24 Photos That Encapsulate the Early Days of the Internet

It may feel like you hopped on the internet just yesterday. But it's been a long, strange trip over many years. That trip has provided some...

By PocketEpiphany

Published 3 months ago in Ftw

It may feel like you hopped on the internet just yesterday. But it's been a long, strange trip over many years.

That trip has provided some crazy memories. And here are a few things that only internet veterans even remember!

1
Having your own webpage that you hosted for free on Geocities or Angelfire or Yahoo homepage or something similar. When I was a kid, everybody had their own "website" which was usually just a landing page with a hit counter, some pictures/photos, an .mp3 of their favorite song and some general musings, maybe an about section or a blog if they were serious about maintaining it. They were always slapped together with the most basic HTML editors with godawful formatting and infested with banner ads and popups. I actually really miss those days, because the modern social media sites are creatively bankrupt and hosting your own website and actually making it good has become a more complex affair than it used to be (it's still around, but lacking the same charm). -u/AntiTheory

2
The under construction banner and construction worker digging gifs! -u/mystik213

5
Weird little squares with blue and red on them that would sort of take the place of graphics until the graphics would actually load. The text would be visible but the graphics wouldn't be there yet. -u/hellogriff
6
Webrings. You go to a site, often a geocities site, for something you are interested in and see a little arrow at the bottom of the page; this arrow will take you to another site on the same topic. If you are crazy/diligent enough, you will eventually return to the first site. -u/jrparker42
7
When a TV show would say to check out their website at "h t t p : / / w w w ." Having to spell it out every time. -u/BigBoyTetranadon

8
When it was called the 'information superhighway' -u/attictapes
9
AOL sending discs through the mail offering 500 hours of free web access -u/Keithninety
10
ICQUh oh (in a high pitched tone). -u/DictionaryStomach

11
FTP, Gopher, Mosaic, running download jobs overnight hoping that the multikilobyte download from overseas running at 100 bytes/seconds didn't crash. -u/magick_68
12
Making webpages using simple html -u/HeyHx2
13
Using offline mode of browsers to get back to some webpages while you were disconnected to save money. -u/Dangerous_Biscotti63

20
Internet dial up sound -u/Usernamess
21
Printing out pages and pages of cheat codes for games. -u/VastNewt
22
Not HAVING internet and playing Minesweeper, Solitaire, and Pinball instead. -u/morenitababy