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30 Internet Veterans Share The Things That No Longer Exist That May Trigger Repressed Memories
Interview With Expert
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.
This post may include affiliate links.
"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
The hit counter on the bottom of webpages that told you how many people visited the page.
#3
An internet that didn't have any advertising.
Ray Ceeya (RayCeeYa) 1 year ago
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.
"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
I remember when Amazon was just an online book store.
Jrog 1 year ago
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.
#5
AskJeeves.
Ray Ceeya (RayCeeYa) 1 year ago
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.
#6
Getting booted off the Internet when someone in the other room picked up the phone.
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?
#7
Winamp.
BROmanicus85 1 year ago
I remember carefully "working" the equalizer as if I had some club state of the art surround sound system, not 2 beat-up computer speakers that no amount of "equalizing" would make the slightest difference in the sound! :))
EvilBikerScum 1 year ago
I still use it. The only music app I know of that can decrypt iTunes music library. Love it!
Jelena Kovacevic 1 year ago
I still use it to listen to my mp3s (some old goodies i ripped from my cd's so i didn't have to use the 6 cd changer sony stereo, that i also still have lol)
Rocket Surgeon 1 year ago
I still have it installed, along with all my mp3s. Don't use it much but it's nice to know it's there.
InfiniteZeek 1 year ago
Winamp was the beeznees. I had so many cool skins for all my different playlists.
Guess Undheit 1 year ago
The day I stop using winamp is the day there are no computers to run it on. I have a Lose7 tablet running it as my media player. It still works, both the computer and the software. Why get rid of something that still works?
Ray Ceeya (RayCeeYa) 1 year ago
I was still using Winamp until about 8 years ago. Now I use Spotify.
#8
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.
#9
Getting internet in the mail.
Jack Burton 1 year ago
I had like a hundred different accounts cause i only used the free part.
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
Hampsterdance
The ICQ "uh-oh!" noise
Guest books on websites. Sign my guest book!
#11
Dancing baby.
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.
#14
Limewire.
#15
--<-@ "Here's a rose for all the ladies here"
Man, we thought we were so f****n smooth in those chatrooms.
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
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.
Ray Ceeya (RayCeeYa) 1 year ago
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.
#19
Charlie wake upp, you silly sleep head, wake up. We found a map, a map to candy mountain.
#20
Instant messenger door opening noise.
#21
MSN messenger shaking and ringing a bell when your friends wanted your attention.
Mimi La Souris 1 year ago
and which displayed the song you were listening to, what discoveries
#22
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.
#23
Flash games.
WindySwede 1 year ago
Or flash animations. Like how in a tree, the hare in the sports car. Et cetera!
#25
The Napster and Lars Ulrich drama.
#26
Rotten.com. I remember checking out this site in internet cafes and hoping no-one else was looking in. Gross, but informative.
Barong 1 year ago
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.
#27
Home Made Angelfire Websites with Under Construction signs and Flaming Torches.
#28
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.
#30
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.
#31
That awful, grating sound that no Human can ever perfectly replicate, that came out of your modem before your Internet connection would actually become stable.
#32
A/s/l.
Jack Burton 1 year ago
in France it was ASV (age, sexe, ville); it was so regular to send that, it makes me laugh to just imagine someone sending this now
#33
Web Rings. Even people back in the day don't seem to remember them. They remember page counters, and guest books, but never the web ring... My Geocities pages had all of those.
Jrog 1 year ago
Kids, let me explain you what a web ring is. Web rings were a workaround to make a website popular in the early days of search engine optimization. A website would be rated higher if it had a high count of links going in and out to other pages. So people quickly understood that if they wanted to boost their SEO they had to link to other websites, and be linked in turn. Pages sharing the same topic usually did it out of mutual help, but in some cases mildly famous websites had some steep requirements to allow your personal page to join the ring, to the point of asking for money. Being part of the ring of a page that was central to a fanbase or topic was a highly coveted honor and being removed could spell the end of a small website. This went on for a while after Google changed their rating system, because rings still brought some traffic, until it became synonymous with "old homemade page" and became cringe.
#34
Angelfire/Geocities pages
I remember my friend was fancy, and made a page with frames, which now sounds like design hell.
#35
Usenet.
Jrog 1 year ago
Usenet took a turn for the worst when it was integrated in Google Groups in the early 2000s. So many users stumbled into it without knowing the proper netiquette, something that up to that point was an issue limited to a few months in Autumn, when kids started their academic years and usually "discovered" the Internet in their colleges.
#36
Compuserve.
#37
F****n' forum drama. No matter what forum you were on, there was guaranteed to be age old drama that every knew, mod infighting, maybe even a rival forum.
Some had all of that s**t and more. Before the internet was massive, s**t was petty.
Petra Schaap 1 year ago
ohhhh before facebook, when we would talk about music on bands' forums. I made many many friends there that i would meat IRL at concerts! And drama, always so much drama, but mostly fun. Even more fun when you would find out the band was reading the forum too and would say stuff onstage that only the forum members understood :-D I miss those days!
#41
But I'm le tired.
What do you think ?
Jack Burton 1 year ago
I use to have a joke with that command. Just record any sound file and put it under the right name on the AOL folder files. Quite surprising ^^
Load More Replies...
William Teach 1 year ago
What's Gen X to you? We were really the ones who were using this stuff originally, not Millennials.
Sonia Bailey 1 year ago
GenX here I started university in 1993 and started using FTP chat to talk to people all over the world! And we had email and netscape!
Load More Replies...
arthbach 1 year ago
There's lots of people who don't know the difference between the internet and the web. The internet really started in the 1970s, with smaller, more localised systems going back into the early 60s. By contrast, the web became publicly accessible in 1991.
Dolly_of TheCowboy 1 year ago
Thank you. When we did computer science history they talked about the "internet" being created/used from the early 1960s by the US Defence Department in case of nuclear war to enable the bunker people to talk to each other post-apocalypse and then it got expanded and morphed into "the web" as better technologies were built over time until we have the free for all it is today where it is 99% ads give or take a %
Load More Replies...
Ken Beattie 1 year ago
No one mentioned GIF pages where someone would scrape every animated GIF they could find on the internet and plonk them all on one page. It'd take forever to download and once it did it'd grind most browsers to a halt.
Rayne OfSalt 1 year ago
Not one mention of Bash.org or Encyclopedia Dramatica anywhere in the list? Rude.
Thomas Hunt, Jr. 1 year ago
Early days, huh? Guess Panda never considered Bulletin Board systems or connecting to another computer with only a tape recorder, phone receiver, a microphone...and being able to whistle a certain way. Good ole 150 baud. That was our modem before they started being made and sold in stores. Long live ASCII art!
Steve Hall 1 year ago
I don't miss the early internet at all. I like the instant response of the modern systems.
Rostit.. . 1 year ago
the first time I used the internet, it was all command line and you used gopher as your browser. On my dads mac quad900 and a 2400 baud modem to get on bulletin boards to download slow af ascii porn.
Guess Undheit 1 year ago
Telnet. Before browsers, Telnet was king. You could visit sites and download FTP content, find info, search through libraries, etc. Kermit and FreeNETs. In the early days getting online was expensive. If you were poor and had a low-end computer with a modem, and your community had a FreeNET, you could browse in text-only for free. Lynx (which is still in development!) was more than good enough for reading websites, sending email, checking job boards and sending resumes. MUDs. Everyone is gaga about online gaming these days and there are dozens of places to play (up yours, Blizzard and Rockstar). Back in the day, MUDs were D&D text only worlds where you could meet people from all over, playing for free and for fun. BBSs. Pre-internet, and mostly local, but you could share messages and have access to info you couldn't get anywhere else. And warez.
Guess Undheit 1 year ago
Frog In A Blender. Hamster In A Microwave. Late Night Shopping. Lions In Kenya.
Load More Replies...
Anony Mouse 1 year ago
I loved the "You've received a free gift" e-mail from Coca Cola - click here for your free beverage holder! Then you click and your CD drive opened. Hilarious at the time.
Marley Nachi 1 year ago
Also, internet safety was really unregulated so as a kid we were taught not to share your personal information or talk to strangers. MSN was full of creeps, and to beware of pedos. Now you have your full name and banking details online and talk and meet up with strangers (Airbnb, uber, online shopping, facebook with your full name, etc...)
R Dennis 1 year ago
I remember when Prodigy first came around... then AOL... suddenly, due to the competition Prodigy started cracking down on the wild west they were. We started calling them the P* Police and started making workarounds. But AOL was the Apple of early web portals - simple, so it took over.
Adele Maestranzi 1 year ago
Screen Saver called Bad Dog. Little dog would run across your screen, knock over the trash, dig holes in on the screen, pee on the trash can. Would love to find a new version.
Sky Render 1 year ago (edited)
My fondest memory of the early internet days was online gaming. Every game had its own connection service, there was no voice chat (nobody had microphones yet), and generally players were more civil than nowadays. It was possible to be a woman in online gaming without fear of being treated like garbage for it, all you had to do was pick a gender neutral alias.
Petra Schaap 1 year ago
when the internet was full of fun. Sigh! back in the nineties in the computer room of our school i would go to chatrooms and just chat with random people from all over the world about everyday life. No insults, no politics, no conspiracy dramas, no hate, just "oh wow you live in Amsterdam?! thats so cool!" also as my BF lived abroad we would meet in a chatroom because that was cheaper than calling, and then we would go private. And when i finally got internet at home, go online, get all the emails in, and go offline again ASAP :-D
Molly Whuppie 1 year ago
for anyone missing the old geocities/personal sites with webrings, guest books and visitor counters, there is a movement to bring them back. check out neocities for some examples. https://neocities.org/browse
Annik Perrot 1 year ago
Félix, the cute cat who lived on your computer screen. But maybe it was only à French thing...
Jack Burton 1 year ago
I use to have a joke with that command. Just record any sound file and put it under the right name on the AOL folder files. Quite surprising ^^
Load More Replies... William Teach 1 year ago
What's Gen X to you? We were really the ones who were using this stuff originally, not Millennials.
Sonia Bailey 1 year ago
GenX here I started university in 1993 and started using FTP chat to talk to people all over the world! And we had email and netscape!
Load More Replies... arthbach 1 year ago
There's lots of people who don't know the difference between the internet and the web. The internet really started in the 1970s, with smaller, more localised systems going back into the early 60s. By contrast, the web became publicly accessible in 1991.
Dolly_of TheCowboy 1 year ago
Thank you. When we did computer science history they talked about the "internet" being created/used from the early 1960s by the US Defence Department in case of nuclear war to enable the bunker people to talk to each other post-apocalypse and then it got expanded and morphed into "the web" as better technologies were built over time until we have the free for all it is today where it is 99% ads give or take a %
Load More Replies... Ken Beattie 1 year ago
No one mentioned GIF pages where someone would scrape every animated GIF they could find on the internet and plonk them all on one page. It'd take forever to download and once it did it'd grind most browsers to a halt.
Rayne OfSalt 1 year ago
Not one mention of Bash.org or Encyclopedia Dramatica anywhere in the list? Rude.
Thomas Hunt, Jr. 1 year ago
Early days, huh? Guess Panda never considered Bulletin Board systems or connecting to another computer with only a tape recorder, phone receiver, a microphone...and being able to whistle a certain way. Good ole 150 baud. That was our modem before they started being made and sold in stores. Long live ASCII art!
Steve Hall 1 year ago
I don't miss the early internet at all. I like the instant response of the modern systems.
Rostit.. . 1 year ago
the first time I used the internet, it was all command line and you used gopher as your browser. On my dads mac quad900 and a 2400 baud modem to get on bulletin boards to download slow af ascii porn.
Guess Undheit 1 year ago
Telnet. Before browsers, Telnet was king. You could visit sites and download FTP content, find info, search through libraries, etc. Kermit and FreeNETs. In the early days getting online was expensive. If you were poor and had a low-end computer with a modem, and your community had a FreeNET, you could browse in text-only for free. Lynx (which is still in development!) was more than good enough for reading websites, sending email, checking job boards and sending resumes. MUDs. Everyone is gaga about online gaming these days and there are dozens of places to play (up yours, Blizzard and Rockstar). Back in the day, MUDs were D&D text only worlds where you could meet people from all over, playing for free and for fun. BBSs. Pre-internet, and mostly local, but you could share messages and have access to info you couldn't get anywhere else. And warez.
Guess Undheit 1 year ago
Frog In A Blender. Hamster In A Microwave. Late Night Shopping. Lions In Kenya.
Load More Replies... Anony Mouse 1 year ago
I loved the "You've received a free gift" e-mail from Coca Cola - click here for your free beverage holder! Then you click and your CD drive opened. Hilarious at the time.
Marley Nachi 1 year ago
Also, internet safety was really unregulated so as a kid we were taught not to share your personal information or talk to strangers. MSN was full of creeps, and to beware of pedos. Now you have your full name and banking details online and talk and meet up with strangers (Airbnb, uber, online shopping, facebook with your full name, etc...)
R Dennis 1 year ago
I remember when Prodigy first came around... then AOL... suddenly, due to the competition Prodigy started cracking down on the wild west they were. We started calling them the P* Police and started making workarounds. But AOL was the Apple of early web portals - simple, so it took over.
Adele Maestranzi 1 year ago
Screen Saver called Bad Dog. Little dog would run across your screen, knock over the trash, dig holes in on the screen, pee on the trash can. Would love to find a new version.
Sky Render 1 year ago (edited)
My fondest memory of the early internet days was online gaming. Every game had its own connection service, there was no voice chat (nobody had microphones yet), and generally players were more civil than nowadays. It was possible to be a woman in online gaming without fear of being treated like garbage for it, all you had to do was pick a gender neutral alias.
Petra Schaap 1 year ago
when the internet was full of fun. Sigh! back in the nineties in the computer room of our school i would go to chatrooms and just chat with random people from all over the world about everyday life. No insults, no politics, no conspiracy dramas, no hate, just "oh wow you live in Amsterdam?! thats so cool!" also as my BF lived abroad we would meet in a chatroom because that was cheaper than calling, and then we would go private. And when i finally got internet at home, go online, get all the emails in, and go offline again ASAP :-D
Molly Whuppie 1 year ago
for anyone missing the old geocities/personal sites with webrings, guest books and visitor counters, there is a movement to bring them back. check out neocities for some examples. https://neocities.org/browse
Annik Perrot 1 year ago
Félix, the cute cat who lived on your computer screen. But maybe it was only à French thing...
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