Asklemmy

My fondest memories of being online predate having web access!

I grew up in a remote corner of Kansas. BBSs were the thing in the 80s and 90s, and maybe CompuServe. But everything was a long-distance (expensive!) phone call. I had various hacks to get Internet email. Via a wonky FidoNet gateway was the best for awhile; my system dialed up a BBS in the middle of the night (cheaper rates!), quickly exchanged mail, and hung up.

Then I got a UUCP feed. Similar concept, but then I could also get... USENET! (Not the binaries people think of now, but discussions.)

Eventually I got into Free Software: FreeBSD and Linux. I remember going to a computer lab in a college in summer when it was empty with a large stack of floppies. I'd download Debian installer disks via FTP on about 6 computers at once, write them to disks, and repeat. Woo!

Finally PPP became available in my area. Affordable Real Internet at home! I promptly put up a personal website (ISPs gave those out standard at the time), ran my UUCP stuff over the Internet, etc. I remember the thrill of being able to access news sites. From Kansas! For Free! And then there was RealAudio even. And maybe even RealVideo, if you were super lucky.

A lot of libraries were set up with telnet access to their card catalog - how cool was that, seeing what's there and even renewing my books from home!

Then I moved to a city and got myself a 128Kbps ISDN line. That was hopping! I could run a live SMTP server myself - no more UUCP. Somewhere around that time, Slashdot popped up as a popular site. I also used Mapquest to get -- and PRINT OUT -- driving directions. Then you started having search engines - AltaVista, Excite, etc. And Deja News - the Usenet indexer - was one of the best ways to find technical information. Sort of like a "site:reddit.com" search now.

When Amazon became a thing, that was cool. No more driving 40 miles to a bookstore!

Eventually I got a job at a University, and my desktop machine ran Linux. It had an un-firewalled public IP, so I promptly started hosting my Linux-related website on it.

Oh, and did I mention IRC? (Chat rooms)

But you'll note, I named the websites last. My fondest memories weren't really about websites. They were about communication and community. I never really liked web forums ("I can use my own client for email and Usenet, and get all of the groups in one place; why should I register 20 different accounts for forums that will go down with the server admin gets bored of the project?").

Actually, they still aren't. I mean, websites are USEFUL - like, say, Google Maps or OpenStreeMap. But do I have fond memories of Google Maps? No, not really.

Fediverse, man... this is community. I like that. I like my Mastodon instance. I'll probably grow to like Lemmy too.

The irony of the web is that it opened up so much more rich expression than text did, so much so that nobody ever mentions the word "multimedia" anymore. And yet, because we are awash in rich expression, it all blends together to be sorta unremarkable, because that is the world we are in now.

Personal webpages, where people basically wrote about themselves, their hobbies, etc

"Badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger, mushroom mushroom!"

I'm pretty sure that's technically still Web2 you're talking about, but I remember back in the day I would sometimes go to cracked flash game sites to play flash games with cheats (I was like 8)

The police still haven't caught me

https://www.spacejam.com/1996/

When search was bad, finding something cool on the internet felt like finding buried treasure.

I'll always remember Illucia: The Town of Final Fantasy. It was a Final Fantasy fansite started by some college student (I assume since it was hosted on some university's web hosting; maybe UC Santa Barbara?) named Tatsushi Nakao in the early 90s. The page greeted you with original art of a pixelated Final Fantasy style town. You could click on various buildings to go to sections of the site. It felt like a place, and it was fun to explore.

I remember the Quake web community in the mid 90s — a bunch of web sites, sometimes linked together and sometimes not — all with Quake-related content. Large portal sites would organize around interests, and they would seek out smaller sites about niche parts of that interest, bringing them into the fold to offer hosting and services. PlanetQuake is the one I remember most around Quake. The PlanetQuake site was a place you'd go to get the latest Quake news, but then they also hosted more niche sites.

The first practical "programming" I ever did was in Quake macros… and that's probably a major part of why I have the career I have today. There was a whole site dedicated to Quake macros (probably hosted on PlanetQuake, but I can no longer say for certain) that helped me get started and even helped me along when I got stuck.

I recall another site which I believe was called the House of Mouse which existed solely to extoll the virtues of the keyboard/mouse control scheme for Quake. When Quake was released, the prevailing way to control a shooter was with the arrow keys on the keyboard. Doom guy wasn't able to look up or down, so the mouse wasn't necessary. (You could control Doom with the mouse, but moving the mouse forward caused Doom guy to walk forward. It was a terrible way to play!) Hence the need to convince people to play with the mouse and keyboard.

I miss the early web. Smaller communities like this, Tildes, and Mastodon give me those same vibes again.

I just miss websites that didn't move crap around as they loaded, so when you go to click on something it moves out from under your mouse (and sometimes makes you click on something else).

Before "good" search engines existed there was a sense of exploration hopping from weird site to weird site. Because there were no rules people would really put a piece of themselves into their websites. They would just be little virtual islands dedicated to one subject or another that the author found interesting.

discovering that 3-D animated email GIF that was the mailbox with the word 'email" that revolved around it. i added it to my geocities site immediately!

ah, simpler times...

Fondest memories are of using mIRC late in the night while listening to WinAmp.

Stickdeath, Yahooligans, Geocities/Angelfire/Tripod, and of course MSN Messenger. I still use the notification sound from MSN as my text tone on my phone. Just feels right.\

That and traditional Web Forums. They're still around obviously, but not quite the same as they used to be.

I remember playing the heck out of http://ambar.darklights com

It was a text based strategy game, people used to break the game using math to compute for the optimal best combinations of troops to land ratio. I wasn't very good at it but i enjoyed it.

I remember reading gamefaq guides on very pbscure ds games that I loved to play but was very bad at.

The engineer at my college TV station telling me about this world wide web thing and me saying "Sounds cool but I don't think it'll replace gopher".

Omg forum signatures.

I remember on one forum I visited, people would do these "scavenger hunt"/puzzle things, where they would encode some sort of clue in an image in their signature. Like in the corner of the blue background, there's a grid of pixels of slightly different shades of blue, and if you treat the lighter blues as 1s and the darker as 0s, and decode it as ASCII, it'll give you a URL to another image, which has another clue, this time a math puzzle, etc...The first person to "solve" the signature would DM the answer, and they would edit the signature with a leaderboard of usernames who solved it.

And people would get crazy creative with it! It was a lot of fun.

I was having an argument with a friend in early 2000s about when Lance Armstrong had won the tour de France. I was completely wrong, but I wasnt going to let that stop me. I copied all of the html from a site that had the stats I wanted. Pasted all of the code into a geocities, just edited one of the years to create the reality I wanted and then published the page before sharing it with my friend. He didn't buy it and I fessed up. He was impressed with the lengths I was willing to go to to win a dumb argument though.

"Dancing Babies" & "Flying Toaster" GIFs everywhere!

Webpages that could get created in 5 minutes without a super fancy editor and excessive coding - good times!

Hmm... I still have printed out some correspondence from prodigy bbs focused on SNES game genie codes for FF6, which is probably the earliest physical artifact / memory.

I also remember the very first two times I interacted with IRC, which on time #1, I picked a random nick from mechwarrior and talked to someone. Then, on time #2, i couldn't remember and picked a new nick from mechwarrior, and person I talked to had no idea who I was and I didn't remember the name either. That one really stuck "identity" into my consciousness.

Another strong memory would be my homemade, geocities webpage with a starfield background and midi/tracker music player loaded, "under construction" sign on page, and text about FF7's sepiroth. lost to time, though.

Outside of that.... phpbb and other random forums, irc culture especially for music creators with things like one-hour compos for tracker tunes as a way to write anything, shit or not. good stuff.

Also, early MMO games had really neat emergent behavior and it was fun to see how the social aspects played out. I think that's ... adjacent to web 1 stuff and MUDs. So, in Ragnarok Online, low-level acolyte classes had few ways to level but they could us their heal spells offensively against undead monsters. The best way to do this was against high-level undead things, and there was a place (glastheim churchyard) that had a safe location to rest and restore mana. Well, higher-leveled priests would electively go there and party up with folks purely because the higher-leveled priests had a spell to "increase mp regen" for party. effectively, they'd party a bunch of lower-leveled folks, sit in safe space, and repeatedly cast the spell when it ran out. that's it.

later, the game added non-undead to the zone, as well as an mvp / boss spawn. kinda rude, tbh. but i loved all the social spaces folks would gather around to be safe and regen health/mana between leveling sprees. newer takes on MMOs miss that.

Starting college, just met a bunch of new people and we discovered the prime number bear. We would obsess over keeping our computers on 24/7 to see who could get the highest score. https://alpha61.com/primenumbershittingbear/

Meeting my ex wife on Livejournal. Was a paid member since 2001.

I found this website when I was like 13 and thought it was pretty cool. I spent most of my time bullshitting on ultimate guitar forums before it got shutdown and sputnikmusic

http://www.realultimatepower.net/index4.htm

It looks like the homepage is broken but everything else still works

Back in 1995, my first night using the internet. I remember visiting websites by guessing their URL, since there were no search engines and I didn't know of Yahoo! yet.

I visited the Louvre (louvre.fr was an easy guess), and was amazed by all the photos of art that I could see! I also visited NASA (nasa.gov) and saw some satellite images, something that blew my mind.

It was a new world opening to me. I stayed awake til late, mesmerized by all the internet could offer. In those first years of using the internet I remember some nights that I would log off early because "there was nothing else to see".

My memory might be faulty but I just remember every other website was dedicated to Quentin Tarantino.

"The Doors" fans forum in the late 90s. I don't even remember what we talked about (it wasn't about The Doors most of the time) but I loved the people there. They listened and responded with kindness and patience. I made several friends there and even went abroad to meet some of them in person.

There was this “mmo game” website where during the battle you had 3 radio buttons to choose shooting left, center, or right. Then you had another 3 buttons to jump left, stay, or right. And it’d be 5x5 people teams and you had to aim the direction that person would jump to hit them. Each turn lasted a minute during which all 10 players would make their choices. Outside of the battle it also had inventory system, stores, money, and jobs. You essentially do a job that lasts 3 human hours, that gets you paid, and you use bill to get better gear to fight.

Extremely simple. No JavaScript. Just web page with radio buttons. I played that game all the time.

Using GoZilla! to download .mp3s. I downloaded stuff just to hear the Download Complete roar. Lol

Searching Yahoo for fansites... I remember searching for Quest for Glory 5 and downloading multimedia and these cool wallpapers and then hopping onto the next fan site on the webring... Oh and signing the guestbook while the RealAudio plugin played music...

IUMA - Internet Underground Music Archive. One of the first websites I ever saw, period. Circa 1994 on the Mosaic browser at my college library.

The LEGO website

The first time I stumbled into superbad.com and it clicked with me immediately like art sometimes does. Total recognition in an ineffable language. It's my first memory of a distinctly internet culture.

alt.fan.pratchett and specifically the sprawling, unending hedgehog song that exhausted every rhyme there is to be made about bestiality. (That man really earned his knighthood.)

The Star Wars Cantina. I hadn't even seen all the Star Wars films, but I somehow fell into this clunky HTML chat room, and managed to role-play along just well enough to feel part of a community.

Finding music. Discovering bands on mp3.com when that was a thing. Typing odd combinations of words into Napster to discover songs and artists I'd never have been exposed to otherwise and still love today. Buying digital albums for the first time and feeling something so personal and special about not having to go to a store and rely on what they have in stock or order from a website to have shipped in several weeks. Reading eMusic editorials and putting my credits to obscure reissues and international releases I couldn't possibly have found out about any other way. (Now it feels like every service wants me to listen to music that sounds like music I've already listened to. Bandcamp's editorials are my last oasis.)

I don't know about favorite but I will give my first memory:

This was at a time when our lab had X.25 terminal access (9600bps I think) to some Unix hosts that were on the Internet but we didn't have proper TCP/IP connectivity to the lab itself. I'd already used a bunch of terminal based stuff: Email, Usenet, IRC, FTP/Archie. At some point I downloaded Mosaic because I was vaguely aware of the buzz around it. I managed to compile it (or was it pre-built? I would have needed Motif to build it), fired it up, figured out how to open some local HTML files that came with it and I could tell that it was some kind of hypertext system. But it had no authoring and without proper Internet access the external links didn't work. So I didn't really get what it was about.

But I figured it out later on.

I used to spend a whole lot of time on the Winamp forums where the community was just top notch.

I met my first girlfriend on MSN Messenger. ICQ used to be great too.

Way too much time in AOL and Yahoo chatrooms.

A/S/L?

Does Nickelodeon E-Collectibles count?

Google Reader. It was basically my homepage, had everything on it. I was crushed when they killed it and the alternatives didn't do it for me.

Forums + IRC. I was active on a handful of forums. Felt like real communities as opposed to what Reddit offered.