Good Ol Days ONLINE!!!

[Simfarmguru]

Tell us stuff you remember from the early internet era!

I remember AltaVista was my favorite search engine!

[Butterscotch]

I actually don't remember much from the early days of the Net. I had to go online for school projects and such, but I didn't really go online until 2003 or so.

I do remember doing online searches before Google existed; either that, or when Google was very new.

For school projects, I remember that the idea of using a webpage as a source was very new, and both students and teachers were unsure of how to credit them in the appendix of reports.

[Simfarmguru]

*nods* I remember having to credit internet sources as well...

[Mage the Observer]

I remember looking up obscure fansites for my fanfic/fanart fix. DeviantART and FFnet have spoiled me, and made actual fansites a lot harder to find.

I also remember a time before GameFAQs, when one had to look for tips and walkthroughs site-by-site, and everything had to be taken with a grain of salt.

These memories were run on Win95, if you want to date the era.

[Simfarmguru]

I remember before I found GameFAQs! And I remember when I first found it and it was a wee bit of nothing...

Ahh, the days of internet rumors...

True fansites are awesome, I miss them.

[Mage the Observer]

The good ones were epic win before the phrase became popular. Only trick was spending hours finding the good ones among all the bad.

[BorderWolf]

One memory I have is of newsgroups. One that I did post on was of an old club that started on the Prodigy service when it was more of a bullitenboard service. When Prodigy decided to change their membership fees to a newer payment plan two months after they raise the membership fee from an older fee. Most member just left to sign with better internet providers. When starting the club as a newsgroup, the number of members rose from roughly 40 (since Prodigy was based in the US) to over 400. The downside the newsgroup had was of non-club members posting unappropriate stuff (adult rated stuff). Even when we asked nicely for them to post that kind of stuff in the correct newsgroups, we got snotty replies that they can post whereever they darn well please.

[Simfarmguru]

I remember Prodigy! My dad had it, the star on the home screen is still one of my first memories of the net.

[TBustah!]

My family first got online sometime around 1997-1998. Later than many, sooner than most, at least in this Podunk. It worked to our advantage: it was dial-up with a local server, but because we were among the few people in town that had it, it was actually fairly fast and reliable.

An early rule we had was for every hour I spent online, I had to spend an hour riding my bike or otherwise exercising. It didn't last for long. I can only imagine what kind of crazy shape I'd be in now if we'd stuck to it. XD

Early sites I frequented:

-Lego.com: I loved the Brick Game, which was just Connect 4, but with 2X2 Lego bricks. My very first online account of any kind was with Lego.com. It was also where I made my first screen name, "COSMONAUT2000". I was into space travel and the like at that age, but thought that there would probably be too many people with "astronaut" in their names, so I went with the Russian version. With the new millenium around the corner, EVERYTHING had to have "2000" slapped onto the end of it back in the late 90's (a ridiculous trend once parodied by South Park), and the screen name of a certain nine-year-old boy was no exception.

I checked in a couple years back, more than decade after I created the account, and lo and behold: it was still active! My avatar, a Lego astronaut, even carried over from the old style (simple illustrations of Lego characters, there were only like ten to choose from) to the newer modular style where you could "build" your own: it was still an astronaut in a white space suit.

-Nickelodeon.com: Mostly for the games. I also did the polls and such, and occasionally voted for shows.

-Cartoon Network.com: The two big draws for me were the games and C-Toons.

The games were great all around. They had a little bit of everything. There was one I replayed constantly... Has anyone here ever played the Cartoon Cartoon Summer Resort series? They play kind of like those point and click adventure games (like Monkey Island or Sam & Max), but they're laid out like an old-school top-down RPG. They were a lot of fun, and you can actually still access them today:

www.cartoonnetwork.com/games/cc/summerresort/index.html

C-Toons... they were basically online trading cards, and you could arrange them in little scenes and whatnot. They'd show you a code at a certain time (usually Friday nights) on the Cartoon Network channel itself that you could write down and redeem for a card or points.

Oddly enough, Cartoon Network.com still uses the same bizarre naming system for screen names that they did back then... you can't just type something in, it takes three random words to make your name.

There are others, but this thing is getting pretty long.

[Simfarmguru]

I LOVED Cartoon Network Resort! I still dig it up and play from time to time. I also remember the trading cards, I never had enough points to get the stuff I wanted...

[Tsuki]

I remember Cartoon Network Resort! Fun times!

Other earlier memories were just basically using the net for school, though i do remember going onto Zelda Power a lot for my Zelda art/fic fix.

[TBustah!]

There's a glitch in it now.

After you beat the first episode, the player is supposed to switch to the next one, but it doesn't.

So, only the first episode is playable, and it's probably always going to be that way because I doubt too many people care that a 10+ year old game doesn't work anymore. It's a wonder it's even still on there.

[TBustah!]

Nevermind.

Try Googling each episode individually. You can access them that way.

[TBustah!]

Shockwave.com, anyone?

They had lots of great games, but "Tamale Loco" probably stands out the most. I can still quote the hilarious intro cartoon almost verbatim. ;D The second one had better graphics, but the intro wasn't as good.

It was also my first exposure to "South Park". Mom and Dad blocked Comedy Central back then, so all I had to go on were the clips posted there.

[Simfarmguru]

Yeah, having lasted this long...

Heaven knows what version of Flash it uses now...