Yahoo used to have what was intended as a top-down directory of the entire internet, created by hand. It was incredibly useful at the time. -u/slashdave

In the very old days, to send an email you had to explicitly list out all the computers the mail would have to be routed through to get to the destination. Thank you Eric Allman for Sendmail! -u/nozjazz

The excitement of upgrading from a 28K modem to a 56k modem and GMail being by invitation only when it was first launched. -u/mega_gee

"Under Construction" banners, images, and gifs. They were on every page, the page was always "under construction". You'd put one there while you were writing the HTML then take it out when the final version was done, but way too many people never bothered with that step. -u/fukitol-

I always thought the biggest thing a younger person would notice about the internet is how hard it was to access period. Not the difficulty signing on but finding a place to get on. We can just get on our cell phone and look up game cheat codes or item locations. I remember going to a friend's house with a notebook and writing down stuff for FF7 or going to Cheatcodecentral. Fast forward to like 2007 and I was still going to a friend's house and printing off Vice City codes and item locations. -u/sirNataz

The need to set a good “away message” on AIM, since it may be up for over a day before you can get back on. -u/IDUU

Many brands having child-friendly sites that had flash games and no monetization beyond it being an ad. Played Nabisco Minigolf a LOT. -u/Gothsalts

You have to try to put yourself into a mindset of how you would go about finding things on the Internet in the days before popular search engines like Google or social media. Discovery of content ended up being due to word of mouth, ISPs and their services or finding links from other sites you knew about. I remember a lot of fan pages/fan sites for different things would all have sections of affiliate links to other similar fan pages and sites in a mutual effort to help people discover other similar content. -u/deltavim

You had to type the website in exactly to get what you wanted. Which meant having 30 random, crumpled, torn pieces of paper with long URLs on them. In your pockets, your bags, your desk. -u/SnooBananas915

There used to be books (the real paper kind) with lists of websites to check out. This was maybe 1995? I don't know anyone who ever bought one. -u/Granny_Jeff_Sessions

Waiting for an hour for an image to download, line by line. -u/rrrrrroadhouse

Downloading a song from Limewire and then going to listen to it and then you hear “I did not have sexual relations with that woman.” -u/Uokhun1994

I used to keep a magazine beside the computer so I could read something while waiting for a web page to load. -u/PALOmino1701

You rarely saw ‘Username already taken.’ -u/nanomeister

I remember one of my friends asking me, “Have you heard of YouTube?”And I said no. -u/Burrito_Loyalist

That computer speakers could predict phone calls. -u/renoits06

Being "offline". Now everyone is online all the time, but "going online" was an actual limited time thing you went and did and then when you are done you got "offline". Now being online is a permanent state of being. -deleted user

You had to use the home phone line to be online, using a dial-up modem. Which meant you could talk on the phone or be on the internet, but not both. If you were a fancy rich person, maybe you had a 2nd phone line just for the internet, but that was rare. And this was way before cell phones when landline phones were much more important.-u/soulcaptain

I attempted to explain “All Your Base Are Belong to Us” to a young coworker and she refused to believe it was a real thing. -u/DrFridayTK

You could prank someone really good by changing their computer sounds to short sound bytes like burps and f**t noises or car horns. -u/youtookmyusername3

"That file's one Meg??? Guess I'll go to bed now and check it out in the morning."... and say a prayer the connection didn't glitch out sometime in between. -u/briefwittyphrase