Believe it or not, there was actually a time before the internet - before watching pugs was a legitimate form of entertainment.
Now people on Reddit have shared their first memories of using the world wide web, but as nostalgic as it’s making us - we wouldn’t exchange broadband for anything.
“Mum shouting: ‘Get off the internet, I have to use the phone!’”
“Another kid’s dad was showing us something called a BBS. It was all text. I was unimpressed. Went back to playing some weird game on the Encarta CD-ROM.”
“Being a bored little kid in the late nineties and typing the word ‘fun’ in the web browser, then being confused about all the porn that popped up.”
“My first memory of the internet is going into an AOL chatroom. I was ten and couldn’t type at all, everyone else was chattering away and I was just reading along. Typed something in and everyone started talking to me and I panicked and logged out.”
“Downloading the song summer girls by LFO on Napster and looking up pictures of dolphins.”
“Before Google, even before Jeeves, there was Lycos and Webcrawler. I recall staring at the blinking cursor thinking “I can just search for anything!?”
“Clicking on a “You’re our 999999th visitor!” advert. Then freaking out when it started asking me for credit card info.”
“The sound you get when you pick up the phone and someone is on the dial up, which is also the worst sound in the world.”
“Being allowed to look up whatever I want for fifteen minutes a day. Which would be enough to load 1 full webpage with a small 100x100 image.”
“Trying to send an e-mail to Tony Hawk by putting his name rather than an e-mail. I may have been smart in school, but it lacked in a couple of other areas.”
“’You’ve got mail’ - heart skips a beat.”
“Yahoo chat. Used to go into rock/metal chatrooms to get recommendations for new bands. I received a direct message one day from someone living about a hundred miles from me who liked my profile pic. Ended up meeting a few weeks later, hooked up. Yahoo indeed.”