When I went to college there was no YouTube (the blogger said to her grandchildren). Instead, we had to find videos in weird corners, or download actual files. It was chaos. Anyway, I was thinking of this because I saw one of those ripoff Pop Tarts ads and remembered the brilliance of “Rejected.”
If you haven’t seen this, I’m sure you can see it was the type of thing that a group of 18-year-olds would quote back and forth to each other in lieu of actual conversation for at least a year and a half. Which was a huge departure from high school, where we were quoting Teen Girl Squad and Trogdor the Burninator. Or middle school, where I just hung out in AOL chatrooms trying to find a boyfriend like in You’ve Got Mail.
Anyway, tell me about the weird things you remember from when you were first on the internet! And then we can join together for a rousing rendition of “We Like The Moon.”
I looked up every Kristi Yamaguchi fansite I could find and printed out articles and pictures to add to my Kristi Yamaguchi scrapbook.
Also: Les Mis fanfic.
Fanning is so much *easier* since internet. Remember when we used to have to buy actual magazines and cut pictures out?
I made a scrapbook of Calvin and Hobbes comics by cutting actual strips out of the actual newspaper and pasting/taping them into a blank notebook. Those were the days!
Oooh, yeah, I painstakingly downloaded (using a 56k dial-up modem) several images of the cast of Boy Meets World to insert into a PowerPoint presentation I was doing about same in my free time.
I cannot emphasize enough that this was not a school assignment or anything like that. Just your average eighth grade Boy Meets World hobbyist.
Making PowerPoints for fun is one of those weird childhood memories that I think about every once and a while. A few years ago we found a floppy disc with an autobiographical one my sister made when she was 7 called “All About [sister’s name]” and it was so cute and SO tacky.
I am VERY glad to know others did it, too, because I definitely made approximately a dozen on various subjects FOR NO REASON beyond my own enjoyment.
Same same same. We also made PowerPoints for the opening credits of our homemade claymation movies but the camcorder we had was too old to actually hook up to the computer (as far as we could tell, anyway), so we would film the computer screen as the PowerPoint played…
Oh my goodness, that sounds wonderful. And claymation movies! As in stop-motion?
In the spirit of Mallory’s comprehensive understanding of both Into the Woods and Company:
Les Mis? That’s the musical where the guy is mostly interested in fucking a blonde chick than any sort of revolutionary action?
yep, yep with the Les Mis. Had like six proto-screennames identifying me as a Friend of the ABC.
Also I was at the LIBRARY.
Any old Hotel Le Cafe folks around these parts? Because I am 100% willing to reminisce about that.
Les Miserables was (and still is) my favorite novel, and I shared it as a favorite with ONE friend in school, as well as loving the musical, only us two. The only memorable internet presence it had was a long text version of the libretto, which I printed out and still have in a large binder. Years later, I was shocked, SHOCKED to discover there were fans all over the internet. I felt kind of indignantly outraged, actually. I still refuse to accept it. (Unlike other fandoms that I purposefully sought out so I could share the love with fans.) Nope, I just can’t share it with anyone but her.
Les Mis fanfic yesssssss!
Les Mis fanfic? Me too!
X-Files discussion boards on Usenet! (Would it have been alt/tv/xfiles?)
Sample comment at the end of any given season: “IS MOULDER DED?”
Me too me too that was my usual haunt.
Yesss yessssssss
omg, I was on alt.tv.xfiles for like a minute when I was a kid. I could not figure out the usenet yet at that time because all I had was an ASCII bb, so it call came as a wall of text. When I finally got an actual usenet reader, I hung out in alt.tv.animaniacs and alt.fan.dave_barry. Oh man, childhood.
My absolute favorite part of Kumail Nanjiani’s X-Files Files is his visits to those boards and how he tracks the slow but inevitable descent into modern internet culture, complete with flamewars and trolling, purely through that lens. It’s fascinating.
Days home sick = typing “Pussycat Dolls” or “Rent the musical movie” or “Mean Girls bloopers” into a search engine and just watching videos all day long
P.S. when I was little I thought Monster.com and Google were the same thing because Google sounded like a name a monster might have
I definitely had a Rent tribute Geocities page that I “made,” complete with MIDI music. I think I was part of one of those internet webs or whatever they were called where you’d put a badge on your site that would link back and forth to other Rent-related sites.
WEBRINGS.
oh god, web rings.
That’s right! I totally forgot what they were called. But I had all sorts of web ring badges all over my sites.
Look this whole article is RIDICULOUS but also pretty hilarious and includes this amazing quote: Courtney Love called me late one night. I was one of her (many) AOL IM buddies. (“I love the internet,” Love said. “It’s like a video game about me.“) She was in town. Did I want to come out for a drink at such-and-such a bar? “It’s in Humboldt Park,” she said brightly.
Oh man, AIM. Y’all remember that??
I STILL HAVE MY AIM USERNAME. I think it’s about…. 15 years old now. I still use it. Every day.
The day AOL shuts off AIM is going to be a very sad day for me. YES I KNOW THERE’S ALTERNATIVES THAT’S NOT THE POINT
related, remember ICQ??
Who do you still talk to??
Lots of people who have known me/said username forever. I just can’t bring myself to move fully to gchat or Facebook chat, although I do use those for some people! There’s just something about a decades-old AIM handle.
SAME
I TALK TO OTHER OLD NERDS
YASSS what up fellow oldnerd
I had an ICQ number in the late 90s, and I was the last of my friends to get one. I still don’t like chat much, for me it’s like the worst of phone and email in one. I know this is a minority opinion though!
Whenever the “…” shows up in iMessage, I just want to see what the other person is typing… bring back the ICQ way so I can see people’s thought patterns and typos.
I do! I lived for that little “uhoh!” noise every time I got a new message.
I still use my AIM through the Pidgin client as despise and distrust Facebook messenger. Where are my conversations stored and with what intent? I have endless txt exports of truly regrettable ICQ logs from the late 90s, but they are safely maintained locally where I can destroy by magnet and fire should it become necessary.
Some say the world will end in fire, / Some say by magnet. / From what I’ve tasted of online sadness / I hold with those who favor magnet.
This is beautiful and hilarious and I love it so much.
*applause*
My friends all stopped using AIM when everyone went to college. I still miss it.
I still remember all of my old AIM away messages, and the specific situations I would use them for. Also my best friend’s.
Oh my god yes. I had my RL username, and then a handful of in-character handles for various characters I RPed. Like Dib from Invader Zim, or Ein from Cowboy Bebop. (Yes, I RPed a corgi.)
I actually still use AIM, every single day! My office installs it on everybody’s computer for “hey I forgot what date this report is supposed to have, can you please tell me, I’m too lazy to walk over to your office” purposes. It has the unintended side effect of facilitating a thriving, yet silent, office gossip scene.
We use Lync/Skype for that
when I was 13, someone IMed me pretending to be Miley Cyrus and I believed her
There was a relationship that started in 2000 that only existed because of AIM. Up late at my parent’s house, chatting with a boy I really should not have chatted with. The CHIME.
I met my very first internet friend because he had created a GeoCites or an AngelFire site (back when you had to write all your own HTML) dedicated to his love of Liz Phair. The 90s were a special time.
YES. We used it in college before gchat (heck, gmail) was a thing. Constantly logged on & had tons of away messages that I would use based on the situation (all tagged so that I knew which was which). Specific alert sounds for when certain people logged on/came back from away.
OH my god, my first real queer girl crush was facilitated by freshman year late-night AIM use. Even though we lived in the same dorm, we both had buzzkill roommates and no other choice.
I’m actually seeing her for the first time in 15 years next month!
Fucking AIM and my babydyke past.
AIM is the only reason why I can type so fast. Previous attempts failed. If I were born when texting was the thing I’d be hopeless.
“I love the internet,” Love said. “It’s like a video game about me.”
THIS IS WHY I LOVE THE INTERNET TOO COURTNEY
Just a couple of years ago, I started a new job at an alt weekly here and the guy who was training me asked if I used AIM and what was my handle because that was how most of the editors corresponded during the day. I used to use it prolifically BUT it had been so long that I was pretty much rendered speechless that an entire office full of people still considered it their go-to. And then I couldn’t even figure out how to get a new account and set it up, which felt like being completely out of touch with the times going in both directions at once.
What about the end of the world?
Pretty sure we quoted that instead of conversing for AT LEAST three months.
I STILL tell people I am le tired.
I open conversations with Mr.BHam “h’ok, so.”
Same with me and Mr.Q9. Also, I often say, “I am le tired,” and he will respond with, “Zen take a nap. And zen fire ze missiles!” Also sometimes I will say, “WTF, mate?”
I have found my people 🙂
Don’t forget “AAAHHHH MOTHERLAND.”
Yeah I quote that phrase and “But I am le tired” more than anything else
ugh love it so much
I occasionally yell “AAAAAH FOR ZE MOTHERLAND” at people.
same. and every time I bring out the globe to show one of my students something I have to fight the urge to say “Hokay so here’s the earth. (round.)”
I still say “Dang, that is a sweet earth” pretty frequently, like multiple times per work week.
And “All Your Base are Belong to Us”
For those who missed it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kCpjgl2baLs Damn, that is a sweet Earth, you might say.
“Hokay so. Here’s da earth.” The end of the world was the catalyst for my very relationship in eighth grade. It ended two weeks later when my capricious eighth grade self no longer found the video — or my boyfriend — very funny anymore.
Pretty sure my husband and I had a conversation that was just quotes from that video and reminiscing about when Flash was new and exciting… about two days ago.
Yes! A couple of my friends from that time and I still quote it to each other. I’m pretty sure that is just embedded in my mind forever.
’bout that time, eh chaps?
…
…
…
…
right-o.
There is a very specific group of friends who will always crack up just hearing any of say “PORK CHOP SANDWICHES!!!”
Those G.I. Joe videos were legendary.
This video was, until recently, the subject of an ongoing debate between my partner and I. At the beginning of the video the narrator says “Look at thees earth. This is one sweet earth, right?” I had always heard the next word as “Roooound,” referring to the shape he had just drawn. My partner had always heard “Wrooong.”
We bickered about this for YEARS, until the morning after our elopement. Then he finally explained his reasoning: “It’s wrong because the earth is not a sweet place, it’s going to end in nuclear winter and polar ice caps melting and whatall else.” Super obvious, now that he says it, but I swore it was “Round” for ages, just because that’s what I remember from when it first appeared! My partner was totally right.
(Side note: when I admitted he’d been right all along, he stared at his wedding band and whispered “It’s a magic ring!”)
Atlasblue85 (comment above) heard “round” too, so you’re not alone
I don’t think that argument was ever settled in my friendgroup.
The first time I watched this it was with my flatmate at the time, and the site we were watching it on wasn’t working properly, so it took us a while to realize it had sound. It’s a bit different as a silent film….
AOL chat room. I was in 5th grade. I talked to a real live actual person about how I was learning Spanish in class, and I translated something for him.
I was just looking at walkthrough videos of Microsoft Bob last night out of nostalgia.
I fucking loved Microsoft Bob. I was 9. It was amazing.
WHO WAS YOUR FAVORITE MICROSOFT BOB GUIDE
MINE WAS JAVA THE COFFEE DRAGON
Is there a list somewhere???? I can’t remember!!!
http://www.danielsays.com/ms-bob-07-friends-of-bo…
IT ALL JUST CAME SCREAMING BACK. I loved Chaos.
YES CHAOS.
I feel so lame for having only used Rover!
To be fair, Rover was pretty boss. He’d turn in circles before lying down and would make cute noises.
Mine was Scuzz! I loved his bad attitude.
Totally legit answer. Scuzz and Polly were the true agents of chaos.
Ditto to AOL chat room, probably 11 or 12 years old, at a friend’s house under the neglectful watch of her divorced father. We pretended to be older and chatted with boys. A/S/L?
My first email address, when I was 16 or so, was a string of numbers. I shared it with my whole family and checked it once a week from my mother’s computer (which I also used to type my English class assignments – all we used computers for back then). I swear I am not so old. Things change fast!
For my first year and change of internet access, I shared an email account with my family. The only people who used it were me…and my dad.
Hotmail was such a gift when it hit the scene, y’all.
Was it a Prodigy email? Mine was also a randomly-generated string of letters and numbers, when I was 13. I checked it so infrequently I didn’t know my boyfriend had broken up with me (by email) until a week after the fact.
another one for AOL Chatrooms here.
Also, the text-based Modus Operandi game & LiquidGeneration’s godawful Sabotage series (the latter of which still exists here http://www.liquidgeneration.com/sabotage/)
My first experience of this magical thing called the internet was in an AOL chatroom over at a friend’s house. The room was discussing NIN and my sister typed out the lyrics to “Closer” and we were promptly banned.
So, yes, my first experience of the internet involved being banned for using the f-word.
I had an Internet boyfriend via AOL when I was like 15 or so. We talked on the phone a lot and I remember he eventually sent me a photo (he was not cute) in the actual US Mail. And we would cyber and were “married” online. And he would send me poems, with red text on a black background. Which, when you tried to print them out, would reveal that the black background was hiding that the same email had been sent to MANY girls. I think at one point a couple of us were going to confront him with the evidence together. (His original excuse were that the other recipients were his aunts or some bullshit)
OH man. We used to go to soundboards and crank call people. A personal favorite was the Mrs Cleo soundboard. http://www.albinoblacksheep.com/flash/misscleo
Soundboards!! Oh man I almost forgot about those. There was a phenomenal one with David Lee Roth’s vocal track from “Running with the Devil” isolated that made me laugh every single time.
http://www.soundboard.com/sb/David_Lee_Roth_Sound…
This one?
!!! This is the sounds but not the original UI for the soundboard – still COMPLETELY AMAZING. I think I’m going to construct myself a voicemail greeting out of this.
My dad had one from Kindergarten Cop. “Who is your daddy, and what does he do?”
Ahh my friends and I used to prank call our teachers with soundboards from Ebaum’s World! And not when we were in middle school–it was when we were like juniors and seniors in high school, embarrassingly enough.
Maddox, and the Evil Overlord List.
for some reason that just reminded me of Seanbaby, original flavor, before he disappeared for years and then resurfaced to join Cracked.
I printed out the Evil Overlord List and kept it in a binder along with a bunch of other internet lists. I wonder if my mom still has it somewhere.
My bf had never seen it before so I giddily introduced him to it. Along with that splendid Python/LOTR crossover script.
Me toooo! I think my Internet Binder is still in my storage unit with years of fanfic notebooks (at least I hope it is)
ugh Maddox. so embarrassing.
Maddox is terrible but I loved his page critiquing children’s art. I still say “Vroooooooooooooom! F” all the time
For every animal you eat, I am going to eat THREE!!!
guyzzz I had a Prodigy account and I went on a message board where I talked to people about David Eddings and Robert Jordan books and I think I was like thirteen? Sometimes I think about things that I wrote and the embarrassment is overwhelming.
Oh my ears and whiskers, I may have been in that same chat room. The David Eddings Club… I met my current husband there. Not joking. We were both in our teens. Thank God none of that was archived. Also, wtf Prodigy with their random number-letter email addresses, like they would assign you [email protected] or something. But the {s sound.wav} thing that would play a little snippet of music (if people had the file I think?) was kind of neat.
I remember when the Macarena.wav thing was playing nonstop in the chatroom.
I RPed Piers Anthony characters on Prodigy. The thought of the number of pedos that were probably on there creeps me out to this day.
ME TOO but it was my dad’s Prodigy account and I posted in Tolkien usenet groups.
OMG I did this too except I was mostly on SW bbs. I even hung out in a Prodigy sci-fi & fantasy chatroom!
I was so, so cool.
for me I think, when I look back on it I was so clearly a twelve-year-old trying to hang out with grownups and oh man is that something I wish I didn’t remember
I was 13 and I was trying to hang out with like, 16-22 year olds and yes, yes, I wish I could kind of forget it too. Occasionally I’ll mention it on a place like this or someone will find me on FB (I actually revealed my real name to 1-3 people I met in the chat rooms) and the conversations would be like:
“remember when we used to hang out in [chatroom name redacted out of embarassment]”
“yes! that was terrible and silly! why did we do that??”
That chat room is how I learned how to type quickly. Also, I was so pleased with myself at that age because I could type quickly, accurately, and with the correct grammar and punctuation. I foolishly thought all of that stuff would be crucial for passing for being older than I actually was. If I only knew how internet communication would evolve..
OMG THIS EXISTS: http://prodigy.dreamstruct.com/forums/activetopic…
no way no thank you the last thing I want is to be recognized from that time
I was about that old when I was talking about _Twin Peaks_ on Prodigy! Also afternoon soaps.
I had an AOL account that led to me hanging out in the Red Dragon Inn and RP’ing as a girl/dragon hybrid oh my GOD just typing that makes my face go red.
A friend of mine showed me AOL free-form RPG chatrooms one Christmas Eve visit when I was… 16 probably? I then talked an ex-boyfriend into giving me a screen name on his account because my parents wouldn’t let me get AOL on my own. I ended up owing said ex-boyfriend quite a bit of money.
I played in those chatrooms for a very, very long time.
I also have awesome memories of Geocities sites from an HTML class I took during high school. I have long regretted that I didn’t back them up when I had the chance. I had one detailing my process of trying to get a gold chocobo in FFVII. Mem~o~riiiiiies
Oh also! The very first site I remember being a rabid fan of was some guy named Andrew who was, if I remember right, a journalism major at Ole Miss. It was called eMpTyV and he did reviews of music videos. He was hilarious and very smart.
My parents were divorced, and I had to use different screen names at the different houses, which meant I was flipping back and forth between the accounts every week. But it was the most equitable way they could figure so that one or the other wasn’t paying for all of my internet.
doesn’t it blow your mind to think of how expensive it could get back in the day???
Everything about the early internet is so weird. I remember coming home from school and I’d put in a CD, then turn on the computer and sign onto the internet. By the time I was checking my email the CD would be on the 3rd or 4th song.
SO expensive. I used to have to earn my internet time (we had AOL, Compuserve, and Prodigy at various times, so my parents broke it down by the hour) through chores and stuff. I got 2 hours on Prodigy for one birthday.
Amazing to think about.
OH MY GOD YOU GUYS EMPTYV IS REMEMBERED ON THE INTERNET THIS JUST MADE MY ENTIRE LIFE. http://emptyv.multimedia.cx/
My little sister and I used to make joke pages on a site called… XPage I think? There was one called Cherrylicious and one called Supermarket Sweep Etc.
I also had a Phantom Planet fan page on Geocities, and it got enough hits that somebody associated with The Donnas sent me a free copy of their CD in exchange for putting their banner ad on the page.
Expage!! That was my very first website I made, I think. In sixth grade, me and a group of people in my grade all made pages. We’d make comments about each other’s pages, and I remember keeping a directory of everyone’s pages, complete with a short summary. Despite the fact that at least two of these girls were people I never interacted with in real life, from completely different friend circles.
This is where I first learned HTML, followed by the Neopets tutorials.
Was this Rhy’Din? Because let me tell you, every time I make a new internet friend and they also remember Rhy’Din, it is the biggest trip.
YES IT WAS. Red Dragon Inn forever! OK we need to exchange email addresses and reminisce like immediately.
Remember those things you’d send to friends that were like “CONCENTRATE ON THIS” and then at the end out of the blue a scary dead girl would pop up?
Good times. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-6gnAxrGWY\
They weren’t youtube videos back then, but this was what I found.
Screamers! THE WORST!
Yes and I HATED THOSE THINGS. Still do, lmao.
I would always inevitably lose my concentration because I easily let my mind wander, so I never quite got scared. But these things are the actual worst.
Related: remember those awful chain emails that would tell some story and then end with “If you don’t send this to 25 friends in the next hour, this girl will come into your room tonight and kill you” or something like that?
People still post that crap in comment sections on YouTube.
My friend did that to me all of once–and that was when we both found out that if I’m startled badly enough, I start sobbing uncontrollably.
YES. There was one I ran into a few years back that was actually a scary story about a kid who encountered a kuchisake-onna (link is to Wikipedia definition, not to scary story), punctuated occasionally with illustrations. Except sometimes those illustrations moved. When I found out, I almost threw my laptop across the room.
When I was about ten (so around 2000) and I went to a friend’s house, we would go on chatrooms and talk to random people. All I remember is starting every conversation with A/S/L? and that her username involved dolphins.
A few years later, I got into fandom via IMDB messageboards.
My little description on my Tumblr says “myname/age/location” and my friend was making fun of me the other day because it’s basically me introducing myself to the world with my A/S/L. Old habits die hard.
I got into fandom through imdb too! I was 15 and all my friends were going through their emo angst stage and meanwhile I was spending hours every day on imdb talking to strangers about phantom of the opera.
One of the first things I remember doing on the internet was starting a Saddle Club-esque roleplay group via AOL… email? Groups? I don’t remember. All I know is that it involved making up horses and statistics about them and pretending to buy them and own them. It was called Bits and Bridles. I cannot believe I remembered that.
After that I think I moved on to message boards, usually celebrity based (Hanson, and Orlando Bloom), where I wrote a lot of fiction and made my first really bad graphics. And eventually formed a group of friends who RP-ed a message board based game where we lived in a castle and had numerous male celebrity boyfriends and lovers. As you do when you’re 15.
Also yes I remember AIM, but ALSO do you remember MSN messenger because that was SUPER big for awhile. I had a whole group of friends I met through message boards and we all used MSN.
I definitely tried to get into the whole virtual horse ownership roleplay thing but I wasn’t patient enough to build my stable from the ground up. I just wanted to have the most ballin’ horses straight off the bat!
I mean I’m gonna be honest, I’m pretty sure I started the group myself JUST so I could jump into having the most ballin’ horses, lmao.
I was SO into horses as a kid/tween. (I had a whole wooden stable of plastic toy horses and they all had names and had to go in a specific order into their stalls and I would get so mad if anyone put them away wrong.)
I had a number of horse figurines and a shitload of Saddle Club and Pony Pals books. The entire bottom drawer of my dresser was dedicated to horse paraphernalia for a while. And yet, I rode a horse maybe three times total in my life!
I was definitely in a couple of those horse owner roleplay groups. I wish I could remember the names now. I remember making a very impressive Angelfire website for my stable.
And MSN messenger was SO cool for a while. I talked to my friends from the Lord of the Rings message board/IRC chat I was in through there.
Oh man, I swear I got through most of year 12 and the first couple of years of uni by playing endless games of Hexic with my friends through MSN messenger. I remember going to bed with those damn things behind my eyes.
Oh! And when MSN updated and suddenly the emoticons MOVED.
Oh man, my high school girlfriend was big into horses (owned one in RL too) and was really into these RP games.
SIm Horse!!!!!!! I am 99% certain this one is from the one I did: http://www.angelfire.com/ma/simhorse/
Bless you, I probably never would have thought about this again for the rest of my life.
We’re gonna see lions, only in Kenya. http://www.weebls-stuff.com/other-toons/video/ken…
oh my god yessssss my cousin and I were obsessed with these, especially the Kenya one, we quoted it to death for years
narwhals narwhals swimming in the ocean, causing a commotion because they are so awesome
MANGO MANGO MANGO MANGO MANGO MANGOOOOOOO
Oh yesssssss
I went to Norway for my honeymoon, and when we were first discussing the trip I turned to my then-fiance and said “more like SNORWAY” and then we had to watch this video.
MAGICAL TREVOR tho!
http://www.weebls-stuff.com/other-toons/video/mag…
Oh man. When I got my very own AOL account, I was under 12, so I dutifully set my account to the “Kids!!!” setting.
I had three sites I visited religiously at the time: the TY beanie babies website, Neopets, and the official Harry Potter site at the time.
The AOL for kids setting blocked all of those except the TY beanie babies site.
I came to my mother nearly in tears about this, and she instantly agreed to change my account setting for me.
I WAS JUST COMING HERE TO POST ABOUT THE BEANIE BABIES WEBSITE
NEOPETS
I realized recently that my budgeting habits are totally descended from my Neopets strategy. Gotta save up to get that fairy paintbrush.
Yes neopets! I was a little bit sad a few years ago when I realized that I have no idea what my password was and I no longer have access to the email I signed up with so I can never check on my neopets ever again.
NEOPETS YES.
I spent way too much time on that site. At first I loved just having the pets and playing the games maybe trying to get a paintbrush. I made multiple accounts because I wanted ALL THE PETS. And the limited edition pets, YES PLEASE.
Then I discovered the message boards. The wonderful Neopets roleplaying message boards. The epic multi-post intros that were basically just someone’s attempt at short fiction and not actually interact-with-able. The GRAVE OFFENSE when someone else took control/described what your character was doing. The snobbery of knowing how to spell medieval and looking down one’s nose at those who didn’t. The snobbery of roleplaying real original characters instead of movie/book/TV/celebrities. The sheer number of people playing perfect female characters who only wanted dudes to flirt with. The challenge of learning CSS to tweak your profile to make it look super cool when people clicked to find out MORE about your characters (because your multi-post intro wasn’t enough, I guess). The thrill of maybe roleplaying a kiss scene once?! even though you were a girl playing a male character so it felt kinda weird for your character to kiss a girl. The need to disclose that you were a girl playing a male character before it got to that point just to make sure the other person was cool with that. The actual friends you regularly played with and whose characters your characters built relationships with. Having to start a new board because you maxed out the old one. Oh those ridiculous message boards.
Eventually I got bored of it. I left for a time. I came back out of curiosity and discovered the Plots and was hooked again. Mysteries to be solved! Battles to be won! (I never previously cared about the battledome.) Avatars and trophies to acquire!
I was on there way beyond an appropriate age, but I look back fondly on it. It’s how I learned to type properly and quickly.
(And way too much, as evidenced by this post…)
Neopets has been so fundamental to my life. A few years after joining Neopets, I found the Neopian Times Writers Forum…so many friends there, so many good times. I feel like surely there have to be other forumers or former forumers among the Toast commentariat, but I’ve never seen anyone mention it in these Internet Nostalgia threads. And none of the forum friends I keep up with have mentioned seeing me post here.
Also, a couple years ago, I found my former Neopets guild leader on tumblr. My very first internet friend, back from my preteen years.
The number of times I got iced because of slash on those boards. Sometimes you just want Draco and Harry to hold hands or exchange Christmas presents in the Room of Requirement, okay. OR DRACO FINDS A BLACK KITTEN WITH GREEN EYES AND FEELS ODDLY AFFECTIONATE TOWARDS IT. (What? No, you wrote great openers.) The secret codes we’d resort to in our board titles. //
Meera Chase and Destruct-O-Match forever, guys. I earned the fancy avatars cause I was so boss (had nothing better to do with my time).
AND THE MONEY TREE?
The Ty Beanie Babies website was my very first website!
I still kinda miss my Neopet.
I will F O R E V E R associate Comic Sans with the Beanie Babies website!
this reminds me of the time my brother tried to play a game on Nickelodeon’s website, but made a typo that took him to some pretty hardcore pornography. then my parents got pretend-serious about parental controls…
Yeah, turns out that prior to (I assume) Mattel purchasing americangirls.com, that website….did not redirect to the americangirl.com website. That was a fun parental discussion.
Oh hey remember AIM? ICQ? iRC? Spinnwebe? The dysfunctional family circus? Peter Pan guy? The I kiss you guy? Vulva sleeping bags? Rotten dot com? The black table? Suck magazine? Camille Pagila’s advice column?
No? Just me?
every time I see the word ICQ i automatically think of the default “uh-oh!” noise it made.
this biz: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6iCPIUGnHQ8
A university prof still had ICQ on his computer and it popped up every time he would load his slides. Instant nostagia every time.
PETER PAN GUY FOREVER
Camille Paglia had an advice column????????????????? WHERE
That can’t be real. If there was a Camille Paglia advice column it was probably ghost-written by a 12 year-old Mallory and that’s how she got started on the path to greatness.
It was Salon? I think?
She really, really did! Like thewhelk, I think (?) it was in Salon.
I met my first boyfriend on, oh god it was a forum for RPGMaker2000 people, we collaborated on a game. Turns out we lived nearby and decided to go see a movie together (god I wish I could remember what movie it was) and well, one thing lead to another and BOOM it’s making out* in my mom’s car while the best of Blondie plays. Heart of glass is rolling on and my pants are off , windows are fogging up right Titantic like and then my Mom opens the door cause she thought she left some papers in her car.
Which also doubled as my coming out story.
Anyway flash forward a few years and he’s in town to, I think try out for Jeparody and we have lunch and he’s all super skinny now and very superior cause he made bank flipping houses and “building equity” and not so low key mocking me for dropping out of college and being unemployed and still fat but jokes on him I m married with actual Manhattan real estate and last I heard he was underwater on several properties SO THERE.
I love everything about this story.
*saves link to show to other people*
I saw this article pop up on Twitter than raced over here to immediately CTRL+F for “ICQ.” Uh oh! Uh oh! Uh oh!
I had an ICQ number low enough that I was reasonably cool for it.
me toooooo. Do you think I can remember it anymore? nope!
ICQ! I remember my college boyfriend wanted to chat with that and I could never figure out why it was cooler than AIM, but clearly he thought so.
I especially loved The Black Table, thank you for reminding me.
AIM and ICQ, yes.
Rotten.com I’d heard of but never visited. And suck.com.
the amount of time i spent learning how to skin my icq and winamp client as a teen is, in retrospect, possibly a wasted skill in my present vocation. the UI experiences i could’ve developed instead!! at least i have awesome memories of making prime cardcaptor sakura skins, HIT ME UP NERDS.
spinnwebe came up in some twitter convo recently and I had to look it up and bask in the glow of the, like, two captions I successfully submitted to the caption contest. I was honestly shocked to find that none of the jokes were as hilarious as I remembered, I thought that caption contest was the height of internet humor.
Oh, shit, the Peter Pan guy, I was just thinking about him the other day.
PETER PAN GUY AND I KISS YOU GUY YES
Suck! Camille Paglia! I remember. Also Fuckedcompany.com, that was fun.
ROTTEN.COM OMG. My cousin was the first person I knew with high-speed internet and that was the first site he showed me.
I do not remember dysfunctional family circus, but I do remember nietzche family circus! I imagine it’s the same basic idea?
and yes, the peter pan guy. I always visited his website by mistake when I was trying to buy tickets for the peter pan bus.
I remember when new Strong Bad Emails were posted once a week you could stand in the middle of the floor in my dorm and hear it starting over and over again as people rushed to their computers to watch.
My VERY first Internet experience was a Redwall fan board called the Long Patrol BBS. A lot of the people had websites with their fanfic, and I remember most of us had fan characters that we posted as on the board. (It wasn’t quite roleplay, or at least not all of it.) (Mine was SarahRose of Noonvale, a brave mousegirl.)
High school I was the least cool girl ever and I spent a lot of time on Rent fansites (a guide to all the references in La Vie Boheme!) and the ReBoot newsgroup. Good times, good times.
My creative writing class had (an?) Internet-connected computer(s) and every week me and my friend would gather to watch Strong Bad. Very important.
Long Patrol BBS! I was more of a regular at Starfire’s, but I’m gonna say at least 95% of my Very First Interneting was Redwall-related? I see your brave mousegirl and raise you one Spring Rudderfleet, an adventurous river otter who was just like me but better in every conceivable way.
I’m CRYING. The internet is such a beautiful and strange place. The only username I really remember is Martin ap Cymru, who was very kind to an obviously inexperienced kid.
A brave ottermaid named Nimelai who was also just like me but better winks in your direction before diving into the Mossflower and swimming away.
I am now so sad that I was too old to experience Redwall fan boards.
Strong Bad was excellent, I was a bit of a raver, so that lightswitch raver was referenced often and I still always start saying “The system… is down! The system… is down!” whenever my kid starts playing with lightswitches.
The Trogdor reference in the finale of Buffy was A+.
Hampster Dance
(And then I misspelled hamster for about a decade)
Yessss. (And thank you for helping me realize that this is why I have trouble spelling hamster). We used to set our Latin teacher’s homescreen to it and he didn’t know how to change it and it was glorious.
YES. Circa high school, IIRC.
Also ICQ, although I have long forgotten my number.
I had a juno.com email address.
And I lost many, many hours to Snood my sophomore year of college and came a little too close to failing calculus because of it.
goddd I was so addicted to Snood. It was bad news. (but I was so GOOD at it. so good.)
Snoooood! Even my mom was addicted to snood
My cousins who were like 5+ years younger than me showed me that site first, and it was the moment I realized I was already An Old on the internet even though I was only like 20.
I learned so much (good stuff!) about birth control and sex from early livejournal sex tip communities. I was 15 reading about how all labia are different, and I think that had a really positive impact on me during my formative years!
I was super into the Planned Parent for Teens website!! I learned so much about sex from that… as well as from writing slashfiction.
In order:
Signing up for hotmail in the library carousels in high school.
University email which was just white text on a black screen.
My 3rd year university boyfriend building me a computer of my own.
The ICQ message sound and that little green flower.
Mahjong all night long after my 3rd year university breakdown and ensuing lack of friends/social invites/ability to speak to people unless absolutely necessary.
Finding my first girlfriend on a dating site literally called Technodyke.
Breaks from Mahjong to read and write long long loooooong emails to said girl before ever meeting her.
A message board that I’m not even going to get into (but did inspire a short story about a troll I had published in an anthology.)
Aw, my high school/college boyfriend built my first two computers too!
Technodyke! Sign me up.
And now your user name is reminding me of my first job after university…
Ha, this actually is my first job after university! It’s a rite of passage. Please tell me it gets better.
Well, now I’m a pretty comfy government HR person, but…. I had a lot of other jobs in between them, many of them ill-paid and one of them I got fired from, so.. I can’t guarantee it will but probably?
I also spent a ridiculous amount of time crafting my AOL “Profile” which in retrospect, was really just a FB page.
Oh god yes. I was very proud of mine which was filled with angsty song lyrics and self-deprecating comments and one of my male friends from the Blink 182 message board told me that I needed to project a more confident image with my profile if I wanted to attract boys. His screen name was Spinning Chicken.
ALSO a lot of “games” on what I now realize were promotional websites for toys and TV shows I liked – Polly Pocket.com, PBS Kids.com, TVO Kids.com etc.
um ok but that game on polly pocket where you had to like drive and collect clothes and at the end make an outfit from it I was obsessed with that game. (tell me I am remembering correctly that this was indeed polly pocket and im not mixing it up with barbie which i also frequented.)
My sister and I played hours and hours of some kind of safari game about the Wild Thornberrys on nick.com. Does anyone remember what that was about? I know there were cheetah babies.
A game, probably made on the very first version of flash, called Slap The Spice Girls, which was Wack-a-mole with the Spice Girls’ faces.
(This was when “Wannabe” was on the radio CONSTANTLY and did not have the benefit of the warm glow of nostalgia.)
Just that flash … was a thing. OMG.
I REMEMBER THAT!
Oh man, one of The Young at my job just said something like this last week–“when I was in college there was no YouTube.” Several of The Youngers boggled. The speaker was about five years younger than me, though, so there was definitely no YouTube when I was in college–but we had flash animations! Muffin Films and that one video about the end of the world and dancing hamsters and badger badger and this one terribly offensive video about stick figures that my peers nonetheless quoted nonstop. Internet inanity always finds a way.
So that was college. When I was in high school, AOL had these things called keywords, which were like little apps for certain publications or organizations. I used to visit the message board at the keyword for Rolling Stone magazine. When AOL stopped using keywords and started using regular old web pages, the message board was only accessible if you’d bookmarked it. After that point the only people who used it were a bunch of teenagers like myself, all over the country, who met up there to talk about our lives and compare our elaborate, many-fonted signatures boasting quotes from our favorite songs and movies.
It was great. I still think about those folks from time to time, although I have not tried to find them. I still have some of the Paintshop images and .wav files we made for each other. If you’re out there, hello.
Wait… “terribly offensive video about stick figures” is bringing back a memory, nestled as it is amongst things I too recall from college… remind me what it was?
A quick google of the only lyric I could remember (“you want me to do things to you like the sun and the moon. I don’t have time!”) and the video appears to be called “Bang Bang Bang.”
RIGHT!
Thank you!
FEED ME.
I’M HUNGRY!
I spent so much time on muffin films.
DO YOU LIKE BRAN MUFFINS?
… the moral of the story is, NEVER talk to muffin trees.
HARRY POTTER FANFICTION. And ICQ.
And here I will (slightly ashamedly) link to my ff.net profile from 2000 as a kid who just got free access to the family computer: https://www.fanfiction.net/u/27572/Twilight-and-S…
If you’re brave, share yours too, if it still exists.
Did anyone else spend a lot of time playing HP trivia online, as though they were training for something?
Quick, what colour was Hermione’s bathrobe (it’s v v important) ?
I want to say pink?
YES
YES, I feel vindicated (I didn’t want to post my guess, because what if I was *wrong* about a piece of extremely obscure Harry Potter trivia? My whole conception of myself would have to change.)
My FFN user id is only four digits long, that’s how early a user I am:
https://www.fanfiction.net/u/3587
May these accounts never die and may our grandchildren never find them.
(OMG I totally read some of your Animorph stories back in ’99!!)
I was wondering if there would be someone who had read them back in the day! Bwahaha.
Sandman fanfic!! My hero.
I also managed to turn that in, slightly edited, for an AP English Language assignment. Win-win!
It’s okay, I was such an early adopter my username was a word. Spelled correctly. No numbers or anything like that after it.
https://www.fanfiction.net/u/32117/
I’m so sorry, everyone.
I think I read your POTC fanfic back in the day! I also had an account, but it is (thankfully) deleted by this point.
I don’t even wanna think about my ships back then. Also can’t look it up at work but FF.net AnimagOread reporting for duty.
…
I don’t wanna talk about how desperately I looked forward to finishing those chapters after school each day.
I never had an ff.net account, because I was too good for the Pit of Voles.
Thankfully, this means almost all my early fanfic is now lost to the void, because I don’t even remember the website names to look them up in the Wayback Machine.
I personally would only read LotR fic good enough to be published on Hennuth Annun.
Yessss!! I was sad to discover FF deleted all *NSYNC fanfic (I’m sure they are saved on a floppy disk somewhere) but at least still left HP and a little Xmen! https://www.fanfiction.net/u/76327/SleepyAngel
OMG NSync and BSB and Beatles fanfiction on FF.net were ridiculous! Middle school me and BFF read the hell out of them.
HP fanfac wasn’t my first fanfic (maybe someday I’ll post the story about how I finally figured out what a “lemon” was via LJ fanfic…), but I’m pretty sure it’s where I started understanding my super queer sexuality, lol.
Oh, fan fiction. Oh sex ed via fan fiction…
I won’t link to it because nobody over the age of 16 should read it, but it’s out there. Along with one of those cringingly long FanFiction Dot Net bios with the super-long “bold what applies to you!” lists.
I do not care that I am late, Fanfiction.net represent.
https://www.fanfiction.net/u/103005/EvilBunny
Don Hertzfeldt, who made “Rejected,” is still owning. His short film “World of Tomorrow” was nominated for an Oscar this year and it’s stunning. I highly, highly recommend it.
Speaking of cartoons I quote endlessly…..
His film It’s Such A Beautiful Day (originally released as three shorts) is on Netflix right now. It’s… something.
Whaaaat I did not even realize that was the same person. I loved World of Tomorrow.
World of Tomorrow made me cry. I second this recommendation, it’s really, truly beautiful.
Purplemoon! I remember nothing (lockers? tampon advice?) but I remember it was A Thing I Loved!
Oh my god i’m so glad someone else said purplemoon, I thought I might be crazy! I had the cdrom games as well, which came with these giant plastic jewels which I wore proudly. It was about a girl and you guide her through awkward social situations I think?? And there was online messaging…oh man.
I had the games too! I loooved them. They had weird CD cases, like with a special button or something I think. And I was really into those plastic jewels-something about the shape and their being clear really appealed to me. I had the same feeling about the Harry Potter plastic rocks (?) which came in different colors and had little pictures of like a chocolate frog or broom on them.
I was just coming here to post about Purple Moon! I think that was my first online community–I built up a huge collection of those weird stones and things you’d find around the site.
Ooh I spent a lot of time on Purplemoon! It was the website for a computer game company (Secret paths, Rockett’s … School Life?). I remember particularly having like trinkets or mementos that you could collect by going to different pages, and of course I wanted to get them all.
i was obsessed with Rockett’s Secret Invitation.
Behold! The Truth Glasses…
omg Purple Moon! Loved it. But I must admit internet security wasn’t very good back then, a creep messaged me through there and I was only 10.
gURL.com, anyone?
my first email was from there!! all the memories.
me too!!
OH FUCK YEAH. I still keep their book on life as a damn grownup b/c there’s some dope harm reduction shit in there.
YES.
OH, OH Y E A H
I JUST GOT THE NAME OF THAT WEBSITE in the year of our Lord two thousand sixteen
ME TOO. I didn’t even realize there was anything to get until I saw your post just now, and now I’m delighted.
Yesss. There was that game where you made your own boy band and they had those crazily extensive satirical bios of each possible member, one of whom was described as “the love child of Elton John and Barbara Streisand” which I didn’t follow at the time, but now every once in a while I think about it and chuckle.
fuuukkk yesss. Came here hoping to find some fellow gURLs. I’ll never get used to being so wholly understood as I am among Toasties. *wipes tear*
Yes!
I remember the day i was trying to visit gurl.com with my younger cousin and couldn’t remember the specific way to spell the site address, so I typed in girl.com. uh, yeah. Not the right site at all. Nope.
And that’s the time I accidentally visited a porn site on my grandma’s computer. I remembered that it was gURL a lot better after that.
The same thing happened to me! I started panicking and crying and forgot how to close the browser window because I was, like, 8. Unexpected pubic hair can be really scary!
FUCK YES! I had a gURLmail account as my very first email. I still heart the black & purple layout. Instant fond nostalgia.
Whoa! I think I have a wristband with their logo on it, but at the time I got it the internet was not a thing I had access to (far too rural), and thus I’m also just now seeing that name for what it means. How bizarre.
yes! my life and my heart!
Hours spent on Neopets and trawling deviantArt for good Sailor Moon fanart, followed by reading tons of HP fanfic.
haha, yes, also loved the “music” related forum on deviantArt of all things.
I still know my ICQ account number.
OMG, now that you mention it, I think I might remember mine, too. 14726190??
that is the correct number of digits.
Mine was 6799934! Early adopter 🙂
Me too! Did you know it’s still around? I logged in to my account a few months back (mainly to confirm that the number I had floating around in my brain was actually an ICQ number and not some other weird number). (10915717)
oh geez.
Star Wars gangsta rap. The one video with the squirrel. My spoon is too big. Charlie the unicorn. Trogdor. My terrible first email address.
so much fanfic. So. Much. Fanfic. And killing my parents’ printer by printing out crappy pictures of the LOTR cast and Ewan McGregor.
Good times.
also. Let’s just go full throttle with the awkward here. Not my earliest, but my most reviewed fic. (Kinda. Not really a fic. But the actual earliest one was deleted by mother in a fit of net hysteria when she discovered I was actually doing things online.) https://www.fanfiction.net/s/2082834/1/The-Gospel…
Charlie the unicorn!! My college group recited that over and over again as we tromped through London & Oxford–I am so so sorry, people of England.
shuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuun
It’s a magical liopleurodon!
They took my frickin’ kidneys!
omg the squirrel
I HAVE STIGMATA OF THE EYES
Still can’t hear about people’s astigmatism without immediately hearing this in my head.
I think that’s part of why that bit, in particular, stuck out to me so much–because I have astigmatism myself.
That and “I hate trying to pick out new glasses, it’s like trying to pick out a whole new face,” because that’s the most accurate thing anyone has ever said.
Tiny 2005-me read your fic. She says thanks.
Not so tiny 2005 me says you’re welcome.
You’re thinking of Foamy the Squirrel – http://illwillpress.com/
Actually I think I was thinking of some funnyordie flash video with a squirrel singing about gonads? (I’m too afraid of what I might find to look it up.)
But I definitely remember Foamy the squirrel. Especially the stigmata of the eye.
GONADS AND STRIFE
Gonads in the lightning (I think this is a thing I remember.)
https://youtu.be/6A0p-U1LBbQ Weeeeeee!
Oh god it lives
I still remember most of the words to the Star Wars gangsta rap.
http://www.albinoblacksheep.com/flash/lobster
The first thing I ever did on the internet besides research for school reports was participate in an extremely AU Harry Potter RPG, where I was introduced to Robert Jordan books and Neopets in rapid succession. I also spent a good deal of high school on spacefem.com, which had a community a lot like the Toast has now.
Freshman year dorm-floor-shirts were Teen Girl Squad themed! (Still have mine in a box somewhere. Represent 3rd Veenstra!)
Earliest internet memories–hanging out on the message boards for Ed (remember the TV show with the bowling-alley-lawyer?) and mail ordering UK CD singles from a really sketchy website (in retrospect the world before paypal was so weird).
I LOVED ED. (There are still some hilarious Web 1.0 fan sites still out there!)
Every time I spell out Wednesday I think of how on the Stuckey Bowl forums we used to call it “Wnesday” when there wasn’t an episode airing :*)
YES I remember Ed! My family watched that show religiously!
I am HERE FOR THIS. In no particular order…
All your base are belong to us
Neil Cicierega’s Animutations (specifically Hyakugojyuuichi)
Eskimo Bob
AOL Sailor Moon message boards (I still have two friends I originally met on there when we were 14)
gurl.com
Those build-a-bear type websites where you could make your own personal webpages (slightly predating Angelfire and Geocities). I don’t remember the name of the one we used to use all the time! But there was so much comic sans and so much glittery animation.
SailorMoon.org message boards
Weebl and Bob
+++ to all your base and Weebl and Bob. Awesome nostalgia. <3
I was scrolling down in a hurry to post Hyakugojyuuichi.
So beautifully weird. Did you know that he is the creator of Potter Puppet Pals as well??
GURL DOT COM
OH GOD THE SM.ORG MESSAGE BOARDS
I bought three trading cards off of someone there once, mailed concealed cash. I was SO NERVOUS because i was such a Young!
I have two friends I met on AOL Sailormoon message boards too! We ran rival mailing lists in 7th-8th grade. <3
SailorMoon.org! And my very first website was hosted on gURLpages.com. I think my username on both those sites was Sailor Moonpie.
You can do anything at zombo.com. Anything at all. The only limit is yourself. Welcome to zombo.com.
YES! ZOMBO.COM! Thank you for that reference. To be fair, I had been on the internet a while when I first saw it, but it’s one of my favorite things on the web.
iPad users will be pleased to know there is an HTML5 version of zombo.com available for their browsing pleasure at https://html5zombo.com/. Long may it reign.
My first email account (Yahoo) was a reference to an Adam Sandler movie.
Oooh, I think my first email was magecatt? And it is an eternal regret that I have lost the password
I still have friends on FB that have carried over with me on to Facebook, and we met on Livejournal groups about riot grrl.
once I googled my name and the only result that came up was a guestbook comment I had left on an alfred hitchcock fansite in 1996
well done.
Sex chatting with older dudes with your 12-year-old best friend beside you as a “joke” and feeling very wonky in the pants.
ohhhhhh man.
Yes, I remember doing this (although it was as a freshman in college because I am old)
saaaaaaaaaame
Well, I’m an Old, so I remember getting my first email address in college circa 1993. I remember the first webcam I ever saw–completely pedestrian footage from a woman’s living room, but I was fascinated. I remember playing Snood all the time in grad school when I should have been doing work (dragged all my friends down with me). But mostly I remember LiveJournal. I still really miss long-form blogging, and I miss LJ’s handy approach to privacy: anonymity okay, with posts that could be public, friends-only, or private. For me it was the perfect safe space for calibrating degrees of oversharing and recording milestones in my own life. (I still sometimes think of my employer by the name I gave it on LJ, CTBNL–College To Be Named Later.) Of course I know LJ is still around but it is Not The Same, and my habit of daily posting there has been broken for far too long.
I do wonder if the peak, decline, and fall of LJ, which I now see mirrored in Facebook, is the long-term fate of every social media platform, and we will keep reinventing our ways of communicating in new shapes as each previous iteration is fatally overtaken by Russians/porn spam/our parents (or by our parents who are Russian porn spammers?).
I miss LJ and the people I met in passing there. And, as you say, the ability to control who saw which posts. I mean, I’ve carried a few LJ friends over to FB (along with a few FameTracker people) but the arena just feels completely different. I reach such a level of frustration with FB sometimes that I deactivate it for a few days just to get away from it.
SNOOD! YES.
I get excited whenever in a video game there’s a Snood ripoff as a mini game. I crack my knuckles and say, “This is what I trained for.”
I am also quite old, judging by the rest of these responses. My memory of getting the internet (AOL) in circa 1992 was that I didn’t know about search engines. So I would just type “horses” or “puppies” or similar 11-year-old rubbish into the address bar. And now that works, but at the time it just gave me an error message. I’m not sure how long it took me to realize I needed to go to yahoo or ask jeeves or whatever, and THEN type in “ponies”
I still have a Livejournal somewhere…
I had forgotten that there was a time when you *couldn’t* just type “horses” into the search bar. O.O
I miss LJ, and its knockoffs… Insanejournal, dreamwidth…
LJ was pretty much a perfect format for the rp community. Tumblr is…not so much.
I think maybe this is the webcam you saw? I was really fascinated by this episode. Sorry this link is awful
http://www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/feeds.sou…
I miss LJ too. I made some lifelong friends there. I even traveled to another country to meet a bunch of LJ fandom friends in person (gasp, meeting strangers from the internet!)
yes indeed. I am younger, so snood was a high school thing for me. Our school had just started a laptop program, which like most of those programs, was very poorly thought out. “Let’s require these kids to carry around computers with unfettered access to the internet at all times. It will help them learn (in unspecified ways we will figure out later)!”
I decided to uninstall snood and AIM from my laptop when I got to college, and largely due to that decision, my college GPA was a full point higher than my high school GPA.
Badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger MUSHROOM MUSHROOM
I just my dude a message saying that there was a Toast post of internet nostalgia and his immediate response was, “badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger MUSHROOM MUSHROOM.”
To which the only real response I had was just, “Snaaaake!”
And the subsequent Potter Potter Potter Potter Weasley Weasley
A Snape, a Snaaaaaaaape: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jT8afh58v3o
I was just about to mention the Potter version!
1980 or so (I was about 10 years old), my best friend’s dad worked for a defense contractor. He had a home computer with a modem that could call in to the defense contractor’s servers…. and he wasn’t very attentive to security (with all the info we needed to get in just sitting on the desk next to the computer). So, naturally, when no one else was around my friend and I would jump on the computer, dial in, and explore. (We looked around directories a lot, but spend most of our time on a MUD that someone was hosting there or somehow connected to.)
Looking back now, I’m a bit horrified by the lack of security on that system, but what fun we had.
I distinctly remember watching some news show in 1995 where they were talking about this new thing call the World Wide Web, and my brother scoffing because he and his nerdy friends considered images to be a waste of bandwidth and had turned off image loading in their browser (not an unusual thing to do at the time).
I went to a Zork Bulletin Board. I loved Zork.
I met the founder of Zirkle once. He was an ass.
Looking back now, I’m a bit horrified by the lack of security on that system, but what fun we had.
I mean, that was what kicked off the plot in WarGames.
GREETINGS PROFESSOR FALKEN
I’m still proud to say that I first learned HTML when I tried to customize my Neopets profile page. Those coding skills are marketable, man.
The Badger Song (badger badger badger badger MUSHROOM MUSHROOM) was so popular at my elementary school that kids would walk through the halls singing the song and some teachers had to explicitly forbid it in their classrooms. Flash animations were magic to early-aughts preteens.
I am taking my first HTML/web design class now as an adult and it’s A) Hard, B) making me shake my fist at the sky while yelling “whhhhy didn’t I try to figure out more coding on neopets and myspace???”
Myspace and Geocities for me, LOL. But yeah, those HTML skills are what helped me break into tech. Without them, I’d still be languishing in “Independent Contractor” positions in private education.
Pfft, you were using measly HTML? I had CSS on my profile.
(Except now you remind me that no, I didn’t. I did fine with HTML, but def just lifted any CSS stuff from someone else’s template.)
Shit, I was a college student in the early aughts and the Badger song was pretty damn magical to me too. I believe the Badger song transcends age, quite frankly. 😉
Lately I’ve been Neko Atsume-ing a lot, and it really hits you in the Neopets void, imo.
OOOOOO A SNAAAAAAAAAKE
I SEE A SNAAAAAAAAAKE
#neverforget
FANDOM WANK
I WILL MOURN YOUR PASSING TIL THE DAY I DIE
#theirsonisasparrow
Also, my friend and I were super obsessed with this guy who dresses like Peter Pan every day, and it seems like he’s still going 10+ years later, so good for you bro
Oh god, every time someone shows up on my Tumblr dash being all cryptic about something wanky I MISS FANDOM WANK ALL OVER AGAIN.
#hiswife? #ahorse
Omg Peter Pan guy! He’s why the phrase “you do you” was invented.
FANDOM WANK, YES. Squidwarts OTP.
Oh wow, I so miss the feeling I had with FandomWank primarily. Like…. my first huge internet community was dominated by women. I remember when we set up the wiki to have a list of known guys on FandomWank and it was, like… thirty people plus me (because I thought it was funny). Ah! Good times. I remember everyone so fondly. Sometimes I see a user name which reminds me of someone I knew through FnadomWank and I wonder if it’s the same person, and if they remember me.
My very first internet memory is probably checking out the beanie babies website after setting up the family’s AOL account. I checked it religiously for a while but I don’t think there was ever actually that much content?
Another early memory: After faithfully using Yahooligans as my only search engine for months, I wondered if Yahoo really was THAT much scarier and more “adult”, so I searched for “Shakespeare”. The first result was titled, “Was Shakespare gay?” Shocked and dismayed, I hurried back to Yahooligans for the rest of my (elementary school) days.
I too was obsessed with the Beanie Babies website. It actually did have a surprising amount of content, as I recall– I remember a bunch of the beanies having diaries that were frequently updated. For a little while all I wanted to do with my life was grow up and get a job writing content for stuffed animals on the internet.
Yahooligans! Holy cow. That was first a thing in middle school, and I used it to do research for an Anne Frank report. I tenement being similarly nervous to see what adult Yahoo had in store.
I believe I had a geocities webpage.
And of course I spent too much time on AIM a/s/l’ing in chatrooms, talking to the boys at my middle school and typing in acronyms about my mom being behind me (because of course we only had one desktop and it was in the family room)
But my early internet height was when I entered a contest on cartoonnetwork.com and won a Skateboard Shannen.
The chime of ICQ.
The anxiety of making the decision to tell an internet friend YOUR REAL NAME after knowing them online for five years.
Developing your personal priorities for moving through usenet newsgroup hierarchies so you wouldn’t miss anything.
Arranging an IRL get-together for people from a message board, wearing nametags with your user names, and then having your confused waitress ask if you are Trekkies or swingers.
Going to get a snack or refresh your drink when you were waiting for a photo to load over dial up.
OH man, I was a late adapter to the internet. Favorite early memories are from like 10th grade – looking up cool haircuts/cute boys on Make Out Club, and having a Diaryland diary.
diaryland! make out club! oh noooo i had blocked those memories! Also another one lipstickandcigarettes i think it was called? Oh boy.
HARRY POTTER PUPPET PALS . Not my first internet memory, but the flash videos we were watching in college along with The End of the World. Follow the butterflies, follow the butterflies…
Alas! A cornucopia of love.
*bother* *bother* *bother*
it’s a pipe bomb! 😀
To this day my fiance or I will occasionally walk up to the other and just start flailing our arms yelling “Bother bother bother bother bother bother”
For a fiance, I’d go with “naked time!”
(for confused comment readers, that is in fact a reference to the puppet pals, not me just being weird to a stranger in the comments. go watch it!)
I haven’t been able to find the original animated ones in YEARS (granted I didn’t try very hard but)
Neil Cicireiga! He still makes live action versions of the Puppet Pals from time to time, I believe. He’s on YouTube now. I think he wrote a song for Gravity Falls?
Probably dating myself here, but my first solid Internet memories are:
1) Hampsterdance.com! http://www.hampsterdance.com/classics/originaldan…
2) I still remember laughing at this a little bit more than makes sense in retrospect. (The original You’re The Man Now Dog! page of YTMND.com) http://yourethemannowdog.ytmnd.com/
Yes, the Hampster Dance! And all the copycat sites with different things dancing. I can still remember that looping song.
YAS YTMND. I wish I could dig up some of my favorites.
Back before the WWW I hung out at a great place called ISCA BBS. Mostly college students, from all over the US and then all over the world. 200 topics to discuss, plus that darned goatse.cx image that showed up all the time.
Also we used to cultivate elaborate finger files, and finger folks at other colleges, and send them talk requests if their finger files were interesting. I kinda miss that, tbh.
This is a year old so most have already seen it but in case you missed it or need to relive it, the founders of Neopets did an AMA!
https://www.reddit.com/r/neopets/comments/26fwhh/…
Did anyone else create their own country on NationStates? All my floormates and I were really into it sophomore year of college (c. 2005). I no longer remember what my country was called or what it did, but gotdamn if it weren’t a really high priority for me at the time.
I had one, but I think I was only into it for like a week…
I had one! It was very cool, and lots of my friends also created countries. But we only played for a few months, I think.
oh I had forgotten all about that until this very moment!
Pre-internet 1986: I used an acoustic coupler to sign up on UNIX- and DOS- based BBSes. The first message I got was wondering what I looked like naked. *sigh*
Actual internet: probably something with work, like doing software support via AOL message boards, and our rudimentary company website that took several minutes to load.
Oh hells yes with websites that took several minutes to load.
“The first message I got was wondering what I looked like naked.”
the more things change….
Oh, children. Raise your arthritic claws in the air if your first experiences involved a BBS. I sure hope that my university wiped its system archives, because the number of people who would drop dead of embarrassment were the files ever released would put a definite crimp in the workforce.
Oh hello fellow Old Nerd!
An aged nerd is but a paltry thing,
A tattered meme upon a stick, unless
Mind clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress,
Nor is there Linux school but studying
Monuments of its own magnificence;
And therefore I have sailed the seas and come
To the holy city of I grow old I grow old, I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.
Memories from this vintage: using a personal floppy disk to access Pegasus mail; seeing the first library computer to get Netscape (the internet has PICTURES now oh hey look that guy’s found porn); seeing an animated file for the first time, knowing it had taken around an hour to download a cartoon of a spinning Jolt can (you can carbon-date that reference, can’t you).
Finally, my people! PINE e-mail and Netscape at university — we felt so progressive!
I forgot about PINE!
(How could I forget about PINE?)
Same way as me, you moved to the similar-looking but fancier mutt?
Or else the same way as everyone else: you moved to hotmail and then, later, gmail.
Rocketmail! For about five minutes. Then Yahoo, then Gmail. I still have the Yahoo for certain groups.
ROCKETMAIL.
Wow. I am old. And my Yahoo email will never die – sometimes people from Way In The Past find me that way.
We had ELM.
I loved PINE. I still think HTML email is kind of ridiculously elaborate. All you needs is words!
PINE, OMG! I remember that!
applause
(It sure does feel like I’m on the old end of the demographics around her. I sure do remember netscape.)
Oh, yes! I remember when the internet got pictures! The techie boy in the dorm room below mine got a “web browser” and showed us. And PINE, and ELM… Oh, fellow olds. *sniff*
What was before Netscape? I know there was something, but I just can’t remember what it was. I just remember Netscape being the new exciting better thing.
My mom played some kind of game on the local BBS. I remember I was allowed to sign into it once (with a parent looking over my shoulder), but I was too young to find any of the stuff on it interesting.
It meee
Yesssss. I lived on a BBS for a while – can’t remember how I found it, but it was a general nerd board with a focus on anime. We’d have a couple RP threads, the OT thread, talking about our favorite shows, advice threads… I can’t even remember what it was called, but I remember it was blue.
does anyone else remember the Brunching Shuttlecocks? teenaged me loved that site.
I did too. I still love their who looks down on who nerd chart and a few others.
yes!! “Your Roommate Plays the Indigo Girls” is still one of my favorite things on the once and future world wide web.
I still can’t listen to Closer to Fine without thinking about it and I never want to.
And The Book of Ratings! Which, I just discovered, is no more. Nooo.
Here are some.
http://brunching.com/ratings-datearchive.html
I got here late and was scrolling hoping someone brought it up! I still quote Bandwidth Theater all the time. Mostly “You godless couchfuck.”
The Geek Hierarchy: still relevant, although could always use some updating.
INDEED
I’ve just trawled through this comment thread to find a mention of Brunchers. I was on the chat board there, ages ago, as geek chik.
When I was in 8th grade we were all getting our own email addresses for the first time, and we would pretty much just send each other stupid ask memes (long lists of questions to answer about yourself — whatever those were called back then, idk) and those *really* long blocks of just text but everything was spaced and arranged so that when you scrolled down continuously it turned into an animation? Again, I have no idea what that’s called, but man we LOVED those. And if you were really ambitious you’d try to make your own.
A year later I was reading too much into people’s AIM away messages and reading explicit X-Files fanfic. Good times…
Oh hot damn. I forgot about those scrolling text animations. I used to spend a lot of time making those in emails and sending them to friends. I cannot imagine why I thought they would want to see those.
No way, it was impossible to read too much into AIM away messages because that was the main mode of communication. It was vaguebooking before Facebook. like, song lyrics about a bad breakup just to make sure everyone knows how you are VERY ANGRY about how it went down.
Neopets. So many Neopets.
And I was deeply (DEEPLY) involved in an AIM based Zoids RPG, which was one of the lesser tier Toonami animes and involved people in giant semi-sentient animal robots hitting each other with said robots for Reasons.
Those “dolls” that were tiny brilliantly coloured images that you could dress in all kinds of horrifying colours and clothes and then post them in your avatar on your favourite message board? I spent many many many hours making those. It was amazing.
That’s how I learned Photoshop! (The off-brand version my family had, anyway. The skills were mostly translatable.) After dolls, I honed my abilities making livejournal avatars.
yep, a good 90% of my photoshop knowledge comes from LJ avatars (and layouts).
Yes! Those were so compelling.
Sooo many dollmakers! Both the terrible very small ones and then the nicer ones as the community grew (Doll on the Hill Factory and Xandorra’s, anyone?). I also made a lot of my own dolls, starting out basically filling in clothing with one color and moving up to shading and better nuance. I never got Photoshop though, just Irfanview to make the background transparent. I spent a lot of time trying to quickly get the shape of the outfit ready as of course the bases do not have clothes on …
Yess. What were those even called? There’s a moving company around Seattle that has two of them as their logo (“the Moving Angels,” whaat) and seeing one of their vans never doesn’t squick me out.
I was so into those! And then I would print them out and tape them to every surface in my 5th grade bedroom
I was 22 when those came out and my roommate and I spent hours on them.
I had a nervous mom who would somewhat obsessively check the browser history on the family computer every week for Bad Websites (which included Myspace and LJ, because most of her fears were about accidentally talking to predators on social networks). Obviously I got around this by obsessively deleting my history every time I closed the internet explorer window, which she found annoying but couldn’t really do anything about. But one time I forgot and I came home from school and she was at work and there was a note on the fridge that just said “WHAT IS HARRYPOTTERFANFICTION.NET???” Thankfully she was confused by the amount of content and didn’t read anything but most of my early internet memories are about being sneaky for really no reason!!
YES to the last line – most of my early internet activity involved sneaking around my parents, but not really doing anything bad (mostly chatting with friends on AIM). My MO was to stay up SUPER LATE and then get on the dial-up internet after I was sure my parents had gone to bed. My worst fear was that my mom would wake up and pick up the phone extension next to her bed and “hear” that I was on the internet.
It added such a weird sense of DANGER to things that are so normal and innocuous now!! Sometimes I remind myself of how jealous 14 year old me would have been of my undeleted browsing history and freedom to talk to whoever I want online whenever I please.
I am now desperately trying to remember the websites we all visited during registration/tutor time at school when I was about 14-16 (our tutor base was an IT room, so it had computers!). Things like lists of jokes, easter eggs (in films/TV programmes) and embarrassing moments.
High school: AOL chatrooms with people shouting random band names and a/s/l at each other all day long. Juno email address.
College: ICQ and that viral thing with the sheep bouncing across your desktop. Spoofing emails from [email protected] and such from port 25, and building my first website using pico and the MOSAIC website tutorial, optimized for what, Netscape 4? Nearly failing out from too much time spent on mIRC (#DALnet 4eva). SO SOPHISTICATED.
edited to add: KIBO (http://kibo.com/), who actually responded to me via alt.non.sequitur, so I had email from Kibo and could thus brag about it in my Geek Code oh god
OMG, the sheep. We had that at WORK, what were we thinking? (Yes, I am an Old.)
JUNO! That was my very first email address! <3
“Pope Lizbet, get off the computer, your mother needs to use the phone.” “But…”
I got infinity grounded in high school over Mortal Kombat fanfic that wasn’t even sex related.
Ahhh dialup.
Our prime dialup years were spent with my dad living in Brazil and my parents wouldn’t pay for a second phone line, so all my friends got to chat with each other on AIM immediately after school but I had to wait for my father’s daily call from a different time zone and gawd, inconsiderate!
I already know without reading the other comments that y’all are about to make me feel OLD.
My very first time on the internet was late 1994, when I was a junior in high school. We already had a dedicated phone line (because my dad ran BBSes).
I used webcrawler to find a fan page about My So-Called Life (my then-obsession). It was a text-only page, no html, filled with quotes from the show, and I spent the next hour or so giggling maniacally.
If only I’d known that it was a sign of things to come: twenty-something years later, and my favorite activity is still giggling maniacally at fandom things on the internet.
I figured out how to access the actual web through AOL when I was 14 (so late 1994/early 1995) and that was the first thing I did: download all the tiny dialog clips I could and print out sheet after sheet of MSCL quotes and pictures. YOU CAN’T USE THE PHONE, MOM, I’M ON AOL!
Muffin films! http://www.muffinfilms.com/
And the moral is, never talk to muffin trees! I used to be able to recite that entire video…
Additionally I remember a time when you were NEVER EVER EVER supposed to post a photo of yourself online lest predators come and get you. Or masturbate to you. That day has CLEARLY passed.
I still never put my surname or hometown in posts on my LJ. It’s friendslocked, very few people read it and quite a few of them are people I know well in real life. But WHAT IF.
Oh yes. I’m still wary of posting photos of myself away from my locked-up Facebook because what if?? Obviously there can’t be axe murderers after everybody who’s posted a pic, but old habits die hard.
RIGHT?
I used to go on an text RPG and my mom would wonder why I was on the computer so long (reading and writing, of course) and one day I really wanted to finish a post and my brother wanted to use the computer–the ONE computer in the house, mind you–and I finally broke down and said I needed to finish writing and explained the website and my parents FREAKED. They were mad I was talking to strangers and thought it was dangerous, although after a long talk I managed to wear them down and let me keep going to the site.
Now teenage girls are posting pictures of themselves everywhere. Wow.
My parents did the same thing when they found out I had a myspace. I didn’t even have pics of myself on it and the only thing I did with it was leave annoying comments on my 3 other Myspace-having friends’ pages, but they were CONVINCED that meant that a serial killer was coming for 13-year-old me.
Around 2002-2003, I was in middle school and had multiple assemblies about how you should NEVER give out your contact information online, never meet with people you’ve talked to online, or give them ANY information that could be determined to find you out.
And then I went home one day to have my parents say “Hi, we’re having friends from Canada come over, we met them on the internet! They’re nice people.”
So, that clearly gave me some cognitive dissonance. In retrospect, they probably were swingers, but I NEVER want that confirmed or denied.
HORSELAND!!! It taught me HTML (for jazzing up my stable’s homepage) and Photoshop (for making complicated pictures for my horses featuring their names and various effects) and helped me make my first-ever online friends. I guess I technically owe my career to Horseland, and I should start giving it more credit.
I got an email address when I was around.. 12? maybe? but I didn’t really start using the internet until a few years later.
definitely spent a lot of time trolling people on weird “teen” chat rooms. told lots of potential internet predators that I was 17 (so grown-up! so mature!) with red hair and violet eyes (like Alanna, obvs) and lived in, idk, Florida? when in actuality I was 13 with brown hair living in MA.
That was LOTR days, so my introduction to fanfic was The Very Secret Diaries. And I saved and occasionally printed out a LOT of pictures of Pippin/Billy Boyd. I used to make my own desktop backgrounds which were just collages in MS Paint of whatever I was obsessed with at the time.
VERY SECRET DIARIES!
I was absolutely obsessed with those. My very cool friends and I would print them out and read them to each other at lunch
Oh dear, the diaries… I threw the print-outs out a few years back, but it was not easy. And so many crappy printed photos of the LOTR cast, my parents must have hated me for using up all the printer toner. I used to cover my school books and folders with those photos and cringe at the memory.
SAME. Printed out photos of Legolas taped over every single notebook.
It blows my mind that the Very Secret Diaries were written by Cassandra Clare. You can really see the ff influence in her books, though.
I know! I’m still super fond of them, in an internet-nostalgia way. & I’ve only read the first half of the first Mortal Instruments book, but yes. You can definitely see it.
It’s also fun to look back and wonder at how much CC-related fandom drama was going down at about the same time that I was so innocently loving those fics! I didn’t have any toes in HP fandom at the time, so I missed EVERYTHING and was only educated on the entire Cassie Clare backstory by my college friends and backreading fandomwank.
Oh, I didn’t know that! I never read any of her published books, but am considering hate-watching Shadowhunters. A friend of mine has Very Strong Feelings about this show.
Oh, LotR. I took an inordinate amount of pleasure in explaining ‘Figwit’ to my bemused coworkers the other day.
It was entertaining, until they asked me how I even knew all that at which point I had to fake a cough and move away.
I explained Figwit to my sister very recently as well!
Dollmakers. For. HOURS. Except the ones you had to download software to play with, even though those were always the prettiest and had the best characters.
Lurking through Sailor Moon geocities or angelfire fan sites for pictures and then having my sister print them off for me so I could put them into a binder and make my own Sailor Moon art books.
Neopets’ forums when their forums were still just a collection of hyperlinks. (Met one of my to-this-day best friends on those forums in the 4th grade, good god.) Also, when Neopets would be down, but it was okay because you could still play Meerca Chase.
AlbinoBlacksheep and playing all the escape the room games. Also, here’s a llama/there’s a llama/and another funny llama.
Oh God, Escape the Room games, I totally forgot about that (but would probably still play them today)
I just remembered another one – did anyone else spend any of their teen years on the ultra cool BOLT.COM??? I frequented the “alternative religion” (I was Wiccan at the time) and body modification boards of the site and the first of many boyfriends I met on the Internet was a dude I met on bolt.
YES! I don’t remember much about it other than I answered a bunch of personal questions? And there was one dude I very specifically remember to this day who I was totally into.
Do you remember the tshirts??
OMG! Thank you! I was trying to remember what this site was.
I, um, have an actual print out of an advice question that I posted on there and the very sincere responses I received. (It was about a boy, of course. Dear past self: He’s a jerk.)
Didn’t they have a section where you could submit designs to be printed on t-shirts? Sort of like a proto-Threadless?
YES! I had a TON of the bolt t-shirts. I am right now feeling some feels about the fact that they all went away a long time ago. There were some really cool ones.
My very first foray onto the Internet was bolt.com! I didn’t really know how internet worked, though so I didn’t do much actively there.
YES. I basically lived on Bolt through high school, first in the tag books and later the Random Thoughts board. I actually stuck it out until the bitter end of Bolt2 and even went on to Helldot for a while. I think I still have a few people I met there friended on LJ and Facebook.
I wish I’d managed to stay in touch with some of my Bolt peeps! There were some really cool people that I recall. But even with my mad Google-stalking skills there’s no way I’d be able to track them down these days.
If you remember any of their usernames (or even just your own), there are some Bolt-related Facebook groups where I’ve seen people reconnect.
BOLT!! I had been trying to recall the name of the site. Probably crossed paths on the Wicca boards, ~teen witches~ forever
!!! I love that someone else was on the alt religion boards. <3
Newgrounds
H’okay. this is the earf.
ICQ/MSN. Saving quotes and funny sayings for your name/away message.
Tiny LJ icons, packed full of detail.
Webcomics about boys gaming. I had a bad sense of humour and thought these were the pinnacle of comedy.
I was part of the largest (at the time) Star Wars group on the internet – Emperor’s Hammer. Apparently it still exists. Anyway, they play all sorts of old school Star Wars games (XvT, etc). I specifically was part of a rebellious sub group of “Bounty Hunters”. Mostly we were people who didn’t have the Star Wars games, were bad at playing them, or just didn’t like the military style used in the main group. We wrote stories and did little competitions to find obscure Star Wars characters from the books/movies (predating Google so searching wasn’t as easy as GIS) and it was awesome.
i remember getting the internet in 6th grade in exchange for giving up the disney channel in our cable package. my parents signed the family up for compuserve, where you had to pay an ungodly amount to access the internet by the hour.
i cannot even begin to imagine how much my parents ended up shelling out in charges while i just flounced around the internet, reading x-files fan pages, making friends on IRC and the spacebar, and waiting a gajillion years for pics of gillian anderson and david duchovny to download over our dial up connection speeds.
by the time i migrated to geocities and built my own webpage, we had thankfully moved up to a flat rate internet company, and all was right with the world.
Ah yes, that month where I discovered CompuServe chat rooms and racked up such an insane bill that it was agreed upon by all that it would 1) never happen again and 2) never be mentioned.
My friends and I all had Yahoo email addresses and would make up chain letters to send to each other. We were really fond of the marshmallow emoticon: ()___)
and, um, porn.
I was deeply, deepily involved in a few AOL message boards. First an RPG board in the Kids section—someone reported me once for saying “shut up” and I’m still bitter—and then in the ~AOL Teen Territory~. SO MANY hours logged on the anime and Final Fantasy boards, oh man (FFMB!). We were super cliquey and probably terrible, but I loved it.
My tween internet obsession (my god, I did spend soooo much time online, how did I get away with it?!?!) taught me HTML and basic Photoshop. Which I use AT WORK. Thank you, doll forms, livejournal, and Harry Potter/LOTR fandoms.
Teen girls on the internet in 1998: Geocities < Tripod < altern.org < getting invited to be hosted on someone’s private domain.
Oh also, Vikimouse. HTML tables for days.
I skipped Geocrap and started on Tripod, pretty much. (Also: freeservers.org or somesuch.) And then the culmination, after being hosted by someone on their own site, was buying your own domain and hosting. Back then, being ad free was a badge of honour.
I’m another Old who didn’t get her own email account until college, in 1998. A year or so later I discovered fanfic, and that’s all she wrote. Ah, back when we had to navigate random geocities websites and an individual’s LJs for fic.
LJ is that old? I had no idea. (I’m an old too, hello.) But wait a minute, I remember hearing about the invention of “blogs” (short for “web log!”) being described as “like a person’s diary, but online” (and I thought “That sounds incredibly boring!”) And that was more like… 2002ish?
Ok, I looked it up on wikipedia. (Do you know that site? It is like an encyclopedia, but on the world wide web. I read about it in Dad Magazine at the library.) And LJ was started in 1999. I’m amazed.
y’all the hamster dance
I was also really fond of this email cartoon (NSFW).
Youtube is not its original format, so the video has some sound quality issues; it looks like the website with the original version is gone.
I already tell Kids These Days that when I joined facebook it was thefacebook. And I still tell my mom that you need a .edu address so she doesn’t try to friend me.
I remember that when thefacebook launched, there was also collegefacebook, which I preferred because you could have more than just the one picture thefacebook allowed. I was sure collegefacebook was going to win that battle.
This is a good example of why I don’t invest in the stock market.
When I first saw Facebook, I thought, “that looks boring, there’s no way to customize your page like on MySpace.” It’s probably good that I also haven’t invested in the stock market.
I still miss the “is” from when facebook first introduced statuses
Until they reformatted how statuses are displayed, and the status would be shown on the same line as your name, I would still write my statuses in that format. It wasn’t until they added a line break (and then a while) that I stopped doing that.
I have an older adult friend who still writes all his posts that way, as in:
(John Smith): remembers this day last year when he was walking his daughter down the aisle.
(John Smith): is thankful for good friends in his life.
Do y’all remember how for a brief little while, you could edit someone else’s post on anyone’s wall? Like if their grammar/spelling was incorrect, you could change it, and the change would be highlighted and it would lead back to your page.
Do you mean when the entire wall was just a text box?? No one else remembers this! When I first made my account freshman year, I had a bunch of cute quotes from my new friends, then some high school DOLT came along and deleted everything on my wall!
I remember being bitter about the fact that my friend who was attending a University was able to use thefacebook, whilst I could not because I was attending community college like a goddamned dirty peasant.
It’s ok though, because she introduced me to The Best of Craigslist. For a very long time, I kinda didn’t realize there was more to craigslist than just that best-of page.
I went to high school with a guy who looked exactly the the Facebook Guy. And we had a page called [NAMEOFDUDE] Looks Just Like the Facebook Guy.
I remember listing my dorm room and what classes I was taking each semester on my profile. It was so helpful then as a way to get in touch with other people in my school! I feel bad for college kids now who can’t use it that way. Or maybe there are ways, but it’s so much more general now, I feel like it would be difficult.
Digimon RP message board. I remember it having all these absurdly complicated rules that nobody but the original handful of admins bothered about. At some point they made me an admin for some reason (despite being, y’know, a child) and I wrote new ones that were bad (because again, child).
I also remember a Dragon Ball Z fansite that had a deck builder for the the CCG that obviously existed for no good reason that I spent hours with despite never having seen a DBZ trading card.
as someone whose first fandom was digimon, i identify deeply with this comment. (although, i’m not sure if i remember if my bboard group had crazy rules. maybe they did??? i was a dumb kid playing terrible OCs, who knows.)
Yeah, there was another Digimon RP board that I went to as a kid and it was full of really bad original Digimon. Like, an endless wave of “like Agumon, but stronger and with spikes”.
The crest of courage is currently the lock screen on my phone though, so I guess it made an impression.
First internet memories: Atlanta Braves fansites and “The Unaired Fifth Season of Lois And Clark: The New Adventures of Superman” fanfic.
Years later, my favorite pre-youtube videos included Salad Fingers, Strindberg and Helium, and Making Fiends. Anyone? Anyone?
I am SO disappointed whenever I say “miseryyyyyyy!” in a Helium voice and no one gets the reference.
I don’t know anyone who gets my S&H references either, but it’s so quotable!
I say disappointed but I’m also delighted that I get to share it with someone who’s never seen it. It feels like….[hands cupcake] For YOU!
Oh gods I never knew whether I was more creeped out by Salad Fingers or straight up interested. Need to watch again.
OH GOD SALAD FINGERS NOOOOOO (but also yessssssss)
Making fiends, making fiends, Vendetta’s always making fiends, making fiends, while Charlotte makes friends!
Eat vegetables with every meal, or your face will start to peel. And your teeth will all fall out and your feet will smell like grout.
(My college girlfriend was so pissed she introduced me to those videos after I wouldn’t stop singing that goddamn song)
HEEEEEELIUMMMMMM! 😀
For a while the only place I could load websites was the Franklin Institute Internet exhibit, where I looked up the Ty Beanie Babies websire and the official Scholastic Animorphs website.
I later ran my own Animorphs website and wrote fanfic and became a BNF in that fandom by the ripe old age of 11.
I once got to update MORPHz.com!
The Franklin Institute had an internet exhibit?
It was one of the temporary rotating exhibits!
Oh wow! I was wondering how I missed it. I figured I was probably too young to care (the erosion table was more my jam).
THAT EROSION TABLE THO.
Oh, also: I still have friends I met on the Fametracker forums, and they have friends they met on Television Without Pity back when it was still Mighty Big TV.
I still mourn Fametracker.
Me too. Not the mods, though.
Me too. I still have two of their magnets on my fridge!
man I miss TWP
I mainly lurked on TWoP but, omg, I miss it.
MightyBigTV! I mourn you. I miss you.
I spent 75% of my time in 10th grade geometry just reading the West Wing forums on mbtv, and that was the season it premiered, so how much conversation could there be around 4 episodes? A lot. A lot of conversation is how much.
Why did my teacher just let me sit in the corner playing around on the internet?
OMG, were you lurking when Aaron Sorkin used to come to the forums so people could heap praise upon his writing genius?
Honestly, I was not really involved in the forums by that point. That happening during season 2 and 3, I think, at which point I no longer had all of geometry to spend on the internet, so I would not be able to read too much in the forums before my mom needed to use the computers. As a result, I didn’t interact with Sorkin’s “Benjamin” but, boy oh boy I was there for the fallout.
Truly one of the most glorious things to every happen in the history of fandoms. It was so totally bonkers.
Omg Mighty Big TV…I think the snark of the Dawson’s Creek recaps helped me develop critical thinking skills better than any of the books I read in middle school.
Honestly I don’t even remember what my first internet memory is. I know we had it a lot earlier than many of my friends because my dad works with computers so he was always ahead of the curve on this stuff.
Some of my fond early memories were getting really good at super basic html by making custom fonts for people on the neopets boards in like 5th or 6th grade. Everyone wanted stuff that was super sparkly and a foot tall and changed colors, it was wild. Eventually the site had to put bans on what people were allowed to do with fonts because threads were virtually unreadable. But before then I had people requesting fonts from me almost daily, it was great.
I also remember in like 6th or 7th grade my friend and I created fake msn or aim profiles to mess with our friend. We said we were friends of his cousin from summer camp and she showed us his picture and we thought he was cute so convinced her to give us his username. It only lasted probably less than a month before we got bored of it and gave up but it was entertaining for a while to hear him at school the next morning talking about these girls.
I still use my first email account that I made when I was 14 & even though the name is dumb and from some “novel” I wrote as a kid I am never ever letting it go.
Also, when I was in college we used to run around screaming “My spoooooooooon is TOO BIG” at each other all the time, and to this day whenever I get too down-in-the-dumps grumpy pants my friends still quote Strong Sad at me.
My first email was a Yahoo email that has a word with numbers following it, and it is still by far my favorite account to use. I have a Gmail account, but I hate the interface.
Oh god, so much fanfiction. All the fanfictions. All.
Buffy fan pages, the Savoynet archives, and those “choose an image” personality tests.
MUDs. As in multi user dungeons, the text based RPs. I played a sword and sorcery one called AAAAARGH (with 5 As, very important) and my class was thief and I was probably 10 or 11 so I was still shaky on the correct spelling of “thief” so it was rather hard for me to use my attacks. I ended up staying in touch with friends from that game for years afterwards and met two of them IRL when I was about 15. Exciting stuff.
Also Geocities Sailor Moon fanpages. I used so much color ink printing every image I could find that the school changed their printing policy.
And then somebody found the hamster dance in 7th grade and that was hours of entertainment.
I played a MUD called Jellybean. The gods were giant rabbits, I think. Everything was written for maximum cuteness.
OH MY GOD I played AAAAARGH. Not for very long, I ended up on another MUD for a long time (and met a long-distance boyfriend there) but I can’t remember the name. I had completely forgotten about AAAAARGH until you mentioned it.
“They need to do way instain mothers who kill their babbys. It was on the news this mroing, a woman in AR…”
HOW GIRL GET PRAGNANT
I hung out on a Charmed fanpage (yes, really) with adjacent chatroom. I had about three or four different handles, one for actual chatting, the others for roleplaying characters from various other shows (never actually Charmed).
I had an internet boyfriend named Chris from Michigan and I would write about him in my diary all the time and once wrote out “I LOVE CHRIS!!!!” with each letter and exclamation point on its own individual page. In retrospect I find it alarming that his screen name was Pred86, but given that we mostly emailed each other things like “I think I did ok on my math test today. Love you!” he may not have been a child molester (or at least a relatively harmless one).
Also once I accidentally got my family kicked off of AOL by saying “Who got the hooch?” in a Kids Only chat room. I was quoting a then-popular song and didn’t know what it meant. When my mom called AOL to ask why we were kicked off the customer service rep was like “Ask your kid about ‘hooch’ and she’ll look really guilty.” False! I was just confused 🙁
Who got the freshy-freshy, who got the only sweetest thing in the world
Let’s get real, let’s get heavy, til the water breaks the levee
Oh my gosh, I seriously heard that song on the radio at least 3 times for a year. Our local pop/rock station LOVED that song. I will know all the lyrics until my dying day, no matter how much I try to forget them.
There’s a long-running story in my family that we (and all of our immediate relatives) were banned from AOL because my brother set loose some sort of password stealing code and accidentally hit (then AOL CEO) Steve Case with it.
I sincerely doubt the story, but it wouldn’t be the most far-fetched thing about my brother and the internet that eventually turned out to be true.
you know you can’t drop something like that last juicy tidbit and then not tell us more right?
AOL had an set of message boards devoted to urban legends and I practically lived there (for my allotted 20 minutes of internet time per day, and no more than 20 additional minutes I had to pay for myself to cover the cost of going over our monthly minute allotment). There was UL discussion, but also this thing where one of the moderators pretended to be everyone’s auntie and doled out sage advice and everyone was role-playing in some way. That was a first for me and I really dug it. Then I came back from a family trip and the whole thing was gone; replaced by some new AOL-sponsored UL site that was not the same. Sad day.
There was a site called Rinkworks that had a lot of surprisingly complex and funny text-based adventure games. It’s still up and as far as I can tell everything is still functional, although it doesn’t seem to have been updated in a while and the design still has that early 2000’s pizzazz.
YES DOES THIS ALSO HAVE THOSE SHORT VERSION OF CLASSIC NOVELS?
oh man, I was obsessed with those.
YES, those were the best! Ahh now my nostalgia is really kicking in.
OH GOD YES. And the Computer Stupidities page.
YES RINKWORKS YES
ahem excuse me but YES RINKWORKS
The very first Youtube video I ever watched was called Yelling at Cats and as far as I can tell it’s still up.
It’s literally a guy, yelling at and terrifying his cats. (Terrifying? I don’t know, they all run away from him.)
It’s still really funny, as long as you don’t think about it too hard, and I like to assume this was the kind of thing he made For The Internet and not like, how he normally treats his cats.
It’s very internet circa 2006 though.
Remember in AOL chatrooms, when you’d be a/s/l-ing along and someone would come in and announce a “Scrambler” and it would be several rounds of jumbled words or phrases you had to guess? Good times.
I remember being 13 and Rent had just become a thing, and it taking 30 minutes to download a 2-minute medley of music from the soundtrack.
And that heart-flutter feeling when my crush from theater camp logged onto AIM.
IRC. Geocities. The Michigan State usenet access I “borrowed” from a friend. Text-based browsing before Netscape. Also, trying to download Netscape over a 14.4 modem.
My first really substantial Internet memory was discussing Princess Diana’s death in an IRC room devoted to They Might Be Giants.
eta: I find it really funny/weird that so much of general Internet blather has survived from like, 20 years ago–things like using
/dies
is directly from IRC, which seriously no one has used IRC in a really REALLY long time.
And really, I mean, chatting with people online (IRC, BBS, etc) is still pretty much the same, it’s just changed form and location.
Xanga.
I really don’t want to know if mine still exists AND YET
I tried to look mine up and it said something about how everything has been cached and i can retrieve it if I like? no thanks
I found my xanga again a few years ago and died of embarrassment. I think I tried to delete it but not sure if I was successful.
Same goes for my LiveJournal.
Why were we allowed to write blogs on the internet back then??
I have had The Internet since Compuserve, although I’m not sure I ever actually made it past the bulletin boards and onto the actual internet at large until we get AOL.
However, for internet nostalgia, I submit HattBaby.
My internetting began on Compuserve fan forums, specifically X-Files, Babylon 5, and Lois and Clark. Looking back, a lot of those people were adults having reasonable adult conversations, and I was 13 and missing all their cues and butting in where I was not wanted.
Anyone else remember Mittens and Snowdrop?
That was about 6 years into my internet life, but I remember it with such fondness. “I wasn’t sniffing your spicy brains.”
Yes yes yes yes yes, I went through all of the content on that site OBSESSIVELY when I was… maybe eleven? I remember being very nervous that my mom or someone would notice the “Suggested for mature viewers” and I would be In Trouble. I still read the webcomic (when it’s updating, for like three months now it’s basically just been travel pictures).
Clearly it is time to revisit Mittens and Snowdrop (and Sarah and Mr. Snaffleburger and Samurai Lapin…)
soc.motss
1) A lot of music based AOL message boards. My most frequented was Smashing Pumpkins, you guys. Like how could I possibly be more 90’s?
2) Agonizing over crafting a perfect AIM away message.
3) Learning HTML specifically for livejournal entries.
to this day any/all HTML I know is because of livejournal.
Oh yes, the away message! I’d forgotten about that.
Away messages were very important. My most frequent were “I saved Latin, what did you ever do?” and “I hate Uncle Jamie!”
Ohh the time wasted on AOL music message boards. I frequented Blur’s, for some reason.
*overly 90s fistbump*
Yep, all my HTML and (minimal) CSS knowledge is from coding livejournal entries and eventually layouts.
Also like week 2 of AOL chat rooms someone asked if I wanted to “cyber” and I thought it was slang for “private message” so I said Sure!!!! Two second later my virgin eyeballs were beyond scandalized.
I spent almost all my time on FF.net reading Rurouni Kenshin yaoi (Sano/Ken OBVI). My contribution to the pile was a 21-chapter epic in which both Sanosuke and Kenshin died tragically at the end because I couldn’t figure out how else to end it.
I also wasted HOURS on LJ roleplay groups, mostly Kingdom Hearts crossover RPs. One of the biggest ones that I was in was called PaixaoRPG, if I recall correctly. I played Sora (the third or forth player to pick him up, I think), Ein from Cowboy Bebop, and Dib from Invader Zim. So much fun. I still remember the great scenes I had with the Riku player.
1. TheForce.net message boards and writing a LOT of trailers for fan fics I never got a chapter out of.
2. In hindsight very awkward RPG chatrooms which had a lot to do with me figuring things out about myself, sexuality wise.
3. Geocities Fanpages. Feeling like a badass bc I could write HTML in junior high or w/e.
4. Livejournal friends (Kat? Angelique? You out there?)
5. an ill-advised foray in to RPF stuff. still amazed is so normal these days.
also i visited old college friends this weekend and straight up sang Strongbad’s techno song, drunk at 3 PM in the afternoon. “the system is down!”
Oh, LJ friends. To this day, I am a total blog creeper, but it all started back in LJ days. In high school I somehow found and followed the LJ of an older high school girl who lived in Oregon (I lived in Indiana). She posted the most beautiful pictures of Oregon, and talked about going to college, her friends and family, her health problems, everything. I have no idea who she is, and I am 100% sure I could not find her if I tried. But I think about her every once in a while, even 12 years later.
Even now, I tell my oldest kid to stop playing with the light switches by saying ‘this is not a lightswitch rave’
When I first got an e-mail address around age 12 or so, I decided that every e-mail I sent would be in a different “voice” (i.e. overly proper British dude, valley girl, etc etc) and thinking I was so hip and funny.
I cringe so hard every time I think about it.
I did something similar in LJ, which involved ending every single verb and even some non-verbs in -eth (for…. medieval vibes? maybe??) while complaining about freshman year of high school (because you were either emo or you were ~*quirky*~), and it definitely still exists because I still use the same lj account.
I used to grab a book every time I went to use the internet. So I could read it while waiting for the pages to load of course.
My parents live in a rural enough area that they still have dial-up. There are always magazines and books by the computer for entertainment while waiting for pages to load.
I remember leaving rural Michigan for that exotic women’s college in Pennsylvania, and people asking me if I was worried about missing my friends, and telling them that I’d heard about this thing called “electronic mail,” and that I hoped my college had it so that we could all stay in touch.
Then, in my Freshman year Physics class , we were required to read a certain number of journal articles each week. One of the ones I read was about this new communication tool called “The World Wide Web” that allowed scientists to collaborate and share data around the world. “Huh,” I said to myself, “I wonder if they have that at the computer center here.” I remember being very excited when I checked and they did.
Ah! Fellow Bryn Mawr grad??
… a Japanese email pen pal website (It never worked out), my mum side eying me because I had ended up on the website of an indonesian hotel, and she feared that to be really expensive because she did not know how the internet worked.
my first video probably was the llama song.
The llama song! I need to go and listen to that again now.
Dragonriders of Pern RP-by-email. I discovered those books when I was about 12, and got our first email accounts. You weren’t allowed to write stories about someone from the books, so people came up with their own characters/settings using the world. I was super into it.
Yessss! I loved those play-by-email RPGs.
Not my earliest internet memories (hello, Beanie Baby website), but my most enduring: AOL message boards. The Friends board was my main haunt—I spent SO much time talking to the other regulars. On that board, on some other empty AOL board we migrated to and took over so we could chat off-topic, in endless IM group chats, on our online diaries. You had to have a code for LiveJournal, I wasn’t cool and goth enough for DeadJournal, so we mostly stuck to Diaryland and Blurty.
This might be an obscure one, but I remember being obsessed with these things called “Internet cartoons” as a kid. It was basically just people making websites for their original characters and putting up drawings and stories organized into “episodes.” I remember one about a group of octuplets, and another about a bunch of teens who lived on an island.
Also, ____ Ate My Balls sites, anyone? That was a dark time in our collective history…
Once I hit college, YTMND was a main source of amusement. One night my friend and I watched YTMNDs for eight hours straight and were barely able to speak in anything other than memes for days afterward.
http://jurassicparkwtf.ytmnd.com/ BEST YTMND EVER
In pre-YouTube days, I watched meme videos via Albino Black Sheep (which STILL EXISTS btw), most notably “Badger badger badger badger…”
Oh god I forgot about Trogdor the Burninator.
Most of my early Internet memories involve me trying to get friends to stop talking to 30 year old men online, (they were 13/14.) “THAT IS A BAD MAN!!” I would say. I still say it. I am the friend who will tell you if that’s a bad man or not.
You are a good friend to have and we appreciate you.
One of my actual earliest memories, other than the fun of emailing/IMing with boys in 1996, was of a random AOL user starting a chat with me (I was 16 at the time) and me thinking, “Oh neat! I can talk with someone I’ve never met!” and then he asked me if I was typing in my bedroom and what I was wearing. :/
I noped right out of there and blocked him with extreme prejudice, thankfully!
That happened to me once with this dude who found my profile by searching for Juliana Hatfield fans. I was very excited because Juliana Hatfield is awesome but then he started hitting on me and saying he couldn’t believe I was only 14 because I sounded like I must be in college and then ended the conversation by telling me to write down his screen name and IM him when I turned 18. I still chuckle about that dude from time to time.
I remember a Best Buy (?) commercial from about 1992 that featured a girl who had made her own website about tree frogs. For weeks I watched the TV obsessively for the .5 seconds that showed the URL so that I could write it down and go look at the website… only to find that it wasn’t real. I’m still crushed, but at least now we have competent search engines.
I was all about Homestarrunner.com and Teen Girl Squad and Strongbad. (I still quote “I have a crush on every boy!” when I’m feeling particularly frisky and NO ONE gets it.)
Albinoblacksheep.com! I miss the early days of Flash animation so bad.
AIM chatrooms! Does anyone remember SmarterChild? That robot that would answer you on AIM?
And what was the name of that online Pictionary game that BLEW UP in middle school and people would just use it to chat with randos on the DL??
I still, against my better judgment, proclaim random things to be “no place for a mighty warrior!”
Uh oh, we’ve got a spinner…
I’ll notify her next of … uh … fruit cup.
AAAAAH I REMEMBER SMARTER CHILD! It was so weird, in retrospect.
Yahoo chat rooms before they became a cess pool. I met my first longterm boyfriend there! A/s/l? and how the whole room would get CAPSY if some one came in using a terrible highlighter yellow to type in. Discovering that celebrities had email addresses ( i blush to think of the awkward emails i msy have composed! ) Staying over at a friend’s house to icq creepy randoms, because…fun?
My first internet experience was when we were filed into the computer lab in third (?) grade and told that we were GOING TO ACCESS THE INTERNET. We were given a “web site” to type into a “browser” and then, ta da!, we were “online”. It was Netscape Navigator, and I remember being unimpressed at the lack of glitter and glamour after we had successfully connected.
I met my now husband in a Christian IRC chat room when I was 12. We talked about bras, and I thought he was from Hawaii because his name was wainuidude. Turns out he was in New Zealand, but that didn’t stop us!
College was full of Strong Bad quotes, and my friends and I still convey our various emotions via Teen Girl Squad.
Oh my god. So many early Internet memories. We had a service called WOW! before we had AOL, and I remember being super bitter when AOL eventually won out, because I missed my WOW! internet.
Other memories include starting random arguments in AOL chat rooms circa 1997 with my “girlfriend” who I had never met in person (who is now a Facebook friend who I have met and am still friends with after all these years!) Other AOL memories – taking extreme offense when someone said “m or f” which I somehow in my sugar-addled young mind interpreted as them calling me a motherf*cker.
I don’t know if it counts for this discussion, but my first ever memories of connecting to something outside my house on the computer are BBS memories. I spent a LOT of time playing Legend of the Red Dragon (L.O.R.D.) on a variety of BBS servers. I still have the urge to find a way to play that game sometimes.
On my lunch break and haven’t been able to read every comment, but does anyone remember myjellybean.com? I was obsessed with it circa 2000-2002. So many dolls to make, so many quizzes to take!
Did anyone else use urban75, the English raver/anarchist site? I used to chat there when I was in high school (literally, when I was in the school computer lab and was supposed to be building sites in HTML and DreamWeaver) and the older punks found it adorable that my username was canadian_punx (it was 2001, I regret nothing). I’m still Facebook friends with someone I met there.
I other favourite haunt was Yahoo! groups/pages. I remember when Rob and Gabe and Tyler from Midtown would comment on their group. And the time someone put together a scrapbook for Adam from Taking Back Sunday when he broke his collarbone.
FEEEEEEELINGS.
I also read alooooot of Harry Potter fanfic on a website that I think was called The Common Room, my first real foray into finding fic on my own.
Because I am old, i didn’t have meaningful internet until late in college, at which point I spent a lot of time on the Ms. Magazine bulletin boards until they collapsed in a giant garbage fire. Then I spent all my time on Home Star Runner, and my conversations for five years or so included the phrase “Can you spare any mush for me?” 97% of the time.
“No, Sickly Sam. I wish you’d leave us alone.”
The Ms boards! I think I still have the “desiring desirability” thread archived somewhere in an old backup-of-a-backup.
Also, how could I forget about The Palace Virtual Chat?! I had tons of online friends there, and spent so much time chatting there that when my mother grounded me to my room for a week and forbade all electronics use, I was more upset at not being able to talk to my Palace Chat friends than I was about not being allowed outside or to see real life friends for a week.
I’m too young to really remember the pre-2005 internet, but in the late ’90s I would play games on NickJr.com that took literally HOURS to load. I remember setting up a game with the Tickety Toc loading screen and very carefully telling my dad NOT TO CLOSE IT after I went to bed, and then in the morning I got up and hunted for Swiper with Dora. I was maybe 4 when this happened? I really wish I still had that ability to plan ahead.
Endless quizzes and games on gURL.com, never really caring about the financial system on Neopets (and starting over constantly), Homestar <3
In 1994, the Internet that wasn’t the UW/library website was:
1. TMBG
2. Star Trek
3. Monty Python
At least, as far as I was concerned.
So many, all of the things, but also: email surveys? Hundreds of A-or-B style questions that you traded around with your friends? And they were exciting because maybe a couple of the questions approached the risque level of “boxers or briefs”? I may still have some printed out copies of those in the back of my childhood bedroom closet.
AOL Instant Messanger 1996
Username BrianKcksButt (some dude): Hey
Username MulderGrrl84 (me): Hi
BrianKcksButt: ash?
MulderGrrl84: 14,f, 5’6″ (lies, I was 12)
MulderGrrl84: What bands do u like?
BrianKcksButt: The Offspring, No Doubt
MulderGrrl84: I like No Doubt 2! 🙂
BrianKcksButt: Wanna cyber?
::MulderGrrl84 has logged off::
Pretty much my experience with yahoo chat rooms. To this day I remember the one time I tried cybering. Dude said “I pull your pants down fast but your panties down slow.”
I about died of laugther and quit.
Lots of good memories, most mentioned by others above, but also: being in middle school and going online with my friend at her parents’ business, visiting a chat room, having some guy in India ask us if we were virgins, logging out.
My very earliest memories were getting online and only accessing websites that were in this little booklet of kid friendly sites that my parents got for me somewhere, and having my dad explain what ‘baud’ meant and why it took ages for pages to load on our dial-up connection.
But oh man, once I got older and had more time online (and quit worrying about straying from that little booklet), I had several Geocities sites, subscribed to several email lists – the Madeleine L’Engle one was particularly exciting as it was a pretty safe bet that I was one of the youngest subscribers but people still took my questions and thoughts seriously – and was an avid devotee of AOL teen boards. I also hung around the Daria newsgroup, which was really my introduction to the magical world of shipping and fanfiction.
I don’t know what I’d be without the internet, truly.
Thanks to this thread, I’ve had “Magical Trevor” stuck in my head for about an hour now. Not my earliest memory of pre-YouTube internet, but obviously my most stubbornly persistent.
Oh my god, Magical Trevor was basically the theme song for the 2004 Myst fandom convention. My friend and I sang it most of the way from his house in Pittsburgh to the convention hotel in Toronto.
The rec.arts.babylon5 fan community. Fandom in those days seemed so much more -personal- than it is now.
I also remember printing out Television Without Pity recaps of The Real World Boston and Seattle and reading them in the car on long road trips to and from Central Oklahoma to Central Missouri. (Janice and Lindsay BFFs forever).
Wow, I wrote the Seattle recaps. World colliding.
my 15 minutes of internet fame was being featured on a pitas.com blog highlighting that, due to my usage of the ^_^ emoji and general cheerfulness that was peppered with (admittedly embarrassing) otaku appropriative slang, i was ruining the internet. those damn teen girls, right?
(as an aside, i will be v. impressed if anyone remembers pitas.com: the hard code version of livejournal, which i still kind of miss in a major, proto-html2 kind of way.)
THAT SAID, most of my earliest internet memories are from RPing in bulletin boards and on aol boards/chatrooms! the anime! the weird fixation on x-men evolution! the mu* client boards that looked like logging into the mainframe even though it was 2001! the things i wrote while my parents screamed at me to get off the dial-up because my podunk town didn’t have wifi or ethernet, man.
I remember pitas.com because the Internet Boyfriend I met through a MUD had a blog/journal/whatever there!
I also RPd in AOL chatrooms – were you in the Red Dragon inn area perchance?
if nothing else, i’m relieved that it wasn’t all in my head. (it redirects to diaryland, which is proving to be a weird portal back into time that i hadn’t expected, but that’s another story for another day.)
sadly, no!! gosh, i wish i was, though. to think of meeting proto-toasties in my formative years!!
No joke, finding http://www.mum.org helped me to deal with the advent of my period by normalizing it/placing it in historical context for me (lil baby researcher!). Looking at vintage German sanitary pad packaging = somehow oddly comforting to this 13 year old! It didn’t even OCCUR to me that this was a weird site until this crazy VICE expose: http://www.vice.com/read/how-one-man-ran-the-worl…
Looking at it now – yeah, it’s a super weird site (but I still love it!)
No joke, finding http://www.mum.org helped me to deal with the advent of my period by normalizing it/placing it in historical context for me (lil baby researcher!). Looking at vintage German sanitary pad packaging = somehow oddly comforting to this 13 year old! It didn’t even OCCUR to me that this was a weird site until this crazy VICE expose: http://www.vice.com/read/how-one-man-ran-the-worl…
i was super obsessed with neopets and used to create incredibly emo backstories for all of my neopets and i ws theyre Cool Parent figure… also i was incredibly obsessed with deviantart, particularly with this one artist who was obsessed with horror movies and i looked her up and YUP STILL JUST AS WEIRD and why did 12 year old me love her so much when i had never seen any of the horror movies she drew fanart for??? so many questions
Communication of Feelings via song lyrics in AIM away message.
Achewood.
One day, my Mom was sick and bleary, and I, rotten child that I was, saw my chance to strike. I came up to her with some reason (I don’t remember what) that I needed her AOL password, and her sickness clouded her judgement and she gave it to me.
And then I was finally able to access all the Star Trek joke websites previously blocked to me. I was not a particularly cool kid.
Lots and lots and lots of Jane Austen fanfic, and somehow finding random online chat penpals. I still kind of wonder what happened to Simon in the UK. He was nice enough to try and teach me how to tie a tie over hotmail chat that one time…
Neopets. Chatting with SmarterChild on AIM. The sound of dial-up. Ahh, the sweet sound of dial-up.
Oh, and the Willy Wonka site? Like, it was a website with games based around the Nestle Wonka candies? Tell me I’m not alone in this.
NO YOU ARE NOT thank you for reminding me of this. I think the Nerds game was my favourite?
Was that the Breakout-style one? Because that one was definitely my fave.
I don’t even know. Maybe?
Now I really want some Nerds though. GOOD MARKETING JOB, NESTLE, you make me want your candy YEARS later.
Oh boy. My earliest memories were logging on to the library’s internet after school in 1996 and discovering everything I could ever want to know about whales, dolphins, Christian Bale, Jared Leto, and wolves, and then I proceeded to print out hundreds of pictures of all of the above at the bargain price of 10 cents a page.
As I trundled on in life, I got my first email account at Chickmail.com (firekitty101, to the amusement of all my young male teachers), and then a/s/l’d my way through aol chat rooms for single truckers(I posed as an older woman looking to hook up because I have a faulty moral compass), Wicca and Depeche Mode.
And then B3TA was introduced to me, where I became an insufferable Anglophile and watched flash videos til my eyes bled. But it had the Buffy Swears keyboard, come on! Still internet gold.
My earliest internet memories were Virtual Presents and a website that featured Friends quotes (a new one would go up nearly every week after a new episode aired, and back then, screencapping was a PITA). That was all done over the school’s internets. I didn’t get it at home until 1997.
My parents specifically forbid me to have a ~geocities website~ when I was in high school in the 90s, but all my COMPUSERVE CHAT ROOM FRIENDS had one, so I made one without permission. I wanted to put a picture of myself on it, but my family didn’t own a scanner, so I snail-mailed a photo to one of said friends, who scanned it for me so I could have it on my weird website that mostly had answers to those email questionnaires and, like, Highlander fanfic or w/e.
Oh yeah, my COMPUSERVE username was “huggs” from that one terrible X-Files episode.
Webrings? Filling out applications to join different webrings? Man.
In high school I spent a lot of time on the AOL Blink 182 message board, not because I loved them all that much but because that’s where all my internet friends were. Then the board got taken over by people who actually wanted to talk about Blink 182 so we migrated to the completely deserted Dashboard Confessional board.
About 10 years later one of my friends from that board helped my band book a show at a semi-popular venue in Boston when we had a hole in our east coast tour. Thanks AOL!
Did anyone else make websites that were the equivalent of scrapbooks/sticker books? I remember finding cute/pretty pictures like on other places online, saving them, and then putting them on my own (geocities, angelfire) site. I had these different sections of the site so you would start in the forest and see trees and foxes, then to the ocean where there were dolphins, fields with horses, etc. All with text about the animals/buildings/scenes I ‘owned’ (plenty of these things were drawn, so it wasn’t like I was pretending to actually physically have them) and color coordinating page backgrounds. One thing I remember in particular were yrir, which were basically cute fat ponies some person drew and gave accessories/names. Lots of people had them on their sites; can’t find a single image of one these days though!
What you’re describing is basically just a proto-Pinterest. Go figure.
My brother and I ran a Pokémon fan site from maybe 1998-2000. Our dad hosted it for us. We made friends with other grade schoolers who ran Pokémon fan sites at the time. Pikachu gifs everywhere, obligatory background music (and it was also obligatory that this BGM be unique for each page), everyone trying to be the first to get screenshots from the latest episode of the cartoon…
Then we moved on to Harvest Moon 64, and then my brother lost interest so I started running the Harvest Moon site myself, and holy shit iframes everywhere. More importantly: if anywhere on the Harvest Moon Internet (I promise you that was a thing for a while) you have seen anyone recommend building a staircase and corralling your chickens on the roof, that was my idea first and they took it from my site, thank you.
(I could also go into the subsequent years I spent on Neopets, Avidgamers, MSN Groups, and six or seven other defunct platforms yelling about Dragonriders of Pern. I will not.)
Wow. What was the Harvest Moon site called? I was obsessed with HM64 back in the day and the chicken thing sounds sort of familiar but also I feel like you couldn’t actually do it in the game??
I also helped people design shitty anime/video game websites with More Frames Than Entirely Necessary.
I genuinely can’t recall what it was called. HM [some noun]? Not HM Farm, though, because they were the big soulless sleek HM site I most envied at the time.
But I can confirm, at least in HM64, that roof chickens worked. When you had them outside, they didn’t need food, but I forgot to build an enclosure for them, so I had to dash around and collect them all any time it rained… UNTIL I realized that the Staircase extension from the carpenters let you access your roof. There was just barely enough room up there for 6 chickens plus eggs. …So now every time it rained I was laboriously grabbing chickens off my roof and shuttling them through my house and back to the coop, when really I could have just put them in a fenced-in pasture with my cows and sheep. I still thought I was the smartest.
One time I redesigned the website so that, in addition to far too many frames, navigation was all done by a single drop-down menu. That was also quite a fad in shitty anime/video game websites ca. 2002.
Hmm. I don’t remember much, except that the music restarted every time you changed screens, so moving chickens was PRETTY AWFUL. Actually, you may appreciate how awesome my very first HM64 playthrough was… I had never played a harvest moon game, or really any game. I had no idea what I was doing. I never spoke to anyone except Maria until she agreed to marry me. All I would do, day in and day out, was farm, deliver a gift, and sleep. I didn’t talk to anyone. I didn’t cultivate any other relationship.
Do you know what happens when you get married and don’t have a SINGLE FRIEND??
The saddest wedding ever, that’s what. My wife even made some comment like “Oh… I guess no one showed up…”
To this day I wonder if anyone else ever experienced that.
That is INCREDIBLE. I didn’t even know that was a thing.
My first playthrough I wasn’t terribly proactive about befriending townsfolk either, but I wanted to marry Karen, so I went to the bar every night. Some nights she wasn’t there, so I’d give presents to everyone else who showed up instead. Our wedding was attended by all the bar regulars and no one else. Which, actually, is probably the exact wedding she wanted.
I had a Pokémon fan site with background music too! It was on expage and it was really bad. I left up Christmas decorations on it for months because I couldn’t be bothered to change them. I think it might have had dancing pikachu gifs.
In high school I caught my younger sister pretending to be me in an AOL chat room. I was LIVID.
Ah the good ol’ days of listening for the AOL free dial up internet sound. Now that’s a sound you’ll never forget, kiddos.
I was pretty obsessive about Sailor Moon fanfic and even went so far as to make my own spin off with Geocities site. I was a slacker high schooler though and it never really got off the ground. But man I was mad when I didn’t make it into the fan fic group that was Sailors with angel names.
Oh for SURE Aicha by GellieMan! This was 2004 so it was pre-YouTube, but luckily somebody was looking out for us: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RLjBCqeYYas.
I still remember the dance.
Usenet, at the dawn of the nineties, a few years before Eternal September, courtesy of my first library job at a university. Recently, I was reminiscing about those years, and trying to remember what I did most evenings when I wasn’t taking classes or playing in one of the school’s musical groups, and then I was like, “Oh, yeah–getting into arguments with strangers, oversharing, disclosing personal stuff that I’ve never told someone face-to-face, finding out a lot more about certain things and, ah, practices than I’d ever guessed previously–the usual.”
-SO MANY MESSAGE BOARDS. I was active on a bunch of different ones, *and* I kept making my own to talk to my real-life friends (who never seemed to be as into it as I was….).
-The first time I made plans to meet up with an Internet friend IRL, I canceled on her after it turned out she wanted to evangelize at me.
-I also kept making Geocities sites to host my terrible terrible original fiction.
-I was one of the only teens on the “Al-Gals” mailing list for lady Weird Al fans, which was otherwise populated by middle-aged moms.
-I still quote “my hed iz pastede on yay” all the time.
Hahahaha Al-Gals is killing me.
“my hed iz pastede on yay” has a special place in my heart.
The early email address I had: dancing_nancy@… Every time I told it to someone I had to explain that 1) I am not named Nancy and I don’t dance, it’s a SONG TITLE JEEEEZ clearly YOU don’t listen to Dave Matthews Band!!! and 2) what an underscore was. “You know, that thing that looks like a hyphen, but it’s not, like, you have to hit the shift key to make it…ugh, just let me write it down for you, you’ll know it when you see it.”
Um…reading the New York Times online? And Wonkette, because that was when Ana Marie Cox was still running it, and it was like thirty percent insightful political analysis, forty percent scurrilous Washington gossip, thirty percent coverage of the baby panda in the Washington zoo.
Youtube came along in my senior year of college, and I used it to catch up on old episodes of Sesame Street, mostly Monsterpiece Theater. (If you’ve never seen Monsterpiece Theater Waiting for Elmo, go watch it right now, it is the most genius parody of all time.)
The first site I ever commented on was Television Without Pity, mainly the House, MD boards, and I still miss it.
Butterstick! I was on the internet well before then but I miss those days of Wonkette.
I had zero interest in chat rooms when we got AOL, but my mom wanted me to try it, so she helped me make a screen name and sat with me while I joined a chat room called “twelve years old” or something like that. (I was 11, but there weren’t any chat rooms for 11-year-olds.) I think I said one thing and within seconds I got a PM from somebody who asked, “Twelve? Really?” I still wonder what that person’s deal was.
Okay, so this isn’t my first memory (because pretty much everyone else has mentioned the things I did) but in high school I was in a couple classes that were piloting these desk/computer hybrids. In my creative fiction class, we just played flash games the entire time, but in my journalism class, we invented this “game” using Wikipedia. I don’t remember what it was officially called, but I always called it “Kevin Bacon-pedia” (as in, 6 degrees of Kevin Bacon). Someone(s) uninvolved with the competition would name two very disparate things and, using only links, the competitors had to navigate from one page to the other. It was a blast. By the end of that year, we all had some solid skills re:navigating Wikipedia/search terms/the internet
Shockwave games. Downloading the Shockwave player to dock all my favourites.
Later: Using Deadjournal (much cooler than Livejournal, it was ~dark~) to share feelings with all my friends in high school, because talking about feelings in person is hard, but writing long and detailed (or purposely short and vague) posts about our feelings was way easier. In this way i instigated a break-up with my grade 11 boyfriend without ever having to say “I don’t really like you that much, I don’t think I have feelings, you like me way more and that’s weird, I don’t want to date you anymore”.
oh god I totally had a deadjournal that I themed after Sailor Galaxia from Sailor Moon, ~so deep~
Playing MUDs, MUCKs, MUSHes…any other acronyms I’m missing?…via telnet because it took me a while to figure out how to get a proper client. Building ENDLESSLY insanely vast fortresses in RedwallMUCK, because it was the only one I played on that had such total building freedom. And being so freaking proud of myself when I had one character who was a bluerider at Igen Weyr, and another made it to journeywoman weaver and I was getting actual commissions for descs. (oh, descs.) (oh, shortening of words.)
Livejournal RPGs, but, before that, I was mostly into e-mail list-based RPGs. My earliest ones were all Cats. As in, the musical. I made a few really-excellent-for-my-age-and-the-era-if-I-do-say-so-myself Cats fansites, did a bit of Cats cosplaying, wrote a lot of fanfic. (My first ever fic was a Cats story. I was 10, and I didn’t know fanfiction was a thing. I thought, somehow, as a stupid 10-year-old, that I was the first person to ever invent the idea of writing a story based on someone else’s story. I quickly learned better.)
Neopets, of course; little!me once participated in a focus group they had around here, and I got a t-shirt and some plushies out of it. (Plus Adam etc signed my shirt! I put it reverently in a drawer somewhere and I think I may still have it.)
I learned so much – programming and design and how to use Photoshop and writing – from things like making LJ icons for myself and various RPG characters, all my hand-coded websites and building in RedwallMUCK, and, obviously, the sheer quantity of text I wrote between rpgs, fanfic, and a neverending stream of musical & book reviews…
Oh! Anyone remember site wars/whatever its rival’s name was? Or Sev Trek and the other sev-y cartoons? Or the original version of Tad Williams’s Shadowmarch, when he was writing it on a messageboard, serially, or whatever was happening with that? (I think eventually he gave up and just finished it traditionally. Either way, I love those books but I will never not be disappointed with one very specific part of the ending.)
In a completely less pleasant bit of nostalgia – anyone remember Salad Fingers? That thing still terrifies me.
!! I was wondering if anyone would mention Pern RPing..I had mad respect for blueriders. I remember all those ‘Dragon Colour’ pages that would talk about the different characteristics/roles, and blueriders were only for advanced RPers since they had less of a defined position in the Weyr. (Writing this out makes me want to revert to typing things like >.> and *glomp*.)
Lord bless and keep you, Jaya, if for no other reason than the Rather Good clip you included. Viking kittens? Orange game? Crab of ineffable wisdom? Yes and yes (and yes).
I am really in love with everyone in these comments. Putting it out there for the Livejournal (later, Deadjournal) crowd, Cleolinda’s Movies in Fifteen Minutes, Potter Puppet Pals, THE NANCING PONY?, MSN groups (sadly my page “Hugs4Hobbits no longer exists, sorry little me), and many many thousands of hours of fanfiction.net. No regrets.
I was also part of a Tolkien community hosted (I think?) on MSN, or maybe GeoCities, called I Nili o i Ardanole. I have a little woe in my little heart that I did not keep up with the pen pals I made through that site. Did anyone else ever come across it?
M15M!! Yes! I still think about “Our Lady of the Soundtrack” when things get particularly melodramatic.
Also.
*howls sexily*
the ORIGINAL Viking Kittens before he got DMCA’d for using Led Zeppelin!!
Spending a lot of time on the Sci Fi Channel’s website doing this thing where you could capture screenshots of whatever was playing on the channel at the time and make a humorous caption to go with it. It was a promotional tie-in with MST3K because the show had just moved to Sci Fi Channel. The page was called Caption This! I made my first internet friends there.
Talking to a boy online, and having him send a polaroid picture of himself via USPS to my friends house (so my parents wouldn’t see it) so I would know what he looked like.
Reading lots and LOTS of Buffy fan fiction (Spike-centric, obvs)
I didn’t get internet until high school, not because it didn’t exist but because my mum thought it would ruin us. Anyway, a few years prior to internet, I had been given the 1st gen ipod with the black and white screen, and because I had no internet and couldn’t install the updates needed to put music on it, I just played the block-breaking game.
When we did get internet, I spent so long on the itunes store listening to 30 second clips of popular songs.
Oh, man. I was on AOL as early as 1996 but I mostly recall like…AOL chatrooms/AIM/IRC from that time period. Circa 2000-02 was more like it: Gonads & Strife, pre-Cracked.com Seanbaby, Teen Girl Squad*, Livejournal, the babygoth messageboards??, illusionsgallery dot com to browse and moon over pre-Raphaelite paintings before Wikipedia.
*Mr. Singstrix introduced me to all the other Sbemail, like…5 years ago…
This isn’t my first internet memory, but recently I was lying on my couch streaming a movie and remembered what it was like to spend twelve hours or some such nonsense downloading an episode of some television show through a peer-to-peer file-sharer.
I got to college in the early 2000s and my dorm had ethernet everywhere. And it just blew my damn mind that I could plug my computer into the internet and leave it connected (with a clever AIM away message!) ALL DAY LONG. Which was important because downloading movies and television shows took being connected all day long. And then I would watch them and just feel like, oh boy I am living in the future!
And now I get mad if it takes an extra second for my Netflix to buffer.
When I was in elementary school, I have vivid memories of an older cousin’s boyfriend spending three days downloading Titanic. When they already had the double VHS.
I JUST remembered the other day how long it took to torrent individual episodes of TV shows, and it blew my mind a little.
AOL CHAT ROOMS.
We were one of the first families I knew to have multiple home computers, and although we had dial-up for an embarrassingly long time, that didn’t stop us from allllllllways being online. I had a “boyfriend,” or at least another 12-year-old I was flirting with (we had PHONE CALLS!) that I met in an AOL Teen chatroom, and one day a girl contacted me and said she was his girlfriend, and we had a big threeway fight and I never spoke to him again.
I think one of the first internet videos I ever saw was this one, and I still love it to this day: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hPtBnhehPOU
I LOVED Teen Girl Squad! Also I remember my friend and I finding Salad Fingers before Youtube was a thing.
Posting a second time just to put this one up. Chelsea Peretti & her brother created it and I love that it still exists in its original hideous old school form. Black People Love Us!
http://blackpeopleloveus.com/
I’ve forgotten so much of what used to be super really massively important to me, but when I think of early internet days, it’s a blur of Elfwood galleries, Geocities Star Wars fansites, German chatrooms that were slowly taken over by Turkish speakers, LOTR fandom things. We got a computer and internet extremely late (1999?), and when we did, my brother hogged the family PC. I remember him spending all his time gaming and commenting on the forum of a German gamer magazine (which is still around today), and me basically tagging along.
I went to college in a little-bitty town. In 1991, the town’s newspaper published a feature article about me, and how I used THE INTERNET and EMAIL to stay in touch with friends who were at other colleges on the other side of the country. Good times.
Yeah, I’m here for hampster dance (and dancing jesus and everyone else that followed), everything Homestar Runner (especially the Halloween episodes), The Ultimate Showdown of Ultimate Destiny (which I showed to my now-husband on an early date and blew his mind), AOL chatrooms, using way more than my allotted hours on CompuServe and hoping my parents never noticed, and trawling Wiccan geocities sites for a hint of info amongst the sea of black backgrounds, little animations, and wand cursors.
OKAY IN ORDER:
-miscellaneous VERY early AOL stuff when you could still, like, search profiles by interest and actually meet people that way and hang out in chat rooms with them
-a Redwall series Delphiforum – I also did a bunch of web design for people in that fandom around that time (late 90’s) even though I was like 12
-some MSN atheist chatrooms for a hot second
-second-in-command at an AOL chat based Sailor Moon AU RPG that was sort of notoriously elitist and if you happen to be someone whose application we riffed and sent back to them I’m really sorry because we were 14-year-old assholes
-blog platform trajectory went diaryland –> deadjournal –> xanga –> LJ over the years, with LJ being the longest-lived of those (2003-2009)
-did anyone else have a series of internet boyfriends/girlfriends because that is literally my whole dating history before age 20 and there were SEVERAL and it was all very dramatic and angst-ridden and I feel like I really don’t get to count it as someone who was a bit of a late bloomer on the Actual Dating front, and I was seriously just thinking the other day how this is something I wanted to chat with Toasties about because I cannot have been the only one
Right there with you on the internet dating! Thank you so much for bringing this up. I had no problem explaining to my first in-person boyfriend at 17 that I had previously dated someone in another country who I’d only “met” online and over the phone, but it definitely feels like a strange piece of history I can’t entirely count now.
I don’t know what it’s like for kids now, but internet dating felt like a totally normal experience/rite of passage at the time for people in a variety of interest groups/subcultures. Granted, it wasn’t so easy trying to explain to my mother why I needed her permission to go to the UK to meet up with this guy and it would all be totally fine, of course.
I don’t think I ever talked about it openly? But my on/off-for-5-years girlfriend visited for the first time in 2005 and my friends (though not my parents) definitely knew what was up and weren’t shitty about it. We’re still friends though and I’m not sure when that switch happened, but when she visited platonically in 2009 she was definitely just “an old friend” and that’s how I both address and, honestly, think of her now. I feel like sometime in the mid-late 2000’s the internet reached enough of a cultural saturation point and stopped being a niche nerdy thing that it got… weirder and more embarassing? But idk exactly when that switch flipped.
The super toxic internet boyfriend circa 2003-2005 I’m not in touch with now, but I FB-stalked him a while back and I would put money on him being an MRA these days. 😐
I spent the summer of 2000 playing Chrono Trigger for SNES on an emulator that would crash all the time, and which could only run at 25% speed on my family’s odious HP Brio desktop. Ahh, memories.
I quoted Monty Python this morning (‘Let’s not go to Camelot, tis a silly place’), and the response was laughter, then the confused head-tilt, then ‘Where was that from again’?
WHERE MY NAPSTER PEOPLE AT?? Did I leave my parents’ phone dialed into dialup all night to steal me a TLC song? You’re damn right I did.
Oh man when I was a teenage weeb I would download literally any song that said it was from an anime. I listened to so much music from shows I’d never even heard of.
I joined the internet purely for Buffy and Angel geocities fansites, and then I quickly discovered sexy BtVS fanficiton one day. Also Habbo Hotel!! (2002-2004) TomFelton.com fan forum that quickly descended into an off topic forum before his parents decided to stop paying for bandwidth and pulled the plug in 2005ish. Still bitter Tom. LiveJournal is where I met some of the best people, my Harry Potter inspired username was ‘marauded’ and it lives on but I haven’t logged on in about 2 years. I used to pour my guts out on LJ, as a weirdo 13-18 year old stuck in a small town in the west of Ireland.
I quoted Monty Python this morning (‘Let’s not go to Camelot, tis a silly place’), and the response was laughter, then the confused head-tilt, then ‘Where was that from again’?
Instant feeling old….
All right, 4 pages of comments and I can share a lot of memories.
I got an email address in college (maybe 1993 or so) and I remember thinking “what the hell am I going to do with this?” because only the other people I went to school with had email.
I got home AOL internet for the first time in 1996, and did 80s music trivia in the chat rooms.
I discovered the Straight Dope Message Board in 2000 and thus started my internet friend harvesting. We have migrated from SDMB to LJ to Facebook. I figure there has to be another Doper around here….
*raises hand*
I was on the SDMB for years – even after I more or less stopped posting, I still did a Death Pool list every year until 2012… (I just looked at my list for 2012, and ten of the thirteen people on it are still alive!)
I still can’t write lists with only two items without having to suppress the urge to add “3. Hi, Opal!” :p
I’m fairly certain that the presence of a name on a Death Pool list guarantees someone’s life for another year. Whatever year it was that Nelson Mandela died, I think I got three people by the end of the first quarter. Every other time I did a list it was a big ol’ goose egg.
I was a Doper for ages – started when it was still (just barely) on AOL and then over to the SDMB. I still read occasionally because old habits die hard, but I haven’t posted in years.
I do vaguely remember surfing the web at my parent’s work (a university library) before we had a computer at home, but not much about it, except for the first website I checked over and over again: a Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode guide/recap site. Every week. Plus reading old entries.
I didn’t get a computer at home until the beginning of high school in 1999, when we moved and got an iMac (so stylish!) and dial-up internet that connected us to the university’s service. Main computer memories in late high school involve chatting on AIM while I was doing/should have been doing homework. So much AIM chatting. So much drama! My friend group also had a group Diaryland diary that was started mainly to make fun of other, more dramatic (hah!) people, make fun of ourselves, and just be generally weird. Thank god that we had pseudonyms.
Freshman year of college my new group of female friends made ourselves a fake sorority/secret society Geocities page. Again, thank god we used pseudonyms. We also had a study abroad group livejournal the next year to keep each other (and our families) updated on our travels…and then a secret journal just for our friends about going to clubs and getting hit on by weirdos.
I think my friends might be able to find me by this comment (hi y’all!)
Freshman flash video memories:
Strongbad, Trogdor, and company
The End of the World
Badger, badger, badger
Potter Puppet Pals
Anything from Albino Black Sheep
I quoted Monty Python this morning (‘Let’s not go to Camelot, tis a silly place’), and the response was laughter, then the confused head-tilt, then ‘Where was that from again’?
My first Internet was a proto-MMORPG called Sierra Online, which was the next logical step after my childhood Kings Quest fixation. (My mother recently found the beta tester signup sheet I filled out for it, aged 12. It *is* kind of adorable, considering I ended up in tech.) There I killed many imaginary monsters and made friends, one of whom I am still Facebook friends with.
Graduated to Usenet maybe halfway through high school and quickly settled down to a few regular haunts: alt.fan.dave-barry, alt.music.moxy-fruvous, rec.arts.tv.mst3k, alt.tv.animaniacs, whatever the Quantum Leap one was. We didn’t know then that posts would be around forever, so somewhere on the Internet I am still 15 and earnestly being witty.
I did receive one completely unsolicited marriage proposal via email when I was in high school, so there’s that.
So, my veeery first internet memories are vague recollections of the AOL kids navigation screen. I think I spent a lot of time on Nickelodeon’s Kids section, too. This was in the days of dial up/AOL 2.0, so “a lot of time” meant maybe half an hour a day. My sister and I were so excited when we got internet access for the first time.
That moved into equine owner roleplaying message boards and these websites where people roleplayed/made up lives about their pet cats. I think I read about one in Cat Fancy magazine and that led to a massive late elementary/early middle school wormhole. (I was…not a popular kid.) I was very proud of the day my cat Angel got “married” and her fiance’s owner made an impressive MS paint dress on a scanned photo of her.
Once I hit high school, it was all about a LOTR message board and associated IRC chatroom, and keeping up with friends from there through livejournal, MSN and AOL messengers, and Myspace. That place and the people I met there had a huge impact on my life. I was a lonely, homeschooled kid who was way too liberal for the evangelical church that was my only other social outlet. Logging on every night and bonding over books, music, TV, life experiences – it was the first time where I really felt like I had met “my people.” Someone just set up a Facebook group for people from that message board to try to plan a 20th anniversary meet up (in 3 years) and I felt the weight of years settle on my ancient shoulders like never before.
in 1998 or so i was hooked on these weekly serial stories. Idk even what website they were on, but one was called Ratskellar and it was some murder mystery set in a bar at a college. I printed out every weekly story and put it in a binder so I could have it as a book. Unfortunately I did this at my work-study job at my high school and Sr. Mary Pat was not very happy when she found it.
I was 11 and looking up fan sites of my favorite animes (Digimon and Sailor Moon) and found fanfics on pages with midi tracks or just text files. Lots and lots of text files. Then Fanfiction.net back when they let you post real person fanfiction and NC17. That shit was crazy. 🙃
I didn’t have proper internet access until I went to university. I can still remember the thrill of discovering the JDSalinger fan mailing list (Bananafish) and spending ALL NIGHT in the computer room reading the archives and sending messages. That was a great list with lovely people. I still see some of them pop up in random places around the web and feel a fond recognition.
In high school I was a moderator on the message boards for a SONG LYRICS WEBSITE where people argued about their feelings and meanings relating to songs. LetsSingIt.com*. I never spoke of it in person to a soul and honestly still haven’t. (“Look up the lyrics, you say? Hmm, looks like this website will do…”) I spent the other half of my time at that age on the forum for a local punk band I deeply loved.
If we’re talking first memories, though, some gems include:
-A friend haughtily explaining what this new AIM thing was
-Wishing my parents were cool enough to get AOL
-Endlessly formatting AIM (and finally, AOL) profiles
-Sitting at a sixth-grade sleepover in a room full of girls I’d soon lose touch with while one had “cybersex” in an AIM chatroom and narrated it
-Learning basic HTML for thousands of Geocities, Angelfire and Expage sites (no one ever seems to remember the latter)
-Wishing I had more hobbies because I’d just make the sites and abandon them, unlike my peers who had real fan dedications
-Dollz.
*I just looked up the lyrics site and amazingly, it is still going. The most recently active thread is a word association game that began in 2006 and is still being added to now. What a world.
Okay, wait. DIARYLAND. Did anyone else have a Diaryland blog? I’m not even going to front. I kept that blog going for 10 freaking years.
My first “internet” was AOL when I was like 7 years old. I felt so damn cool. Also, local dial-up ASCII bulletin boards. What did I even do when we finally got access to the web? I remember Kibo… do you?
Homestar Runner was college days for me, but nobody in my college was cool enough to know what the hell I was talking about. That’s why I had Internet Friends. Brunchers, if you’re here, give me a whatwhat.
My actual first internet memory was being on dial-up (yes) and going on a BBS (YES) and messaging with this one guy from my school. I have no idea what we talked about. We never actually spoke to each other when we were at school, either.
The golden age of awesome internet came about after I was out of high school.
– ICQ – remember that little “uh-oh!” sound when you had a message?
– Strongbad: The System! Is Down! The System! Is Down! (Still have this on my workout playlist, and I’m not ashamed)
– Speaking of playlists – Napster! And the weird cartoon parady of Metallica saying “Napster BAAAAAAD!”
– The dirigiberbil. Does ANYONE else remember the dirigiberbil? It’s still here: http://rathergood.com/mark/
– There was also this crazy video with Princess Leia and Darth Vader (can’t remember if it was figurines or movie clips) set to an Alanis Morissette song. It was AWESOME.
I am FREAKING OUT
Oh man, I definitely had a close internet friendship with a classmate that I never actually spoke to in school, too. We talked a bit in middle school (there were 21 kids in our grade so everyone pretty much talked to everyone) but once we got to high school, we wouldn’t even say hi to each other in the halls. But we’d sit on AIM talking all night and helping each other with FreeOpenDiary layouts. It was weird, even for the time.
so. many. webcomics. So many. I obsessively read through all of Demonology 101 about fifty times as a teen. Amazingly it’s still on the internet!
I still follow the same webcomics I was reading 13 years ago–Questionable Content, Scary Go Round (except for this really cringey otaku one called Megatokyo. it was so so bad in retrospect….)
oh my god i’m old
My earliest memory would probably be playing MadMaze on Prodigy. I am fairly certain that was our first internet access, and I remember my sisters and I entertaining ourselves with the various games available through the Prodigy network. There were a number of them, but I remember MadMaze the most, if only because I never actually finished it. I miss MadMaze.
My own personal auto-generated Prodigy email address, circa 1998, when I was 13.
AIM every day forever in high school. I had to be off the internet by 9:30 on school nights but in the summer all bets were off. I still remember the shock of exhilaration when the person(s) I liked logged on.
One particular Buffy message board: The Kitten, The Witches, and the Bad Wardrobe. This is how I was spoilered for Tara’s death before spoilers were even an everyday issue.
And then college was all Livejournal all the time. RPGs, comms, regular posting back and forth with IRL friends. I still have friends I met on LJ.
That pretty much takes us through 2008. God I miss LJ.
Late post is late and I can’t go through all four pages, but I actually wrote a blog post about this very thing a little while ago:
Highlights:
– having a secret Geocities website and trying to upload everything via pagebuilder
– learning HTML when Geocities stopped allowing hotlinking
– OPEN DIARY (I still have lots of friends from Open Diary who have followed me across the internet, I love you guys)
– jumping ship to Livejournal when OpenDiary went to FreeOpenDiary
– online TCGs (any Mystic Cards folks out there anywhere???)
– pixel sprites
– using aliases on the internet so pedophiles couldn’t find us
– Homestar Runner, obvi (‘it’s DOT COM!’)
– Weebls-Stuff and Joel Veitch (he’s the guy who did the Spongmonkeys and Blode)
– BLODE AND THE GIANT BEE
I didn’t have AIM until I was in college but I definitely remember an anime-chat thing I used to go to, my sister totally had an online boyfriend there or something idk.
I miss the old internet.
OPEN DIARY, I’ve been trying to remember what it was called. I spent so much time on there in high school.
Barnes and Noble used to have a tween/teen-oriented entertainment shoot-off site of Sparknotes called Sparklife and it was my jam c. 2008-10, maybe? (Hi, I’m a Young’n)
There was one writer who did Twilight recaps (scathing, scorching ones, of course) accompanied with terrible Paint illustrations, if memory serves. There was also an advice column that definitely had terrible Paint illustrations. People called themselves “Sparklers” and there was a fairly tight-knit commenting community. One of my closest irl friends and I somehow discovered during these years that we were both “sparklers” and it felt like FATE.
I was such a sparkler! One of my quizzes made it to the page and I felt so important! I actually added Auntie Sparknotes and Dan Bergstein to my facebook so whenever it’s one of their birthdays I get a rush of nostalgia.
& Chelsea Dagger omg…
livejournal! deadjournal! the Park chatroom!
So. Much. Hermione/Snape. (Uuuuugh.)
Oh no, me too. Definitely uuugh….
Expages. Angelfire. Spice Girls fan sites. Sissy Fight 2000. Paper dolls. Webrings. Cliques. About Me. Cosmopolitan Virtual Makeover. Making Fiends. Purple Moon. Girl Games. Gurl.com. Chickclick.com. ICQ.
sheroes central, anyone? Pretty sure that and ff.net and AIM were 95% of my middle school internet experience.
I had an AOL account by second or third grade (’97ish), so I spent some time poking around the AOL forums and probably on the American Girl doll website prior to that.
Also did anyone else have an internet answering machine because you only had one landline so you would know who was calling and if you needed to get off so your mom could call them back? I DO NOT MISS THOSE DAYS.
He’ll save children, but not the British children. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l7iVsdRbhnc&n…
Whenever people talk about Hamilton, I think about this song. The original rap about our forefathers!
I went to Washington College, and everyone in the school knew this song. Is this really old internet? Am I really that old?
Do you remember….
-ebaum’s world? And that insane “wheeee!!” video? (“Gonads and strife…”) (2000ish)
-Snood, absolutely, and popcap games (I remember being in a college computer lab, and 3 of us drinking Arbor Mist out of dixie cups and playing games at 4 AM during finals week)
-becoming actual pen pals with AIM frienda (or was that just me?) circa 1995
-Myst! Well, that’s not the internet…but I associate it so strongly with the computer and chatting
-thinking of a witty Away message
-being able to unsend an email!!
-Livejournal, of course!!
Shockwave? Loved it. There was a flash game on there that was about a wizard and had alchemy puzzles and a part where you fought dragons and it was amazing. Also distinctly remember a Britney Spears soundboard.
Also was a sexually curious pre-teen who cybered with randos on the internet in my school uniform eating snacks. Sometimes I would just copy and paste the sexy parts of fanfics.
I had weird friends in high school, so in addition to Homestar Runner and Salad Fingers, I used to love whatever this bullshit is:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K0TlGPv224M
Not gonna lie, at 33, I still regularly ask my husband, “Tuesday’s coming. Did you bring your coat?”
I am so much older than I even feel. I really don’t remember even knowing what the Internet was until I was living in Saudi Arabia and then Nigeria in the mid 90s. I was on a bunch of Yahoo lists regarding “progressive Islam.”
I was anna_in_cairo after I moved to Egypt in 1998. I stayed on all those lists for so many years. We had dialup at home and so I usually did all my internet ting at work.
In 2006 my friends on the Progressive Islam lists helped me leave Egypt with my kids to get away from my abusive husband.
Aside from the Islam stuff, I loved (and still love) cat related stuff. I remember the advent of the Cheezburgr site and the heyday of Cute Overload.
My kids and I remember all your base and other silly memes. My son who was in his early teens when we moved back here in 06, immediately got into a social media thing called vampire freaks. I was horrified by the stuff he did online. I used to hide the computer cords because nothing I did would get him offline.
Then there was MySpace. Then there was Facebook. I used okcupid in 2009 to briefly try to date. I was 41 at the time. Fortunately I met my partner within a month and disabled the profile.
I discovered LibraryThing in 2007, it’s still my favorite thing on the Internet.
The Internet saved me in so many ways when I was very socially isolated. I am so grateful.
Oh forgot that when I moved to Egypt in 1998 one of the things I did between actual full time jobs was freelancing for PC World Egypt. I wrote a cover story, a review of the beta version of Windows 98 Arabic. I also taught classes at the US embassy to Egyptian journalists on “Internet research” all about using Boolean logic on altavista and other search engines pre-Google.
That’s really great! I had an assignment in college (around 1997) to interview someone with a different faith than mine (Christian) to find out about their beliefs, and since my college was rather isolated, I had the bright idea “I bet I can find someone on the internet!” and I found an Islam chat room. One nice patient lady told me all about Islam, because I knew almost nothing. Maybe it was you! (Probably not, but it’s neat to think about.) The internet really has been wonderful at bringing people of the world closer together.
My mom dragged me and my sister along to the Denver Public Library’s main branch, where they had The Internet, and I am 95% sure the first webpage I went to when I had control of the computer was Weird Al’s. (It was either that or the Twinkie science thing.)
I am an Old, so it was about 1996 and I was on Alta Vista searching for sites about Alfred Hitchcock, and the only really good one was in French.
I joined ebay in 1999, and my username was and still is (first name)(last name). The equivalent of sarahsmith, both very common names, so I haven’t managed to get that as a username anywhere else. And my mom and I found amazing bargains because nobody else was looking at ebay or bidding against us. I remember my friend loved cameo jewelry, so I did an ebay search and found maybe 6 cameos.
I remember hearing about a brand new website called Amazon that sold books. “Like ebay?” “Sort of, but only for books. New books.” “Are they really cheap or something? Cheaper than a bookstore?” “Sometimes, but you have to pay shipping so it’s about the same.” “Weird!” That’ll never last!
Hi, fellow old.
High five!
I was a hardcore Alta Vista fan. “What is this new Google garbage?”
DROP RPG on the Avidgamers and Neopets forums, anyone?
I got my mom to sign me up for a Juno email account in… 1995? 1996?, when I was 11ish, so that I could join the House Rabbit Society email list as part of my crusade to be allowed to adopt a pair of rescue bunnies. I was promptly scolded half to death by the other members of the list for some breach of etiquette involving too many lines of text (including previous messages, maybe?) because apparently people were paying by the line for their email. To this day, I am not sure how that worked.
And then my best friend and I discovered AOL chat rooms and spent a lot of time coming up with elaborate and “glamorous” descriptions of ourselves. I remember a lot of improbable eye colors.
We were a bit late to the game, so I remember when in 1996 my dad called me into his office and said he found a cool thing on the internet and proceeded to play me a real-audio file of the simulated roar of a “trombone dinosaur”.
“Sandia National Laboratories and the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science in Albuquerque produced the low-frequency sound by analyzing computerized tomography (CT) scans of a fossilized Parasaurolophus skull and simulating, on powerful computers, the sounds its internal passages and cavities would produce if air were blown through them like a musical instrument. “
I miss all the fun things!
My very first internet experience was getting a yahoo email because all my friends had one when I was about 12, and my mum wouldn’t let me use my real name. And then we just emailed chain letters and stupid jokes to eachother constantly.
And then in secondary school everyone started talking about Bebo and so I got one so we could stalk a girl we didn’t like and that was the beginning of the end. The Bebo Days as we refer to them were epic and tragic.
Somewhere in there I also discovered fanfiction thanks to Quizzilla of all places, and eventually graduated to livejournal where I steadfastly held on for way too long because Tumblr confused me.
Remember when websites had guestbooks? And it was mostly other people saying “hey, cool site, check out my expage/bravenet/angelfire/geocities site”?
Remember before CSS existed when website layouts were made with frames? D:
Fraaaaaames.
I never understood them and had my savvier friend do the frames on my website. My friend’s guestbook from the early 2000’s is still accessible on line (incredibly so) and I sometimes go there to read what happened on the same day 13 or 14 years ago O.o …
I remember putting every animated gif I could find on my websites (flames! so many fake flames!)
I know I’m like a million hours too late, and I’m sure people have probably mentioned these above (but I do not have the time right now to read all 5 pages of comments):
The Very Secret Diaries of The Fellowship of the Ring
Jerry the Frog Productions
Movies in 15 Minutes
Is Very Secret Diaries the one that Cassie Clare wrote? Omg I only found out about that AFTER her douchebaggery came to light and by then it had been wiped from the internet. I must have searched for weeks!
Personality tests on thespark.com, which later became OKcupid. There was a purity test, a death test, and a couple of others.
I’ve been on the internet since 1997 but for the first couple of years I spent most of my time in irc chat rooms or looking up fan sites for my favourite band. The other day my mom found a handwritten log I’d meticulously kept of the time I’d spent on dial-up so I wouldn’t get in trouble for running up the phone bill.
my “friend” told me to visit “boys.com” on the one family computer we had in our house. It turned out juuuust great
Oh man, I am sad that I missed all this yesterday.
The first time I remember really being invested in the internet was at about age 11, when I was ALL ABOUT Sailor Moon. I learned HTML with the sole intention of making a Sailor Moon fan site. All Sailor Moon fan sites were essentially identical, with character info C+P’d from elsewhere–like, there was NO REASON to have any of these.
There was also this one fanfic trilogy that was big enough to have, like, whole message boards full of people drawing fanart of the original characters? (If anyone remembers it, it was the Sailormoon Millennia series.) And I liked it so much that I printed it out and kept it in a box in my room so I could re-read it without tying up the phone line. (I also vividly remember the experience of wanting to read a fic with multiple chapters but only having a limited time on the internet, so you’d open up each chapter in a separate tab so you could still read them once you were offline.)
A few years later, I got very into the Harry Potter fandom, first through the FictionAlley message boards and then later on LiveJournal. (Special shoutout to anyone who was active on the hp_girlslash comm.) I met a lot of amazing people, all of whom I have now lost touch with. I actually really miss LiveJournal and consider Tumblr to be vastly inferior, because I guess I am an Old.
Also extremely late to the party, but: the first thing I ever looked at on the internet was a friend’s online They Might Be Giants fanzine. In 1995. The internet was so new that every page had a gray background, all links were blue (and purple after you’d clicked them), and people were very excited about using HTML tables to gain a modicum of control over web page layout. I think that was almost before Geocities came along, even. I remember surfing the web with Mosaic, that’s how long ago it was.
Also, I remember “web rings.” And AOL. And the early days of Yahoo. I am OLD, y’all.
In my very first month on the internet I emailed my favourite children’s programme, and in response they invited me on the show. And I actually went on! My expectations of the internet were set very high after that, but nothing since has come close.
Can’t believe I missed this article yesterday, so much nostalgia. Did anyone else play BOLO?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bolo_(1987_video_ga…
I don’t know which one is my actual first Internet memory, but I remember we had ~designated Web time~ during computer class in elementary school (I want to say 4th or 5th grade). I never knew which website to visit, since this was pre-Google and you had to type in the url and hope it existed. I remember some kids visiting disney.com. One kid was smug because timmy.com existed and he had “his” own website.
In maybe junior high? I was allowed to use my dad’s work computer sometimes, but I was terrified of accidentally buying something and my parents being charged (I did not realize this required more than just idly clicking). I think I looked up sites like American Girl dot com and the Jump5 website. I also remember getting those AOL cd-roms in the mail.
We got an Apple Performa for Christmas in 1993, and all I used it for was dial-up AOL access to the Red Dragon Inn chat room.
We had ethernet when I went to college and that was when Kevin Smith posted the entire script for Dogma online before he started shooting, I spent an evening on my roommate’s computer reading it.
Do you know how long it takes to download stuff from napster with a dial-up connection? Because I spent whole nights finding bootleg Ani DiFranco live shows and downloading them.
I think in 2003-ish, my husband and I got our first desktop computer as adults with high-speed internet and spent hours on rathergood.com and ebaumsworld watching the GI Joe cartoons. The Viking Kittens are the only way I can handle Zeppelin.
I’ve needed this thread so badly – I’ve been trying to find the only site I went on when I was 12-ish (so 2002) called GirlLand.com or something like that? It was a tie-in with a videogame about having boyfriends BUT there was a forum that included a “problems” section that included a “sex” section which was just chock full of filthy and formative user-generated content. Google is acting like this beautiful, nasty, tumblr-precursor never existed. Plz hlp. I’d have my friend over and ask her if she wanted to read problem pages on the internet with me and “accidentally” click on the sex one. Sometimes those stories still feature in my night-time musing.
My very first internet experience was when I was 12 and I took a mini-university daycamp that had a world wide web course. We learned how to surf the net and make our own sites (mine was a collection of links to pictures of other people’s cats, not unlike what my tumblr is now, come to think of it.)
When we first got the internet at home when I was 14, I used my family’s email account to get email from the few friends who also had internet access, and this seemed normal at the time. I didn’t move to my own account until I found out my mom was reading my email when she sat me down to tell me that my best friend was dating my ex-boyfriend. A mutual friend had emailed me to tell me they thought it sucked, and my mom had read the email and thought I didn’t know yet. I did know! My best friend had told me herself before they even started dating! Why are you reading my email mom? “I just scrolled to the bottom to see who it was from in case it was for me.” You don’t have to scroll to the bottom, or even open it to see who it’s from! I was righteously disgusted with what was either a flimsy excuse or evidence of her technical incompetence, and made my own account.
Also, gURL.com, and then, when I was in university, the BUST magazine message boards. Are there any other Busties on here? I feel like there has to be. That board was so formative for me, it’s where I found my fellow feminist weirdos.
I was super into the online roleplay on the Blackberry Creek site. One forum was medieval times, another was a high school. I was 12 and just addicted. I think it rather sparked my love for storytelling, actually.
This post made my day yesterday. Netscape Navigator, Homestar Runner, talking about things I had no business talking about with people I had no business talking to in chat rooms…
Early this morning, a woman came into my library and needed help attaching a PDF to an email in her CompuServe account. My brain simultaneously exploded and wondered if she were the female version of my father- pretty sure he still has an account.
Speaking of Homestar Runner, I just checked the site and it looks like they uploaded a 30-minute long Answering Machine. It’s up there with what I remember from middle school.
The first viral video I saw was definitely that alien who’s singing “I Will Survive” until she gets squashed by a disco ball.
Looking up Garfield comics as a 10 year old, reading a book as I waited for them to load.
As a high schooler- Alias fanfiction!!
Oh fuck…. man… My neopets are gonna be dead aren’t they?
I am very upset that I did not know about fandoms before basically now. THINGS WOULD HAVE BEEN SO DIFFERENT. It’s not my first internet memory, but I once posted this question on a math forum and someone was like, “cool! I want to make some graphics of this!” and I’m pretty sure I promptly outed myself as twelve by trying to be pretend chill.
Active on forums for the show House.
Lurked forever in The Lord of the Rings fandom then wrote fanfic.
Got censured for being rude on a Wild Thornberries forum.
Um, I loved “My Hands Are Bananas” on YouTube to an embarrassing degree?
I’m early 30s, so old enough to have not learned about the internet in school – I think the closest we had was the low-fi Logo turtle.
I remember running up huge bills tying up the phone line, playing ‘Mindmaze’ on Encarta (I’m not much of a gamer), yahoo groups, bolt.com, hamster dance, searching for info about this awesome new movie called ‘Cruel Intentions’, youtube being invented, Mighty Big TV, TWOP and Fametracker (Wing Chun and ‘Talking about the boards on the boards? That’s a paddlin’.), printing reams of Buffy fanfic, fandom_wank slowly going insane…
YES IT WAS. Red Dragon Inn forever! OK we need to exchange email addresses and reminisce like immediately.
There was a video with badly drawn stick figures…was it about weird-ass superheros? The only line I remember is “NOBODY LISTENS TO SKA ANYMORE” because it was all I said for 10 months. I tried to find it a few years ago and NO TRACE. (If this is familiar, link me bra!)
Also the MTV Rock message boards, talkin’ ’bout Goo Goo Dolls and Our Lady Peace and how much Good Charlotte sucks, with the perpetual undying thread “LAYNE STALEY/ALICE IN CHAINS SEVERELY DISRESPECTED BY MTV”
I never commented in it, but I like to think it’s still there…still undying.