Eras of the Internet Starter Pack

Also tumblr definitely belongs in 2010-2015. A kid made this for sure.

Yeah, 2009-2013 is how I’d define it.

Aight, I ain't tryin' play my games with no deel doe, aight?

Some more info

Maddox and the alphabet of manliness

Albino Black Sheep

I played the shit out of those Shockwave games.

this was the first ever video I watched on the internet via albino black sheep. It was around 2003. The same guy that did this later went on to make Quiznos commercials with his creations the spongmonkey.

It was widely regarded as one of the first 'the internet is leaking' cases. Nothing would feel quite the same until Rick Astley Rick rolled the Macy's ThanksGiving Parade.

That breaks my heart

“It’s a trap” was one of the first internet things that had me unable to breathe from laughter

Captain. Jean Picard. Of the USS. Enterprise.

Spooky that Captain Picard popped up in the video I was watching right as I was typing out his name.

Frames. Website frames everywhere.

Trumpet Winsock, Netscape Navigator, WS_FTP32, Forté Agent, Quake, mIRC, ICQ, RealPlayer.

Mid to late '90s was dialing into BBSes. Telnet, FTP, newsgroups, etc.

ChunkyChuck will be forever abandoned as I lost the email I used to register my account and can't remember my password.

mannn i use to get off school and go spin that wheel in neopets for that free stuff lol... time flies

So many LAN party memories came flooding back to me with this comment. F.E.A.R and CS:S were high school staples for me.

MSN messenger, too.

And Napster

I'm embarrassed to say I had an ICP fan page on Angelfire.

Where's my Quake at?

...don't forget that CG dancing baby.

RealPlayer

Buffering

Buffering

Buffering

BUFFERING

Winamp

Rotten 👀

ICQ

Uh-oh

Mucks and text-based RPGs too.

Where's my boys Icy Hot Stuntaz

Slashdot

mIRC is gross, though. X-Chat FTW. Or even IRCLE.

EDIT: imagine getting salty over which IRC clients I prefer.

Don't forget HotLine

Neopets

The military still uses mIRC for airspace and tactical data net coordination

RealPlayer, ...

Buffering.........

Anybody else hang out on "The Palace" ? I had a sweet avatar with wings. Very edgy.

And Winamp. It really kicks the llamas ass.

I dont know what any of these are good lord i am genuinely a child

Waited hours for the download of the Episode I Quicktime teaser trailer.

And the companion AOHell

Elf bowling, frog in a blender, and hamper in a microwave. Star Wars rap and the farting televangelist. Juno, and NetZero. Excite-Xtreme and the Apple doomsday clock.

You fuckin forgot limewire and a family of viruses you got with it.

Dunno who remembers the program Trillian, but they only stopped being able to connect to ICQ as of April 2019.

Realplayer and DivX (then later, XviD)

Don't forget The Zone and Kali.

Geocities.. lolol

Forgot Flash.

Ask Jeeves!

What about freewebs? I miss it.

Big giveaway was how the latter half of the 2000s was missing the time when the Internet was dominated by The 300 memes. Also Leroy Jenkins, Cake is a Lie, Leave Britney Alone, Maddox, Shoop da Whoop, Chuck Norris facts and the genesis of YouTube Poop were unmissable in the mid-late 2000s. Also the time when everyone said "pwned" and ROFLcopters were forum mainstays. Hell, just the entire concept of forums back then.

I would argue Slenderman and Rage Comics only took off around 2011 onwards.

I was born in ‘97 and I feel like I was a part of every block except the last one. But I am only 24, so… Young enough to recognize the newest trends but old enough not to care about most of them.

O hell yeah. This is Era of Internet for little kids. Including the 2018-2020, there's so much shit that only little kids would give a fuck about in it.

Correctamundo! (For reference, I was born in 2006.)

I was thinking the same. Peek internet for me was 2002-2010. Nothing can bring back the excitement of Windows XP, waiting 45 minutes for a Lesko flash video, playing C&C Tiberian Sun online, getting the perfect WinAmp skin, oh and seeing all those unfiltered, traumatizing, videos and photos from various—mostly now defunct—websites.

Probably 1997-2001 tbh, given how they started at 2004.

Biggest clue for me was seeing Fortnite in a previous “era”.

lol I got the "you've got mail" voice as my notification ringtone

I had email long before I had friends. Still have an email...still no friends

OP commented they were born in 2006, so they were barely alive for the 00s as well.

While you are there bring back some vintage Surge.

I have memories of my dad showing off Doom 2 when it released. He, my brother, and I all used to play together on LAN using laptops he got from work. He worked in IT so we've always had technology before it was commonplace. I think I was around 5.

So many frames

Dude I totally had a frame laden angelfire page about a video game full of shitty links, marquees, counters, “web crawlers”

And we didn't have none of that incognito mode bs, just a good ol fashion history and cookie delete

Really? I thought the average age was much older.

yeah, but the tumblr everyone remembers (like this pack is trying to capture) was a 2008-2015 thing. The superwholock-emo-anime-ao3-clusterfrick that we all know and ~~love like~~ tolerated. After '14 with dashcon and various fandom crashes, generally the main tumblr userbase getting a good look at how (subjectively) cringey it was, it kinda backpedalled, and generally most current tumblr users are pretty lowkey.

So is 4chan, but it looks like it died in 2010 according to this

Tf2 is also alive and kicking. And screaming. They don’t want to be forgotten. They are teetering on the edge, and if they fall, they don’t come back. Valve will not save them.

Yeah that would explain why the first panel is the longest stretch of time and so vague. So much stuff happened between 2004-2010. I feel like 2000-2005 could be the first one which was sort of the infancy of post-dotcom bubble sites like Google and when Facebook was still college email only, internet forums, chat rooms and P2P downloading, early meme sites like ytmnd, salad fingers, xanga...

Yes this is clearly like a 20 year olds vision of the internet since circa his birth. Oof. There’s a lot you’re missing from this pack champ

But how would they know what the internet was like in the year they were born? You’re more likely to remember sucking your mama’s titty than looking at https//:WWW.YouTube.Com/try-not-to-laugh-95.

Also this feels like the internet if you were a teenage boy in those eras.

He commented he was born in 2006. Makes me feel better cause I didn't even recognize 1/3 of the stuff in the first panel.

ya hence coppa in the most recent one despite being a tool since its existence designed to trick that annoying 12 year old in an irc chat into getting themselves banned

2006 lol

nobody knows about that and im from mid 90s

That would explain why tumblr's in the late 2010's bloc

Tumblr's been around since like 2008 and all the big events everyone refers to as important history about like dashcon or superwholock or mishapocalypse are all early-mid 2010s

I thought it still is a thing (revived at least)

What do you mean?

We had goatse and meatspin, that was enough for us back then.

"It's dot commm!"

Cheerleader!

Created in 2009 okay but I would definitely not call it a pre-2010 thing culture wise. It wasnt really a part of internet culture for most people till the Slender game came out in 2012 and LPers were obsessed with survival horror.

If that's the criteria then TF2 is placed incorrectly - released in 07

But then Vine should be 2010-2015 with that logic

Minecraft was made in 2009 as well.

Fair, I only remember marblehornets getting popular in 2011 sort of time, then the game which made it popular was waaay after

I'd argue 2008-2014 is a better range. People dont understand how huge a phenomenon COD4 was for gaming back then, it brought so many people into FPSs, same with Halo 2 and BF3

Dozens of career youtubers got started making MW2 K!llstreak videos that are still around today making bank...

Watching Ali A because he was literally the only guy who seemed to be able to do the zombies easter eggs back in the day

Why do people always act like LoL isn't or hasn't been the biggest game since like 1 year after it's release?

Infinite warfare deserves a spot on it's own in 2015 - 2018

I don’t think they put CS or Half Life up there at all. Frankly, it’s odd not to see WoW up there, too.

Luckily for me, I’m reminded every time I jump on Reddit :)

Happy Tree Friends gave me flashbacks.

Never before had my elementary school self seen such shit before.

So you're just gonna ignore Sheila like that huh

Bro I fuckin love Homestar Runner

I might toss Happy Tree Friends in there too though that could be a little earlier than 2004.

God I'm glad that meme died, it was insufferable.

Lmao thanks mate

Forget that, take me back to 1993, even though I wasn't even alive yet then.

Use Archive.org's Wayback Machine lol

i just wanna go back

Huh, just like the prices people pay for abstract art! I've seen some paintings in local art stores that look like a 5 year old made them, being sold for thousands of dollars. It's all "Emperor's New Clothes".

Probably 80% of NFT sales are people selling them to themselves on the sly to make the value seem higher.

We are going to look back at now as one of the stupidest times in history.

Don’t you see how that is detrimental to our society though? To incentivize preying on the foolish or vulnerable is the worst feature of capitalism.

I'm trying to understand...

An NFT is a piece of code on a distributed blockchain demonstrating digital ownership of…anything. Drivers license, land contract, a digital booklet, concert ticket, medieval sword in a video game, and YES a jpeg are all forms of what we call a Non Fungible Token.

Why is it being talked about so much lately? Why did it become a thing just now? It doesn't take a genius to come up with this idea..? Especially when you mention that jpegs are NFTs. A blockchain is a database. Who owns these..?

You clearly have money to throw away, please donate it to cancer research or something useful instead of destroying the environment to get a glorified yugioh card that you don't even really own and about which only the five other brainwashed california tech bros around you give a fuck

Oh i know. Its great!

I wholeheartedly agree, whores-are-nice69

[deleted]

And disappearing at an exponential rate each year as corpos cut the internet into pieces

Spamton neo has one of the best tracks in the game so far

geocities

Area51 neighborhood represent!

Yeah that "oof I'm old" feeling hit hard.
I remember when MOST of the internet was full of people born 1979-1992. It was before the boomers learned how to use the facebook or the gmail, Gen X started having kids, and it was a millennial sandbox. Is that not the case anymore? Are we no longer the young rapscallions that compose the internet?

I remember when my neighbour told me "you know, AOL isn't even really the internet, it's just a small part of it." and it was all downhill from there.

18/f/cali

I was checking local weather instantly even earlier. You'd actually step outside and look into the sky. "Does it look like rain? Nope, guess not". Was about as accurate as any weather app today IME.

And then you had those old people that could tell you what the weather was gonna do because of some aches in their legs or something.

Internet was a lot more distributed without any gatekeepers. Because social media wasn't a thing, nobody really lived on the internet; perhaps the only near equivalent would have been a Geocities or Angelfire page.

Because the internet wasn't a lived-in experience, everyone who was on the internet that contributed it in any way, especially from like 1995-1998 or so were amateurs. Barely anybody was a 'professional' web developer, so it all came away feeling really unpolished and gnarly. Much of that was also because with dial-up, things needed to be simple in order to actually load.

There weren't established aggregators either where people gathered, except for maybe chat rooms but even then they were comparatively small affairs. Nothing was centralized, and forums and chat rooms were their own kingdoms.

Because the internet hadn't had been really commercialized, it was a wild west out there. A company might have helped you got online, but that was it. Big Tech wasn't a thing. Nobody really had an outsized role on the internet to throw their weight around, and nobody played cop. It felt like there were no rules and everything was fair game, for both good and bad. For people who before then were used to having very limited options to find information and connect with people, my god it's hard to describe how much you wanted to go discover. Because if that, you could easily find all kinds of messed up stuff. If you remember all the gross subreddits like r/spacedicks, there was a lot of stuff like that which you could find all over.

I still don't think i've ever felt that level of 'wow' moment where I knew that This. Changes. Everything. The closest might have been when I really first got on Reddit 10 years ago or so where it felt much much more open.

It's not about comparing one era of the internet to another. The difference between 2015 internet to 2010 isn't that drastic compared to having nothing, to being able to communicate with anyone, at any given moment, at nearly anywhere on the planet, and explore what seemed to be a near limitless amount of information instantaneously (well, more or less. Those 56k modems took a minute to load sometimes). It was mind blowing, particularly for those of us around 10 or so when your brain is just craving information and wanting to know how the world works. Finding the most random, niche, weird web pages back in the 90s was just the most fun thing ever too.

Plus boobs.

Less social

Think about living a life where you only communicated with people at school and at home, where your horizons were only as broad as the area in which you lived.

Then one day, you woke up with an iPhone.

It was like that, except your parents yelled at you about the phone line.

There's stuff I saw on the internet in 1998 that I'll never be able to get out of my brain. There was no 'dark web' back then. Literally everything was the dark web and you could find yourself stumbling onto the must fucked up shit you can't even imagine just on accident.

It's like the internet today is a slick professionally built mall.

and the internet of the 90's was a combination of a bazaar, and art faire, and a flea market where everything was put together by dedicated fans and enthusiasts.

or if eras of the internet were social media sites -

The Internet today would be Facebook - algorithms, digital manipulation

90's internet would be reddit - sites were user created -like the way subreddits are , there were "web rings" where links to dozens of other related sites were at the bottom of the page (this was a game changer).

But, in the 90's aggregate sites like reddit weren't a thing. The best you could hope for is to type your topic into a search engine and hope something comes up this time after months or years of searching. Often it was just one page of images and info for your niche interest, or a small site for a certain movie [Like this era appropriate Space Jam site]. Or if you were a fan of Cammy from street fighter all you had were a couple of images where they photographed the screen, and you know what? You were grateful. And fan art was super rare too. Then one day a few years later this Cammy Fan site appears and its the best thing ever. Cammy Fan website

Weird suggestion but check out the game “Hypnospace Outlaw”. It’s a point and click mystery game where you explore the 90s internet. I was born in the 90s and let me tell you, it is BANG on. The game is also hilarious if you have any interest at all in the type of culture that existed during that time. Its really well done and the soundtrack is amazing. SQUISHERZZZ!!!

The internet back then was bad by today’s standards (from a technological standpoint), but it was much more fun. Back then very few people did things on the internet to get in trouble. Nobody used the internet to plan terrorist attacks. Social media wasn’t eroding the fabric of society because social media didn’t exist. The internet wasn’t helping radicalize anyone into extremist views. The internet wasn’t yet an echo chamber for people to validate their political opinions. Back then you could go online and basically have a second life. Today you have to be on your best behavior online, like you’re in church or court. The internet used to be like a fun club that you couldn’t wait to get in to.

proto early coptic afro-eurasia late ice age according to some circles

Halo 2 + Xbox Live was something else. All those custom “zombie” games

That's why I said what I said. I don't have to look it up, I lived it

For me personally, the peak of Vine was also the peak of internet and it's creativity.

I still think 2016 was the best year for memes.

I fucking hated it so much

True but parallell to that was also this weirdly creative nihilistic internet culture that was just so fun! It's like the madness of how shitty the world was was channeled into the best memes I've seen since the early-mid 00's.

I remember the 2010-2015 period (Internet humor-wise) as the fucking pits and mostly pretty boring and EXTREMELY formulaic humour. 2015-2018 was unpredictable and often difficult to decipher, and that's what made it so fun for me. It was like watching Tim & Eric.

2018- present is, IMO, going back to the extremely rigid meme "formats" of the early 2010's, and with the same complete collective inability to spot or even understand sarcasm, irony and satire in written form.

It was the dark ages. We appear to be experiencing a Renaissance of sorts right now, but it won’t last.

The modern era is so much worse, at least that era was straight up counter culture compared to the corporate internet where everyone is trying to steal your fucking data and suck away all your money. How fucking awful

Correct. 2016 was shitty AF. It was when every incel and MRA got the spotlight and whined about canceled culture.

Not much, seeing as I was extremely young.

I'd guess it's because of the community around it.

*cue The Price is Right's fail-horn.

yeah spot on

last night I was trying to remember what mp3 player I used. This post reminded me.......Winamp ......it was Winamp.

And don't forget the marquee tag!

South Park in Real Player....nostalgia activated

Omg RealPlayer.......

Diablo 1 then. Oregon Trail is 90s nostalgia bread and butter .