one time i downloaded a MIDI of the Friends theme song off of someone’s Angelfire page
I tried to illegally download an MP3 of Simple and Clean but my mom picked up the phone and disconnected our internet.
I made an anime fansite on one of my pet’s pages on neopets.com and every single asset and art on it was direct linked/stolen from other websites because i didnt know how to upload images to the internet myself
I owned and used a .zip drive
I made an anime fan page on Angelfire that just had a bunch of gifs I found for things I liked INCLUDING those ancient ass gifs of a) Pikachu running, b) Pikachu balancing on a Pokeball, c) odd dancing Raichu, and a bunch of Rurouni Kenshin screenshots.
The background was set to black, but had that falling cherry blossoms gif over it.
The font was gold colored and it was COMIC SANS.
i made a fanfiction shrine that was up for two days before getting taken over by middle eastern hackers
the first time i ever used internet explorer i used it to go to the nintendo power website in order to get the toll free number to call nintendo and ask them how to get the raiden magicite in ff3. (otherwise known as ff6)
I downloaded MP3s from AOL chatroom mp3 bots. Also cgshrines was my original danbooru. (IT’S STILL AROUND, AMAZINGLY)
I used to watch a music video of one of my fave low-key boy bands (No Authority, what up?) on their interactive CD in the Mac Lab after school.
I once made a Kingdom Hearts AMV set to Good Charlotte’s “Lifestyles Of The Rich And Famous” on Windows Movie Maker and uploaded it to Kazaa.
I had a Gorillaz fanpage that had a built in chat feature that I used to talk to my friends while in computer class because other messaging clients were disabled. I was found out pretty quickly.
I actually printed out the neopets permission form for my parents to sign and then physically mailed it to them bc scanning and emailing it was beyond the realm of my ability
I’m 99% positive that I was literally the first person ever on the internet to put screenshots of “Invader Zim” on a webpage.
I screencapped this during the first airing of the first episode and put it on my geocities homepage with a few dozen others before the episode had even ended.
That is its original size.
Streaming video wasn’t really an accessible thing but I was able to do this because I made my parents buy me an expensive device called a “TV card,” which allowed you to screw your cable television cord into your computer to watch live tv on your PC. The sound didn’t work, so I had to turn a real TV on in another room with the volume blaring if I still wanted to watch these television premieres while I ripped my exclusive cutting edge image galleries.
I also had a digimon page and was very proud of some of the moments I managed to screencap. There wasn’t any record feature so you had to be QUICK!
My first website had a different autolooping MIDI file on every page; one of them even used “The Macarena”. I used Internet Explorer’s proprietary <bgsound> tag so that there was no player UI and it couldn’t be turned off.
(In my defence, that was over 20 years ago, and a consensus hadn’t yet emerged that websites with audio were the Devil. It was a different time.)
I built the first website to show preview images of the KiSS dolls I found on an anime FTP site, a website which I later grew into the Big KiSS Page, leading to the popularization of KiSS dolls in western fandom. It led to a brief mention in Wired and my name being temporarily on the Wikipedia entry for KiSS dolls. I also made one of the first animated FKiSS dolls.
I also made the musteline sprites for Furcadia.
Oh, and I maintained one of the most popular and over-built player classes on LambdaMOO (where I was “APHiD”).
And I made some ANSI animations of Ranma ½ by hand.
Oh! And I made the first bendable hair for the original Sims game by building the first tool to give third-party creators access to the Sims character blend data.
When this first came around all the stuff in my head was just how connected anything I did back then had some root with Dove – so long before we even met or knew of each other!
I got my birds & bees talk from a CD-ROM textbook.
It took two hours to download the teaser trailer for Star Wars Episode I.
i put my comic strips up on a geocities page, an iteration of media which would later on be dubbed “webcomics”
Converted my gopher menu to an NCSA Mosaic page. It had an animated title exploiting an html bug. Also, animated GIFs for icons. Remember those? hahah how quaint. But those went away in favor of Flash animations. And then I helped work on the very first HTML 2.0 layer animations for Netscape. Oh, how far we’ve come. I hear animated GIFs are quite popular with the kiddos these days.
Yay, Gopher to Mosaic! I had to do that too, for the Perseus Project (it’s still around!) *Hi5s oldies* At first our homepage was just a long list of links snd some ugly gifs, until I consolidated it into an imagemap-based “dashboard” whose design I shamelessly adapted from LCARS.
Web -1.0: Searching college nets with Veronica and Archie. Posting Doctor Who fanfic on a coolege VAX bbs. Reading a roundrobin Doctor Who fanfic called Lime Jello that was passed around by mailing 3.25 floppy discs between writers. Performing an arcane conversion ritual to send email from the Bryn Mawr/Haverford/UPenn regional network across a bridge to someone on the University of Virginia’s regional network. Noticing when our IN% email addresses changed to the format name@such-and-such, which was a sign that our small regional network had hooked up with bitnet. Building a website for the classics department, and building my first personal homepage with someplace.edu/~username in the URL, which was fairly common back then.
We would get AOL installation disks in the mail and I would use the free trial that came with them every time. Eventually, we started getting calls from AOL asking us if we wanted to become actual members. They would always ask for me, but I wasn’t 18 so they couldn’t speak to me. I also looked at porn on Kazaa.
I had to wait up to an hour for my dial up modem to load the page I printed all my Gameshark cheats off of, most of that loading time was to load the “CONGRATULATIONS, YOU WON!” popup.
I briefly had the attention of my entire fandom because I had three entire unused LJ codes and most of the authors in our fandoms still hadn’t been able to get on and start porting their fic from the mailing list archive hells it was in.
I roleplayed in the Star Wars Cantina on the Webchat Broadcasting System.
Also I’m fairly sure I was one of the first people ever to download and install Napster. When I found it, the website was FrontPage 95-tastic with clip art and bright blue and red Comic Sans text.
