It Is the Late ’90s
The monitor has yellowed with age. Its plastic casing is warm beneath my fingertips. When I press the power button, it answers with a sharp, electric SKchkKKCKkhhhhhzzz—the sound of glass waking up, of static gathering itself into possibility.
I can feel it against my face.
Then came the ritual: the startup chime, the low hum, and the strange patience required to wait for a computer to become a doorway.
I would sit there like the hacker kid in Jurassic Park, hands hovering above the keyboard, fully prepared to uncover some hidden architecture of the world. In reality, I was probably going to a fan page with twelve animated flames and a MIDI file playing in the background. This still felt extremely cool.
Eventually the desktop appeared. I clicked the internet icon. The modem screamed at another modem for a while.
Then I was in.
Somewhere else.
The Big Wait
Getting online took forever. Downloading one decent-sized picture took another forever. Sometimes the picture arrived one horizontal strip at a time, and you stared at it like an archaeologist brushing dirt from a lost civilization.
If somebody picked up the phone downstairs, the whole journey could end with a click. Brutal.
I am not going to pretend this part was secretly awesome. Dial-up was a pain in the butt. Still, all that waiting created a sense of arrival. The machine made you stop what you were doing and go through the portal on purpose.
That little ceremony changed the mood. Cyberspace felt far away, even when the computer was wedged into the corner of the family room.
The word online sounded futuristic because it described a place you could enter and leave. You logged on. You went surfing. You disappeared into the computer for a while and returned with a folder full of questionable downloads.
Somebody Lived Here
Once you made it through the modem gauntlet, the web was gloriously personal.
People built homepages about whatever they loved: a movie, a wrestler, a pet lizard, a local band, an extremely specific argument about a video game. They chose six fonts because they liked all six. They tiled one tiny picture across the background. They added a visitor counter and waited for fame.
A lot of those pages were janky. Links went nowhere. Images had mysterious red Xs. A cheerful banner announced that the site was UNDER CONSTRUCTION, sometimes for the next seven years.
That was part of the charm. You could tell a human being had been there making choices. Maybe strange choices. Maybe neon-yellow-text-on-a-star-field choices. Still theirs.
The page felt like someone’s bedroom wall. You saw the bands they liked, the quotes they copied into a notebook, the friends they shouted out, and the glittery thing they had just learned how to make blink.
You were visiting.
Going Surfing
We really did call it surfing the web, which sounds corny now and was honestly pretty accurate.
You followed a link because a tiny spinning skull said COOL STUFF. That page linked to somebody’s friend. Their page belonged to a webring. Forty minutes later you were reading a homemade guide to ghost sightings in Ohio.
There was no neat feed waiting to hand you the next thing. You wandered. You got lost. You found people through the things they cared enough to publish.
This could get weird, messy, and occasionally super sketchy. It also meant discovery felt like discovery. A good page became a secret you wanted to send to a friend before somebody needed the phone.
Communities formed in guestbooks, message boards, and forum threads that ran for hundreds of pages. Strangers made FAQs together. Fans archived work nobody else thought to save. People taught each other how to build the next weird little corner.
The web kept expanding because regular people kept leaving doors open.
Keep It Weird
I miss that sense of a person on the other side of the page.
I do not miss unreadable text, broken navigation, or waiting half an hour for a song to download. Those can stay in 1998 with my frosted tips. The weird little human decisions, though? Those ruled.
There was no reason for a dancing alien to live beside a serious movie review. The webmaster put it there because they had just found the dancing alien and thought it was rad. Case closed.
That freedom made the web feel huge. Every page could have its own weather. You never knew whether the next click would lead to a clean archive, a chaotic fan shrine, or a black screen with one cryptic sentence in the middle.
Somewhere along the way, a lot of us stopped thinking like webmasters and started acting like renters. We moved into the same few buildings, used the furniture already provided, and let the landlord decide which neighbors we could see.
Convenient? Totally. A little bleak? Also totally.
Build a Doorway
The old web is gone, but the reason it mattered is still sitting right here.
A screen can create the sensation of crossing a threshold. The journey can have a mood. A page can sound like the person who made it. Visitors can feel welcomed into somebody’s odd little patch of cyberspace instead of processed through another hallway.
We can build that feeling with faster machines, better tools, and considerably fewer modem screams. We can also keep the good stuff: curiosity, personality, and the sense that a real human chose what belongs here.
That is why this essay made you boot a computer and dial into a fake network before you could read it. The wait was silly. The popup was clunky. For twenty-six seconds, though, you were going somewhere.
Then a browser opened, and here we are.
Welcome to our weird little corner of the internet.
Please sign the guestbook on your way out.