People Break Down What Most Folks Have Forgotten About The Internet's Early Days

I miss the simplicity of not having a thousand apps. I'm simple.

Ah Memories...

"Search engines before Google existed. Alta Vista, Lycos, Web Crawler..."

deenali

Bad Downloads

"Downloading custom cursors for your computer. I gave my family computer so many viruses back in the '00s trying to click things with a lightsaber."

TW1103

"Amazing. I had totally forgotten about all the virusy stuff I downloaded to my home computer, purely so the cursor would disappear and reappear. My parents had zero knowhow with computers either, so likely had no idea wtf I was downloading. Cursors were cool though, despite all the malware."

AdderWibble

Collections

"During the early days of the web, when most websites weren't plastered with advertising... Website view counters."

over_clox

"Back in the day of counters, one day I went to my website and the counter was in the thousands. I just thought it malfunctioned and ignored it. Years later I learned that my website, which had a MIDI collection, was published in a newspaper in another country. I couldn't say for sure if that was true and whether it aligned with the counter change."

pupeno

The Look

"Yea the internet was simpler too, layout style I mean. I like old style HTML webpage layouts. I personally don’t like hyper modern logos and designs on interfaces. Something about old slightly pixelated designs about them home screens and app logos really made them satisfying. I’ve even went as far as seeing if I could install some extensions that could change the layout of sites, make them feel older, give them that 2000’s html look."

Original_Ad_1103

Found It

"Stumbleupon.com"

idont*uckwithstupid

"I used to waste so much time with stumble upon."

lilbroccoli13

What a strange and crazy place the internet was.

notification

"Poking on Facebook."

lamspartacus

"I had a friend that poked me and I never noticed the notification. He died. I now have this unreturned poke as a reminder that I’ll never be able to poke them back."

Klaus0225

Playtime

"Flash games."

mc_mike810

"Many flash games are not dead. BEHOLD! The flashpoint project. They have saved thousands of the old flash games in a playable format. Go forth and relive your childhood Also paging u/The_Middler_is_Here"

Jayccob

I will find you...

"There was a rhythm game that I don't remember the name of that me and some friends would challenge each other in, and it had the song Guitar vs Piano 2 which introduced me to Envy, who was a pretty big newgrounds artist at the time. I wanna go check out their stuff again now, I'd completely forgot about them till now."

Silvervirage

GroupMeet

"Forums. There used to be so many, incredibly active and dedicated forums."

FromJavatoCeylon

"A lot of the forums I visited were ruined by photobucket when they decided they wanted paid a lot of money from their users. So many build threads and tutorials ruined."

jus_like_at

"IMDb had the best message boards back in the day. Chatting with your internet friends around the globe about every nuance in your fave movie. Man I miss that. Reddit is close, but nothing beats the olden days."

FeFiFoMums

Fun

"Do you guys remember those egg things that hatched little creatures after a while? You'd put one on your website and then the artist would update the source url with images of it hatching? There were all kinds of little fun things like that."

Sapiencia6

Those were the days!

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