19 Unbelievable Realities About the Internet You May Not Believe

One of the hardest things to imagine today is how our lives would be without the Internet, which is everywhere. We use it to communicate, watch movies, shop online, order food, and more. Surprisingly, you can even find the love of your life via the net and meet people from 1,000 miles away. But it was not always like this. We’ve collected 19 stories from Reddit, showing us what the early Internet age was like.

😄 ’’There used to be books (the real paper kind) with lists of websites to check out. This was maybe 1995? I don’t know anyone who ever bought one.’’ © Granny_Jeff_Sessions / Reddit

😄 ’’You have to try to put yourself into a mindset of how you would go about finding things on the Internet in the days before popular search engines or social media. Discovery of content ended up being due to word of mouth, ISPs and their services, or finding links from other sites you knew about. I remember a lot of fan pages/fan sites for different things would all have sections of affiliate links to other similar fan pages and sites in a mutual effort to help people discover other similar content.’’ © deltavim / Reddit

😄 “’Under Construction’’ banners, images, and GIFs. They were on every page, the page was always “under construction.” You’d put one there while you were writing the HTML, then take it out when the final version was done, but many people never bothered with that step.’’ © f****ol- / Reddit

😄 ’’Before, it was all corporate. So many homemade pages for any interest you could think of. Bad HTML, blinking graphics, and instrumental music in the background. I met one of my oldest online friends in 1997 through a site he made for our favorite band. We were email penpals for years before social media was a thing.’’ © jhope71 / Reddit

😄 ’’Being ’offline.’ Now everyone is online all the time, but “going online” was an actual limited-time thing you went and did, and then when you were done, you got ’offline.’ Now being online is a permanent state of being.’’ © Unknown author / Reddit

😄’’I remember how we always had to focus on having to write the web address correctly since if you got it wrong you went nowhere. It’s not like now, when you can just write it about right and Google will correct you and take you where you want. Perhaps I remember this extra vividly since I was a young teen living in Norway so our English wasn’t top-notch at the time, which made it extra difficult to navigate the web.’’ © Lick_my_balloon-knot / Reddit

😄’’Waiting for an hour for an image to download, line by line.’’ © rrrrrroadhouse / Reddit

😄’’The web pages that were way too flashy. Falling snow, custom cursors, music randomly playing, animated GIFs everywhere.’’ © bbbutAmIWrong / Reddit

😄’’Chatrooms. Nowadays, everyone just chats through messengers and social media, but back then, we had to join a website to connect with people online and only could do so a few hours a day as there weren’t any flat rates yet.’’ © ZerosWolf / Reddit

😄 ’’I remember one of my friends asking me, ’Have you heard of YouTube?’ And I said no.’’ © Burrito_Loyalist / Reddit

😄 ’’Me and my sister downloaded the teaser trailer to Toy Story on our 14.4 kbps modem. I remember we had it going all day long, and yelled at my parents telling them to not pick up the phone. When it finished we watched it on RealPlayer and it was like 12 seconds long and blurry. But it was so glorious.’’ © s***mywakelol / Reddit

😄 ’’That computer speakers could predict phone calls.’’ © renoits06 / Reddit

😄 ’’In the very old days, to send an email, you had to explicitly list out all the computers the mail would have to be routed through to get it to the destination. Thank you, Eric Allman, for Sendmail!’’
© nozjazz / Reddit

😄 ’’The pop-ups. Oh my god, the pop-ups. You’d open a webpage, and 20 windows would open. It took a while for pop-up blockers to become a thing, now you can’t even advertise with pop-ups because all browsers block them by default. I still occasionally refer to my ad blocker as my pop-up blocker.’’ © pinguemcecidero / Reddit

😄 ’’I used to keep a magazine beside the computer so I could read something while waiting for a web page to load.’’ © PALOmino1701 / Reddit

😄 ’’Forums. People on Reddit right now seem to think they’re being persecuted if they get warned or banned from a subreddit. Back in the day, you had individual forums. And if you wanted to stay there, you played by the owner’s rules because nobody cared if you thought you were unfairly banned. And it was difficult to find alternative forums, so you had to deal with it. ’’
© Patissiere / Reddit

😄 ’’You know what I miss? Old school site maps. Sites would have a page that listed every page associated with that site. They were actually pretty handy, especially if something wasn’t obvious on the main pages.’’ © FrankObolobolopoulos / Reddit

😄 ’’You had to use the home phone line to be online, using a dial-up modem, which meant you could talk on the phone or be on the Internet, but not both. If you were a fancy rich person, maybe you had a second phone line just for the Internet, but that was rare. And this was way before cell phones when landline phones were much more important.’’ © soulcaptain / Reddit

😄 ’’We had news groups. It used the e-mail client and you had to join a group to actually view and post. That and IRC were your only options back then.’’ © Gezzer52 / Reddit

Bonus: then vs now

What do you remember about your first days on the internet! Share your memories in the comments!