Staying up till 2am to play BRE (Baron Realms Elite) on a local BBS. 2am because that was a time I could dial in without the line being busy.
I also played a little LORD (Legend of the Red Dragon), but BRE was my favorite.
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Staying up till 2am to play BRE (Baron Realms Elite) on a local BBS. 2am because that was a time I could dial in without the line being busy.
I also played a little LORD (Legend of the Red Dragon), but BRE was my favorite.
Having my own email address, making a website and pirating a metal album
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Discovering that Burning Man exists. I'd never heard of it until I followed a link from Boing Boing and my head exploded.
The "download complete" Godzilla roar using the GoZilla! download manager. And using WinAmp to play my newly downloaded mp3's.
I wasn't born back then, but it would have been the fact that search results weren't total crap like today: only reddit seems to offer decent results if you don't want sites like wikihow to come up... I wrote a more elaborate blogpost partly about it.
Downloading a file and after hours of downloading it gets stuck at 99%
The owner of a site called zug dot com wrote a lengthy and hilarious essay on his treatment for an anal fissure. There were MS Paint illustrations of the procedure.
I was enthralled but also learned a lot about using humor to discuss situations that a person would otherwise be ashamed of.
My dad trying and failing to dial out and connect to AOL italia to send his sister an email. I have no idea how much he paid for the service and the fact that local calls still cost money and I'm not even sure AOL was local, but it was so slow it took forever to send anything. Forget pictures.
It's not that early, but eyezmaze.com (which apparently still exists) was one of those sites I found one day and regularly played on for years.
If you want to get a feeling of the old internet, look here: https://search.marginalia.nu/explore/random
To be clear, those are not (only) old sites, but a lot of them feel like the old web.
Eyezmaze โค๏ธ
"You got mail"
Probably watching an old Ed Edd N Eddy fan animation I found on yt that I cannot find a trace of anymore, or just the old yt shit post videos in general. That, or things like getting on Nitrome or any other site to play flash games. Mutiny on Nitrome was one of my absolute favorite flash games and one I never beat since I was still young.
The AOL kids home page with all flash games. I played a lot of the tom and Jerry blueprint game.
When there were dedicated websites to silly gimmick/songs like Hamster Dance, Boogie Blocks, etc.
BonziBuddy destroying the family computer.
Creating my own Proboards message boards and discovering Alien Adoption Agency.
I was a big MST3k fan back in the day. When it was on Sci-Fi, they had a MST3k-themed site called "Caption This" where it took screengrabs of whatever was on the channel at the time and you'd crack jokes about it.
It doesn't sound that interesting now, but if you're familiar with the show you'd see the appeal.
Also having to wait five minutes for a single JPEG of boobs to show up. Really helped teach a person patience.
Newgrounds most definitely. And as an earlier poster stated, muds. Specifically MUME. Oh man many hours have been spent playing that game