How everyone who knew how to had their own personal homepage.

What I mostly remember is the sense of hard work and discovery.

In the mid-to-late 1990s, after the internet became a public phenomenon, but before it totally dominated our lives, spending time on the web felt very different than it does today. There was no publicly-accessible index of websites, search was in its infancy, and link aggregators as we know them today just didn’t exist. For the first time, you didn’t need to be a tech-savvy person to experience the WWW, but it was still pretty incomprehensible to most people, who didn’t understand what the internet was for.

New “homesteaders” developed websites on free hosts like GeoCities/Tripod/Angelfire; the former host organized itself into “neighbourhoods” of sites because we still thought about the internet as a physical space. Web rings served as pilgrimage routes that connected websites together, irrespective of domain or host, into self-selected communities. They organized around subjects/themes, like Lemmy communities, subreddits, hashtags, etc. are today. They emerged around the same time as public bulletin boards which, for people who were not familiar with BBS, were also a transformative technology, and also the source of life-changing memories.

I am so privileged to have been around to explore the early internet.

My favourite memory is also one of my funniest.

When I first got my computer Hotmail was the e-mail of choice. Everyone had to have a Hotmail account, it let you use MSN Messenger!

I didn’t write down the spelling, and as a 12-13 year old I typed in “hot male dot com”
Coincidentally that was also one of the first times I realised I’m probably not straight.

Before getting home Internet access, my “online” world was BBSes. Local BBSes, of course, because we couldn’t dial long distance without repercussions. My favourite demogroup was Future Crew and I hated that it took months (or sometimes never) to get their releases on our local BBSes. Even with Fidonet, a lot of BBSes would only sync with remote nodes a couple times a month to save money, so it was slow going.

I remember a few days after we got home Internet access, I was eating breakfast and I suddenly had a thought. Wait…doesn’t Future Crew’s BBS run an FTP server? I think I saw them mention that in one of their nfo files. If they have an FTP server, I could just…connect to it. Like, directly, myself, from my house.

The implications of this were so strong that I started shaking. I couldn’t finish my breakfast.

I ran downstairs and booted up the computer and typed in ftp.mpoli.fi and…there it was. Future Crew’s home BBS was just available for anyone in the world to connect to. I navigated around a little bit and found a song I hadn’t seen before on any of the local BBSes. I started the download, and it worked, and a blazing 3kB/s. I remember I just started crying at the implications of what a worldwide network meant.

Primitive search engines often allowed you to browse websites by topic. You could click on stuff like different music or film genres, specific movie or book titles, or celebrity names, and youd be presented with a list of all websites on that topic.

Since it was the early internet and everyone had multiple personal geocities or angelfire sites, you’d churn up pages upon pages of results for everything. Each search engine produced vastly different results, so you could waste a day on Alta Vista, then go to Excite and do it over again, finding a bunch of different stuff.

I’d spend hours opening websites for shitty (and some surprisingly excellent) bands from all over the world. A handful even went on to real life notoriety.

My biggest flex along those lines is I became a huge fan of AFI in 1992 or 1993 because there were some folks in California writing about the punk scene, and they came up a lot. Sometimes somebody would host 30 second .wav (.ra, maybe?) files recorded on a crappy tape recorder or something from a live show or local radio station. It was a cool time to be young and excited about music.

Everyone was nice to each other and followed unwritten rules in communication. :)

From back before you accessed all your sites by using a search engine and instead you typed whatever that thing was and then “.com” (e.g. you wanted info on Cocoa Puffs, you would go to cocoapuffs.com) into your URL bar (yes, before that bar was a unified search/URL bar). If you mistyped or spelled something wrong, you would get porn almost every time. And then that porn would take over your whole computer. Even if you closed your web browser, it was your desktop background now. And trying to change it back didn’t work. And you basically just had to restart your computer because your OS was completely compromised until you rebooted, then it would go back to normal after the reboot.

I loved just browsing the web and looking at random sites. Back in the late 90s, everyone made websites for anything they wanted. The internet wasn’t consolidated into just a few big sites then, there were personal websites for literally everything.

There were even meme websites… like in the sense that the sites themselves were the meme. For example, there was a website “Mr T ate my balls”, and then there were a ton of other similar sites like “Chewbacca ate my balls” or “sailor moon ate my balls”.

If I wanted to find info about a specific TV show or something, there were likely multiple fan sites set up that were dedicated specifically to that show.

It was such a different experience from the internet today. I kind of miss it.

The dial-up tone. I used to be able to gauge how good the connection was going to be by the tones, as it would fall back to slower speeds if it could not connect at the highest speed. That tone meant connecting to the “world at large” for me.

• Newgrounds
• Homestar Runner
• AIM
• Yahoo chat rooms
• MUDs
• Not internet, but Leisure Suit Larry holds a special place in my memories.

I’m not sure if this is considered “early internet”, but it was StumbleUpon. There was always something interesting. You could browse interests and see other users who liked them. I looked at the Farscape category and a few people had added it. I sent a message to one of them who had a few other similar interests and we became pretty good internet friends. Turns out she was a Brazilian girl. We had nearly daily chats on MSN messenger for a couple years. Every once in a while I remember her and hope she’s doing okay. I still find it crazy that I was able to connect with another Farscape fan all the way down in Brazil in the early 2000s.

It was like 92 or 93 and my dad brought home a computer and didn’t know what it could be used for so they just let 7 year old me mess around on it. My year older cousin told me that we could use it to talk to him using instant messaging. When I showed my parents they were blown away.

Also when I realized the computer they bought had bundled with it DOOM. That was great!

Fan message boards where people actually loved what they were fans of. Now you go onto the internet to talk about that show or game you love and it’s nothing but people shitting on your joy.

I miss the flashgame boom and runescape being on Miniclips top 5 games.

Illucia: the town of Final Fantasy. This was a Final Fantasy fan site, but themed as a town from a Final Fantasy. This isn’t a town ripped out of a particular game though. Illucia was an entirely original town with original art created by fan Tatsushi Nakao.

Before the release of FF7, it was themed after a town from the 16-bit era of Final Fantasy. To navigate the town, the user was presented with a clickable server-side image map, where clicking on different buildings in the town would take the user to a page on the site that was thematically appropriate to the building.

Quick aside: a history lesson on image maps. Image maps were a technique that allowed for a single image to be linked to multiple different places based on where the user clicked it. In the later years of image maps, the web site developer (“webmaster” to use the period-appropriate nomenclature 😜) could define the different clickable areas in HTML and the browser would handle requesting the correct URL based on where the user clicked. This is a client-side image map. Before browsers had this capability though, browsers would instead send the clicked coordinates to a server-side script — often written in Perl, I think — which would translate the coordinates and send back the corresponding page.

Anyway, after the release of FF7, Illucia was reworked in that style. I believe in this iteration, the user would interact with it by using the arrow keys to walk an actual character avatar around the town and enter various buildings rather than clicking on a (relatively) simple image map.

Just like the FF series did, the site sorta lost its luster for me at that point. Final Fantasy had gone from an ensemble cast of quirky but warm characters and brightly colored pixel art to a blue and gray mess of blurry, pre-rendered environments and low-poly brooding characters that looked bad at the time and aged even worse. I pretty much stopped visiting, but I still fondly remember those old pixel art days of Illucia.

Sadly, I haven’t been able to find any trace of it online anymore aside from one brief mention in another online article. If anyone knows of anything, please send it my way!