...say mid to late 90s when you would get excited that a URL you found
actually connected to a web page? Or when you would take a chance to see if places had a web page by pre-guessing a likely URL?
I remember one Sunday going for a walk and coming back eager to know some history on the Basingstoke Canal and went to see if I could find any info online. Imagine the surprise when indeed a couple of pages of close-typed text came back and a couple of tiny b&w images... Even more exciting was that I did this on my Atari ST on a dial-up pocket modem!!
<Vintage BOSS Upgrades>
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One of them was http://www.kawasaki.com and one really long a fanboy page loaded up with people's names and descriptions of their motorbikes. It took about half an hour for the images to load up, line by line. By then I got bored, switched it off and spent the rest of the day playing Minesweeper.
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I don't quite go that far back with the internet, IIRC it would have been around 2000/2001.
The one thing I wish I could recall was the name of the search engine I used at the time - AltaVista was one of the big ones, but the one I used a lot had a name with "monkey" or "ape" in it (unless I'm much mistaken) and I've never been able to find any mention of it anywhere.
Guess you never hung out on too many alt.blah Usenet groups, then
I remember when there were trolls, flame wars, flame baiting and all the rest, and trolling actually meant something proper, not just being mean to someone. t'Internet has always a been a weird mix of friendly people (still in touch with folk I met via IRC) and total psycho's. And sometimes friendly psychos.
Even now toxic places like Xbox Live used to be wonderfully friendly, where you'd end up meeting, chatting, and befriending people.
Remember working at BBC - Novell Netware network in the days when you could only have one active protocol stack....IPX or IP. Even used Lynx (text based www browser)
I do remember when Lynx was our only option for a browser, and how much easier things felt coming back to uni after a holiday and Netscape Navigator had been released. It was also interesting how many music pages were already up in the mid 90s. I think the first band page I went to was Dream Theater, and maybe Megadeth who were also quick on the uptake. I also remember there being a really good All About Even fan page up quite early on.
Early search engines I remember using - Excite, Alta Vista, Yahoo, Lycos, Infoseek.
And I remember reading somewhere a suggestion to try a brand new, very minimalist little search engine that had just been release with the odd name of Google.
Newsgroups, chat rooms and Webferret were my main uses of the net back then