Asklemmy

Definitely Chatrooms 👌

AIM! My entire junior high would be up all night chatting away. I figured out my mom's password on her power Mac, and hid out in her office lol. It was so fun and novel at the time.

The owner of a site called zug dot com wrote a lengthy and hilarious essay on his treatment for an anal fissure. There were MS Paint illustrations of the procedure.

I was enthralled but also learned a lot about using humor to discuss situations that a person would otherwise be ashamed of.

Earliest thing I remember was, as a kid of maybe 6 or 7, my family got internet installed (circa 95/96), and I found an early Pokémon fansite (via Yahooligans, most likely) that listed all 150 Pokémon and the "meaning" of their names (ie Hitmonchan and Hitmonlee are combinations of "hit" and Jackie Chan and Bruce Lee respectively). I was of course only just learning to read, so it took me a few visits to the website to read though every entry, but I was so stoked to see such engaging content on this new "internet"-thing

BBS, ftpmail, archie, veronica, news, mail !! tons and tons of information never before available to me..

I wasn't born back then, but it would have been the fact that search results weren't total crap like today: only reddit seems to offer decent results if you don't want sites like wikihow to come up... I wrote a more elaborate blogpost partly about it.

Downloading a file and after hours of downloading it gets stuck at 99%

Probably that happy zing you got whenever anyone signed your guestbook on your homepage.

Having my own email address, making a website and pirating a metal album

Staying up till 2am to play BRE (Baron Realms Elite) on a local BBS. 2am because that was a time I could dial in without the line being busy.

I also played a little LORD (Legend of the Red Dragon), but BRE was my favorite.

I was a big MST3k fan back in the day. When it was on Sci-Fi, they had a MST3k-themed site called "Caption This" where it took screengrabs of whatever was on the channel at the time and you'd crack jokes about it.

It doesn't sound that interesting now, but if you're familiar with the show you'd see the appeal.

Also having to wait five minutes for a single JPEG of boobs to show up. Really helped teach a person patience.

Creating my own Proboards message boards and discovering Alien Adoption Agency.

The AOL kids home page with all flash games. I played a lot of the tom and Jerry blueprint game.

BonziBuddy destroying the family computer.

Green N logo. Windows 98. Teal solid wallpaper. Waiting for gifs to load and files to download on a 56k. BEEP BOOP. The burning smell of a CRT.

Bonus: emulating Metal Slug 5 on emulator

Probably watching an old Ed Edd N Eddy fan animation I found on yt that I cannot find a trace of anymore, or just the old yt shit post videos in general. That, or things like getting on Nitrome or any other site to play flash games. Mutiny on Nitrome was one of my absolute favorite flash games and one I never beat since I was still young.

"You got mail"

It's not that early, but eyezmaze.com (which apparently still exists) was one of those sites I found one day and regularly played on for years.

If you want to get a feeling of the old internet, look here: https://search.marginalia.nu/explore/random

To be clear, those are not (only) old sites, but a lot of them feel like the old web.

Newgrounds most definitely. And as an earlier poster stated, muds. Specifically MUME. Oh man many hours have been spent playing that game