O L D ☆ I N T E R N E T

This is my page for thinking about the old internet. I guess it's like a blog, but even more useless.

The first website I ever saw & the later websites I went to.
The first website I ever saw was in 5th grade, so it was probably 1996. A kid who had the internet for so long that I later learned his AOL email address was only 4 or 5 letters long showed us MTV.com. I remember flaming torch gifs and the site looking like a dungeon, but that may have been a link he followed from the main page. I was pretty blown away, but I didn't really do anything on computers back then other than playing Oregon Trail and some Wheel of Fortune game in the classroom. They were on those big floppy disks, like the actually floppy kind. In 6th grade, the middle school had a full computer lab. Flying toaster screensavers and everything! I think my grandparents got a computer this year too. I mostly used it to look at UFO websites. Despite the mindblowing first website I ever saw, I basically didn't use it until 1999 when I learned about forums and learned the term "japanimation" and started looking at jpegs of anime and talking to people about The Simpsons. I make no apologies for being annoying in old forums and never knowing how to spell anything.

The first website I ever saw & the later websites I went to.

The first website I ever saw was in 5th grade, so it was probably 1996. A kid who had the internet for so long that I later learned his AOL email address was only 4 or 5 letters long showed us MTV.com. I remember flaming torch gifs and the site looking like a dungeon, but that may have been a link he followed from the main page. I was pretty blown away, but I didn't really do anything on computers back then other than playing Oregon Trail and some Wheel of Fortune game in the classroom. They were on those big floppy disks, like the actually floppy kind.

In 6th grade, the middle school had a full computer lab. Flying toaster screensavers and everything! I think my grandparents got a computer this year too. I mostly used it to look at UFO websites. Despite the mindblowing first website I ever saw, I basically didn't use it until 1999 when I learned about forums and learned the term "japanimation" and started looking at jpegs of anime and talking to people about The Simpsons. I make no apologies for being annoying in old forums and never knowing how to spell anything.

My First Home Computer
It wasn't until late in the year 2000 that we got a home computer. Like I think it was a Christmas present to the family, although I vaguely recall we got it before Christmas and it just took a few months to actually get set up. It was a Compaq, like everyone got, and my dad built a wooden topper to sit on an antique table in the living room for it. As he was sanding the table he managed to get a splinter straight through his finger, so I remember having to go to the emergency room with him for that. After literal blood was shed for the computer, we finally got it up and running! Some of the very first things I remember doing (besides searching for "japanimation" and quickly filling the harddrive with jpegs of Sailor Moon and Cloud Strife) was downloading Paint Shop Pro's free 30 day trial and learning how to do command prompts to get SNES emulators and ROMS to run. I would also set the clock back in order to get an infinite number of free 30 days of PSP, which I would use to draw bad Final Fantasy fan art with my mouse. I am a digitial hoarder (totally unorganized) so I still have some of these shitty jpegs I made and all these ROMS and their save files. We had dial up AOL, although I believe we flirted with a few weeks or months of NetZero. So we only really used the internet for a few hours at a time in the evening. I still remember my mom calling us over when she got to a website that had a 404 Forbidden error because she was amazed that she somehow stumbled onto a forbidden website. Me, being an expert on the internet because I was using it for exactly as long as her, tried to explain it doesn't mean that. But of course, I really had no idea what it meant, just that I had also seem 404 errors before so it couldn't possibly be some sort of secret. At some point my dad downloaded Napster, and we could wait hours and days for an MP3. I had a small collection of them, but we had a large CD collection, as well as a CD subscription service, so it wasn't too interesting. I also learned how to burn CDs, so I would borrow CDs from friends and burn them. Sometimes making cool art for the big sticker on the cover with the art assets that came with the software. I remember burning The Foo Fighter's The Colour And The Shape and putting a green image of an X-ray hand on the label. Which I still associate as the actual cover for that album. Despite having a CD ROM drive, I would, for some reason, pull up my small portable CD player and put it near the computer to listen to. Probably because playing a CD in the computer got in the way of the midi music of whatever SNES game I was pumping dozens of hours into.

My First Home Computer

It wasn't until late in the year 2000 that we got a home computer. Like I think it was a Christmas present to the family, although I vaguely recall we got it before Christmas and it just took a few months to actually get set up. It was a Compaq, like everyone got, and my dad built a wooden topper to sit on an antique table in the living room for it. As he was sanding the table he managed to get a splinter straight through his finger, so I remember having to go to the emergency room with him for that.

After literal blood was shed for the computer, we finally got it up and running! Some of the very first things I remember doing (besides searching for "japanimation" and quickly filling the harddrive with jpegs of Sailor Moon and Cloud Strife) was downloading Paint Shop Pro's free 30 day trial and learning how to do command prompts to get SNES emulators and ROMS to run. I would also set the clock back in order to get an infinite number of free 30 days of PSP, which I would use to draw bad Final Fantasy fan art with my mouse. I am a digitial hoarder (totally unorganized) so I still have some of these shitty jpegs I made and all these ROMS and their save files.

We had dial up AOL, although I believe we flirted with a few weeks or months of NetZero. So we only really used the internet for a few hours at a time in the evening. I still remember my mom calling us over when she got to a website that had a 404 Forbidden error because she was amazed that she somehow stumbled onto a forbidden website. Me, being an expert on the internet because I was using it for exactly as long as her, tried to explain it doesn't mean that. But of course, I really had no idea what it meant, just that I had also seem 404 errors before so it couldn't possibly be some sort of secret.

At some point my dad downloaded Napster, and we could wait hours and days for an MP3. I had a small collection of them, but we had a large CD collection, as well as a CD subscription service, so it wasn't too interesting. I also learned how to burn CDs, so I would borrow CDs from friends and burn them. Sometimes making cool art for the big sticker on the cover with the art assets that came with the software. I remember burning The Foo Fighter's The Colour And The Shape and putting a green image of an X-ray hand on the label. Which I still associate as the actual cover for that album. Despite having a CD ROM drive, I would, for some reason, pull up my small portable CD player and put it near the computer to listen to. Probably because playing a CD in the computer got in the way of the midi music of whatever SNES game I was pumping dozens of hours into.

RPG Maker
The first computer game I really really got into was probably RPG Maker, which I must have pirated off the internet. I spent hours making parts of games that went nowhere and searching for assets to use and rip and modify. I remember having dreams in the RPG Maker interface. I got The Offspring's Conspiracy of One some early post-computer Christmas and would listen to it on repeat, making RPG Maker character sprites for hours in the winter. Probabyly slowly driving myself insane.

RPG Maker

The first computer game I really really got into was probably RPG Maker, which I must have pirated off the internet. I spent hours making parts of games that went nowhere and searching for assets to use and rip and modify. I remember having dreams in the RPG Maker interface.

I got The Offspring's Conspiracy of One some early post-computer Christmas and would listen to it on repeat, making RPG Maker character sprites for hours in the winter. Probabyly slowly driving myself insane.

Getting Banned From AOL
AOL used to have a lot of chats and forums and little pages you could make. So, of course, we used to terrorize those places whenever we could. We would, occasionally, swear too much that AOL would give the whole household account a temp ban. Worst of all, it would always email whatever we said to get banned to our parents. Sorry I said "Britney Spears is a fucking bitch!" too many times in chat rooms. How embrassing.

Getting Banned From AOL

AOL used to have a lot of chats and forums and little pages you could make. So, of course, we used to terrorize those places whenever we could. We would, occasionally, swear too much that AOL would give the whole household account a temp ban. Worst of all, it would always email whatever we said to get banned to our parents. Sorry I said "Britney Spears is a fucking bitch!" too many times in chat rooms. How embrassing.

My First Websites
Somehow I ended up with some sort of software, like on a disk, not pirated, that let me make WYSIWYG websites, but only through Tripod. So I made a ton of those. A lot of them had my really shitty art on them. Some were fan sites. Some were weird troll sites where I pretended to be really into something really weird. So, I never really learned too much HTML, because of this site editor. But I did learn to look at the code of other websites, that were doing things I wanted to do but the editor couldn't, so I could steal their code (that they stole from somewhere else) and do cool stuff. I also joined a few old internet websites, I was a member of Elfwood way back when, before there was even a sci-fi section let alone a fan art section, and joined Deviantart pretty quickly after it was created. I had a Live Journal back when you still needed a code to get one. I got extra credit in Creative Writing class for keeping a Live Journal, even though I mostly only posted online quiz results.

My First Websites

Somehow I ended up with some sort of software, like on a disk, not pirated, that let me make WYSIWYG websites, but only through Tripod. So I made a ton of those. A lot of them had my really shitty art on them. Some were fan sites. Some were weird troll sites where I pretended to be really into something really weird. So, I never really learned too much HTML, because of this site editor. But I did learn to look at the code of other websites, that were doing things I wanted to do but the editor couldn't, so I could steal their code (that they stole from somewhere else) and do cool stuff.

I also joined a few old internet websites, I was a member of Elfwood way back when, before there was even a sci-fi section let alone a fan art section, and joined Deviantart pretty quickly after it was created. I had a Live Journal back when you still needed a code to get one. I got extra credit in Creative Writing class for keeping a Live Journal, even though I mostly only posted online quiz results.

Old Internet Memories
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