c/90s-internet-memories

Wasted $200 on a GeoCities "premium" template pack back in 98

Thought I was getting all these cool graphics and JavaScript effects but it was just a bunch of broken links and ugly clip art that looked like it was drawn in MS Paint. Anyone else blow their allowance on those sketchy template sites?

PSA: Check your old HTML tutorials before building a site off memory

Last month I tried to rebuild a personal page using stuff I remembered from the mid 90s. Forgot that blink tags and marquees don't work in modern browsers at all. Had to scrap three hours of work after testing it in Chrome. Anybody else have old coding habits come back to bite them?

Showerthought: I used to think those old banner ads from 1997 were totally useless... but maybe they were better than today's targeted stuff?

Vent: Everyone romanticizing dial-up like it was some magical experience

I keep seeing posts about how "cozy" and "simple" the old 56k modem sounds were, but yall are forgetting the reality. I lived in a house with three siblings and ONE phone line in 1997. Every time I wanted to check my NeoPets or download a 5MB wallpaper of a Windows logo, someone would pick up the phone and BAM - disconnected. Plus the screeching was LOUD and woke up my parents at 2am when I tried sneaking online. Who else remembers the actual struggle of waiting 45 minutes for one JPEG to load? Let's be real about this.

Dropped $60 on a 'retro internet' CD-ROM in 1997

That disc claimed to have 10,000 hand-picked websites archived, but half the links were dead and the other half were just ads for AOL. Anyone else get burned by those scam compilation discs?

Showerthought: Realized my old dial-up ISP charged me for 5 hours of busy signals a month

I was digging through a shoebox of old AOL floppy disks and found a bill from 1997 that showed $12.99 for 15 hours of usage, but there was a $4 surcharge for "failed connection attempts." I did the math and that means I paid for over 5 hours of just busy signals that month because everyone in my town was trying to get online after 6 PM. Did anyone else's ISP sneak in fees for crap they couldn't control like that?

Wasted $45 on a CD-ROM encyclopedia set from a swap meet

Bought a whole box of Encarta 95 discs at a garage sale thinking they'd be cool for nostalgia. Every single disc had scratches so bad they wouldn't load past the intro screen. Anyone else get burned on old software that turned out to be junk?

My dad swore I'd break my modem downloading stuff at 2 AM

He told me the phone line could only handle 30 minutes of connection before it fried the card, so I set a kitchen timer every time I went on Prodigy. Six months later the modem was fine, but that timer is STILL stuck in my head anytime I hear a dial tone.

That time a 14.4k modem took 45 minutes to download a 3MB picture of a kitten

I sat there staring at the progress bar on Prodigy, convinced the whole thing froze, only to find out my buddy sent it from his college's T1 line and didn't warn me. Has anyone else ever sat through a download that long only to realize the file was corrupted at 99%?

Figured out that thing where you type 'cd..' twice fast to jump two directories in DOS

After getting lost in my dad's old Windows 3.1 file system trying to find DOOM2.exe for like 20 minutes, I accidentally hit the up arrow twice and realized you can just press F3 to repeat the last command instead of typing it all over again.

Hot take: I was shocked by how much data a 28.8k modem actually moved

I was digging through some old tech magazines my dad kept from the mid-90s, and I saw this ad claiming a 28.8k modem could download a 3MB file in about 15 minutes. That blew my mind because I remember waiting what felt like forever just to load a single webpage with a few small pictures. Found this stat in a 1996 issue of PC World, page 47. It made me realize how spoiled I am now with my fiber connection, but also how much patience we had back then. Like, you planned your whole evening around downloading one album from Napster. Has anyone else run across a specific number from back then that just surprised you? I'm curious what other stats people have stumbled upon in old magazines or manuals.

Took me 6 hours to figure out why my old Netscape bookmarks kept vanishing

Back in 1997 I saved a folder of maybe 80 cool sites on my Windows 95 tower. Next day they were all gone. Took me until 10 PM to realize it was because I had the disk write cache set to zero in the BIOS. Lost a whole Sunday over a dumb setting. Anyone else lose bookmarks to some weird system bug back then?

The one comment that made me stop using Comic Sans on my homepage

Back in '97 some random guy on a web design forum said my site looked like a 5th grader's book report and he was right. After that I switched to Verdana and actually learned about readable fonts, has anyone else had a stranger's critique totally change their design approach?

Downloading an entire Geocities site with a free tool actually worked

I remember back in 1999, I had this Geocities page for my band that took me like 6 months to build with all these custom GIFs and MIDI files. Then one day I heard Yahoo was gonna shut down Geocities and I panicked. Some guy on a forum named something like "WebRipper2000" said I could grab the whole site with this free program called HTTrack. I was super skeptical because most free tools back then were just packed with spyware or would crash halfway through. But I tried it on a Sunday afternoon, pointed it at my URL, and it downloaded every single HTML file, image, and sound file to my hard drive in about 20 minutes. The whole thing was like 12 megabytes and it kept all the folder structures perfect. Has anyone else used HTTrack or a similar tool to save old sites before they disappeared?

Overheard my nephew calling dial-up sounds 'creepy alien noises'

He said our old 56k modem sounded like it was from a horror movie and I tried to explain the comforting rhythm of that handshake was like a lullaby to me back then, but he just looked at me like I was crazy - anyone else feel weird hearing those sounds as nostalgia instead of annoyance now?

Just realized that chat room in 1998 with the guy who called himself CyberpunkX

I was in this AOL chat room about sci-fi novels and this one dude kept correcting everyone's grammar, real annoying. Then he told me my taste in books was shallow and gave me a list of authors I'd never heard of. Anyone else run into a random stranger online who actually changed what you read?

That time I realized how many people actually used dial-up until like 2005

I was digging through some old archives from the Wayback Machine the other night, looking at a GeoCities page I made back in 1998 for my band. And I got curious about how many people were still on dial-up when broadband started rolling out. Found a stat from the Pew Research Center that said 40% of US homes were still using dial-up in 2002. That blew my mind because I remember feeling like I was the only one left on 56k after 2001 or so. But then I thought about how slow DSL was in smaller towns like where my cousin lived in rural Nebraska. He didn't get cable internet until 2006. So it makes sense now why those old forums stayed active for so long, everybody was still waiting for pages to load. Has anyone else come across a stat like that which totally rearranged your memory of how things really were back then?

I finally figured out why AOL chat rooms were better than IRC

Honestly, back in 1998 I swore by IRC for speed and cleanliness. But after helping a buddy set up his first computer last week, I sat through an AOL 3.0 session on his old Packard Bell and it hit me. The buddy lists, the profile photos, the little sounds when someone entered a room - it made talking to strangers feel personal, not like a command line. Has anyone else found a specific old platform that just clicked better for them than the popular one?

The one thing everyone gets wrong about download speeds on old modems

I keep seeing people talk about how they got 56k downloads back in the 90s like it was instant for everything. That's not how it worked at all. I remember downloading a 3MB file of a Doom level pack on my 28.8 modem and it took almost 20 minutes. People forget that connection speed was theoretical max and you'd actually get like 4-5 KB/s if you were lucky. Has anyone else noticed this or am I just being that guy?

Found a trick to speed up my dial-up by stacking two 56k modems

Back in '98 I was pulling my hair out trying to download a 10 MB game demo over a single 56k modem. Took like 4 hours and always disconnected halfway through. Then my buddy showed me how to hook up two modems to separate phone lines and use a program called Midpoint to combine them. It actually doubled my speed to around 9-10 KB/s and the downloads finished in under 2 hours. Anyone else ever try multi-link dial-up or am I just showing my age here lol?

Showerthought: My first chat room flame war in 1997 taught me to never use my real name online

I was in a Yahoo chat room for fans of the band Garbage, arguing about their second album, when someone pulled my full name from my AOL profile and posted my parents' listed phone number. It was a quiet Tuesday night in my bedroom in Toledo, and it felt like the whole world just crashed in. Anyone else have a moment from those early days that made you lock down your privacy settings for good?

I finally got my Geocities page to load under 30 seconds on a 28.8k modem, here's how

Can we talk about the first time you saw a webcam stream?

I was at my friend's house in 1996 and his older brother had a camera set up in his dorm room at UNC. He showed us this grainy black and white feed of his empty room, updating like once a minute. It blew my mind that we could see something happening somewhere else in real time, even if it was just a chair. What was your first 'whoa' moment with live internet stuff back then?

Found my old Angelfire site from 1997 while cleaning out a closet

I was going through some boxes in my attic in Charlotte and found a printed-out homepage from my first website. It was just a page about my dog with a tiled background of little green aliens and a hit counter that said '00007'. I had to use a 28.8k modem and it took like 20 minutes just to upload one picture. Anyone else ever stumble on their ancient web stuff and just cringe-laugh?

My first Geocities page got roasted for using that 'under construction' gif

Back in '97, I was so proud of my Star Trek fan page. I had that little animated construction worker guy right at the top. Posted the link on a Trek BBS and someone replied, 'The web is always under construction. That gif is the mark of an amateur.' Felt like a punch in the gut, but they were right. I took it down that day and just launched the page, even if parts were empty. It forced me to think of a site as something live, not a project forever being built. Did anyone else have a piece of 'netiquette' criticism that actually stuck with you from those days?