I loved when the image turned out to be a progressive JPEG, where you got to see the whole image right away but it was super blurry. Then as the image continued to download, more details were revealed. It was kind of like a real-life version of the “image enhancement” tool that was in every crime drama later. It was also fun to try and guess what the really blurry parts were before the image fully downloaded.
It really was a great format when I surfed the web with my 14.4 or 28.8 modem.
Oh man, this thread has been a real nostalgia trip for me.
Honestly, what I miss most about the early web of the 90’s was getting up from the computer, maybe to refill my drink, use the restroom, or to join the dinner table, and realize that I had just been browsing the web for hours. And it was fun! Clicking from page to page and site to site, exploring, reading, learning. It was all so fascinating and wonderful.
Nowadays, the Internet doesn’t seem to provoke that sense of wonder in me anymore. I don’t get up from the computer after many hours of browsing, unaware of how much time had passed, and go “Wow, that was a lot of fun. I can’t wait to do that again.”
Like others have said, I do kind of miss the quirky designs of all of those “perpetually under construction” websites hosted on Geocities and the like. People really expressed themselves and their interests in a way that’s just not as common anymore. And who didn’t love the GIFs of a guy jackhammering next to an under construction sign scattered throughout a web page?
Then I also have core memories from that time period, like Dial Up multiplayer games, where you entered your friend’s phone number into the game and your modem called their modem to play. Or going to the post office to mail a Money Order for an eBay purchase, since I was only 12 or 13 years old. Or Napster, and waiting hours to download a song that turned out to be something else. Or just waiting minutes to see an image download line by line. Or learning to hand write HTML for my own website. Or my Dad coming home with one of those “phone books for the Internet” and connecting to random FTP servers hosted by universities or NASA or whoever and exploring what they had available.
Good times.