I miss the Old Web.

[IamLEAM1983]

Y'know, GeoCities pages cribbed together with jack shit in terms of HTML knowledge, horrible GIFs, MIDI files everywhere - and frames. I miss the olden days where you could download the Mondo Player and basically tune in to a whacky Flash-based channel that broadcasted stuff along the lines of Happy Tree Friends. I miss surfing cruddy Web pages in search of BoBaFeTT's Diablo trainer and item editor. I miss the ugly-as-sin Hot Topic and Alchemy Gothic pages I'd browse as a teen, thinking I was a SUPER SERIOUS GOTH, YO.

I kinda miss those days in which downloading Quake the first in name was a late Friday-night endeavor, something you did once the window for phone calls had closed and your folks had tucked into bed. I'd wake up at five in the morning, giddy as shit because the download had finally passed the ninety-percent mark on my shitty 56K dial-up modem.

I even miss the dial-up sounds. Or the AOL Start-Up CDs, because we'd use those as coasters around the house. I miss that brief window in which dial-up was borderline extinct and had turned into the most democratic Internet access model in the province. For something like a year, there was free dial-up in some parts. Download caps were on nobody's mind and Napster and KaZaA were the shit.

I mean, my ISP has come to its senses and has switched us to an Unlimited plan. Unlimited broadband just doesn't feel the same as unlimited dial-up.

My two virtual temples were AlbinoBlackSheep and Newgrounds. We'd tuck ourselves at about forty people into the school's computer room and just compulsively email one another, or send each other script kiddie-level viruses we'd snatch off of Astalavista, completely ignorant of the school's computer use policies. One guy even stuck sulfur on a blank CD, slotted it in one of the computer lab's rigs, and watched the disc drive croak with some sort of sadistic glee. The school's IT department wasn't worth shit, there wasn't one corner of the Web we couldn't access with a little effort. Or, you know, basic knowledge of command lines that'd make Internet Explorer pop up on shoddily "Internet-blocked" library search terminals. Some guys ended up in detention for that, which always struck me as weird. What's so bad about that, considering how we were all perfectly willing to close our browsers and let someone who needed to run a library search get to it?

I never went further than basic computer maintenance and two thirds of the wizards I hung out with probably graduated to either a killer IT job or some sort of shitty post at a computer parts store - but for three to four years, we were all on the same level. Lit geeks, math geeks, geometry or Trig geeks - we all fell asleep during Computer class because our school had no fucking budget and worked off of Windows 3.1 for the longest time. The first time my fingers touched the keyboard of a Windows 95 PC, I was overjoyed.

I also remember how my uncle Jack briefly ran off of AOL. Coming to his house and hearing the French Canadian take on "You've Got Mail!" was just so surreal to me, as was the idea of having a set of dedicated terminals to access. AOL was partitioned off into basic Net access, a Teenager portal, a Finance portal, a Cars portal, etc. It was like they didn't trust the average consumer of being able to figure out MIRC.

I kinda miss the slightly-later years, too, with Netscape and The Flaming Akrennian and everyone compulsively installing ICQ everywhere so they'd never miss a beat from their list of friends.

I remember the first time I was asked to troubleshoot my aunt's computer, an antique straight out of the Glory Days of Malware. She had something like five Bonzi Buddies fighting for attention, one VirtuaGirl that totally hadn't been installed by her deadbeat boyfriend and popups. Popups everywhere.

She had the Best of the Worst of my online adolescence on that thing. I was almost sad I had to reformat it.