30 Weird Things About The Early Internet You May Have Forgotten Shared By People On Reddit

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.

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

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

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.

Who here remembers Netscape Navigator being the best browser?

"BADGER, BADGER, BADGER MUSHROOM MUSHROOM!"

I remember entire websites dedicated to customizing your cursor

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!

Amazon was still a bookstore.

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.

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

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

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.

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

YouTube wasn’t around.

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.

Hamster dance

It was just hamster gifs

Aol chat rooms. I do miss those tho.

This just gave me flashbacks. 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 childrens' education in using technology.

My friend's mom's reaction when I replaced AOL's "you've got mail" with "you've got porn"