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Mar. 15th, 2024 12:17 pmI was recently looking at Neglected Pokémon Lovers Unite!, ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
zarla's Pokémon website, which she's kept online since the late 1990s. This was my favourite place on the Internet when I was twelve years old, and it's the website that first inspired me to write fanfiction of my own. I'm glad it's still around, a little piece of a different time. (There's an essay on the NPLU itself about the time the website was born into, and how things have changed.)
Looking back at this online part of my childhood has got me thinking about the old web. Like many people of my generation, I started using the Internet around the turn of the millennium; I think it was probably 1999 when I got online, at the age of eleven. It was a very different time!
In the twenty-five years since then, the Internet has gone through a lot of changes, from its overall structure to the ways people choose to communicate. There's still a lot of text on the Internet, of course, but I think there's been a broad shift in focus over time, particularly on social media, from text (LiveJournal, EZBoards) to images (Tumblr, Instagram) to video (TikTok).
Anyway, in the interests of online preservation, I thought I'd note down some of my recollections of what the Internet was like when I first started using it!
( Looking back at the Internet of the early 2000s. )
If you have any recollections of your own from the earlier days of the Internet, go ahead and share them in the comments! I think it's worth trying to preserve this history, and there are undoubtedly things I'm forgetting.
(For example, I just remembered Newgrounds! I didn't mention Newgrounds or Flash videos at all! It really felt like the end of an era when Flash support was dropped.)
I think a lot of you started using the Internet around the time I did, but, if you're a later arrival, you can still share your own memories; I'd be interested to hear them! Someone who came to the Internet in the 2010s could probably identify the differences between that Internet and the one of the present day more clearly than I could.
On a final note: oh, wow, the cute little sprites that used to be on every Final Fantasy VIII website are archived over here!
And, of course, a couple of those ubiquitous Pokémon sprites are still preserved in the beautiful 'home' button I created for my own Pokémon website when I was twelve, which seems an appropriate way to conclude this entry:
zarla's Pokémon website, which she's kept online since the late 1990s. This was my favourite place on the Internet when I was twelve years old, and it's the website that first inspired me to write fanfiction of my own. I'm glad it's still around, a little piece of a different time. (There's an essay on the NPLU itself about the time the website was born into, and how things have changed.)Looking back at this online part of my childhood has got me thinking about the old web. Like many people of my generation, I started using the Internet around the turn of the millennium; I think it was probably 1999 when I got online, at the age of eleven. It was a very different time!
In the twenty-five years since then, the Internet has gone through a lot of changes, from its overall structure to the ways people choose to communicate. There's still a lot of text on the Internet, of course, but I think there's been a broad shift in focus over time, particularly on social media, from text (LiveJournal, EZBoards) to images (Tumblr, Instagram) to video (TikTok).
Anyway, in the interests of online preservation, I thought I'd note down some of my recollections of what the Internet was like when I first started using it!
( Looking back at the Internet of the early 2000s. )
If you have any recollections of your own from the earlier days of the Internet, go ahead and share them in the comments! I think it's worth trying to preserve this history, and there are undoubtedly things I'm forgetting.
(For example, I just remembered Newgrounds! I didn't mention Newgrounds or Flash videos at all! It really felt like the end of an era when Flash support was dropped.)
I think a lot of you started using the Internet around the time I did, but, if you're a later arrival, you can still share your own memories; I'd be interested to hear them! Someone who came to the Internet in the 2010s could probably identify the differences between that Internet and the one of the present day more clearly than I could.
On a final note: oh, wow, the cute little sprites that used to be on every Final Fantasy VIII website are archived over here!
And, of course, a couple of those ubiquitous Pokémon sprites are still preserved in the beautiful 'home' button I created for my own Pokémon website when I was twelve, which seems an appropriate way to conclude this entry:
