1990's internet memories

I've been spending way too much time looking over old geocities pages from the 90s. Geocities itself has been taken down from the internet, but all the old pages are archived here. Lets just take a minute to remember how awful the internet was back then.

Some of my favourite websites so far

Culchie News
Kat & Jan's Boyzone Page - Excusitely badly designed
Xena Warrior Princess, fan page

I used to have a geocities page myself, but I can't find it, nor do I think I want to. Any of you want to share your old geocities/ angelfire pages?

Some of you were probably in nappies when some of these pages went up, I think it's easy to forget just how far the internet has changed in the last 15 years.

kjl

It used to take 1-2 mins for a picture to download, if you were looking at porn you would get a little bit every few seconds, the excitement to see if it was actually a good picture was thrilling.

I also remember around 1997 being in yahoo chat, I was able to fake private messages with a special code to make your text black. Hard to explain but I was trolling back then.

Duff

The OG Space Jam website.

http://www.warnerbros.com/archive/spacejam/movie/jam.htm

kjl

kjl wrote: »

It used to take 1-2 mins for a picture to download, if you were looking at porn you would get a little bit every few seconds, the excitement to see if it was actually a good picture was thrilling.

Also, porn pics saved on floppy discs with some coded title like "history project"

God help anyone looking up one of my history projects...

Princess Consuela Bananahammock

Ah, the porn. No longer did one have to watch a foreign arthouse movie on Channel 4 at 3am in the hopes of a flash of minge!

pebbles21

ICQ ..Is that still about?

5starpool

I remember starting college in 1994 and buying a copy of Wired just to get the enclosed booklet which listed some good internet sites as I didn't really know any. I had obviously never been on the internet before. The computers were only internet enabled after 6pm in UL (except the 12-16 computers in the library), but I learned from someone how to alter a config file to allow me to use the internet from any computer at any time.

I remember passing time reading scripts on the bbc website from shows like Bottom and Blackadder, and being amazed that I could do that.

Ah the low tech nostalgia.

Edit: Instead of having email as well, students had to make do with an internal messaging system called SUMS. By the start of second year though it had all changed totally.

briany

Oceanfree Dialup CDs.

"Penny a minute. How can you go wrong?", we said.

Oasis1974

IOL No Limits greatest deal in the dark dial-up years. Even after it was pulled over excessive use

keithclancy

Was much more interesting to shock your friends back then, you'd send them a porn link on Geocities and they'd sit there while the image slowly loaded ... passed the boobs ... down to .... a big huge willy.

These days nobody appreciates shock porn.

Akrasia

A Tyrant Named Miltiades! wrote: »

I've been spending way too much time looking over old geocities pages from the 90s. Geocities itself has been taken down from the internet, but all the old pages are archived here. Lets just take a minute to remember how awful the internet was back then.

Some of my favourite websites so far

Culchie News
Kat & Jan's Boyzone Page - Excusitely badly designed
Xena Warrior Princess, fan page

I used to have a geocities page myself, but I can't find it, nor do I think I want to. Any of you want to share your old geocities/ angelfire pages?

Some of you were probably in nappies when some of these pages went up, I think it's easy to forget just how far the internet has changed in the last 15 years.

My Eyes!!
The goggles, they do nothing!

KungPao

Pop ups all over the place (no adblock them days) and pc riddled with viruses and dialers from dodgy web sites.

whiskeyman

'Get off the feckin internet, I want to make a phone call!!!"

keithclancy

whiskeyman wrote: »

'Get off the feckin internet, I want to make a phone call!!!"

Or when you have call waiting and someone rings you in the middle of a download :mad::mad::mad::mad::mad:

kylith

pebbles21 wrote: »

ICQ ..Is that still about?

"UH-OH!"

kjl

Oasis1974 wrote: »

IOL No Limits greatest deal in the dark dial-up years. Even after it was pulled over excessive use

That wasn't the 90's

cloud493

Dial up boxes were amazing. Can't remember if I ever even used it but, I remember the sound.

Wibbs

I had this;

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fInkeBOGX0M

Apple's e-World. Wasn't too bad actually. While it lasted(not very long).

wendell borton

http://bojackhorseman.com/

lertsnim

An hour for a 4 minute mp3 was the norm in my area. It was horrible having a 16.8k connection, and that was on a good day. Also it was a time when no limits didn't actually mean no limits

fred funk }{

We had a book with nearly all the available websites around. It wasn't that big of a book.

spurious

I remember being informed by a Telecom Eireann minion that 4 hours per day on the Internet was 'excessive use'. They hadn't a clue what it was going to become.

I still have a working 6 digit ICQ number - I wonder is it worth anything?

whomitconcerns

Ahhh the dancing baby...passed many a laugh with that!

briany

lertsnim wrote: »

An hour for a 4 minute mp3 was the norm in my area. It was horrible having a 16.8k connection, and that was on a good day. Also it was a time when no limits didn't actually mean no limits

I'll say one thing for dial-up piracy - you really appreciated the songs you downloaded because you would probably only get one or two a night, and your web browsing experience was already slow, but it pretty much came to a halt when a download was going on.

CardBordWindow

I remember downloading Napster, which took so long to download, that I didn't get to download anything until the next time I was online.

And when I did get back, I downloaded Californication by the Chillies at 3.53kb/sec!

Exclamation Marc

MSN Messenger. And repeatedly "appearing offline" only to "return online" moments later in a vein attempt to get someone's attention who was already online. Repeating as nauseum til they said hello.

Yeah I was a cool kid who knew all the moves...

Ahem.

RomanKnows

A lad in school getting caught trying to pull the flute off himself to X-Files porn. He was caught by a teacher as he decided to use the dialup computer just off the teachers room.

Keyzer

Man, those were the days...

Trying to play online first person shooters, stuttering around the maps.

My mother pickinging up the phone and severing my connection to the collective.

Earthhorse

Man, the early days of the net were great. It really was the wild west back then in the sense that no one had a clue what they were doing or how anything should look.

Used to love going into IRC and screwing around. Remember teaching a kid from Belgium what "waffling on" meant. He asked me for my e-mail address. I asked my brother what that was and whether we had one. Used to love just striking up random conversations with people from the other side of the globe. It's mad to me how the novelty of that has worn off. It was so exciting all those years ago.

It might not have been the 90s but I remember e-mailing the woman behind acamgirl.com after The Sunday Times ran an article on her and reading her hilarious replies to creeps who would harass her; Freak of the Week I think she used to call them.

And following a Canadian blogger called Justice who used to switch between posting vitriol about politics and pics of herself in her underwear.

Oh yes, the internet had it all.

And hamsterdance was an obvious winner from day one.

JupiterKid

I got my first email account when I was in university in 1994. I remember emailing my sister and thinking it was really amazing at the time.:o

A few years later I was using the internet proper - pics would take ages to download but again it seemed amazing at the time. It was so slow compared to today but back then there was nothing to compare it to. In my first proper job we had one computer that was internet enabled and everybody seemed to want to use it - ah, the late 90s!:pac:

Son Of A Vidic

A Tyrant Named Miltiades! wrote: »

1990's internet memories

When it took 2-3 minutes just to download one boob.:(

neris

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gsNaR6FRuO0

The_Valeyard

Princess Consuela Bananahammock wrote: »

Ah, the porn. No longer did one have to watch a foreign arthouse movie on Channel 4 at 3am in the hopes of a flash of minge!

Indeed, 90s porn was the downfall of channel 4s 'eurotrash'

plys

before google, there was altavista...

lertsnim

briany wrote: »

I'll say one thing for dial-up piracy - you really appreciated the songs you downloaded because you would probably only get one or two a night, and your web browsing experience was already slow, but it pretty much came to a halt when a download was going on.

And almost cry when you download a song to find some bollocks mislabelled it for ****s and giggles.

rubadub

^^ was just going to say altavista was my homepage, and used netscape

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gsNaR6FRuO0

the horrible noise, and fingers crossed it would connect.

Waiting 30mins for an mp3 hoping it was legit.

Telling my mother I had a hotmail account and saying she can get one and her thinking it was "hot male"

Dancing babies, Teri Hatcher

Oafley Jones

I remember a tutorial in college where the lecturer advised us to use this new up and coming engine called Google for searches. He proceeded to point out it wasn't spelt correctly. I'm old.

Samaris

Earthhorse wrote: »

And hamsterdance was an obvious winner from day one.

Hah, I was scanning the thread to see if that had been brought up. Ah, HamsterDance, the grand-daddy of internet memes.

whomitconcerns

rotten dot com...ca 1997...no neeeeeeeed

rubadub

Hotmail had a whopping limit of 2mb of emails. You had to delete stuff all the time.

In 2004 I joined gmail and it had 1000mb

Cianmcliam

I think hotbot was the search engine most people I knew used back around 1997. Used to carry a 10ft long cable in the laptop bag to connect the 28k modem into phone sockets.
Just when the internet started to look good, along came WAP on tiny Nokia phone screens, how long did that last, months? A year or two?

fancy pigeon

As there was no decent computer that could handle a modem in the 90's in our house, it was iff the the local megabyte café to do our surfing (remember those?) for £2 for the 1st hour and £1 there after

Is Dole/Kemp 96 still active?

Ruu

Angelfire web pages! Things haven't changed much in rural Ireland. Just below 1 meg dl and that is a good day. WAP was funny as well.

Stephen P

I remember in approx. 1999 myself and a mate in college decided to email Huey Morgan of Fun Lovin' Criminals, we just put his name into the To: box and sent it. We thought it was so cool, we were clueless.

briany

Stephen P wrote: »

I remember in approx. 1999 myself and a mate in college decided to email Huey Morgan of Fun Lovin' Criminals, we just put his name into the To: box and sent it. We thought it was so cool, we were clueless.

Pretty naive alright. Everyone knows you had to add '...of the Fun Lovin' Criminals' to actually reach him.

Hammer89

The first time I ever saw an erect penis was on the internet in about 1998 I'd say. I remember being excited - not in that way! - because I thought I'd develop a similar weapon in the future. Suffice to say mine still looks like a cocktail sausage sticking out of Shaft's hair.

topper75

Was Xena lesbian? I heard that was the case, and a little bit of my heart died.

The_Valeyard

Microsoft chat hidden in program files. Jaysus there were some f*cked up people on that site!! It had a cool cartoon comic strip feature though.

mad muffin

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gsNaR6FRuO0

"Welcome to AOL, you've got mail"

Trailer park trash http://www.mytrailerpark.com