The Internet I Grew Up with Doesn't Exist Anymore

Introduction

The internet; what can I say? It's the driving force behind nearly the whole world today - economies, countries, communities, and more run solely on the internet these days. However, it wasn't always this way. Once upon a time, the internet didn't even exist. When it did, the internet was a place. It was a place you went. You selectively chose to visit the internet, based on your own free will. If you wanted to visit a chat room, or perhaps preview a fancy new Flash game, you visited the internet for a few minutes in the evening before going back to your family or friends.

This has changed dramatically in the last 20-30 years. Today, it's 2026 and woven into nearly every part of daily life for the majority of the Earth's population. Let's do a quick checklist and see what requires the internet or becomes tedious if we opt not to use the internet (yes, this list is tedious on purpose):

• Banking
• Paying bills
• Taxes
• Shopping
• Watching TV or movies
• Listening to music
• Reading the news
• Looking up directions
• Ordering food
• Booking travel
• Messaging friends and family
• Video calls
• Playing most modern video games
• Downloading software updates
• Activating new devices
• Backing up photos
• Storing files
• Finding a restaurant
• Reading reviews
• Checking the weather
• Looking up a recipe
• Researching almost anything
• Applying for a job
• Remote work
• School and homework
• Medical records
• Scheduling appointments
• Government services
• Renewing licenses
• Filing insurance claims
• Managing investments
• Home security cameras
• Smart home devices
• Navigation in your car
• Finding a phone number
• Dating
• Selling used items
• Buying event tickets
• Boarding a flight
• Receiving package updates
• Authentication (2FA)
• Password management
• Identity verification

What a list. How fun. I love being absolutely restricted to a specific technology or method with little to no options. Joking aside, this post is my personal reflection of the internet, and perhaps tech and life in general, over my lifetime. I was born in the late 1990s, but was also born in a rural area of the USA, so I have been privileged to see technology evolve from the "my stereo is the highest tech equipment in my house" stage to the "I have all of human history in my pocket" stages. This post is about remembering these moments from my perspective, regardless of whether the evolutions have been good or bad. As you read on, please (PLEASE!) send me an email if this post sparks a memory or you have thoughts. I genuinely enjoy hearing these stories from anyone, and I push for you to send them to me as you think of them.

2001: The Family Computer

The family computer. What a throwback. Perhaps you even had a third place computer you visited. Wherever, whatever that computer was - think of that computer as you read this. I will be speaking from my perspective and I hope it resonates with someone out there.

I recall coming home from school, getting through required chores, homework, or anything else first. Perhaps you had siblings with which you shared the computer or the TV. In my case, we owned an early 2000s Gateway tower PC. A beautiful (read: ugly), beige Gateway computer with the spotted cow on it. It sat on a big "oak" hutch, with integrated file-compatible drawers and specific spots for your matching beige desktop speakers.

To use the computer, you likely turned on a very heavy CRT monitor. Perhaps it even flickered, emitted you a static buzz, or showed a wavy pattern in the graphics. This was the epitome of 2000s technology and people loved it.

Side note: We owned a heavy, wooden CRT TV set from the 1970s or 1980s that hid all buttons behind a fake, black "speaker" that you could press to pop open. A decade or two after we had tossed this TV into our barn for disposal, my brother and I took turns hitting the glass screen as hard as we could with a baseball bat. It never left a mark, regardless of how hard we hit it. Why don't we produce that quality anymore?

If you wanted to use the computer, you had to press a very heavy, circular button that would emit a memorable CLUNK as you engaged the button within the PC. This would result in an airplane level of whirring while it used maybe a few GB of memory and hard drive storage to boot up Windows 95.

At this point, the world was your oyster. You could do so many things that humans throughout history couldn't do:

• Open multiple programs at the same time. Scientists were baffled.
• Minimize a window, then bring it back later. Pure sorcery.
• Move files by dragging them with your mouse. We truly lived in the future.
• Change the color of every pixel in Paint. Michelangelo could never.
• Hear your speakers make a loud POP every time Windows started. Reassuring.
• Watch a progress bar slowly fill from left to right while estimating "time to complete" at 800 years. Entertainment for the whole family.
• Crash the entire computer because you opened one too many programs. Unlimited power comes with responsibility.

If you were luckier than I was, you also had access to the INTERNET at this point. The cyberspace where you transmitted your energy through hyperwaves to digital ends of the earth (i.e., sent a message to a stranger). My family had a dial-up modem until the mid-2000s, so I was rarely to use the internet at this point. The extent of my experience spanned between our family computer (used for games, documents, and wasting time exploring every single menu and application available in Windows) and the church computer lab (containing even older computers, somehow).

At this point, there was no ritual to the internet or even to the computer itself. The computer was a tool used for specific tasks, such as my mother designing pamphlets in some obscure program for printing, or for fun. Oftentimes, you would sit down with no particular destination. You were exploring. I use that word specifically because it's how I truly felt. Whenever I turned on a computer, I was exploring a digital universe that had not been charted before. At this point, the internet was a distinct place you visited. Or, could ignore. If you didn't like computers or the internet, no worries. You could ignore it as much as you'd like.

2004: Exploring the Web

The internet stopped feeling like software. It became its own world. This is the point in my life where the internet became real. I wasn't a pioneer by any means, unless we're talking about The Oregon Trail, but I was willing to test and brute force any system through sheer curiosity, from a very early age.

At this time, we launched Internet Explorer and loaded up your favorite search engine. Perhaps it was Yahoo!, Altavista, MSN, Google, or something else. This was probably your home page, your default search engine in the browser, and had an annoying toolbar installed on top of the browser itself. If you were silly enough (like me), you had numerous toolbars that sacrificed valuable screen space for the sake of nothing.

Suddenly, you could find almost anything ever uploaded to the internet. Some options could be:

• A walkthrough for the level you were stuck on.
• A fan site dedicated to your favorite TV show.
• A forum with 12 members arguing about phreaking.
• A Flash game that somehow consumed your entire afternoon.
• Someone's personal blog documenting their life in excruciating detail.

More than this, the internet always felt enormous at this stage. No matter how much you explored, searched, or cataloged, you never had the full image. The internet was endless, borderless, and expansive. There was always a new rabbit hole waiting for you. Even if you had to watch every image slowly appear one horizontal line at a time.

Before moving on to the next section, do you remember the 1996 Space Jam website? What a modern marvel. Honestly one of the world's wonders.

2007: Living There

Here we are. The part of this post I recall most vividly. The mid-2000s were a phenomenal time in my personal history, as they were my transformative years. As it relates to computing and the internet, this means that the mid-2000s were the years of my utmost exploration, exploitation, and emancipation. Where do I even start?

Perhaps we start with the state of the internet and what exactly was available online. Perhaps this is triggering for certain readers, and I apologize if it is, but it is the way the internet was at the time. If you wanted to see gruesome videos of executions, suicides, or the pain olympics, all it took was a single search and your search engine would happily return any results relevant to the words you typed.

If you wanted to share information over the internet at this point, you probably had an email from a site like AOL, Hotmail, Yahoo, Gmail, or your ISP (Roadrunner, anyone?). Additionally, at this point, webmail clients were extremely popular and most users would launch the webmail clients from their providers to participate in email. Those of us who were cool used things like MSN Messenger, AIM, etc. to chat quickly without having to use an email. You could even use little pictures that provided emotional reactions for you! Oh my goodness, what a time.

Beyond chatting, the next big thing coming in the digital space was gaming. At this time, it was seen as perhaps a silly side-hobby for some. While there may have been some money in it for a few select games, most were not profitable - they were created for other reasons, such as genuine intrigue in mechanics, users' fun, and curiosity. Games and game companies like Runescape, Miniclip (8 Ball Pool, Agar.io, Doodle Army), Club Penguin, Wizards 101, and more dominated the scene in the mid-2000s.

Beyond gaming, this was the age of users learning how to launch their own blogs, vlogs, websites, and more. For example, let's look at GeoCities (1994-2009) and Tumblr (2007-present). These websites rapidly evolved the internet's landscape, as they offered a free method for anyone to deploy a website or blog. Imagine being a young person, or a high schooler, or a college student, or an adult in 2009. You have access to the internet and an interest in something out there in the world. You do a quick search and find a page related to it on GeoCities or Tumblr, leading you down a hyperlink rabbit hole. If you were properly motivated at this time, you may wonder: "How do I do this? Can I create a page like this?" The answer was yes, and it was easy! A few minutes later, you could have your own site. There were few, if any, restrictions on what you could publish online. This could lead you to learning HTML and CSS, as many users wanted to customize their sites, which generally leads to users discovering the freedom of owning their own sites. This included things like mail signatures, avatars, forum-specific usernames and more.

The end result? Everyone could have their own corner of the internet. There was space for everyone and it was distinct. You could tell, both visually and otherwise, that a site belonged to someone specific. It was property, individually owned and updated by a human somewhere on Earth.

2012: When Everything Started Changing

Let's jump forward to the early/mid-2010s. I used 2012 as an example because that's when I was in my first year of high school. At this time, you begin to understand a bit more about the world, log more long-term memories in the brain, and shift your perspectives.

Let's start by creating a perspective of the world's technology at this time:

• The iPhone 5 was released.
• The first iPad Mini was released.
• The Wii U was released.
• Windows 8 & macOS Mountain Lion were the primary operating systems.
• YouTube, Tinder, & Vine ruled the digital landscape.
• Perhaps you even watched Gangnam Style on YouTube this year.

At this time, Facebook continued to cannibalize the internet. Each year, including 2012, Facebook consumed pages and converted websites into pages on their own website. Games, the app center, mobile apps, "pokes", and more slowly replaced other websites and communities on the web. Twitter did the same thing around this time, to a lesser effect.

As part of this domination by the top web service providers, apps started quickly replacing URLs. It felt as if apps became a first-class citizen of the digital world and that they may actually be more preferential to launching a web-first service. Paired with this app-first and centralized web was a preference for algorithms (everyone shudder together) which used data about a user to determine a precise factor of content for a user. Who cares about privacy at this point, right? Let's just mine the data, build the features, make our money, and figure the rest out later.

At the end of all this is a world where more users than ever are carrying smartphones, using apps over websites, using algorithms to find content, and circling around the socially-rewarding locations of the digital universe.

Personally… this felt like the beginning of the end. There was a short period in the mid-2000s to the 2010s where these apps were truly rewarding and valuable. They brought people together and we shared knowledge faster than ever. However, there was a dark side to this revolution. As these apps progressed, and the underlying technologies progressed, the companies and investors driving these efforts took a turn. Efforts pushed into the world of micro-transactions, psychological rewards for utilizing a platform, profits over value, and a slow descent into a disregard for the users.

To me, that 2012 era was a turning point. You may personally love a different era (1980/1990s gamer, anyone? Any former phreaks out there?), but to me, it felt like we kept making leaps in technological capability until we reached the point of economic...