To any originalfags or people who have been using the internet since the 90s/early 00s, what was it like...

to any originalfags or people who have been using the internet since the 90s/early 00s, what was it like? before the general population got to to it, and internet access was considered esoteric almost.

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It was slow. Really, really, really fucking slow. Pictures were grainy, videos were pretty much non-existent as they would time out when you tried to play them. You had to make sure no one used the phone while you were online also and it could be very expensive.

I remember my mother allowing me to visit only sites within our top-level domain, because she though that foreign sites would be more expensive to visit, just like international calls were more costly.

4-5 minutes to download a playboy picture. Then my mom would pick up the phone and fuck me over halfway through.

It was clunky and slow

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We had websites like newgrounds and flowgo to watch dumb political cartoons and play vidya way before youtube even existed. Chatting mostly happened on IRC, most normies flocked to MSN. There were a shitload of p2p networks to download music/movies from, I fondly remember using emule2000 to download eminems entire discography. Windows vista was a fucking nightmare.

Ok zoomer. That's not early internet

Slow and ugly, mostly; every web page was hewn together from some teenager or dopey twenty-something who could understand a few lines of HTML and wanted to spit their opinion into the digital aether. But for all its ugliness, there was generally a greater sense of community, and the content you found was--if not better, then less trite, more specific, catering to the interests of the technologically savvy.

Social media was the death of the web. Permitting every jackass and fool to pollute the internet with mountains of garbage data, and letting companies capitalize on this "curated content" by monitoring everything you do, quite literally has helped to dissolve a shared sense of reality and destroy democracy. It is not an exaggeration to say that Instagram is injurious to self-esteem, especially of young girls; that Facebook is a hotbed of disinformation and absolute fucking nonsense; even this festering shit-hole of a website has enabled the exponential growth of nonsense and ignorance. It has metastasized to a degree that cannot be cured.

But hey, at least now we don't have embedded MIDIs in web pages anymore.

Oh and something you kids take for granted these days: streaming porn? Not a thing. There were rare websites that would embed entire videos but most of the time you'd be stuck downloading weirdly titled videos off your p2p network of choice and hoping it would just be normal porn and not two girls shitting in a cup or something.

Very slow early on but exciting because you had access to information like never before. I lost my mind when I found out about Dragon Ball GT because Z hadn't ended yet in the States. The golden age was definitely 2004-2008 before everyone in the world started flooding it with trash.

Seriously fucking slow and unreliable. But also really exciting. People thought the world would be truly democratised at last. Free trade, freedom of expression and free information would create a freer world.
Then the fucking normies started showing up, and ruined everything.

Lmao this faggot is acting elitist because he had to deal with dial-up pre internet golden age, point and laugh at the dumb nigger everyone.

Words cannot describe the excitement of running QuakeWorld for the first time, and joining multiplayer video games with people you didn't even know.

>early 00s
ok faggot

You could say anything.
No games banned any words because it was mostly direct IP connections, but even on big servers it was all anything goes unless the admin wanted to fuck with people.
NO blacks, almost no women, no social media.
Used message boards and IRC
Every site had a counter and a guest book to "sign"
It was kino

It was nice. If you ignore how there were no videos and images took forever to load.
No or nearly no advertisements. People were more civil. User accounts were not really a thing and seem to have come about due to a desire for censorship. Due in part if not fully to the emergence of trolls and the whole "Think of the children!" moralfags.
Search engines were nearly useless. The beginning to all this censorship was when they tried to separate porn and that which can never be unseen from other content. People thought the internet was immune to censorship despite many examples to the contrary. They would get downright hostile if you contradicted their worldview. Much as they do now over many other things.
Finding useful things was kinda hard. You either lucked out or didnt. The internet either had the knowledge you wanted or you had to go without.
No one cared about the law if you were not doing something like hacking so CP was common and not a fuck was given. Most every major porn site had loli as one of its most popular tags. (Tags were something that came around later. As expected it was used to censor content in bulk.)
The dial up noise was evil. The recordings do it no justice. Ive heard a modern device make the dial up noise. That isnt what it was like. It was horribly loud and shrill. A fucking sonic attack. The noise printers made was not much better. If you tried to print something Everyone in the house knew it.
Sites were tiny and linked together by groups. For example a youtube channel would instead be a single site. If you wanted to find something you either found it by going through link after link of sites or someone told you about it.
Most sites had a little page devoted to sites they liked or were "allied" with. There would often be a nice banner image as a sort of site logo next to a link.
Then companies and politicians did there thing and it all went to shit.

*did their thing

It was mostly just celebrities and movie franchises, and AOL chat rooms. A bit of piracy, but that was before the 320Kbps mp3 were available. LAME had just been developed, so 128kbps or below was typically the standard. Lots of fake files, plenty of bill Clinton's 'i did not have relations with that woman'. If you could find a proper rip of Baja Men Who let the Dogs Out, you were a happy camper. The dial up tones would play for about three minutes before you could get online, and if you lived with women, the land line would always be busy and kick you offline.

Lots of searching and downloading from Kazaa looking for Britney Spears porn cause I was a horny teenager.
Also playing the OG rainbow 6 online religiously

Back before TCP was standard lol

I cant explain it in any way thats going to help you really grasp what it was like. There are alot of larpers now too.

>I cant explain it in any way thats going to help you really grasp what it was like.

yeah, this. some things just can't be put into words.

Usenet was already huge in the 90s. Like reddit except some of it was really intelligent and no graphics except for binary forums. And lets just say you could get anything there.