25 years ago, a younger me would spend an hour every Saturday sat at an old recycled office PC in my parents attic. I’d use it during the week every now and then as well to play games and create weird little Powerpoint projects, but Saturday mornings were special because this was the allotted hour I got to spend online. The Internet was always something that I coveted, the concept of getting content on my device without the need for a disc felt exciting! I would have a list of topics noted down beforehand that I would go and look up, but each week I’d end up somewhere different, finding new websites and new things to do within the confines of Internet Explorer. I discovered forums, chat rooms, Flash games, fan sites, subculture communities, all on top of the websites I’d visit from TV commercials.

Just to clarify, the hourly weekly limit wasn’t some sort of overly strict parenting measure… Well, mostly not. Rather, it was simply a limitation of the technology of the time. Unless you were lucky enough to live in a relatively new property that had high-speed cable, the only way you were getting online was with a dial-up modem connected to a telephone line… And it was slow. But it wasn’t just slow, it also had the unfortunate side-effect of both tying up the phone line and costing money by the minute as a phone call on top of the fees the ISP added. So I can understand why, at the time, I had such a strict time limit to work with. But I made it work and it would only be a few years until I too was able to get online any time I wanted, once we had a new phone line installed just for my brother and me to use to go online with, we still had to take turns, though. And not long after that, our antiquated, rural telephone exchange got an upgrade which meant we could finally get DSL, orders of magnitude faster and more reliable!

Even with the ability to access the web at any time at relatively fast speeds, the Internet was still a very different experience than it is today. This was still at a time where most of the tech giants we know today hadn’t come into prominence yet, if they even existed at all. There were no media streaming services, no app stores and the only consumer devices that could actually get online were computers and some limited support for game consoles. So what did I do on this early worldwide web if all the usual things we have now weren’t there yet? Well, I have a few examples I vividly remember, but you have to take them with the context that this was all new and exciting at the time. It definitely doesn’t paint a picture than the old days were better, but I’ll touch more upon that afterwards. So, here are a few golden moments that stuck out for whatever reason!

• I would be excited, especially with my earliest setup, when I managed to download any kind of video file. Due to video compression at the time being practically non-existent, even downloading a clip of a few seconds that was the size of a postage stamp on-screen could eat into my entire one hour of Internet! At some point, I managed to download a short clip from Dexter’s Laboratory, a show from Cartoon Network. It wasn’t anything more exciting than a short skit they’d show between commercial breaks, but I remember once I had it, I’d play it over and over and over. Just the novelty of having footage from a TV show, from a channel we didn’t get, playing on a computer and not a TV, was just so fascinating!
• Flash/Shockwave and MIDI content was a godsend to people on dial-up Internet. So how did they get relatively long Flash animations at high resolutions to fit into such an insanely small file size? Some sort of crazy intense compression algorithm?? Not at all, as I mentioned, video compression to the point where it was viable was still a ways off, DivX probably being the first step toward that. A Flash animation isn’t really a video at all but a set of calculations and a few assets like sound and images. The animation is generated on the PC in real-time with vector lines. When you see that photo of a dog dancing on-screen, it’s just a single image being squashed and stretched. When you see its eyes bulging in cartoonish fashion, your PC is drawing those circles on the fly. Rather than a video file which is a series of images played in sequence, a Flash animation provides the bare assets and instructions on how they move. I’m probably not explaining it all very well but, it was an incredibly efficient way of creating and distributing animation (and games too!). MIDI was the audio equivalent. Since downloading a single MP3 would easily take 40 minutes, a MIDI file was the next best thing, it could be downloaded in seconds! It used existing instruments built into your sound card to generate the song, so essentially the file was just sheet music and instructions for your PC on how it should be played back. The downside to that was the song could sound very different depending on which brand and model of sound card you had.
• Being stuck on dial-up for a long time and having limited access, I never really got into online gaming until much later, but there was one particular game that conveniently could be played in a web browser and even on a slow connection. I mean, there were a lot of games that fit that description but one in particular blew up in popularity… Neopets! You probably thought I was going to say Runescape, right? Somehow I completely missed that game, but there’s a good chance I wouldn’t have had the time to invest in playing it. Neopets was great though, because it also worked on the computers at my high school. It came right off the back of the Tamagotchi and Pokemon craze, both of which I had a brief infatuation with. But this was such an enormous leap from the little plastic toys you cleaned poop from every now and then. This game had other players, an economy, lots of minigames and other activities to earn new items and foods for your pet, which could be customised in myriad colours from a wide selection of different species, it was just on a whole other level and my entire class was hooked.
• Memes before memes! A site I ended up on a lot after getting DSL was “YTMND”, the acronym of “You’re The Man Now Dog”, which was a quote from Sean Connery from a movie I’ve never seen. I won’t get into the weeds about the name, but the idea behind the site was that it allowed users to upload an image or animated GIF, as well as an MP3. This would generate a webpage that plays both back on loop continuously. Some were hilarious and had users copying the original submissions with their own edits, like the memes we have today, although that word didn’t exist yet so they were called “fads”. It’s one of those “you had to be there” things, trust me on this! This video should give you a good idea of how it worked.

So you might be thinking, things sure are better now, right? There’s so much more we’ve utilised the Internet for in modern times, so many ways it’s made things convenient. And, you know, at face value it does seem that way… So, when people say they miss the old Internet, is it just that their nostalgia goggles are on too tight? Well, that’s probably part of the reason, but I began noticing more and more, particularly as we approached the COVID pandemic, people were not seeing the Internet as this amazing world of discovery and communication any more. In fact, some had begun to see it as a burden, some would spend much of their spare time using it and come away feeling anxious, depressed, angry… “Social media” websites like Facebook, Tiktok and especially X make their money primarily from ad revenue. The longer they keep someone engaged, the more ads they can serve. They have been fine-tuning their content-serving algorithms for years, and unfortunately it does seem that the thing that drives the most engagement is negativity. X would serve me a lot of suggestions for things that it knew would cause me outrage, egging me on to engage with posts and people that, in constant repetition, granted me nothing but misery. A couple of years ago, I decided I would ditch all my social media accounts entirely (with the exception of Youtube) and also stop checking the news every hour, the positive effects this had on my mental wellbeing came about so quickly, they weren’t kidding when they said “ignorance is bliss”… I don’t actually know who said that, sorry! But one can’t hide from the news, and over the past few years the Internet has been at the heart of a lot of it. Whether it’s governments engaging in mass censorship under the guise of protecting children, or having everything from fridges to doorbells connected to it and being made to pay subscription fees for the privilege, there is this growing sentiment that the Internet isn’t fun any more. It feels to me now more like a vector for corporations to have a constant link to my wallet.

This feeling is what really made me take the time to learn how to set up a web server and host a website of my own. If you’re reading this, then I’ve succeeded! Sure, I didn’t code the site because I used WordPress, but it’s all self-hosted and everything and I’m quite pleased with myself how it’s come along so far! The other thing that pushed me to do this was seeing a video recently about how there’s still people making personal websites for fun, a “Web Revival” movement. The idea of having my own little corner of the Internet where I make the rules was just such a tempting hobby to get into, doubly so if it means taking even a microscopic fraction of control away from big tech. It can’t be overstated how much of an impact the web has had on my life, for better or worse. Seeing it consolidated into just a handful of trillion dollar companies, being used for mass surveillance, data harvesting, propaganda and misinformation and making every little thing that used to be a feature into a subscription, it’s really sad to see. It all happened so gradually, I didn’t notice until I’d been pushed to the brink. And as of writing, governments are trying to do foolish things like putting backdoors into encryption standards and having everyone provide ID just to use websites. I promised myself I wouldn’t go off on too much of a tangent about the state of things now so I’ll just leave it there.

I hope these revival movements are the push we need to make the web a place to express ourselves again.