I first used the Internet in early '94. My Dad was an early tech adopter (he also got into VR, and personal computing before that).
I remember us going into a chatroom for Star Trek fans – all of whom were having in-character conversations, a sort of roleplay with Vulcans – and we accidentally made fun of them.
I can't emphasise this next point enough: it was a
major novelty being able to exchange messages with random people from the other side of the planet in real time, from the comfort of your PC. These days, we take it completely for granted, but it was a huge leap in communication back then.
I used to browse for images of Mars and other planets. And even got into some early futurist stuff. The pictures took ages to load. But everything was so much simpler back then – websites had none of the fancy, dynamic content you see today. Little or no advertising. No video streaming. In some ways actually better, less intrusive I guess.
I built my own Geocities page on star types, around 1999. That's when I first learned HTML. Lots of crazy, random, personal websites could be found on Geocities and it functioned as a kind of precursor to all the social media, memes, and other stuff we have today. Search for Geocities on Google Images and you'll see what I mean.
The dot-com bubble felt like a mini-Singularity, with a gold rush of people snapping up the most generic and valuable domain names. Insane amounts of money were poured into failed ventures, causing perhaps the biggest ever crash in technology stocks.
Shortly after that came the whole file-sharing craze – Napster, Limewire, etc. In fact I still have a bunch of MP3s from 2000-2002. That whole period from about '94 to the early 2000s was a real Wild West age for the Internet. For me, the acquisition of YouTube by Google (in 2006, I think?) and the emergence of Web 2.0 marked the final end of that "old" Internet as it became more corporate, secure, controlled and standardised.