I miss the days when the Internet was simple; when I’d sit in my dad’s office chair, fire up Windows 95 and log on to AOL, listening to the dial-up tone (without realising at the time just how incredibly nostalgic it would become) and waiting for the lady with the velvety voice to tell me whether or not I’ve ‘got post’ (we don’t say ‘mail’ in the UK, it sounds daft).
I’d browse websites that took 30 seconds to load but didn’t bombard you with Flash videos, or music, or those annoying little video adverts that make you jump and which you can’t find for ages when all you want to do is turn them off.
There was no Facebook, no Twitter, just MSN Messenger – which worked perfectly. There were chat rooms, where everyone would type at once and it was a nightmare to keep track of all the different conversations going on, yet somehow cosy at the same time. It was an age when people actually cared about Yahoo!, and I would regularly frequent the Chess and Pool games (which, in ten years, have changed very little).
Then there was Geocities, where everyone hung out to make their own webpage. Once it was a thriving hub of activity, where you could have your own little piece of the Internet in a virtual metropolis, the URL spelling out exactly where you were on the World Wide Web. My first website, HotSpot, was in the Times Square section of Geocities, the Arena suburb, house number 7357, and was a garish yet eclectic mix of vivid tiled backgrounds and Comic Sans. Visit Geocities now, and all you get is a simple page telling you that it is no longer: a deserted, decayed wasteland. The streets are empty, the towns no more; little snippets of HTML flutter across the road in the breeze. Geocities is the Internet’s Chernobyl.
Times New Roman was the font of choice for many websites, often clashing on a background that was either tiled (as mine was) or a plain colour – cyan being a popular choice. The stark text would be punctuated by animated GIFS, which caught your eye and became rather annoying very quickly, best demonstrated by the self-styled ‘World’s Worst Website’.
Time moved on, and Tahoma (or Verdana, depending on your preference) took hold. After publishing a MAJOR ANNOUNCEMENT stating that I was closing down HotSpot due to ‘busy schoolwork schedules’, I set up .web, a sleeker yet still rather basic website which contained pretty much the same thing. I shut it down after about a year, and ever since it has been gathering dust in the cavernous vaults of the Internet Archive.
I’m really not sure why I’m telling you all this. I think perhaps, on some level, I’m craving a time when things were a lot simpler, not just with regards to the Internet, but generally. Now I’m all grown up, and I have responsibilities, and bills, and worries far above and beyond whether or not I have an English exam tomorrow. The GIFS and Times New Roman and tiled backgrounds were what I grew up with, and perhaps it’s not them I miss, but the years themselves.
Who knows? Maybe it’s just because it’s late, and I’m tired. I think I’m going to close my eyes, listen to this one more time, pretend I’m in my dad’s study illuminated by the glow of a monitor as wide as it was deep, and then go offline for the night.
i never realised you were still such a geek at heart…