Out of all the things I couldn't control about my life, being born in the nineties is the one I am the most thankful for.
Not only did that mean that I got to enjoy a great childhood amidst a time of economic and social stability rarely seen again, but it also meant that my generation was amongst the first to face the challenges of teenhood online, becoming the true trailblazers of the brave new, connected world. And as overdramatic as that sounds, it's actually accurate... so much so that it was the source of endless arguments with our parents, who had absolutely no experience with this sort of thing and believed that we were walking straight into the claws of the humanity's lowest by joining and completing our profiles on the many sites that were already floating around by the early aughts. Us, on the other hand? We thought that they were being paranoid and firmly believed that everyone we could meet through the computer was an outstanding citizen with our best interests at heart. It's funny how we were both wrong.
Some of the earliest, most bitter arguments I can recall from my tween and teenage years involved the computer... my parents believed that I would become a shut-in with absolutely no social life if I committed myself to it, whilst I thought that I was going to be left behind once my peers started discovering the awesome world of instant communication through MSN Messenger and other services like it. I did actually become addicted to the idea of posting on forums and poking around on Terra (no actual Google at the time, or at least that I knew of) for the next big thing, but my social life hadn't suffered in the slightest by it, mostly because dial-up internet didn't lend itself to bingeing it (not with the speed of a dead monkey). I still went out most Saturdays, enjoyed a healthy amount of time visiting my friend's house and goshing over his PS1 and Dreamcast, and actually had to work like crazy because, more often than not, it was already Sunday and an entire week of homework was due in seven hours. That was fun.
If it was up to my parents, you wouldn't be reading this article. We would have never met... because they'd have made sure that my love for forums and online communities was completely squashed right there and then.
Even if you were the least sociable person on the planet, Terra's Fotolog WAS your homepage... because you'd be clicking links to it all day anyway.
For those in the United States, I don't even have to explain what that meant. For us in Argentina... it was a time of huge economic and social unrest, a dark and dangerous time. And a time of a lot of challenges, most of them bad.
I lost a lot of friends because they had to move out or change schools after the new, broken economy had forced them out of private education. Some people even took it a step further and moved out of the country as soon as they could make arrangements to start fresh somewhere else... and others scrapped by as best as they could. It wasn't a fun time, is what I'm saying.
I will forever remember seeing my friend for the last time one sunny afternoon, right after her family had made the decision to move to Italy. She came to my home, hung out a bit and then was driven to the airport, where a new life awaited her. Heartbreak like that was commonplace at that point.
This meant that our parents had the extra task of keeping us safe, something that hadn't been a problem before that... and what better way to do that than to let us run wild in front of the "magic box" (yes, they called the computer that).
I'm sure some people went to Yahoo's Pool to play pool, but the vast majority of us went there to catch the latest gossip or have a bare-handed fight to the death over nothing.
It's actually fascinating to me how I would spend entire nights unsupervised, getting into pointless and brutal arguments with strangers on places like Yahoo! Games (particularly on the pool and domino servers), arguments that would completely escalate for no reason and of which grammar and spelling would be true victims. Seeing what would trigger the anti-profanity filter became an art form in and on itself and resulted in a lot of awkward moments that would forever be ingrained in my memory as the best ridiculousness the aughts had to offer.
It was a gold rush and an explosion of late 90s/early aughts flavor that we were lucky enough to witness and that we will never be able to recapture, oddities and all.
And there were lots and lots of oddities...
I remember the blazing arguments that were born out of spite, particularly those involving people blocking their friends on MSN Messenger because they just couldn't stand the endless strings of messages with nothing more than links to their friend's Fotologs on them... and then how these turned into open warfare after the advent of extremely shady sites that would tell you who had you blocked on every IM service.
I also remember some sites specifically made to cause arguments and discomfort, like a beast called "TeCuento", which was nothing more than an anonymous message board aimed at local high school students in which they were actually encouraged to leave inflammatory messages and spread rumors that they would never have to answer for. It was bad... but how bad? Bad enough that my school had actually had it blocked on every computer, because it was turning really nasty, really fast.
And, of course, there was the general pettiness that involves a teenager's life, just online... gone were the days of making prank calls and doorbell-ditching, replaced quietly but definitely by actually harmful forms of mischief, like that of sabotaging online auctions for no reason at all, which still shocks me to this day. The internet was truly in its infancy when a bunch of 14-year-olds could get away with that with no accountability nor repercussions.
What you are looking at here is someone's private Dragon Ball Wiki, made by painstakingly copying over every single scrap of info they could gather. Such a love letter to a media they enjoyed was admirable and worthy of all the praise in the world, but it wasn't actually that rare. People would just throw themselves to these passion projects.
I'm not proud of it, but they made it SO easy for us to engage in this disruptive behavior.
Unlike the eight billion layers of security and identification these kinds of sites have today, back then they were as bare-bones as they came. You could get away with entering a 1-800 number as your "home" phone and the site just wouldn't care. You could even change your name mid-bid and they would only raise an eyebrow if it was truly egregious. It was a madhouse, and it was endorsed by a system that still believed in the good of its users.
I actually remember how my friend had fought tooth and nail for a brandnew Dreamcast that had gone up in auction, checking the site several times a day and raising the bid every time he found himself falling behind... but then the complete and utter idiot realized that the console was being sold on another province, with no shipping option and with the seller making it exceedingly clear that they wouldn't send it by mail because they feared that it would be destroyed on the way. So what did my friend do? He ditched his account and let the site sort that out. No consequences. They made it super easy on us.
But, on the flip side, there were also so many good things that they made you forget all about that other stuff.
Multiplayer with a dial-up connection? Definitely sounds like a cruel joke... but it was not only possible, but great.
I like to think of the internet at the time as a regional phenomenon, not a global one. That meant that every single person I interacted with was relatively close to me and spoke my same language... so you can imagine my surprise when I started reading conversations on foreign languages after the biggest site I was a member of at the time decided to host a Stunts tournament and invited everyone who knew how to play to partake.
Simpler times... to the extreme. There wasn't even any verification until after the auction was done, when everyone's time was throughly wasted.
It was absolutely surreal seeing all these people I couldn't interact with being a constant presence on a forum I had grown to regard as my "online home" for the past couple of years. I particularly remember this French dude called Kris and this Norwegian girl called Luna, who at least tried to make themselves available through some Google Translated answers. It was nice of them and I regret not taking them up on that at the time, probably because the system had butchered what they wanted to say to the point of their true intent being unrecognizable... if the internet was in its infancy at the time, online translator tools were still on the womb.
Around this time digital cameras and phones with extremely crappy photographic capabilities started becoming available to the common folk, and that meant that, for the first time, you could actually see who you were actually interacting with through the heavily-compressed majesty of 150x150 pixels avatars and MSN Messenger profile pics. It's actually really funny how much of a game changer that was, because the pictures were so blurry that you honestly couldn't even tell more than the general outline of what you were seeing and, yet, they also provided a much-needed sense of realism to the whole thing. It was no longer about talking to a combination of an username and avatar, but to a real person. And for those of us who had our parents breathing down our necks and looking over our shoulders as our involvement grew and the conversations moved away from the bright graphics of Yahoo! Games? It was almost a godsend.
I won't lie to you and tell you that I didn't utterly enjoy the consequence-free landscape that was presented to me as a dumb, highly inexperienced and somewhat gullible 14-year-old, a landscape that not only allowed, but encouraged reckless behavior and that could end any and all arguments with the simple push of the "block" button (or, if you were being particularly annoying to me, the infamous "buzzer" before I sent you away forever). But I'm surprised by how little I actually cared about that whole blank check for anarchy as it was being presented to me... why? Because I chiefly cared about gaming, and that was what I went online for.
To say that the Abandonware community was strong at this time would be the understatement of the century. For several years now, sites dedicated to "oldies" had emerged like locust and were amongst the most-visited on the planet (the one I had been using was actually number two for the entire continent, which got it featured on the news (!)). It worked quite well because most of us were still fighting with dial-up connections or getting our fix through weekly visits to our local internet cafes, so getting new games was completely out of the question... except for those that could fit by the dozens on a couple of floppy disks.
Some sites, you just knew about. I don't think I had ever Googled half the sites I visited at the time.
I was actually so hooked and hyperfixated on this whole thing that I didn't notice the advent of Facebook, Twitter, MySpace or even YouTube until years after the fact (yes, it was a nice rock I was living under). My whole world at the time included PC Speaker sounds, pixel art and the occasional deathmatch on Counter-Strike at the local internet cafe to keep some semblance of modernity, albeit fleeting.
You... Uhhh... had to be there.
Unfortunately, the fact that I had abused our dial-up connection to the point of it burning an actual hole on our budget and that all local internet cafes had started closing down meant that I was actually forced offline for years, stopping all activity around 2007 and not returning to my usual "stomping grounds" until the 2010s, when the landscape had become completely unrecognizable for me.
Most of the sites I knew had since closed down, others had upgraded and were no longer anything like I remembered (I called that the "vBulletin fever", because almost all phpBB boards had made the transition to that system) and the userbase had also shifted, meaning that I hardly found anyone I had known before still around... much less people like Kris and Luna, whom were probably "expelled" by the changes and the fact that the Stunts tournament had ceased to exist.
Still, I guess it was only fitting to feel nostalgic for nostalgia sites.
I will always remember my online adventures between the ages of 14 and 17 as core to my development as a person, and the lessons I learned from both the good and bad still apply to my life to this day. It's crazy to think that something that didn't exist during my childhood and early teenage years could have such an impact on my life afterwards, even landing me my first paying job on one of the few surviving sites by the time they were legally able to hire me.
What about you? What are some of your core memories from your early internet days?
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