Everyone was nice to each other and followed unwritten rules in communication. :)

Primitive search engines often allowed you to browse websites by topic. You could click on stuff like different music or film genres, specific movie or book titles, or celebrity names, and youd be presented with a list of all websites on that topic.

Since it was the early internet and everyone had multiple personal geocities or angelfire sites, you’d churn up pages upon pages of results for everything. Each search engine produced vastly different results, so you could waste a day on Alta Vista, then go to Excite and do it over again, finding a bunch of different stuff.

I’d spend hours opening websites for shitty (and some surprisingly excellent) bands from all over the world. A handful even went on to real life notoriety.

My biggest flex along those lines is I became a huge fan of AFI in 1992 or 1993 because there were some folks in California writing about the punk scene, and they came up a lot. Sometimes somebody would host 30 second .wav (.ra, maybe?) files recorded on a crappy tape recorder or something from a live show or local radio station. It was a cool time to be young and excited about music.

Configuring my UUCP connection to provide my BBS users with « electronic mail ».

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.

How everyone who knew how to had their own personal homepage.

• Newgrounds
• Homestar Runner
• AIM
• Yahoo chat rooms
• MUDs
• Not internet, but Leisure Suit Larry holds a special place in my memories.