I met a girl on an MSN chat room and we talked for awhile and enjoyed each others’ company. We found out we lived pretty close and were the same age but went to different high schools. We decided to meet up in a public place for a date so I fired up mapquest and printed off directions. She did as well. Well, I took a wrong turn and couldn’t get back on track so I disappointingly went home to get back on MSN to give her the news that I got lost. Turns out she did as well! lol. Next time I just gave her my address and we dated for a bit ha

It was the mid-90s, and just a shell account. Gopher, archie, pine and zmodem.

We didn’t get PPP access for a year or two; this was the days before google - yahoo, altavista, some other engines I can’t remember, and metasearch engines like dogpile that would query a bunch of different search engines and return the combined set of results.

This was the days of mailing lists and usenet for the most part - connect up, download messages for like an hour, then log off, read and reply, then log on and send.

I was there for the original hamsterdance, and it ruled.

Before I had the internet at home, I would use the school library to print out walkthroughs to videogames (at that time zelda.com was not about the nintendo game). I spent several weeks downloading a 100 megabyte demo of a star wars racing game, because at my download speeds it took 18 hours, but normally the connection would drop midway through and there was no way to resume the download without restarting it, so the only thing to do was keep trying and hope to get lucky.

I remember coming home from school, and immediately going on to MSN. The silly gifs were so entertaining back then, and it was very cool to have a gif for each letter - like the letter A in flames LOL. I also used to love Club Penguin and ToonTown. Going into those type of cyberworlds felt pretty magical to me back then :)

Lots of blinking geocities and angelfire sites. Waiting for NetZero dial up to noisily connect. Buffering music and video clips.

I guess my very first exposure was my brother letting me use his university account over dialup. You really had to know your way around in those days or know someone who did. He showed me how I could go to umich (U. of Michigan) and a few other places that ran public ftp servers full of games!

Then I landed a job at a small company which had accounts on CompuServe. Around this time at home, I was playing MUDs a lot on a free local BBS, and at some point, the people running the BBS decided to have a go at becoming the first commercial ISP in town. (They’re still around, in fact!)

So I approached work about opening an Internet account, arguing that it was way cheaper than CompuServe. They reluctantly agreed. I was over the Moon but my superiors were not super impressed at first. They complained that they couldn’t find anything while CompuServe was much better organized. I eventually found Yahoo which, at the time, had a sort of CompuServe-ish vibe of providing this directory that categorized most of the more popular sites by topic and that placated them. You have to remember this was long before search engines and even the www itself was still in its infancy.

I was having a blast, discovering something new every week. Usenet was so cool when I learned about that! And I found out about some sort of MIDI file format with embedded instrument samples you could play to get electronic music in a super compact format long before broadband made mp3s the way to go. What were they called again? Soundtrack files? Something like that. I played them all the time while I was coding.

Day of defeat on steam with a download speed of 56k modem… Took like 4 hours for nearly 700mb? And oh my, was it worth it !

ICQ for instant messages !

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

The games on the PBS kids website over dialup

AOL keywords, AOL chatrooms, free AOL minutes on a disk, dial up modem sounds, slow af connection.

VT100 terminals on Solaris (SunOS) reading usenet, chatting with ytalk, elm (email), Gopher (and searching Gopher with Archie), DartMUD. It was great. Pretty much once we got PC and Mac based clients that stitched together downloads out of usenet posts and could run multiple terminal sessions at once, we were set and the Internet peaked.

Errghhh ooo oo uh uh oh uh uh.

Dial up

Compuserve back in like ‘91.

MSN IM was really popular. I remember it felt really funny to come home and talk to your friends you had just seen.

StumbleUpon was also really cool before it was sold to ebay. It’s how I found cgsociety, but then the website owner shut the site down for some reason and everyone migrated to artstation.

There were also the video games on YTV’s website, and all the other flash games that are hard to find now. Prime among them in my memory was the 3-d missile game. You would guide a missile through a series of spinning obstacles as the missile accelerated. Newgrounds, ebaums world, the original youtube that wasn’t entirely focused on profit yet…

I don’t remember using napster, but I did use Limewire until it shutdown. It was really cool to have access to so much music but IIRC it was mostly mp3’s of a single song and sometimes it wouldn’t even be the full song.

I also spent a lot of time playing tower defence maps on Starcraft \Battle.net, then it started to be over-run by spam bots and no one played anymore. It was really sad to see that happen, and eye-opening for me when no one at blizzard or whoever controlled battlenet did anything about it. Looking back, that was likely a large part of the reason for my eventual to switch to linux.

simple static personal websites with a single tiled image as background, dubious color palette, and a guestbook