Ah, you youngsters.
People who have been on the internet for 4+ years and haven’t had their humor devolve into Dadaist, surreal garbage impress me.
Some hipster cred for real here. 
I first used the internet in 1986, but I didn’t use it regularly until 1995. I used it in 1986 as part of some project to allow so-called “gifted” kids to connect with others around the world.
It was also the first time I’d used what we’d now call a chat room. Back then they didn’t have a name, I don’t think.
However, I was using BBSes of one sort or another from ~1984 on, especially when my comparatively-rich grandparents would allow me to log on when I visited.
Most of what people think is “new” on the internet I’d seen or done on BBSes by 1986. Many of the things that “brilliant” entrepreneurs are “inventing” had been done by 1988 on said BBSes.
It’s funny to watch it all cycle back.
I don’t yearn for a return to those times. The internet is far better, and vaster. But it is odd to see some arrogant 25-year-old “create” something that I used 30 years ago in a nearly-identical form. It’s just on a lot larger scale now, of course.
And computers are so much faster.
FidoNet was pretty awesome back in its day, though. Getting an email then felt like an event. Now it feels like a chore, most of the time.
As a “youngster”, I find it really hard to imagine what the Internet was like before the invention of the World Wide Web. In my fantasy, it was some sort of scarcely populated, desolate wasteland 😀
I whish I could go back in time to experience it.
Before the www, the internet was mostly boring, really. Mainly it was university sites and only a few companies.
Up until 1993 or so, BBSes were better, with more and varied content and just more to do.
Then the www blew all that away.
You win because I didn’t start telnetting and using PINE until I was eighteen. :/ I do remember when chat clients were exciting. Getting an email and images were events because you had to wait eons for them to display on ultra fast 9600 baud modems and then have the whole event end because someone dialed the house.
Ha, “Mom, did you pick up the phone!” Yeah, that was screamed more than once back in those days.
One time I was dialing a BBS I didn’t realize was long distance. The phone bill for that was very large, and we had little money. That wasn’t good.
I still miss those dulcet modem tones….
(Though I often turned them off to avoid waking people up.)