24 Early Internet Things That Only True Veterans 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

3.

Alta Vista -u/CassandraCubed

4.

Winamp skins -u/tossaway69420lol

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.

The .com version of a .org/.gov site being an "adult website". -u/VapityFair

10.

AOL sending discs through the mail offering 500 hours of free web access -u/Keithninety

11.

ICQUh oh (in a high pitched tone). -u/DictionaryStomach

12.

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

13.

Making webpages using simple html -u/HeyHx2

14.

Using offline mode of browsers to get back to some webpages while you were disconnected to save money. -u/Dangerous_Biscotti63

15.

Using the internet or the phone, not both -u/Myrko6902

16.

Actually running out of pages on the internet to look at. -u/FighterWoman

17.

Amazon only selling books. -u/Shiaomimi

18.

Mapquest. Now we just have Google navigation and Apple maps

19.

Encarta :D -u/yellowochre25

20.

asl pls? -u/Waaswaa

21.

Internet dial up sound -u/Usernamess

22.

Printing out pages and pages of cheat codes for games. -u/VastNewt

23.

Rotten.com was the dark site that actually showed photos of the horrible things you heard people say were available on the intertubes. Photos of some guy, dressed in sexy lingerie, self choked to death in a masturbation marathon of some kind BUT who had been dead for a few weeks before being found and photographed. THAT was intertubes back then. -u/mossgard007

24.

Not HAVING internet and playing Minesweeper, Solitaire, and Pinball instead. -u/morenitababy

25.

Readable Newspaper homepages -u/Karakoima

26.

Readable Newspaper homepages -u/Karakoima