On the whole wav/wave debate. I’ve always called them wave files if the full name is written or “wav” if it’s the abbreviation (or even “dot wav”). Guess I’ve been saying it wrong, but we didn’t have KZfaq to teach us that 25 years ago, so just had to roll with how you thought it was pronounced I guess.

The biggest thing was the feeling that the web belonged to us, not governments or corporations.

I miss the innocence and creativity of the 90s internet.

What I miss about the 90s Internet: - Small, lean websites of a few kilobytes, not several megabytes with 50-something huge JavaScript libraries like today. - Unobtrusive ads, mostly only static banners. - People usually were more "open", so you could easily make new friends or just talk to some stranger for hours. - No "Accept cookies" dialogues. What I don't miss: - $400 phone bills. - Modem speed - AOL CDs

Such great memories being connected to the world wide web in the 90s. I met a girl on IRC, this summer we have been married for 20 years.

I miss everyone on the internet being computer literate enough to configure a modem.

What I miss from the very, very early World Wide Web: no adverts.

What i miss most about the early internet: The lack of advertising. Nowadays we are constantly bombarded with advertising through email, web pages, pop-ups, embedded in games, etc, etc... People were respectful and polite. It's impossible to have a nice conversation, forum thread, etc... without some haters spewing vile at everyone or trying to scam you anymore.

The last point of community really got me. In high school I didn’t have many friends and was often bullied, but I was pretty active on collaborative fiction forums. The people on those boards became friends of mine and later I found out that one of my best friends on there lived in Venezuela. At the time I lived in suburban southern Indiana so it was a really cool thing.

Internet was fun when it wasn't for everyone.

I was JUST recently talking my preteen about internet in the 90s... I told him how my sisters and I would pick up the phone to kick each other off the internet so we could use it. He laughed hysterically... we weren't laughing back then, getting kicked off the internet ESPECIALLY while AOLing after having to listen to wee oooh weeeee eEeEeE for 5 mins and wait forever for the chat rooms to load up was not a pleasant experience...

I'd forgotten Webrings existed! You could spend hours finding some of the most bizarre and brilliant websites the internet had to offer. There was always this feeling that you had stumbled upon something that only few people knew about.

I miss the 90s as a whole! Not just the internet.

Dial Up used to be an event, the sound was a teleport to the world. Now its an unconditional habit.

If I could live '94 to '98 in a loop I could do it forever. There was a balance still in place then. The web hadn't wiped out of the external world and it just seemed like you were drinking from a fire hose. Many forget that this was the peak of magazine publishing at the time as well as the real explosion of home video. The '80s were a time of excruciating boredom unless you lived in a few choice spots. The 90's were so overwhelming in choices of things to do it was crazy. Wired magazine, Net magazine (the U.S. mag with the blue pages section) cd-rom magazines, the X-Files, Millennium, Brimstone, Aeon Flux, the websites jodi.org (?), Dreaming Methods, etc. Yeah, I try not to say it but I would trade the whole 21st century to ride that train again (-:

90s internet had character and soul. It lacked many of today's comforts and conveniences, but something was sacrificed to get where we are now. Everything just feels very bland and homogenous now, whereas back then every website was unique, and you learned skills being online and participating. It felt special to be involved. It was an exciting time and I'm glad to be able to say I was there.

The net was a lot more fun back then

internet in the 90's was my shelter. Internet of today is what I want to escape from

I miss the "personal websites". Now everything is in one big template and boring.

What do I miss about the 1990s' internet? Everything. I remember seeing a guy in a shop wearing a cap with a :) emoticon on it and it felt great to see a fellow netizen. This was before "normal people" knew what emoticons were. Another time, probably in 1996, an older person said to me, "The internet is just a fad." I replied, "Yeah, like television." One day somebody contacted me on Yahoo Messenger, though this would have been in the early 2000s. They were from Thailand and we began chatting regularly and I met their friends and relatives all on messenger. I learnt about their country, and eventually visited. Now, I've been living in Thailand for more than 10 years.

I wasn't around for the 90s internet, so this is really interesting! It's amazing to see how much the internet the internet has changed since then.

I miss that you actually had to be smart to get online.

great video mate. really enjoyed it !

I remember coding my first webpage in HTML, wish I still had it. Great video and memories, love it

The main thing I miss is Usenet. Really got a lot of technical know-how from that over the years. Enjoyed giving back to the community towards the end, stopped when it became all forum based.

When people thought it was important to conduct proper "netiquette" ... It was important on Usenet News -- a distributed online forum that you needed a "News Reader" to access. Before it was swamped with users, before it became 99% spam.

Loved chat rooms back in the 90’s!! I was just trolling the entire time, like being in the quilting chat room and saying I was working on quilting a net to catch dolphins. So much fun!!

I remember a chatroom back in 1996 that I still have fond memories to this day. It was called the "Blue Lamp Tavern". It was a chat room on the Blues Travelers website. Most of the people there didn't even know who the Blues Travelers were but just found a chatroom to talk to people. It was all HTML based and you had to refresh your Netscape Navigator for the chat log to be updated. I met this girl, Daisy, on there. A student at Michigan State University, and we became pen pals for years. She wasn't the nerdy type either. Very attractive girl who was my age. We did arrange to meet up since I wasn't too far from her but it just fizzled out... but I still have fond memories of that time.

People, including myself, also miss movies from 90s and 80s... 😏

The feeling of being connected and the sense of urgency because using the phone was very expensive so you had to make your time count and download as much stuff as you could. I felt extremely aware of that moment of being connected. I remember going to the Louvre website for the first time and thinking... this info is coming from France!? Right now?! Across the ocean!?

Oh, what a pain it was to get some internet access at home back in the dial-up days! But yes, there's a feeling of nostalgia when you think about the sound of a modem, Geocities, chatrooms and Altavista and Hotbot.

In the 90s we had netiquette. Internet trolls had a hard time existing back then and spam wasn't wide spread. It was wonderful... and slow. Playing Mechwarrior 2 over the internet was Awesome!

The LACK of social media.

The Internet has gone to shits: Now we have pay-to-win games, paywalls to read a news article, data gathering, social media who offers nothing but polarisation and people complaining and turning against each other, millions of ads, forcing you to click to consent to sharing your cookies, etc.... I'd go back to the way slower Internet of the 90's in a heartbeat!

So true, the internet was an amazing adventure, with so many amazing discoveries and was for fun. Nowadays I generally just visit the same websites and so much information is available in one place, so you don't need to trawl several sites. Also it's becoming as much about serious stuff as fun.

a thing I miss is there was no verification codes and pictures and you didn't have to use an email to sign up, sometimes it was so much easier to get access to some information

One of my proudest achievements was winning GeoCities Cool Site of the Day on June 3, 1996 SoHo/2439 if you want to look it up.

Thank you for making this, Its brought back so many great memories. Much appreciated!!! I miss the 90s internet so much. One of the biggest things I miss was the sense of discovery that the earlier web used to have. Finding a website could be a really exciting thing. Also is it just me or did people seem to be a lot nicer back then on the net?

hey dan, hope you're doing well. totally loved this list.. brought back great memories.. i miss those days too.. and still use winamp, still download (not stream -pah!) music. i remember spending 24hrs continually in an excite chat room, got a £300 phone bill. also had my own website which (embarrassingly) has been archived on the waybackmachine.. there was a real excitement back then.. i feel sad that so much of the creativity has gone from the net, replaced by corporate facebook and generic twitter. for all their reach, today's social media lacks that certain something.

A wonderful nostalgic look back, thank you Dan. This brings back so many memories! I grew up in the BBS age and I remember my first year in university. The local BBS scene was winding down and I was looking for new ways to connect with people online. I remember hearing about a friend of a friend of a friend who had a list of accounts to my cities other university's online network. Some friends and I gathered round and tried them out, dialing into this unknown network with our questionable userid's & passwords. We sat watching my greyscale Atari ST monitor as the modem chimed away and after many attempts, disconnects & busy signals, we successfully logged on! None of us knew unix, or even what it was we were connected to, but that flashing prompt was there, waiting for us to explore. The system was completely open and we tried all sorts of commands, and that's when we stumbled across IRC, and it opened up a completely new world. I was used to chatting with the same couple of dozen people on our local BBS's, but here there were seemingly endless chat rooms with people hailing from all over the world! I was in awe, and I understand and share your sense of nostalgic wonder when thinking back on those moments. For a time, I expected that sense of close community to continue - this was around 1991 and before many people had heard about the internet, or even what email was. But then, in 93-94 when the internet exploded into everyone's consciousness, it felt like that little world that I had discovered had been blown wide open. And while it brought so many wonderful things with it in the years & decades since, there are times when I do miss that sense of newness & discovery of being a part of something that few others knew about.

What I miss most from the early days of the internet is the feeling of being a pioneer. Whenever I do something online today, I can be sure that most five year olds have done the same and I even have the risc of meeting my parents online. One expression I really hate is "Just Google it" (sometimes even with an expletive added). Google has killed many interesting discussions with its ease of access to instant facts. I think in a way that life was more interesting when information was a little harder to get - you would argue for several minutes before somebody suggested that we could look it up on AltaVista (and maybe the argument was over before the search engine was loaded).

I started using the internet around 2004, and I remember Dial up. I even remember my brother covering the computer with a pillow to hide the dial up sound so he could go online.

BLEW my MIND when I first saw a hit counter! I copied a static image of one from a high traffic site and pasted it on my page ;)

first time I saw the internet was college in 1994. I was a freshman and just found out the computer lab had newsgroup readers on their sparc stations. I didn't know what it was but there was an option to read news groups on wuarchive and that first day I managed to find and read the complete history of Iron Maiden. It was awesome. And I remember downloading a wav too - "rita.wav". "ahh after 10,000 years I'm free! It's time to conquer Earth!" I can't remember what I had for dinner today but I remember that sound clip download 26 years ago.

Before the interweb I connected to a local BBS on my Amiga and recieved Fidonet messages (newsgroups and personal messages afair).. That sound of the modem negotiating speed was also signalling the start of an adrenalinepacked and expensive session.. add to that that mom, dad, or a sibling could pick up the landline phone anytime and ruin your session at any given moment.... My first modem was 1200 down and 75 up ... this was for my Commodore 64..

What I most loved about the internet at that time were the chatrooms. The one-on-one and small group chats. You could talk to someone for hours and they'd genuinely be interested in getting to know you and vice versa. I don't think I've used the A/S/L acronym in at least 20 years I forgot all about that lol. I used to anticipate going back on to see if my "friends" would be there and feeling disappointed if they weren't lol. Looking back I don't know if that's good or just sad lol. What I hated though was when downloading MP3s which sometimes took 5-10 mins would fail at 99% or your internet would cut out at 99% usually because someone would fucking pick the phone up lol. My fondest memories of the internet were the late 90s/early 00s for sure. Good times.

The sound of the modem connecting was great, but for me the best sound of the late 90s/early 2k was the "uh-oh" sound of a new message on the ICQ.

Sure miss those days. I remember back then, before KZfaq, there was Useless Pages. Just random webs sites, some hosting several useless things. One of my favs was Virtual Bubblewrap which was just a piece of bubble wrap you could pop. Some hosted weird news stories like the Exploding Whale of how a town tried to remove a dead whale by blowing it up. Finding these sites was always so much fun.

12:23, yeah, remember "webrings?" Those were tools (banners) where websites were connected through that banner since the sites were on a similar theme.

Before this I was a part of many and ran my own local BBS system. Met a lot of great people that way.

I was in high school in the 1990s. My high school had launched its first website in 1995. I remember the IBM PCs in the school library with Netscape Navigator. The local NBC4 station had their own WeatherNet4 website

1990s interent was so mysterious. There was an atmosphere to it that I can't describe but it was magical.

i still use irc every saturday on dalnet lol, love it, and the guy i talk to is in bulgaira, who i have never met, and knows me like no one else... known him for 20 years !! thanks for the vids!

Never heard anyone refer to WAV files as "wav" files before... We always said "wave" files...

Discovering websites is something I used to do a lot of, nowadays I just visit the same ones repeatedly. The discovery factor of the whole internet has diminished for me. I think like with many things, the more visually advanced it's become, the less your imagination fires whilst using it. Email went from being exciting to a burden. Nothing was more exciting than bulletin boards for me then it's been a slow decline ever since..

I remember dialing up to the internet on my parents 486 when I was in my mid teens. You could tell if you were going to have a good connection by the sounds the modem made. Early on I was introduced to the eXcite home page but more importantly the eXcite chat software. Here in Australia a local phone call is only 25c meaning one dial up session of 10 hours would only cost you 25c and a friend of mine worked in a computer store and have me free internet logins so it prctically cost nothing. I was so addicted toeXcite chat rooms, usually hanging out in UK chat rooms (as I'm originally from the uk) I met some amazing people and became an "Avitar Painter" designing custom avitars for people to use in the chat room. Every day I would get online and chat with a female friend in Greece who came to Australia on her travels and we actually met! All these years later I'm still friends with people I met in the eXcite chat room and it was probably my fondest days on the web. Like you said it had a sense of community and excitement. Now we expect it and while todays internet is SO much better in every way. It doesn't have the amazement and wonder any more.

In addition to WAVs and MIDIs, there were module file formats such as MOD, S3M, XM, and IT. Each file was a collection of digital samples along with a script that would the tracker software would read to play back the samples in a specific pattern. Where MIDI files sounded different, depending on what hardware you were using, modules had a more consistent sound between computers and had the advantage of smaller sizes than raw WAV files.

If I care about losing access to something, I download it and keep the file. Can't have access revoked that way. Be it music or movies or programs/games or whatever, a file I have on my local storage and also have backup copies is a file containing content that some corporate weasel can't revoke my access to.

A really nostalgic look back. I started on CompuServe; we only had ID numbers which were our email addresses too. It was such a big switch when you could have an alias email address. For me, the big part of the early Internet was Usenet news groups. That did feel like a community. Messaging with lots of people from around the globe. I think I was subscribed to at least four "Friends" (the TV show) groups.

I remember fredom of expression. Miss that

I just miss the days when the Internet wasn't full of "rank and file" people who think the Internet should be "safe" for them and their broods.

I used to chat with people all over the world back then They all slowly dissapeared from my life

I can name a lot of neat things I fondly remember from old websites. Awards: These were given to personal sites through web rings or other websites and they would be displayed in their own section. Adoptables: Similarly to awards, some websites would have images of baby or animal characters for other websites to adopt by displaying them on their websites with permission from the creator. Oekakis: Art boards where you drew pictures and published them then others could comment on them; DeviantART made these obsolete. Forums/Message Boards: They've mainly been replaced with social media. Informative fan sites: It was always neat seeing a website with a bunch of content dedicated to a franchise including episode/game guides, downloadable music, videos, fan art, etc.; but these days the internet is more organized with social media websites, wikis, KZfaq and such. Sprite comics: It was always fun exploring video game fan sites reading comic strips made with sprites taken from the games and seeing different interpretations of the characters. Hoaxes: Similar to sprite comics, some video game websites would have sections where people shared fake screen shots from games that they made. They could range from being almost the same as sprite comics but with one panel to being jokes like placing Mario in a Sonic game, or simply just a game of "What's wrong with this picture?" Thanks to technology with fan hacks improving, people have been able to make a lot of these things a reality like now you can have Mario in a Sonic game.

I miss not having to hire a lawyer to satisfy EU and national regulations that, it turns out, don't only apply to Google and Facebook. I miss free speech being seen as a promise, not an almost-agreed-upon threat to be curbed. I miss visiting pseudonymous personal websites (which did not have to be garish *or* hosted on Geocities) instead of datamined social media profiles where each expressed oddity may come back to haunt the """owner""" once seen by a co-worker, prospective employer, and so forth.

Oh, you didn't mention Usenet. Best place to find warez and other stuff back in the early days.

Forgot the usenet! This was brilliant, thanks for the nostalgia train.

Love you comments towards the end relating to the sense of community. An area I really miss was Newsgroups which eventually got invaded with ads for viagra and such. Thanks Dan as always

My mother met my father on an old 90s dating site, I don’t know what it is named, but whoever created it, thank you. I’m currently 15 years old.

Back before the Internet was widely available to the public, I ran a computer bulletin board system from 1988-1992. It wasn’t fancy, but it got a lot of traffic. 50,000 connections over it’s life. By the end, we were running 70% connected time around the clock. Just an old XT clone and a single phone line. Fun, but a lot of work.

In the 90s you had to explore the web to find that community that resonated with you, there was quite a large array of people and organisations hosting their own sites, forums, and chat servers. The internet community of today is consolidated by large tech giants. People tend to only navigate to the big name services, Google,KZfaq,Facebook etc. For example KZfaq hosts videos of such a broad cross section of my interest, I really don't feel compelled to search for other websites that might host different videos. It's amazing and at the same time troubling. Even though I write KZfaq comments, it's not the same as being part of a smaller more personal community where you got to know the people and eventually even meet some of them. Even though some of those communities faded away, to this day I have connections to people locally and internationally to those that I met (some still yet to meet) from the 90s internet!

It was just something so special back then and I really do miss that lost innocence. Just like in the 80's being one of a few in class with a home computer. IRC and Lycos in '95 was what I remember the most. Also getting a Hotmail accound pre-Microsoft. It was all so incredibly exotic. I didn't get dial-up at home until '99 but boy that was cool. So slow though when loading a website with images on it 😂

when you could online game on a 56k dial up software modem without any lag... What an awesome well put together video Dan thoroughly enjoyed that - almost like a time machine was taken back and could relate to so much of this.

I first experienced online chatting back in 92 on AOL. I was so amazed that I could actually go into a chat room, type a message, and others could actually read and respond to my comment in real time! That’s taking for granted today. I a was 18 back in 1992 and saw the potential of what the internet would eventually bring although the technology wasn’t quite there yet. I remember when webpages would take ages to load up. Watching anything stream was a slide show. I remember being an early adopter of buying things online. Amazon started out as a simple book store in the 90’s and that was all they sold online lol. I remember purchasing Windows Me and 2000 on eBay in the early 00’s. I’m glad that we have passed that era lol.

Best thing I miss about the 90s internet: the online community wasn't full of idiots yet.

messageboards. I felt you had deeper more interesting conversations in messageboards then on modern social media.

I never in a million years thought I'd see anyone else remember WBS chat! I logged on for the first time when I was 9 years old in 1996. Hard to believe it's almost been 30 years!

Thanks so much for this Dan. Amazing video. Oh my nostalgia galore. Nostalgia feels like something very much needed in these current times. I remember qs a kid enjoying windows 3.1.but when Windows 95 came out, it was like the most amazing development of all time. You brought all that fun back to me in this video brother. Thank you

I remember limewire where pretty much everything you attempted to download was a virus, those were the days where you had to take that risk to ruin your machine to get the music you wanted! Great video as always Dan, do you have anything on podcast? Plus I remember dial up where I was allowed an hour an night of internet use and my dad would pick the phone up to make a call and then go ape shit because I was still on it 3 hours later 😅

I remember saving pages to floppy discs at school and reading it at home (on PC without internet)

Dan, you have very nicely captured the Internet in the 90s. Well done!

Brilliant video! Yes, it was so exciting back then! The first thing I searched for "emulators" and was amazed with what came back :-) I was playing SNES games at 10fps in no time! Actually, that was the first thing I search for when I had brief access to a BBS on a friends Amiga. I searched for spectrum emulator and was amazed to get a speccy emu for my Amiga that I excitedly copied onto a disk, took home and managed to load my old tapes via my sampler cartridge on my A500. Aaah the nostalgia!

This really took me back, thanks for putting this together! I never really used BBSes but spent some time on IRC back in the day, usually trading files, talking about music and stuff like that. I’ll tell you what really killed the classic and far better Internet, and that’s spam. Everyone started doing away with anonymity in order to combat the nonstop amount of junk that will come through. Eventually that led to so much sterilization and then you get left with crap like Facebook and Twitter, no room for rational thought or debate, and you just have the modern cesspool of three or four mega sites with echo chambers of retards. You can probably tell I’m bitter having grown up using the early Internet and then watching it turn to shit, anyway, this was a breath of fresh air today.

I got addicted to the "internet" and spent almost 2 weeks straight, "searching the web". I'm sure I looked homeless and disheveled by the end of my tenure on the "web". And believe me, you had to have some major patience when it was dial up and the only land line you had.

What a great video. Touches on many of the golden days of being online when just having an email made you feel very exclusive to everyone else but those feel who also ventured on the internet. My days started back in late 80's with BBS'es and than to the internet in the early to mid 90's.

Loved it! Next topic: What we miss about the 80’s BBS’s 🙂

Dan...great video mate! And thanks for making me feel old! mIRC!!! Thsts a blast from the past. #Undernet :)

"Stay in 1996, it's better than 2020." Boy truer words have never been spoken. This is an awful year.

Started using the internet in 1998 but got to use it extensively starting around 2001-2002. Chatrooms were wild. MSN chat was the place to go until one person there was murdered after meeting with someone met on MSN chat and MSN closed it down for good. It was big news back then. Al ot of us who were regulars there moved to Yahoo Chat and once I became a regular at Yahoo chatroom Rock 4 I was allowed to play music on the room which made then teenager me really happy.

Thanks Dan, just loved that blast from the past! Great vid

Out of privacy concern I use Duck Duck go, I have seen some Duck duck go bill board commercials in my town, nice to see, google needs more competition.

I remember dialing into a service called Kali back in the day. It simulated ipx over ip and allowed you to play Starcraft, Warcraft II, Doom and a few others online. Also, lest we forget the wild world of share ware. I miss share ware some times.

couldnt afford it back then but in 00s hell yeah miss the chats wtih people when skype started msn live good ol days

The thing I miss about the 90s is computer stores like CompUsa, Egghead and MicroCenter.

ARPANET was fun in the 80's also. How the web has evolved amazes me all the time.

I miss the creativity of early 90s webpages. It was very wild west, anything goes. ICQ chat was always an interesting distraction. The people you met online were generally good natured harmless geeks. It was smaller but full of potential. Now everything is marketing, tracking, selling your data. Glad I got to experience the web in its relative innocence.

Remember around 1996 at about 15 going down the internet cafe to chat to random people on mIRC, with everyone else in there playing multiplayer doom lol

I had that feeling in the nineties playing Interstate 76 online an C&C Red Alert, the people really are nice. Now you only can have a kind of that in VR Only Multiplayer Games and communities, as long not everyone is having it.

I use to love making my own website and fan site, but things have changed so much, that its just not the same anymore. If you want the fanbase or to communicate with likeminded people, there are now social networks.

I remember when you had your internet persona and the "real word" you separated from one another (until the mid 00's)

What a great walk down memory lane! Loved it!