34 Early Internet Memories That People Say Only Older Generations Will Remember
I used to cringe the minute my parents would start a sentence with “back in my day.” But then, a while back, Reddit user u/OlexC12 asked people to share memories from the early days of the internet that younger generations may not know, and I instantly transformed into that lady from Titanic.
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Deep dive into the old days of the “World Wide Web,” and prepare to feel extremely out of touch. If you’re part of Gen Z — get ready to be like, “What the hell are these people talking about?”
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1.“‘Under Construction’ banners, images, and gifs. They were on every page; the page was always ‘under construction.’ You’d put one there while you were writing the HTML, then take it out when the final version was done, but way too many people never bothered with that step.”
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2.“The fact that we used to literally tell our friends ‘BRB’ on MSN [Messenger] when we had to go to the bathroom, and now I don’t get back to my friend’s texts for days (if not weeks) and am like, ‘Oh, sorry, just seeing this now. ?”
3.“The sound of a door opening or closing to signify your friends getting on or offline. [AOL Instant Messenger] AIM was like a bar. Your ‘Friends List’ was tiny by today’s standards — just a handful of friends you knew in real life. One would log in, and you’d be excited to chat with each other. Just by the nature of AIM, you could count on the other person being in front of their computer and ready to engage in active conversation — otherwise, they wouldn’t have logged in. Conversations were rapid fire and natural as a result.”
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4.“Brands having child-friendly sites that had flash games and no monetization beyond being an ad. I played Nabisco Mini Golf A LOT.”
5.“The Dancing Baby.”
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6.“The need to set a good ‘away message’ on AIM since it may be up for over a day before you can get back on.”
7.“Gmail invites. Everyone in my office was crazy to get an invite. When I finally got one and registered, I had invites to give and was king for a day!”
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8.“You had to put yourself into a mindset of how you would go about finding things on the internet in the days before popular search engines like Google or social media. The discovery of content was due to word of mouth, ISPs, their services, or finding links from other sites you knew about.
“I remember a lot of fan pages/fan sites for different things would all have sections of affiliate links to other similar fan pages and sites in a mutual effort to help people discover other similar content.”
9.“Had a question? You asked Jeeves. Wikipedia was never to be used as a trusted source of information. I’m 31, and in grade 5 or 6, they taught me how to use the search function of search engines, i.e. use quotes around groups of words to ONLY search for those specific groups of words.”
10.“Visitor counters and guest books. I almost always left a message.”
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11.“The excitement of upgrading from a 28K modem to a 56k modem.”
12.“Downloading stuff: Phone rings, and someone answers it. Download screws up, and everything is ruined.”
13.“My sister and I downloaded the teaser trailer to Toy Story on our 14.4kbps modem via Prodigy. I remember we had it going all day long and yelled at my parents not to pick up the phone. When it finished, we watched it on RealPlayer, and it was, like, 12 seconds long and blurry AF. But it was so glorious.”
14.“I remember clicking on thumbnails in porn sites and watching the image appear, drawn line-by-line, from the top of the screen down.”
15.“Flash and Shockwave content — especially the games.”
“Take a nap, but then FIRE LE MISSILES!!!!”
17.“Downloading a song from Limewire and then going to listen to it, and then you hear, ‘I did not have sexual relations with that woman.'”
19.“Being ‘offline.’ Now, everyone is online all the time, but ‘going online’ was a limited thing you did, and when you are done, you went ‘offline.’ Now, ‘being online’ is a permanent state of being.”
20.“Going on MapQuest and printing out the directions. Then, depending on your age, your parent yelling at you because you weren’t paying attention and missed the stop. There was no ‘rerouting’ back then.”
21.“I learned HTML and basic ass CSS on Neopets and would customize my MySpace — my favorite customization was a little emo cartoon person in three segments that took you to photos, bio, and message if you could figure out where to click. It was the height of my…
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