20 Images from a Trip to the Early Internet Museum
It's hard to imagine a life without the internet. Even if you try to live a life completely free of it, everyone around you is still using it to pay for groceries, check the news, watch TV, or talk to someone. You won't feel left out, you'll be left out of society unless you compromise a little bit. But the internet wasn't always a prison full of social media with the same content repeated in different aspect ratios.
The ‘90s saw the rise of the internet, and nobody knew what was about to happen. In the early 2000s, more and more websites started popping up to improve people's lives with information and entertainment like we've never seen before. Each website was dedicated to a specific niche, and the visual possibilities were literally endless.
So, here are some images we took from a trip to the early internet museum you don't want to miss.
YouTube: Origins
This is what the home page used to look like before there were thousands of videos uploaded every day.
Me at the Zoo
This was the first video uploaded to YouTube. Only 19 seconds long, it shows YouTube's co-founder Jawed Karim checking elephants at the San Diego Zoo.
Gamer Corner
All websites were loaded with sidebars, buttons, and noisy aesthetics. Gamers had a lot of websites they could check to beat video games or get the latest news.
Tech Companies
Tech companies were the first to have computers everywhere, and slow internet was a must.
References
TV shows in the late '90s and early 2000s started incorporating the internet in their writing to stay fresh and up to date.
PizzaNet
Pizza Hut created one of the first internet delivery services in the world, and it was even referenced in a movie.
Neopets
This was home for '90s kids.
MySpace
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Changed the game forever.
Flash Games
Cartoon Network's website and its games were instrumental in showing kids the capabilities of the Flash software, which would become huge in the 2000s.
This is what it looked like in 2006.
Burger King Internet
In the early ‘90s, the internet was only available in libraries and schools. Burger King was the most popular place to surf the internet in 1998, since having a computer and connection at home wasn’t common at all.
AOL Messenger
AOL was synonymous with the internet back in the day, and everything came on CDs.
PC Setup
The internet was so young and computers were so new that there was no “internet aesthetic” back in the day, and every setup looked like this.
Jennifer Lopez's Green Dress
Google's former President Eric Schmidt cited the massive attention to this dress as the motivation for the creation of Google Images search in 2000. Before that, every Google search gave you nothing but text results.
Maze Game
People had nightmares about this game. You had to be there.
Specialist
A lot of news shows started bringing a PC or internet specialist who would show interesting websites or explain how to do something on your computer.
Viral Videos
Before “content creator” was a thing, any piece of media that went viral was talked about for months and remembered for years.
Not Found
Having internet outages was a common occurrence, and we were able to go outside and touch grass a lot more often.
Passing Fad
The Daily Mail said the internet could be a passing fad in 2000. I think they were wrong.
