He sent me a 3-page email explaining how to change background colors with hex codes, and I still use that trick today when I'm fixing old sites for clients - has anyone else had a random online mentor like that stick with you?
Back in '97 I followed some random dude's guide on Geocities with neon text and a tiled background to build my first computer. I still use his trick for grounding myself before touching components, saved me from frying a $200 motherboard last month. Anyone else learn something useful from those janky old pages?
I was in my basement in Naperville with the 56k modem screeching when I tried to eject the disk and heard that awful grinding sound, so I had to unscrew the whole tower and pry it out with a butter knife while my sister screamed that JNCO was about to come on.
Everyone always talks about hitting a big number as a good thing, right? Well I had a page on Geocities about my cat collection and somehow got 100 real downloads of a midi file I made. But here's the thing, it made me realize how empty that victory felt because most of those visitors were just bots from search engines or people who hit the wrong link. I actually preferred when it was just 5 people who left comments on my guestbook. Does anyone else remember feeling disappointed when a milestone didn't match the hype?
Everyone in 1999 was ditching Netscape for IE, but I stuck with it because the bookmark management actually made sense. IE's "favorites" folder system was a mess compared to Netscape's hierarchical lists, and I still miss that feature today. Anyone else think the underdog got a bad rap?
Tbh my old web design teacher in 1998 told me never to use spaces in filenames for my Geocities page. I argued it was fine since browsers handled it okay back then. Well 6 months later my whole 'My Summer Vacation' folder broke all the links on Angelfire. Was she right or was that just a Windows 95 thing?
Back in '96 I found this cool Duke Nukem 3D level on a random BBS. That 3MB file took forever so I started it before bed. Woke up 6 hours later and it had failed at 97% because my mom picked up the phone. Had to start all over again that night. Anyone else lose sleep to modem noise back then?
I remember this one week back in the summer of 1995 where I stumbled onto a FTP site at ftp.cdrom.com that had just about every shareware game you could imagine. I was stuck using my dad's 14.4k modem, so downloading a single 2MB file like Doom shareware took about 45 minutes. But man, the thrill of browsing those directories and finding weird stuff like Lode Runner clones or obscure puzzle games was unreal. The best part was that nobody cared about download limits back then, so I just let my modem run all night grabbing WAD files. Has anyone else ever spent an entire weekend just hunting through random FTP servers for games that ended up being total junk?
My buddy said I'm just hoarding old junk. But these things have real history on them. Like one disk has a Geocities page I made in 1997 about my cat. Another has an old Doom mod. Each one is like a time capsule. Why does everyone act like digital stuff from the 90s isn't worth saving?
Last night I was trying to grab a Winamp skin from a GeoCities archive and my DSL kept timing out. I got so mad I actually missed that old screeching modem sound because at least you knew it was trying. Went from thinking broadband was the best thing ever to kinda understanding why some folks swear by the old ways. Has anyone else had that moment where the newer thing felt more broken than the old thing?
I was in an AOL chat room back in '97 about obscure horror movies, and some guy named "Cinemaniac99" insisted that The Blair Witch Project was a real documentary. I spent like 45 minutes typing out proof it was fake, and he just kept saying "you weren't there man." Do you think people back then were way more gullible because the internet felt so new, or did they just like trolling before it had a name?
Back in 97 I was that guy arguing on forums that Netscape was better than IE. One night at 2am in my dorm room at UNC Charlotte I was downloading a Metallica song from Napster and my whole system froze. Took me 3 hours to get it running again and I lost a 15 page paper I had due the next morning. After that I just started using IE and never looked back. Anyone else have a loyalty switch like that because of one bad crash?
Met this user "CinephileSteve" in a film chat room back in '97. He gave detailed critiques of obscure foreign films for months, then someone found his real profile and he was actually a 14 year old from Ohio who just read a lot of Roger Ebert.
Back in '96, I found this incredible Doom mod on a FTP server at some university. I figured it would take maybe 20 minutes at most to grab it. Four hours later, I was still watching that progress bar crawl while my mom yelled at me to get off the phone line. Has anyone else sat through a download that felt like it took a whole evening?
I was cleaning out my garage last Saturday and found a CD-R labeled "Orlando 1997." I popped it into my old laptop and it had all these screenshots I saved from a local fan site called Orlando Underground. It had maps of closed arcades, photos from the old Church Street Station, and a listing of every indie record store that shut down by 2000. I spent like 4 hours digging through my bookmarks on the Wayback Machine and found most of the original pages still archived. It made me realize how much local history is just rotting on old Geocities pages. Has anyone else dug up their hometown from those old fan sites and found something they forgot existed?
I waited 3 weeks for delivery and when I opened the box it literally said '28.8 V.34' in tiny print under the sticker, so I lost both the money and my dignity trying to convince my friends I didn't get scammed. Has anyone else bought something that hyped a spec that totally didn't exist?
Last month I stumbled on a GeoCities fan site for a game I played in 1998. It was this cluttered mess of animated gifs and guestbook entries. Back then I thought it was so lame compared to professional sites. Now I realize that raw DIY energy is what made the early internet special. Anyone else have a change of heart about something they used to roll their eyes at?
He said 'someone in the Windows 95 room will know' and after three hours of waiting and getting a response from 'CyberDude42' who told me to delete system32, which I thankfully didn't do, is there anyone here who actually got decent advice from a random AOL chat room or was it all just chaos?
I was in a dial-up chat room about obscure movies and this one dude just lit into me for saying I liked The Wizard of Oz. He went on a full 10 minute rant about how it was "massively overrated" and how I probably never even saw the 1925 version. I was like 14 and just wanted to talk about flying monkeys. He kept pasting these giant blocks of text about silent film history and then logged off before I could even reply. For weeks I tried catching him online again but never did. That one random argument stuck with me more than any of the nice conversations I had there. Has anyone else had a total stranger in a chat room just tear into them over something small and disappear forever?
I used AOL for like 2 years thinking that was just how the internet worked, all those busy signals and disconnects. Then my buddy showed me his local ISP, Netcom in Austin, and I could actually browse more than one page without getting kicked off. Has anyone else had that moment where you realized your service was the problem?
I typed in the URL on a whim and somehow the site is still up on some obscure server. It had a starfield background and a MIDI file of Chariots of Fire that actually played. Has anyone else found old pages still floating around from back then?
I used to argue with my buddy Dave that Napster was killing the music industry, but after finding 40 obscure bands in one weekend back in 99 that I never would have heard on the radio, I started to wonder if the RIAA lawsuit was actually fighting against something good - what side were you on back then?
I found that asking a direct question in #php on EFnet got me a working script in under 10 minutes, but the trade-off was wading through endless ASCII art and trolls, whereas forums like WebmasterWorld gave slower but more reliable answers with no flame wars - which approach actually taught you more back then?
Back in '97, a classmate told me my site loaded slow because I used like 50 dancing baby GIFs instead of a single Quicktime clip. I argued GIFs were more reliable since nobody had fast internet anyway, but now I wonder if they were right. Did anyone else get flak for sticking with 8-bit animation over real video back then, and did you ever switch it up?
I actually MISSED the sound of a 56k modem connecting in 1998. My whole family would groan when I logged on to check my Angelfire email, but that chirping noise meant I was about to explore something new. I learned that slow internet forced me to appreciate every single webpage I visited instead of just scrolling past stuff. Anyone else actually enjoy the wait back then?