Telling people not to use the phone because you were on the internet.

Who here remembers Netscape Navigator being the best browser?

My step dad made a ‘receiver’ to steal the neighbor’s internet out of a strainer covered in tinfoil. I’m sure there was more to it but that’s how my 12-year-old brain perceived it.

I miss the independence and creativity of the early web. You could surf it for interesting topics developed by people as a hobby for hours and not ever run into anything corporate. That has completely reversed now, sadly.

Hamster dance It was just hamster gifs

I must be older than anyone here, because the “early days” of the internet was back when years still started with 19. And there were NO RULES. There was no online tracking, no ad-bots, just no enforcement of any kind. Essentially the internet then was what the dark net is now. Anything could be found, but only if you knew where to look. Search engines were all but useless and nothing was protected for s***. A few hours in a dumpster full of paper could get you access to nearly anything. That was the early days of the internet.

Amazon was a bookstore? That makes a little sense because of their logoś meaning…

Aol chat rooms. I do miss those tho.

Starting a download before you went to bed so it would be done when you got up the next morning.

The always present ‘under construction’ sign as well. The early internet was awash in black background with dayglo fonts and it was glorious. And they were all connected in little rings.

I remember entire websites dedicated to customizing your cursor

All the random s*** on Limewire under completely different titles

This is why I think a lot of GenX/early Millenials are pretty tech saavy. There were no GUIs for software, no pretty websites on the internet, nothing to “Google” for help. You had to be so damned persistent but it made you really understand things. Now I teach GenZ students and although they mostly have superior social media skills, they really struggle to understand how parts of a computer function together. I’ve spent hours trying to explain the difference between a local and remote drive, browsers and enabling extensions, clearing a cache, using suites of apps like Google Apps or Office, etc. Especially with so much college learning shifted to a remote format this year, it really showed some of the holes in our children’s’ education in using technology.

Never needing to pay for AOL. Free discs were everywhere. I used them as frisbee.

Internet Explorer ran the show Every software you download was a toolbar on internet explorer

I dunno. But, I really miss the way recipes used to be shared online. No scrolling through a giant website of background story of the recipe and countless ads. It was literally just the text of the recipe, with comments under of how to tweak that recipe. We were so spoiled by the simplicity and immediacy of ingredient lists back then and we didn’t even know it.

“BADGER, BADGER, BADGER MUSHROOM MUSHROOM!”

How AOL didn’t use URLs. Every “website” had a keyword, meaning that every topic literally only had one website. I remember when Nickelodeon would constantly promote themselves on TV and said “Log on to AOL keyword ‘Nick!'” meaning that that was literally the only place you could see Nickelodeon content.

It your computer had a virus, you knew. Nowadays, aside from ransomware, viruses are a bunch of uncreative sneaky bois that steal passwords or slow your computer down for a botnet.

Extremely Intricate Fonts. I remember my friend showing me some flaming text on his school intranet page and I thought it was the absolute f****** future

The early days of CSS & HTML with cursor effects, far too many different fonts, visitor counters on every website, inexplicable scrolling text, animated gifs everywhere, etc. It was an assault on the senses, but it was also glorious!

Personalizing AOL Notifications. My friend’s mom’s reaction when I replaced AOL’s “you’ve got mail” with “you’ve got porn”

The fact that muting your computer didn’t get rid of the dial-up noise.

Picking up a phone would kick you offline.

Dial-up that would charge you by the minute. People today don’t know how good they have it.

YouTube wasn’t around.

Maybe I missed it, but I don’t see anyone mentioning the dancing baby??? He was so creepy! My mom was stunned that technology could create something “so lifelike” and was obsesssssed. I miss the program I had to create ‘storybooks’, it let you edit the stickers and recolor everything, clicking tiny little pixel boxes for hours Clickclickclick

Waiting 5 minutes to load one email page (AOL)…You’ve got mail.