The Homepage of the 90's

Back when the internet first became accessible to the masses in the 90's here in North America - my parents still refused to purchase a computer to access it.  They never used credit for anything and the price for one was out of reach otherwise.  That being the case, my first experience with the internet I received was via the more humble and affordable WebTV.  WebTV lacked a hard-disk for storing anything -  it was merely 'read-only'.  Nowadays, you can get a decent desktop computer for about $499 or less.  Hell, I bought a laptop via Craigslist for $145 the other day.  It isn't top of the line, but I got a good deal for the price.

Even though the computers were expensive, it was possible to get your internet free of charge (internet = AOL, by the way.) To get free internet, all you had to do was pose as an AOL staff member via Instant Messenger to an unwitting AOL'er (using your '1 Billion Hours Free' AOL trial)  and demand they provide  their sign-on name and password for verification. My god, people were gullible. (Oh yeah, and kids considered this 'hacking.' LMAO.) 

I was thinking back to the time before they had Blogger or Wordpress.  During the advent of the internet, people began, for the first time, getting a peek into the lives of others.  This led to a wide array of blogs "homepages" popping up all over the place.  Homepages were usually virtual 'welcome' centers to someone's home, with a description of what the person does for a living, with a few pictures of the family dog, etc.  This was usually exacerbated by a minimal knowledge of web designing skills combined with a high propensity for tackiness.

In the mid-nineties you actually had to learn HTML to create a "decent" webpage.  (Yes, there's even a code to create a new paragraph, and hitting 'Enter' twice did not do anything.) The learning curve was ridiculous though.  Many people were in the business of creating webpages designed to teach others basic HTML.  Some providers such as Angelfire and Tripod made it easier by providing a 'homepage' builder, but those sites were very limited in functionality.



Regardless which method you used to create your homepage, the common 90's website had most or all of these dazzling features:

1. Animated GIFs dancing across the page
2. A really stuffy picture of yourself in your Sunday best (usually donning a molester-stache).
3. "WELCOME TO" in big bold letters in colors that don't really exist.
4. Really bad music in MIDI format
   
5. Cheesy background images, usually with bubbles or something equally as tacky.

And this thing:

This
is cool!

You can really go on and on here. I guess it's no surprise then that this sort of tackiness would be the catalyst for my interest in the web and what catapulted me toward my first taste of social web interaction (a.ka., cybersex?).  The 'homepage' was the blog of yesteryear and a visitor's signature in your 'guestbook' was equivalent of today's blog comment.

When I get really bored, I am able to search newsgroups through Google for my archived conversations in Usenet groups such as alt.love, or alt.teens.poetry. where I often offered really bad advice to other teens.  (Hey, I was pretty emo.)  I wish I had known then that my juvenile banter would be indelibly kept as a permanent record in my 'internet police record', thanks to Google.

But anyway, it's amazing to me how much the web has evolved.  I no longer have to spend most of my time getting the code just right. I don't think I'm as computer savvy as I was when I was a teenager.  Things weren't as obvious and user-friendly, but that's precisely why you felt a certain satisfaction when you could center an image appropriately or successfully create a link! (FTW!)

Do you still have your old school websites out there? I deleted mine in my early 20's out of embarrassment. It was pretty bad.


This is a fairly accurate parody of what a zany 90's homepage looked (and yes, sounded) like.

Damn, that was painfully nostalgic.