Web Nostalgia
The web circa 2000–2015 was its own strange golden age. Some things were charming, some were a little feral, and plenty would make younger people blink like you’re describing ancient lore. Here are a few things I remember. (Fair warning: some are web-adjacent, but still part of the vibe lol.)
The computer screamed at you when you connected to the internet.
Imagine if a robot was designed with feeling sensors specifically so it could feel pain. Then imagine it's microphone to shriek in agony with was too close to another microphone, causintg a feedback loop. Then imagine that feedback loop accompanied by the wail of am ambulance siren. That was the dial-up connection sound.
Dial-up was slow.
Downloading a single .MP3 file could take several hours if downloaded directly, for example. Some packages did offer faster connections, but even then it wasn't ideal. There's a reason most older websites focused on text-content, and pages with a lot of images were labeled "image heavy" as a warning. In old web design, it was common for images such as headers to be split into parts, and displayed side by side; that allowed the assets to load faster than if it was a single file. While the technology to use different fonts in a browser existed, it wasn't as refined for cross-compatibility, and most designers kept to web safe fonts to save on server space, bandwidth cost, and loading time. Thumbnails were also manually made - a tiny part of the full image, cropped in an image editor, saved as a separate asset, and giving a taste of the full image so people could tell if they wanted to spend the time to load the full image or not. This is actually how Peer-to-Peer filesharing came to be: split a file into smaller chunks, shared among several people, so each chunk could be downloaded faster.) This is also how downloaders like Limewire came to be; it could download a file in pieces, then pick back where it left off if the connection was lost, as long as the file didn't get corrupted. And that was very, very useful, because...
Getting a call on a landline could disrupt your internet connection.
Dial-up internet used the same line as your house phone. If someone called while you were online, your connection could drop, your download could die halfway, and the caller would hear a horrible modem scream. Likewise, you couldn't use you couldn't talk on the house phone if someone was on the internet. To be a computer nerd literally meant being difficult to reach except by email, and God have mercy on the buddy that just wanted to invite you to the movies if they kicked you off of Runescape.
Limewire wanted you to know Clinton didn't have sexual relations with that woman.
LimeWire was the wild west of file sharing. You'll hear horror stories about viruses and spyware, but in my experience, the thing I downloaded the most was an audio clip of former US president Bill Clinton denying sexual relations with Monica Lewinsky.
Limewire didn't know who performed what.
To this day, there are still so many artists that have ended up in a Mandela Effect since so many people found their songs on LimeWire, but the artist attribution was totally wrong. Marilyn Manson did not have a cover of Dead or Alive's "You Spin Me Right Round," and Jack Off Jill did not have a cover of the Divynals' "I Touch Myself," nor was that song written or performed by Blondie. (The covers were by Dope and the Genitortuers, respectively.) There's probably so many more, but those songs in particular made me rip my hair out among my mall goth friend group when someone would attribute them wrong on a mix CD.
Statuses served a function.
Technically they still do, but we don't use them the same way. Back then, being online wasn't a constant, since you didn't have a chat client in your pocket at all times. Cue the status message, intended to state your literal, current, in-that-exact-moment, status. Nowadays, someone may have a status from a week ago, that's not really relevant to what they're doing right now. Back then, the point was, if you messaged someone on AIM or ICQ, their idle message would tell you they were AFK. because we didn’t have permanent access to the internet, there was a bigger expectation to respond when you were online. If your buddy saw you lit up green on their Buddy List? Yeah, they knew you got their IM. 'You're online, I know you got my IM/PM (instant/private message over direct message), why are you ignoring me?' This was before "sorry i wrote a text but forgot to send it lol," or logging into discord to see your buddy pebbled you with a lot of Youtube shorts you can check out at your lesire and they're chill with that because it's not considered an active conversation until you message back. So, a status message served more of a function than just saying what someone was up to - it actively avoided social faux pas.
Sites offered their own embeddable widgets.
Sites like Last.FM had widgets. They were just HTML that required no API. They displayed your listening stats as charts, via generated images, and came in tons of styles. I personally discovered Last.FM from these charts, from someone's Livejournal bios. It wasn't as popular back then, so it actually wasn't that common to see on MySpace profiles. Goodreads had its own widget, too. They resembled little bookshelves lol.
Traumatizing your friends and acquintances was considered "just a prank."
I've seen Goatse. I've seen Mr. Hands. I've seen Two Girls One Cup. Or rather, snippets of them, because a friend sent me a link over AIM with no link preview and I had no idea what I was about to be exposed to. I wish I were kidding in saying internet veterans have seen some shit, often against our will. It was a relief to be Rickrolled. Shock sites were a rite of passage, for worse.
Twitter had a phone number.
Yep! You were expected to text your tweets. Because Twitter was built with SMS in mind, tweets were capped at 140 characters, which matched the max length of a text message. You could also set custom profile backgrounds on the PC website, which meant everyone’s page looked like a MySpace fever dream. The texting feature was not an app, but I'd wager it was a big forerunner. 20 years later, and tweeting from a phone has brought us full circle.
Texting was tedious.
Typing on early phones meant pressing the number key over and over until the right letter showed up. Basically Morse code with extra steps. Most people texted with their thumbs, because phones were small enough to palm like a deck of cards, and writing even one message took several minutes of determined button-mashing. There literally late-night informercials selling little thumb exercise equipment to get your thumb into good texting shape. (Yes, we made fun of that idea then, too.)
Texting could cost a lot.
Mobile plans usually had a limited number of messages. Once you hit that cap, every extra text dinged your wallet. Same with call minutes. Many plans offered free calling and texting after 9 PM, which is why everyone suddenly became very chatty at exactly 9:01.
Long-distance calls had an extra fee.
If your friends or family lived in another area code, you paid for the privilege of talking to them. Being social was a financial risk.
Before texting, there was paging.
A pager would buzz and show the number of whoever was trying to reach you. That was it. You’d find a payphone (which were everywhere, no really), call them back, and hope you had change. Fancy pagers could receive tiny text messages, but most were just little alert bricks clipped to your belt.
Handheld devices didn’t have backlighting.
The original Game Boy and many early cell phones had dark text on a dull grey background. Playing in the dark meant huddling under a lamp. It was quite literally the dark ages. When the Game Boy Advance SP and late-2000s flip phones introduced backlit screens, it felt like technology had finally decided to be kind.