I got online in the mid-90s! Hotmail before it was owned by microsoft, flash chatrooms that I found via yahoo's pages of 'community spaces!', endless geocities, usenet and irc and MUSHes. I used to use AOL at my boyfriend's house, Compuserve at home, and endlessly annoyed my computer teacher at school by circumventing any attempts he made to control student usage.
I was heavily into the interactive fiction world in the late 90s/early 00s and that community was split between a MUD (effectively a chatroom with text-based rooms and objects), two usenet groups, one ftp site and a host of personal webpages. I was on that MUD when 9/11 happened, at the moment when someone in NYC on there said words to the equivalent of 'my god, a plane just hit the world trade centre' and then we spent all day trying to verify the survival of all the other NYC users. I remember telling my coworker that the world was never going to be the same, and him calling me melodramatic.
That community was a tech-savvy crowd of early adopters who linked everyone else into new things. A lot of us had things like livejournal, facebook, and gmail accounts very early on (which is why my email acc is 'my first name' @ gmail.com, to the vague surprise of people who have asked me for it). The internet has definitely changed a lot from those days.
I used to make lj icons, and tiny 25x100px icons for BPAL perfumes for people to put in their forum signatures. At one horribly exposing-feeling 'oh no, my SEO is better than theirs I guess, I have become too powerful' point my website's pages of BPAL reviews and icons ranked higher than the actual company website on google if you searched 'bpal'.
In fact, I used to code (mostly personal) websites for other people--back in the early to mid 00s, if you told strangers you were a website builder they would inevitably ask you to make one for them, so finding work was absurdly easy. I eventually quit because I hated using CSS, and went off to write chatbots for a living instead.
I still don't like that the internet is all photos and videos and that everything feels very ephemeral, but, well, that's the modern internet now.
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I was heavily into the interactive fiction world in the late 90s/early 00s and that community was split between a MUD (effectively a chatroom with text-based rooms and objects), two usenet groups, one ftp site and a host of personal webpages. I was on that MUD when 9/11 happened, at the moment when someone in NYC on there said words to the equivalent of 'my god, a plane just hit the world trade centre' and then we spent all day trying to verify the survival of all the other NYC users. I remember telling my coworker that the world was never going to be the same, and him calling me melodramatic.
That community was a tech-savvy crowd of early adopters who linked everyone else into new things. A lot of us had things like livejournal, facebook, and gmail accounts very early on (which is why my email acc is 'my first name' @ gmail.com, to the vague surprise of people who have asked me for it). The internet has definitely changed a lot from those days.
I used to make lj icons, and tiny 25x100px icons for BPAL perfumes for people to put in their forum signatures. At one horribly exposing-feeling 'oh no, my SEO is better than theirs I guess, I have become too powerful' point my website's pages of BPAL reviews and icons ranked higher than the actual company website on google if you searched 'bpal'.
In fact, I used to code (mostly personal) websites for other people--back in the early to mid 00s, if you told strangers you were a website builder they would inevitably ask you to make one for them, so finding work was absurdly easy. I eventually quit because I hated using CSS, and went off to write chatbots for a living instead.
I still don't like that the internet is all photos and videos and that everything feels very ephemeral, but, well, that's the modern internet now.