this post was submitted on 04 Jun 2025
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I don’t remember it that way. To me, it was a minefield of viruses, popup ads, chain mail, and unexpected extreme NFSW content.
Everything improved a bit when browsers started limiting recursive popups and hidden executables on websites, but for much of the late 90s and early aughts, every click was risky. And oh my god the design of things. I was so happy when the tag finally fell out of fashion.
Boo.
What that taught us was to be fucking careful about what you click on on the internet.
Yeah I think this is definitely a case of rose colored glasses. I absolutely miss the way the internet was 25 years ago but I also do not miss randomly browsing and running across child pornography, I don't miss every kilobyte being measured to make sure I don't over use the network, I don't miss having to have multiple browsers just because a website was written for Netscape and not Explorer, or pop-up adds, viruses, and everything else you mentioned.
Oh, yeah, the browser wars. As a designer during that time, having to learn 5 or more versions of css and JavaScript (which were sometimes competing and broke one another) before code pages were a thing was a nightmare.
And getting kicked off dial-up because someone decided to make a phone call when a large game download was at 97% complete after 5 hours before file caching was really a thing was infuriating.
you sound like you can help me identify that weird square icon that saves my shit
Do you mean these?
They were part of a continuity ritual we performed before they installed cupholders in computers. You’d have to feed them to your pc one at a time when requested, often whilst entering an incantation in the command prompt. The meaning may have been lost to time, but we still use their icon to honour that ritual.
e: I can’t believe I found these so quickly. They were still on the same closet shelf where I put them in 2002.
I'll just leave these here...
...raspberry pi 4B for scale 'cos i can't put by banana next to them, this ain't the 90s ya know?
Came across a bunch that have old backups of someone's data. Also some 5 1/4". Not sure if magnets or a hammer/scissors is the best security destruction 😆
If you’re concerned about privacy, fire nearly always works.
It was good in the places you could trust and bad in others. Say, going over a familiar web ring you wouldn't fear anything. Going via links in a good web directory you would be cautious, but not too much. Looking for pr0n you would do a hard shutdown after a couple of suspicious popups.
I still prefer that time, because it was real, now you see what others intend for you, if not going out of your way, and then you saw whatever you happened upon. It's like a downgrade from a real thing to a plastic toy one.
I also miss that web design, because it mostly didn't conceal the fact that you are using hypertext. Buttons looked native or "like native", ads were in banners in specific places, areas of text were clearly separated. Good typographics.
You didn’t have to be looking for porn – it was super common to run across CP or beheading videos in random niche interest forums posted by trolls. So many times I saw something I did not want to see when clicking for a knitting pattern.
e: I have psychological scars from that Dan Pearl video – for a while in the mid-aughts, it was literally unavoidable unless you stopped using the internet entirely.
On the forums I visited there was an area where new users were allowed, intended for describing who they are and why they should be allowed further.
But generally - I think I might have seen something like that, but without registering it in my memory.
What, you don't want to punch the monkey and also have 50,000 pop-up and pop-under windows spawn because you picked the wrong link?
Also, accidentally discovering that python[.]com was NOT where one went to download the scripting language back around 2006, while trying to help a student get her laptop setup. It's still not, but that's not how I wanted to learn that fact.
I agree about popups and executables (what an absolutely moronic decision to include that crap in browsers), but all the JavaScript BS and "please let us track you" cookie banners in modern websites is a thousand times worse than any use of or could ever be.
If you had a seizure condition, though…