What kind of websites did people visit? Were people friendly?
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Broadband internet was a game changer. I spent a lot of time on fark.com and various other message boards. Chatted with friends over AOL instant messages and IRC.
There was a certain video format for Realplayer that seemed to be the extremely popular for a while and it still…. (Buffering)…. Sucked…. (Buffering)…. Ass
Fark was huge for me back then. Also things like ICQ were the main ways I kept in touch with friends in the pre smart phone times.
The Internet was…Weird. it was way more anonymous and way less centralized. You didn’t just check Reddit or Lemmy or YouTube, you had a favorites bar. You would go down the list and check 4 different flash websites, 3 forums, and some news/entertainment article sites.
And friends would constantly tell you new sites you had to check out. And webcomics. You would find a webcomic and read it from the start, then add it to your weekly update list.
It was also peak gross Internet. You would always be wary of links friends would send. Goatse and lemon party were guaranteed to be hiding in one.
Everyone had their favorite flash game site. Simple, one player games that you did just for fun. No achievements or social element besides sharing the link with a friend.
Man, I’ve been using the internet since 1994. Back then I started with CompuServe. Think like AOL but more beige. It had an instant messaging system and email and a portal with various pages on different topics. But you could also use a browser, like Mosaic or Netscape, to browse the internet. I used Alta Vista and Excite and Yahoo as search engines. There were also personal website that people wrote in basic HTML and hosted on Geocities and communities on specific topics would create webrings to link these sites together. We also used apps like Gopher and Usenet Newsgroups.
And before that it was BBS, bulletin board services, which were computers managed by strangers and you would just call them with your phone line modem using a terminal software and their system would pick up and establish a connection if it was available. You could access messages, emails, upload or download files, and some have you access to the internet if you were lucky.
