Early web memories
This is my response to my own question on early web memories and I jump back to probably around 1997 when I first tried browsing the web. I was home at a friends house who had access and he showed me how it worked. I donāt remember we did much other than click a bit around on Excite (a web portal before Google took over) and I think we actually found a music video, which was possible at the time to view through RealPlayer. Took ages to load.
After that I tried it occasionally at school and with my uncle who was an early adopter of home internet. Maybe around 1999 we got internet access at home through a 56K modem. I remember the ISP was called get2net and it came with both email and web hosting. The last bit was particularly exciting as get2net had a listing of all homepages made by its customers on their website, which was an absolute fantastic way to discover other HTML enthusiasts and of course contribute with my own handcrafted HTML manually uploaded via FTP. The web was a lot more personal, filled with handcrafted websites where people mostly just wrote about themselves and their hobbies. My own website mostly consisted of various tips, cheat codes and FAQs for video games I played at the time.
Before Google took over everything, I mainly used AltaVista. It did have some crude search functionality, but I mostly enjoyed it for its indexing. Tons of websites categorised by topic and most of them just personal hobby projects. The number of websites was still massive, but it did feel more āmanageableā that it is now. Of course it was possible to go on a link safari for hours, but I remember that I in the beginning generally had a feeling of ābeing doneā for the day with browsing. Of course the modem bill by the minute also motivated one to log off.
Later we got an ASDL connection, allowing for constant online connectivity at the blistering speed of 256K. This was a massive game changer and when I started becoming chronically online. I would hang out in chatrooms, waste time discussing with strangers on forums, find music on mp3.com, read Slashdot, look for porn and when Napster came around it opened a whole new exciting world of piracy. Everything was just more experimental and anarchistic, compared to the walled gardens we live in today.
I realise there is also plenty of rose tinted nostalgia for that period, and I don't quite feel the same excitement for new developments in the web or tech world as I did back then. But it should also be acknowledged that everything wasnāt exactly perfect either. As a young straight male, I was completely ignorant of it at the time, but online culture was very unchallenged male dominated and also straight up misogynistic. The moral framework to limit doxxing or cyberbullying wasnāt even thought about. Those things still happen today, but usually not mainstream encouraged or accepted. I do think online culture improved a good bit in the following decade. I personally spent a lot of time on Reddit from around 2011, which for all its flaws, did expand my horizons and outlook on all kinds of blindspots I previously had.
While it does often seem like the Internet has regressed in recent years, the old way of doing things havenāt gone away. All the tools are still there for everyone to use. To make their own website, blog or forum. Web discovery without the need for SEO is still possible through blogrolls and good old fashioned links. We just need to use them.