A Look Back At The '90s Internet

Credit: GeoCities

25

GeoCities

In the early days of the Internet, people were simply astounded that they could make their own web pages. Being able to put up your own MIDI files (those bloopy songs that were ringtones before ringtones could play actual songs) and animated GIFS was unbelievable...the act in itself was worth doing, not to share your feelings or get any kind of commercial gain or anything. This is what we did before blogs. Today GeoCities is available only in Japan (figures), but the Geocitiesizer website can show you what your favorite page would look like if only it had been made on GeoCities. Here’s the GeoCites version of the New Jersey Department of Health and Senior Services.  Turn up your speakers for full effect.

Credit: Chicago Now

24	Chat Rooms

When the Internet first started, no one knew how depraved people could get. There were no parental controls, no nanny software to block bad sites, nothing. Kids like me who came of age in the 90s were exposed to the most effed up minds you can possibly imagine in AOL and Yahoo! chat rooms just by clicking around for two seconds. Kids today won’t ever experience that unless they’re clever enough to seek it out on their own and circumnavigate parental blocks. True story: my mother-in-law happened in to an AOL “Diaper” chat room looking to gab with other new mothers. That is not what was there. Not at all.

Credit: Napster

23

Napster

Oh man, remember when Napster first came out? I remember sitting in my dad’s office for an hour waiting for a Nelly song to download. This was just amazing. There was no iTunes and nobody had any idea music sharing was illegal then, either, so we just went all out, sometimes downloading a whole album in a day! The best was when it showed you what internet speed the person you were downloading from had, so you could avoid the 56K modems and go straight for the DSL, baby! Then suddenly everything changed and you could no longer download the Pam Anderson sex tape. Thanks a lot, Metallica.

Credit: Netscape

22	Netscape Navigator

Netscape officially died on March 1st, 2008. Before then, everybody used Netscape Navigator. More people I knew used it than Internet Explorer. Yes, there was a time when that was some true shit. Then it lost out during the late 90s during the first great American browser war, and IE hasn’t died ever since.

Credit: Hamster Dance

21	Hamster Dance

The Hamster Dance was among first Internet memes ever created. All it was was an entire page of animated hamster gifs—four of them—repeated over and over. And nobody could get enough of it. If you weren’t alive or sentient during that time, there’s nothing I can do to explain it to you. This is the closest living page to the original Hamster Dance.

Credit: LiveJournal

20	LiveJournal

Before anyone got hip to MySpace, we wrote our teenage feelings on blogs like LiveJournal and Xanga. They were awful virtual communities that somehow survive to this day. And today people pay to be on LiveJournal! What? Who are you? Also, why did LiveJournal get rid of Frank the goat mascot? That really was the best thing it had going.

Credit: Ask Jeeves

19	Ask Jeeves

Before people knew how to use Google, we talked to computers like they were people. So some genius created Ask Jeeves, a fictional butler who would “respond” to your questions with internet searches. All you had to do was type questions into the box. Somehow, this made the whole Internet thing a lot easier to understand and made us feel like we were king of the robots. Now Ask Jeeves is just Ask.com, and that sucks.

Credit: Chain Letter Junkyard

18	Chain E-mails

The U.S. government is often blamed for 9/11, but in reality the culprit is millions of unforwarded chain emails from the 1990s. Threatening death, bad luck, unfaithful lovers, or worse if you failed to forward them to every friend you ever met ever, e-mail chain letters put fear into our young hearts. Unfortunately, those awesome things we were promised for forwarding, like money from Bill Gates, never came true.

Credit: Guardian UK

17	Under Construction Signs

Whenever a website was in the process of being built or changed, the webmaster or webmistress would litter his or her page with these signs to let the visitor know. Why people felt the need to do this, I’m not sure. Websites are changed every single day, yet no one bothers with the animated construction worker gifs anymore.  I really wish they would, as I often wonder ifwww.furryweekend.com will be updated in the near to distant future with details about the 2012 Furry Weekend Convention, Furries at the Moulin Rouge.

Credit: Flickr

16

Dial-Up

In the 90s, people got their internet through the telephone. Also, the telephone was a system of wires that lined the skies like Jesus’s pinstripes.  Most households only had one phone line, which meant that no one could call your house while you were on the internet. Since most people didn’t have cell phones, this was an eternal battle between adults and children. And when someone called and kicked you offline? Oh, boy.

Credit: AOL

15

AOL

America Online, now just known as the stylish “AOL,” used to be the only way anyone connected to the Internet. You couldn’t just open up a browser: how crass! Instead, your internet adventure would begin with a series of menus designed to help you navigate the imponderable ocean that was the Internet. Considering we weren’t even able to wrap our minds around how big it was, let alone produce a decent search engine, AOL was the shit.

Credit: Flickr

14	Scrolling Text

Making text move across the screen in an infinity banner was not only extremely stylish, it was mesmerizing. This was our generation’s weed. Learn how to make your own scrolling text in HTML here.

Credit: Wikimedia

13	Online Text-Based RPGs

Before we had World of Warcraft, we made our own RPGs with words. Using programs like the seminal MUD, we creating amazing fantasy worlds...primarily in text. You know what? This is what we had. When they started getting picturfied, they were called Graphical MUDs. That quickly transitioned to MMORPG, a term created by the fabulous Richard Garriott.

Credit: elfwood.com

12	Intelligent Flame Wars

There didn’t used to be all this kind of troll nonsense. When we flamed, we came correct. Flame wars were paragraph after paragraph of well-reasoned diatribe, with very few words consisting of a noun ending in the “-fag” suffix. This was in a time when you actually had to have some technical knowledge to get online, a surefire barrier to entry that made the whole thing a much more pleasant place to be.

Credit: Wordpress

11	Dot-Com Bubble

Once people started to wrap their minds around the Internet, they realized that not only would people start doing more things online than off, but the global nature of the Internet would make people spend more money and make more money than anyone could ever imagine. It was like a pyramid scheme with no bottom, and people snatched up stock in anything that ended with a dot-com. Soon we realized our foolish ways, and the whole bottom fell out and everybody lost a ton of money. Since these people were all venture capitalist assholes anyway, nobody who mattered really cared.

Credit: Prodigy

10

Prodigy

Here we go, I'm going to get a little misty-eyed. Prodigy was my very first internet experience, and the online service provider never did me wrong as a curious three year-old in a technology-forward household. In fact a computer never did do me wrong until a couple of years later when my best friend and neighbor John Dykes (true name) and I discovered the Leisure Suit Larry games.

Credit: Business Insider

9	The Pets.com Puppet

A victim of the dot-com bust, the Pets.com sock puppet was the cutest mascot of all time. Designed by the same people who created the Yo Quiero Taco Bell Chihuahua, the Pets.com dog carried a little microphone in its paw and did a lot of on the ground “reporting.” He even had his own Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade balloon. Now pets.com takes you to a PetSmart site, which is a damn shame.

Credit: freehitcounters.biz

8	Hit Counters

Hit counters at the bottom of your website are now relegated to eBay auctions. Back in the day, we cared about our number of visits not just for interweb traffic metrics, but for pride. Displaying the tens of tens of people who visited our personal GeoCities pages: it’s what our self esteem hinged on before we had Facebook friends to Like our posts.

Credit: I don�t know where I found this picture, but it is incredible for a variety of reasons.

7	E-Mail Virus

Don’t open that e-mail, dog. You could literally light your computer on fire by responding unthinkingly to that You’ve Got Mail siren song.

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6

Numa Numa

Alright, so this only dates back to 2004, but Numa Numa was an awesome interweb phenomenon that deserves credit for introducing the world to Mister Gary Bolsma.  Besides, 7 years old is old enough to be retro. Shit, the PSOne was still in stores then. Numa is the second most watched viral video of all time, bested only by the Star Wars kid.

Credit: Nokia

5	Nokia 9000

The Nokia 9000 was, I believe, the first phone to be able to use the Internet. Okay, the fact that you could use a telephone without plugging it into the wall was madness, but this must have been some kind of Faustian bargain with the devil. The Nokia board of directors were successfully tried as witches, then died.

Credit: imbecile.me

4	Internet Porn

Before there was Internet porn, the only porn we had access to was a trunk full of Playboys in my friend’s older brother’s room in elementary school. They were gross and I screamed! Then, suddenly, a strange world of every imaginable variety of pornographic materials, almost all for free, opened up to anyone mildly curious. In the days before parental internet controls, we saw many things we can now not unsee. I mourn you eternal, baby mouse.

Credit: metro.co.uk

3

Emoticons

How can I be expected to communicate with just words? What do I look like, Billy Shakespeare? I can’t afford no high-falutin’ ruffle collar. Before we had Asian style smilies, we did things like this: <*:oDX That’s a clown, enjoy!

Credit: NetRadio

2

NetRadio

NetRadio was the world’s first online radio. It took advantage of the unbeatable streaming powers of RealAudio 1.0. Seriously, it was awesome, with upwards of 125 radio stations to listen to. This was especially helpful when you grew up in the sticks with nothing but Country FM and Gospel AM.

Credit: AOL

1	Instant Messaging

I guess people still use this today, but time was we raged on this thing like Facebook. Being able to contact friends, like a bunch of them at a time, chatting privately to each one about the other in real time. Frequently asked questions include A/S/L? The correct answer is 18/F/Cali.