The Internet of the early 2000s (and for some, the late 90s) was very different: slow, noisy, expensive — and therefore especially exciting. Every website seemed like a portal to another world, and connecting to the Web itself was a small adventure.
We collected warm, nostalgic memories of our colleagues from Lifehacker about their first encounter with the Internet. The result is a real guestbook with all the attributes of the early Internet: dial-up, forums, strange chats, the first “friends” from VKontakte and the delight of simply being online.
For me, the Internet began with a trip to my dad’s work, somewhere around 2000-2001. And it wasn’t just Internet with cards or with traffic restrictions, but real unlimited – after all, my dad worked for a telecom company.
At that time I was 12-13 years old, and all that interested me then were computer games, wrestling and Beavis and Butthead. Actually, the “search for information” was closely connected with these interests. The “Country of Games” website gave me “codes for immortality and infinite bullets” for Max Payne.
The WWF website left me pretty stunned – that this could even be possible! (Animations, pictures of wrestlers, wallpapers.) It seemed to me that it couldn’t get any cooler. And a search for “Beavis and Butthead” led me to some weird online chat where people just talked about everything and nothing. There, for the first time, I did what would later be called “trolling.”
We were shown what this Internet is in computer science classes. There was only one computer with an output – the teacher’s, the monitor – behind thick protective glass. I don’t even remember where the teacher went, because in a tiny office with five Pravetz-8A computers, 20 people tried to look into the monitor of a REAL IBM computer at once.
And already at the university, in the 2000s, there were computer clubs organized in student dorms. The coolest one was run by Indians: fast computers for that time (they loaded in less than 7 minutes – wow!). We started to immerse ourselves in the information world with jokes and funny stories on “Krovatka.ru”.
Generally speaking, searching for something was an extremely difficult task back then: tons of viruses and ridiculous advertising, zero critical thinking – and, in fact, little information. But communication was cool: the most visited resource was IRC via “mirka” (mIRC).
Oh, I remember that wonderful world! I visited my first websites from the computer club, when I didn’t have my own computer. These were “Dvach” and “Upyachka”.
“Dvach” is like a big online party where everyone can throw in their jokes and discuss which anime is better. Everything there is like on a sports ground: someone is laughing, someone is pouring out their heart-rending stories, and someone is on their own – just eating popcorn and watching the battle. I always found it funny to read how people philosophize about which anime character is the coolest. Although I hadn’t watched anime yet – but there were such fights there, you’d be blown away!
But “Upyachka” is a completely different story. The jokes there are so trashy that sometimes you don’t even know whether to laugh or cry. It’s like a clown meets a philosopher: they sit, drink tea and discuss why the chicken doesn’t have Wi-Fi. And the Albanian language is a separate topic.
The main thing is that there were real people behind all these jokes. In general, I still laugh, remembering all these hilarious moments.
One of my first was “Karaoke Chat” – I googled it, it still exists. We hung out there with my cousin when we were 12-13 years old. We wrote all sorts of nonsense, got to know each other. There were no avatars with photos in the chat – only names. But there I suddenly fell in love with a guy from Germany – and had my first fight when he found out that I was not 15, but 13. He was 19, I think. But I remember I even wrote him a real letter to Dortmund and studied German for him
My first internet was in 2000 or so. I used to go to my neighbors back then – they had dial-up (not yet with cards, but the kind that is included in the phone bill). I REALLY liked sitting in some chat (I don’t remember which one): I just went into random rooms and corresponded with people. I even made acquaintances, and with a couple of girls we corresponded through “Mail.ru Mail” – extensively, like through a paper one.
And then a classmate and I, a couple of years later, went to an internet cafe and watched porn gifs. The administrator caught us and for some reason decided to loudly announce it to all the visitors in the room. It was embarrassing.
I don’t remember the very first website exactly, but I remember that at some point (not right away) my dad allowed me to register on VKontakte, and I became the happiest. We had a limited Internet, I was allowed to use it for 15 minutes a day. But while my parents were at work, I turned on the computer, went to VK and could sit there for an hour – I played Pokemon there and drew something with symbols on my friends’ walls.
I also remember that I was still very bad at using a computer and didn’t know about the Ctrl + C and Ctrl + V functions. And when I received a long message on VK, which ended with the following: “Send this to three friends – and then all your relatives will be happy and healthy,” I copied the text by hand onto a piece of paper, and then typed it into my friends’ personal messages…
In 1995, during one of the games of the legendary Chicago Bulls, I saw the ad for nba.com on TV for the first time. At the same time, in the computer courses I attended, they showed us the Internet and asked if we knew any address on the Internet. I, of course, said nba.com – and they started to open it. The site loaded for about ten minutes and never fully rendered. But the feeling that we were approaching the future from films like “The Lawnmower Man” and “Johnny Mnemonic” was still there
I think one of my first experiences on the internet was when I went to visit a friend, and she and her brother had their own computer in their room! And she showed me videos on YouTube (or “VK”? I’m not sure, I don’t remember). I remember the one where you had to watch how to go through a simple maze, and at the end a screamer pops up .
I got a computer at home somewhere in the mid-2000s. It was in my mother’s room, and she wouldn’t let me near it for a long time. And when she did allow me to use it, it was with a limitation: half an hour a day (my vision was -6).
The first resources I visited were sites with games for girls, “My World” and “Agent Mail.ru”.
Oh, my first website on the Internet — a manga resource (I think it still exists). I read Fairy Tail and D.Gray-man there. We had that same old computer at home that crackled like a tractor when loading. And there was no normal Internet — only a modem. Moreover, we lived in a private house, and the modem did not work everywhere — we had to hang it from the window to get a signal. 🙂
My home Internet started with the beeping of a dial-up modem in the system unit and the purchase of payment cards back in 1999. 🙂 The first sites I remember were Rambler and the site of my native Ulyanovsk Polytechnic University. By the way, the domains rambler.ru and ulstu.ru are among the very first in RuNet. 🙂
I was hooked on “Bashorg”. 🙂 This was at a time when watching a five-minute video on the Internet meant spending a monthly traffic limit, so text formats were great for me. 🙂
It was Wikipedia. When I got a computer at home, I spent some time just reading articles on it because I was so happy: an endless encyclopedia where there really are articles about everything in the world!
From what I remember, these are VK, ICQ, and Zaitsev.net. I also had a limited internet, and once I exceeded the limit – I went into the minus, by 200 rubles, I think. I didn’t sleep well for a week, thinking about how I brought my family to this. Then I paid for everything from my lunches, and no one ever found out that we were literally on the edge.
The first social network was “My World”, messengers – “Agent Mail.ru” and “ICQ”. In our senior school years, we all actively registered and communicated there.
My first internet was Masyanya, “Bashorg”, “Zaitsev.net” for downloading music . Mostly from friends. I remember using cards to connect. 🙂 From messengers – QIP and “Mail.ru Agent”. Well, the first “VK” was already slowly coming…
My first website was some kind of forum with cheat codes, discussions and tips for different games. In the sixth grade, I couldn’t live without the recently released game Baldur’s Gate.
And I remember my first Yandex request. I found out what the pioneers had given Valentina Tereshkova — because I had only heard the first lines of the ditty from the adults. It is worth noting that I had a general idea of what exactly they had given me, but I couldn’t figure out the rhyme for the word “cosmic.”
I first went to a computer club in 1998 to print out Radiohead lyrics and Thom Yorke photos. I spent all my money on printing — they were damn expensive. I still have a stack somewhere. 🙂
My very first website was called BeOn – you could keep a diary there and leave comments under other people’s posts. On this website I earned my first money (by selling diary designs and avatars), found pen pals and… a husband.
My dad had something called “Net” on his computer – it’s like a torrent, only you could dig into other users’ files (ofc, only in folders that they themselves shared). I wanted to download anime , found a file by name… and got a cut of frames from it under “Tatu”. This is the first interaction with the Internet that I remember.
I won’t say exactly which site it was, but it was definitely a walkthrough of some part of Nancy Drew that my friend and I couldn’t get through (we literally kept paper notes and called each other on our home phone to exchange finds, damn). And I asked my parents to help me google it…
Well, I first went online either on the Aria website, the address of which I saw on the inserts of audio cassettes, or simply on Google – in search of guitar chords. It was in 2000, I didn’t have my own computer then, so the events took place in a local computer club – in the middle of a battle in Quake and StarCraft. I remember that the administrator even helped me with all this, since my computer literacy at that time was limited to launching games through shortcuts on the desktop.
A few years later, when I got my own PC, I quickly learned how to reinstall Windows, like everyone else, I spent the nights in chats and exchanged files via DC++. I briefly used dial-up Internet, then I had unlimited Internet — but with traffic divided into “local” and “worldwide”.
