they could use their PCs to browse the worldwide collection of information on other computers connected to the network."

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#2

30 Internet Veterans Share The Things That No Longer Exist That May Trigger Repressed Memories The hit counter on the bottom of webpages that told you how many people visited the page.

squashua , Blake Patterson/ flickr (not the actual photo) Report

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#3

30 Internet Veterans Share The Things That No Longer Exist That May Trigger Repressed Memories An internet that didn't have any advertising.

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Ray Ceeya (RayCeeYa)
Community Member
7 months ago DotsCreated by potrace 1.15, written by Peter Selinger 2001-2017

I've been on the web since about 1994 and that wasn't a thing back then 30 years ago. Ads and Spam go back at least that far.

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"This information consisted of webpages with crude graphics and layouts by today's standards but was incredibly new and impressive at the time. The computers that served these webpages were called web servers, and the worldwide collection of web servers was called the 'World Wide Web' (www) or 'Web' for short."

Eckert notes that mainstream media, sitcoms, and movies glorified computers and the Internet whenever they could, and he mentions the cult classic Hackers (1995) as an example. "Everyone knew that computers and the Internet were the future," he says. "Pundits and regular folk regularly speculated on what the Web would evolve into – including David Bowie."

#4

30 Internet Veterans Share The Things That No Longer Exist That May Trigger Repressed Memories I remember when Amazon was just an online book store.

UnconstrictedEmu , Robert So / pexels (not the actual photo) Report

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Jrog
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7 months ago DotsCreated by potrace 1.15, written by Peter Selinger 2001-2017

I remember when Amazon was dealing in books only, and they just launched Mechanical Turk, a crowdsourced task platform where you would get Amazon credit in exchange for completing some quick jobs (called HITs) like proofreading or image tagging. I got so much credit by doing HITs while commuting that I gave books for Christmas to anyone that year.

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#5

30 Internet Veterans Share The Things That No Longer Exist That May Trigger Repressed Memories AskJeeves.

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Ray Ceeya (RayCeeYa)
Community Member
7 months ago DotsCreated by potrace 1.15, written by Peter Selinger 2001-2017

Before Google dominated there were so many search engines. WebCrawler, Lycos, AltaVista, Yahoo, DogPile, those are just the ones I can remember off the top of my head.

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#6

30 Internet Veterans Share The Things That No Longer Exist That May Trigger Repressed Memories Getting booted off the Internet when someone in the other room picked up the phone.

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Perhaps one of the biggest concerns of the modern Internet is data privacy (the recent Metaverse worldwide outage, for example). But what was it like back then, when the Internet was still in its infancy? Were there any such concerns or debates back then?

Eckert says yes: "Privacy concerns have been paramount since the 1960s, and the Internet added fuel to those fires, so to say. People talked about how governments and law enforcement had a new tool to abuse individual privacy and how telemarketers would migrate to using email and ads."

"And these concerns were even more so with those of us who worked in the tech industry. In 1999, Sun Microsystems' CEO Scott McNealy told reporters: 'You have zero privacy anyway. Get over it.'" I wonder, how would that go down nowadays, especially if we heard it from Mark Zuckerberg's lips?

#8

30 Internet Veterans Share The Things That No Longer Exist That May Trigger Repressed Memories ICanHasCheezburger Its still around, but not the same at all. I can remember my mom and I howling and laughing together. She died twelve years ago and I still think about how much we fun we had with that website.

soulteepee , amystrachan/ flickr (not the actual photo) Report

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#9

30 Internet Veterans Share The Things That No Longer Exist That May Trigger Repressed Memories Getting internet in the mail.

SpacedApeDHD , phreakindee/ flickr (not the actual photo) Report

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Jack Burton
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7 months ago DotsCreated by potrace 1.15, written by Peter Selinger 2001-2017

I had like a hundred different accounts cause i only used the free part.

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For those who don't recall or are simply too young to remember, let's go through a couple of old Internet things. Dial-up internet, for example. Gen Xers seem to be so nostalgic about the modem sound. But how did it all work?

Long gone are the days when you needed a telephone line to have internet access at your home. Back in the '90s, you had to dial a specific phone number given by your internet service provider and establish a connection through a modem.

The computer then used the modem to convert digital data into analog signals that could be transmitted through a telephone line. The analog signals then went through the internet provider's equipment, which converted them back into digital data and connected the user to the internet.

#10

30 Internet Veterans Share The Things That No Longer Exist That May Trigger Repressed Memories Hampsterdance

The ICQ "uh-oh!" noise

Guest books on websites. Sign my guest book!

Disregard-my-opinion , Christiaan Colen/ flickr (not the actual photo) Report

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Google also wasn't always the default search engine. What we today know as Ask.com was one Ask Jeeves. Reginald Jeeves was a fictional butler from P.G. Wodehouse's comics who would answer etiquette questions from his employer, gentleman Bertie Wooster.

This predecessor to Google, Alexa, and Siri is the brainchild of American venture capitalist Garrett Gruener. He came up with the idea of a virtual concierge in 1992 and launched Ask Jeeves in 1997. People asked Jeeves all kinds of questions, from how to get rid of skunk smell to where one can find the best hotel.

#13

30 Internet Veterans Share The Things That No Longer Exist That May Trigger Repressed Memories Peanut butter jelly time!

CH11DW , carfreak0801 Report

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digitalin
Community Member
7 months ago DotsCreated by potrace 1.15, written by Peter Selinger 2001-2017

OMG my kids sing this, and when I started singing along, they were like "MOM! How do you know that???"

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#15

30 Internet Veterans Share The Things That No Longer Exist That May Trigger Repressed Memories --<-@ "Here's a rose for all the ladies here"

Man, we thought we were so f****n smooth in those chatrooms.

Because_I_Cannot , MART PRODUCTION / pexels (not the actual photo) Report

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Jrog
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7 months ago DotsCreated by potrace 1.15, written by Peter Selinger 2001-2017

TBH, not that there were much actual ladies in those chatrooms.

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Although other search engines like Yahoo! and Alta Vista were already popular, Ask Jeeves stood out with its quirky butler character. Why did people stop asking Jeeves? When the dot-com bubble burst in 2000, advertisers fled from web development. The company reportedly lost $425 million, and in the coming years, Jeeves morphed into Ask.com.

#16

30 Internet Veterans Share The Things That No Longer Exist That May Trigger Repressed Memories Discussion boards for specific topics. (And not aggregated under the same website like reddit)

I have fond memories of these. I met a lot of cool people, some of which I'm still in contact with a good decade and a half later.

Bigby11 , MART PRODUCTION / pexels (not the actual photo) Report

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Ray Ceeya (RayCeeYa)
Community Member
7 months ago DotsCreated by potrace 1.15, written by Peter Selinger 2001-2017

Well back in the 90s we had UseNet. By the end of the 90s it was an unmoderated out of control hellscape. In the 2000s I got into several Web Forums that were highly moderated.

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#19

30 Internet Veterans Share The Things That No Longer Exist That May Trigger Repressed Memories Charlie wake upp, you silly sleep head, wake up. We found a map, a map to candy mountain.

National_Tomorrow_42 , FilmCow Report

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#20

30 Internet Veterans Share The Things That No Longer Exist That May Trigger Repressed Memories Instant messenger door opening noise.

MetaMarx02 , Lalo Report

#21

30 Internet Veterans Share The Things That No Longer Exist That May Trigger Repressed Memories MSN messenger shaking and ringing a bell when your friends wanted your attention.

fullmetaldagger , Siri louis / unsplash (not the actual photo) Report

#22

30 Internet Veterans Share The Things That No Longer Exist That May Trigger Repressed Memories Learning basic HTML to pimp out your MySpace profile

Bumper stickers on facebook

Uploading a digital camera album of your night out

Leaving moody asf away messages on AIM.

anon , Pixabay / pexels (not the actual photo) Report

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Robert T
Community Member
7 months ago DotsCreated by potrace 1.15, written by Peter Selinger 2001-2017

It didn't look like that though. No CSS for starters. This looks more like the kind of stuff I write these days, and even then it goes into templates rather than writing a page from scratch.

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#23

30 Internet Veterans Share The Things That No Longer Exist That May Trigger Repressed Memories Flash games.

anon , Andrea_44 / flickr (not the actual photo) Report

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WindySwede
Community Member
7 months ago DotsCreated by potrace 1.15, written by Peter Selinger 2001-2017

Or flash animations. Like how in a tree, the hare in the sports car. Et cetera!

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#24

30 Internet Veterans Share The Things That No Longer Exist That May Trigger Repressed Memories "All your base are belong to us".

UncomfortableBike975 , zuchini Report

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#26

30 Internet Veterans Share The Things That No Longer Exist That May Trigger Repressed Memories Rotten.com. I remember checking out this site in internet cafes and hoping no-one else was looking in. Gross, but informative.

anon , Siri louis / unsplash (not the actual photo) Report

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Barong
Community Member
7 months ago DotsCreated by potrace 1.15, written by Peter Selinger 2001-2017

Used to check this out when working at the ER with my colleagues. We usually didn't get anything as bad as what was on that site since, well, they were sadly well beyond our capabilities and more suited to the morgue. It was the most horrible site out there. I have no idea if it's still up, but I won't check. I intend to get a decent night of sleep.

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#27

30 Internet Veterans Share The Things That No Longer Exist That May Trigger Repressed Memories Home Made Angelfire Websites with Under Construction signs and Flaming Torches.

The__Riker__Maneuver , nx85 Report

#28

30 Internet Veterans Share The Things That No Longer Exist That May Trigger Repressed Memories Treating chat rooms like real, physical places. Like, with an established setting and stuff. People would narrate what they’re doing in that space as they talked. Usually with a font or marker to designate the action: goes to the table and sips coffee.

CrazyPlato , Viktorya Sergeeva / pexels (not the actual photo) Report

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Robert T
Community Member
7 months ago DotsCreated by potrace 1.15, written by Peter Selinger 2001-2017

We did this in RPGs. The one I remember was called UglyMUG where you could build your own world. Text only on a black and white (or greenscreen) terminal!

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#30

30 Internet Veterans Share The Things That No Longer Exist That May Trigger Repressed Memories Google not existing

Netscape Navigator

Excite, HotBot, Lycos, Altavista, Webcrawler

Amazon is just an online bookstore

IRC

ICQ, AIM, MSN Messenger, Yahoo Messenger, Trillian

Yahoo Chatrooms

Yahoo Games

Usenet

AOL

CompuServe

Prodigy

NetZero

Edit: More below:

As u/TheOCDGeek reminded me, Juno (free email and later free internet). There were a ton of free internet services (dial-up) for a while. Most were backed by one company that I can't remember the name of.

About.com

Ask Jeeves

Metacrawler (get results from many search engines on one page)

Digg (Reddit before Reddit)

StumbleUpon

Webrings

Guestbooks to sign

Geocities (before it became Yahoo Geocities)

Tripod

Angelfire.

t0f0b0 , Ged Carroll/ flickr (not the actual photo) Report

Note: this post originally had 45 images. It’s been shortened to the top 30 images based on user votes.

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