The good old days

So, lately I've been thinking over and over about how much I miss how the internet used to be. The days of yore, if you will, when things just seemed so much more fun. Theweb was new and shiny, and I was in fourth grade and in a special club of people who had brand new computers with internet connections...

Does anyone ever think about how FAST the internet is now compared to how it used to be? I just gave up watching a video because it wouldn't load fast enough for me. Back in the day, I would plan a whole day around loading an internet video, watch it in two minutes and then think about how cool it was to have just watched a VIDEO on the INTERNET. I mean, really.

And, I realized as I typed all that, that someday this will sound to my children like my mother did when she talked about her family getting their first TV back in the real "olden days" (just kidding!). But, I think something happened to my 8-year-old mind when I heard the AOL dial tone connect for the first time. It was like a drug I couldn't get enough of.

I embraced the dancing baby. My first favorite website was Ty.com where we could learn everything there was to know about my other favorite hobby at the time: beanie babies. Yup...

There was a creative group of young girls writing serialized stories on the internet and making pretty websites with beautiful, simple layouts and sparkly graphics.

I knew I had to be apart of it. But, back then, creativity was what made you cool on the internet...because we had to be so much more creative back then.

We had to teach ourselves HTML to make a website and come up with things to post there. We had LIVEJOURNAL and eventually XANGA, which became our outlets for expression.

You had to try harder. You had to know more. You had to sit in a chair at a desk with a mouse and a keyboard and a slow ass printer to get anything done. But we had Geocities, where you were assigned a web address based on what community you wanted to put your site in. There was Heartland Prairie and Enchanted Forest.

That helped connect you to a whole community of nerdy people learning the same things that you were...

And if you needed to be connected any more than that, there were WEBRINGS. Sometimes you had to be super popular for your site to be in a web ring, or sometimes you had to know the owner of it or your site had to be about a certain topic. In any case, it was amazing.

These days, you can put any old crap online, and since putting crap online is basically what I do for a living now, I'm honestly getting kind of bored of it.

To alleviate this, and, you know, if the whole world listened to me, I'd say we should bring back Geocities 1.0 - before Yahoo even played a role. We should bring back floppy disks (because the old versions of my treasured first websites only exist of floppy discs). We should show down connection speeds and have an internet renaissance.

We would all be better for it...

What are your favorite old internet memories? We should share them before we get too old and forget, right?