1. Potential partners were picked based on how fancy their IM name was.
<3 <3 <3
2. Singing along to the dial-up modem "tune" was an absolute joy.
What some may call "a horrendous cacophony of beeps and screeches that sounded like someone massacring a robot orgy", others may call "a catchy-as-hell tune".
3. Everything was a bit of an iffy-grey, and we were fine with that.
Be still, my beating nostalgia.
4. Flirting was about three magic letters separated by two highly-erotic forward slashes.
"'Oh my god, take me now on this futon, you instant messenger hottie."
5. Spending hours working on your webcam face.
You nailed it.
6. You got to play games that were of the utmost sophistication.
To be fair, having to keep tapping the space bar until your hands hurt was pretty full-on.
7. Other games were a little more...stripped back.
8. Also, actually printing off cheats for games was super helpful.
And you could tape it to the inside of your textbook and trick your parents into thinking you were (lol) revising for exams.
9. The suspense of knowing that at any time, your browsing might be cut short by someone picking up the phone.
Oh, what a thrill!
Actually, speaking of suspense...
10. The anticipation of waiting 20 minutes for one song to download was actually quite fun.
Even though it was pretty much never, ever worth it. Man, music in the 1990s was absolute trash.
11. Every conversation lasted 10 times longer because you'd started every mention of a website "h-t-t-p, colon, forward slash..."
It went on forever, but boy was it a special time.
12. Adding animated, um, "trails" to your website cursors was considered the height of programming and design.
Still looks great, tbh.
13. Downloading your favourite internet webpages to a floppy disk so you can access them later was a genius idea.
It definitely was not dumb. Bring back floppies, I say. Floppies for all!
14. Going on internet chatrooms was a genuine pastime.
"What did you do last night?"
"Oh, I was talking to strangers in 'film chat' – you?"
"Same, same... OK, well, bye."
15. TyPiNg LiKe tHiS evEn ThOuGh iT tAkEs So mUcH EfFoRt aNd nObOdY kNeW wHy It WaS A tHinG.
(That hurt, actually.)
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