Asklemmy

The owner of a site called zug dot com wrote a lengthy and hilarious essay on his treatment for an anal fissure. There were MS Paint illustrations of the procedure.

I was enthralled but also learned a lot about using humor to discuss situations that a person would otherwise be ashamed of.

Earliest thing I remember was, as a kid of maybe 6 or 7, my family got internet installed (circa 95/96), and I found an early Pokémon fansite (via Yahooligans, most likely) that listed all 150 Pokémon and the "meaning" of their names (ie Hitmonchan and Hitmonlee are combinations of "hit" and Jackie Chan and Bruce Lee respectively). I was of course only just learning to read, so it took me a few visits to the website to read though every entry, but I was so stoked to see such engaging content on this new "internet"-thing

BBS, ftpmail, archie, veronica, news, mail !! tons and tons of information never before available to me..

I wasn't born back then, but it would have been the fact that search results weren't total crap like today: only reddit seems to offer decent results if you don't want sites like wikihow to come up... I wrote a more elaborate blogpost partly about it.

Downloading a file and after hours of downloading it gets stuck at 99%

Probably that happy zing you got whenever anyone signed your guestbook on your homepage.

Discovering that Burning Man exists. I'd never heard of it until I followed a link from Boing Boing and my head exploded.

Definitely Chatrooms 👌

Having my own email address, making a website and pirating a metal album

My dad trying and failing to dial out and connect to AOL italia to send his sister an email. I have no idea how much he paid for the service and the fact that local calls still cost money and I'm not even sure AOL was local, but it was so slow it took forever to send anything. Forget pictures.

I was a big MST3k fan back in the day. When it was on Sci-Fi, they had a MST3k-themed site called "Caption This" where it took screengrabs of whatever was on the channel at the time and you'd crack jokes about it.

It doesn't sound that interesting now, but if you're familiar with the show you'd see the appeal.

Also having to wait five minutes for a single JPEG of boobs to show up. Really helped teach a person patience.

The AOL kids home page with all flash games. I played a lot of the tom and Jerry blueprint game.

Creating my own Proboards message boards and discovering Alien Adoption Agency.

BonziBuddy destroying the family computer.

Probably watching an old Ed Edd N Eddy fan animation I found on yt that I cannot find a trace of anymore, or just the old yt shit post videos in general. That, or things like getting on Nitrome or any other site to play flash games. Mutiny on Nitrome was one of my absolute favorite flash games and one I never beat since I was still young.

"You got mail"

Newgrounds most definitely. And as an earlier poster stated, muds. Specifically MUME. Oh man many hours have been spent playing that game

It's not that early, but eyezmaze.com (which apparently still exists) was one of those sites I found one day and regularly played on for years.

If you want to get a feeling of the old internet, look here: https://search.marginalia.nu/explore/random

To be clear, those are not (only) old sites, but a lot of them feel like the old web.

When there were dedicated websites to silly gimmick/songs like Hamster Dance, Boogie Blocks, etc.

I bought an Internet connection and read from a computer magazine that I'm able to connect to an FTP server for downloading files. (I don't think I needed it for anything, I was just curious of the new technology.) I remember that when I connected to the server, it displayed instructions that one should use "cd x/y/z" to change to a subdirectory, instead of separate commands "cd x", "cd y", "cd z", to save network bandwidth.