This Page Is Under Construction.
I was recently looking at Neglected Pokémon Lovers Unite!, zarla's Pokémon website, which she's kept online since the late 1990s. This was my favourite place on the Internet when I was twelve years old, and it's the website that first inspired me to write fanfiction of my own. I'm glad it's still around, a little piece of a different time. (There's an essay on the NPLU itself about the time the website was born into, and how things have changed.)
Looking back at this online part of my childhood has got me thinking about the old web. Like many people of my generation, I started using the Internet around the turn of the millennium; I think it was probably 1999 when I got online, at the age of eleven. It was a very different time!
In the twenty-five years since then, the Internet has gone through a lot of changes, from its overall structure to the ways people choose to communicate. There's still a lot of text on the Internet, of course, but I think there's been a broad shift in focus over time, particularly on social media, from text (LiveJournal, EZBoards) to images (Tumblr, Instagram) to video (TikTok).
Anyway, in the interests of online preservation, I thought I'd note down some of my recollections of what the Internet was like when I first started using it!
- Personal websites! This is the most obvious change. Back at the turn of the millenniums, there were countless little websites people of all ages had created about whatever they were passionate about. (Remember character shrines?) When I first discovered fanfiction, it was on the author's personal Pokémon website.
In the present day, it's rare to find a personal space someone's carved out on the Internet; people only have some sort of personal existence on a handful of social media websites, and any individual website you might find probably belongs to a company. Neocities is a present-day option for personal website hosting, though, and I know a handful of you have websites of your own, which is pretty cool!
- In the first few years of the 2000s, one of the biggest forms of online social interaction was through forums. The first place I interacted with others online was on a fan forum for Pokémorphs, a series of Pokémon/Animorphs crossover fics by rache01, and later I moderated an EZBoard called Final Fantasy Fanatics. In a way, Reddit is a relic of this era. I suppose Discord has its similarities - here are a bunch of small spaces for interaction with a group of specific people; pick your favourite - but the instant messaging and the way servers are closed off from the outside world means it has a very different feel.
- There was a time when every website had its own guestbook for people to leave messages. As a kid, I used to go onto anti-Pokémon websites, seek out the guestbook and write stories about the website owner being attacked by Pokémon. I was very cool.
And, if you entered your email address with your guestbook message, your email address was just publicly available? I remember mentioning in a guestbook message that I didn't like Eiko of Final Fantasy IX, and months later I got an email from a stranger that just said, 'If you hate Eiko, I hate YOU!' (If I recall correctly, I emailed back going 'sorry, maybe I was unfair to her' and got a response saying 'Apology accepted ^_^', so that particular online conflict resolved surprisingly well.)
- For a while, a lot of websites had their own chatrooms as well, if you wanted to talk to a total stranger who just happened to be looking at this Pokémon website at the same time as you.
- One particular website style I was fond of was 'weird little mazelike websites that you explore as if you're exploring a physical space'. Harry Potter websites were often set up as 'you're exploring Hogwarts', sometimes complete with 'common room' pages you had to give a password to enter. (Sometimes you could cheat and find the password in the page source. I always felt very smart when I managed this.)
The Nameless Forest was a choose-your-own-adventure-style website I used to wander around all the time; it's no longer online, sadly, but at least some of it is preserved by the Internet Archive. There were riddles you could solve to reach secret pages; there were hidden paths you could only find if you scrolled down far enough or clicked on the correct image; sometimes you'd encounter weird fantasy creatures, and you could 'adopt' them, which basically just meant putting their image on your own website. Adoptables, come to think of it, are another relic of the old web.
- Do you remember how people's websites used to have placeholder sections labelled 'under construction', with little GIFs of construction workers? It seemed like a weird tradition - you could just put the page up once it's done! - but I suppose it was a way to convey 'hey, there might be more on this website later; come back at some point!' when there was no easy way to announce updates to a wide audience.
Holy shit, I just went looking and found a page full of 'under construction' images from the old web! This is so nostalgic.
- A lot of sites used the same little GIFs, come to think of it. If you were into Pokémon, you'd see the same tiny animated Pokémon sprites recurring across countless different websites. If you liked Final Fantasy VIII, there were some adorable little pixel animations of the cast that kept cropping up here and there. Where did they all come from? Did all the websites just steal them from each other? Someone must have made them in the first place.
If you have any recollections of your own from the earlier days of the Internet, go ahead and share them in the comments! I think it's worth trying to preserve this history, and there are undoubtedly things I'm forgetting.
(For example, I just remembered Newgrounds! I didn't mention Newgrounds or Flash videos at all! It really felt like the end of an era when Flash support was dropped.)
I think a lot of you started using the Internet around the time I did, but, if you're a later arrival, you can still share your own memories; I'd be interested to hear them! Someone who came to the Internet in the 2010s could probably identify the differences between that Internet and the one of the present day more clearly than I could.
On a final note: oh, wow, the cute little sprites that used to be on every Final Fantasy VIII website are archived over here!
And, of course, a couple of those ubiquitous Pokémon sprites are still preserved in the beautiful 'home' button I created for my own Pokémon website when I was twelve, which seems an appropriate way to conclude this entry:
Looking back at this online part of my childhood has got me thinking about the old web. Like many people of my generation, I started using the Internet around the turn of the millennium; I think it was probably 1999 when I got online, at the age of eleven. It was a very different time!
In the twenty-five years since then, the Internet has gone through a lot of changes, from its overall structure to the ways people choose to communicate. There's still a lot of text on the Internet, of course, but I think there's been a broad shift in focus over time, particularly on social media, from text (LiveJournal, EZBoards) to images (Tumblr, Instagram) to video (TikTok).
Anyway, in the interests of online preservation, I thought I'd note down some of my recollections of what the Internet was like when I first started using it!
- Personal websites! This is the most obvious change. Back at the turn of the millenniums, there were countless little websites people of all ages had created about whatever they were passionate about. (Remember character shrines?) When I first discovered fanfiction, it was on the author's personal Pokémon website.
In the present day, it's rare to find a personal space someone's carved out on the Internet; people only have some sort of personal existence on a handful of social media websites, and any individual website you might find probably belongs to a company. Neocities is a present-day option for personal website hosting, though, and I know a handful of you have websites of your own, which is pretty cool!
- In the first few years of the 2000s, one of the biggest forms of online social interaction was through forums. The first place I interacted with others online was on a fan forum for Pokémorphs, a series of Pokémon/Animorphs crossover fics by rache01, and later I moderated an EZBoard called Final Fantasy Fanatics. In a way, Reddit is a relic of this era. I suppose Discord has its similarities - here are a bunch of small spaces for interaction with a group of specific people; pick your favourite - but the instant messaging and the way servers are closed off from the outside world means it has a very different feel.
- There was a time when every website had its own guestbook for people to leave messages. As a kid, I used to go onto anti-Pokémon websites, seek out the guestbook and write stories about the website owner being attacked by Pokémon. I was very cool.
And, if you entered your email address with your guestbook message, your email address was just publicly available? I remember mentioning in a guestbook message that I didn't like Eiko of Final Fantasy IX, and months later I got an email from a stranger that just said, 'If you hate Eiko, I hate YOU!' (If I recall correctly, I emailed back going 'sorry, maybe I was unfair to her' and got a response saying 'Apology accepted ^_^', so that particular online conflict resolved surprisingly well.)
- For a while, a lot of websites had their own chatrooms as well, if you wanted to talk to a total stranger who just happened to be looking at this Pokémon website at the same time as you.
- One particular website style I was fond of was 'weird little mazelike websites that you explore as if you're exploring a physical space'. Harry Potter websites were often set up as 'you're exploring Hogwarts', sometimes complete with 'common room' pages you had to give a password to enter. (Sometimes you could cheat and find the password in the page source. I always felt very smart when I managed this.)
The Nameless Forest was a choose-your-own-adventure-style website I used to wander around all the time; it's no longer online, sadly, but at least some of it is preserved by the Internet Archive. There were riddles you could solve to reach secret pages; there were hidden paths you could only find if you scrolled down far enough or clicked on the correct image; sometimes you'd encounter weird fantasy creatures, and you could 'adopt' them, which basically just meant putting their image on your own website. Adoptables, come to think of it, are another relic of the old web.
- Do you remember how people's websites used to have placeholder sections labelled 'under construction', with little GIFs of construction workers? It seemed like a weird tradition - you could just put the page up once it's done! - but I suppose it was a way to convey 'hey, there might be more on this website later; come back at some point!' when there was no easy way to announce updates to a wide audience.
Holy shit, I just went looking and found a page full of 'under construction' images from the old web! This is so nostalgic.
- A lot of sites used the same little GIFs, come to think of it. If you were into Pokémon, you'd see the same tiny animated Pokémon sprites recurring across countless different websites. If you liked Final Fantasy VIII, there were some adorable little pixel animations of the cast that kept cropping up here and there. Where did they all come from? Did all the websites just steal them from each other? Someone must have made them in the first place.
If you have any recollections of your own from the earlier days of the Internet, go ahead and share them in the comments! I think it's worth trying to preserve this history, and there are undoubtedly things I'm forgetting.
(For example, I just remembered Newgrounds! I didn't mention Newgrounds or Flash videos at all! It really felt like the end of an era when Flash support was dropped.)
I think a lot of you started using the Internet around the time I did, but, if you're a later arrival, you can still share your own memories; I'd be interested to hear them! Someone who came to the Internet in the 2010s could probably identify the differences between that Internet and the one of the present day more clearly than I could.
On a final note: oh, wow, the cute little sprites that used to be on every Final Fantasy VIII website are archived over here!
And, of course, a couple of those ubiquitous Pokémon sprites are still preserved in the beautiful 'home' button I created for my own Pokémon website when I was twelve, which seems an appropriate way to conclude this entry: