this post was submitted on 25 Jul 2023
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Wanted to ask you about this article, how do you remember the early days of the internet (I was sadly too young at that time). Do you wish it back? And do you think it can ever be like that again? I would be very interested

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[โ€“] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

MSN Messenger, Angelfire, Geocities, marquee tags, flame gifs.

And forums, of course. Music forums, mostly. The dopamine hit when you posted enough to achieve the next "rank". Scrolling flame text in your signature.

I was 9 and had a cringy fan website for my favourite band. I used it to practice HTML and JavaScript (which blew my mind). HTML frames were the subject of a holy war at the time, so I had separate versions of the homepage, one using frames and one without. I would spam the (very few) visitors to my site with alerts and prompts.

Every now and again I would get random emails from (real) people around the world asking me to check out their band or their website etc. And most of the time they were actually good (by my standards at the time).

There was also, of course, the dreaded click which indicated your connection had been lost, most probably because someone had picked up the phone. So you'd have to reconnect and listen to that screechy dial-up sound.

[โ€“] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

AOL Voice: "Goodbye!"

"MOOOOOOOOOOOOOM! HANG UP THE PHONE!"

[โ€“] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

oh-god-oh-god-oh-god.... FRAMES. I had forgotten all about that shit show. It seemed to bring out the Bigendians and Littleendians in everyone. So much screaming. Frames, man.