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Romanticising the Old Internet
Dec. 27th, 2025 01:29 pmSo, I started using the internet around 1995 ish. And there is a lot I love about it and a lot that was extremely difficult. But many people now will look back and see it as some perfect idyllic time of free information exchange, as though there was nothing wrong with it and that's... simply not true.
Now, there is a lot I like about the old internet, don't get me wrong. I like that capitalism hadn't got it's claws into it, and the lack of centralized services made people forced to carve out a place for their own. But it had.. so many hurdles and was so inaccessible in a lot of ways. So, here's a bunch of things that irritated me about the internet in 1995-2005 that I think is, in-fact, a lot better now. I'm gonna babble about my own experiences with this era to give an idea for those that didn't experience this.
The truth about the internet is that to use it, it is in conversation with the technology you use. Want to digitize your art? That's gonna cost you a 1400$ scanner and a SCISI card. Want to draw on the computer directly? Well you better hope you know someone in the AutoCAD industry to hook you up with an Intuos tablet and that you have a free serial port to use it. Or wait a few years and get one of the USB ones. (Also likely setting you back a few thousand dollars) For people that didn't grow up in this era, they have no idea how incredible it was to see drawing tablets in any sort of tech shop, this used to be a direct order specialty shop sort of deal.
And then there's the computer that runs it all that you use to access the internet in the first place. Putting together a computer was more of a hassle then, than it is now. I'm sure people that didn't grow up with it find it confusing now, but back then? There were way more points of failure and chance for incompatibility between boards, CPU, and RAM. Now, you just have to make sure the motherboard's socket matches the CPU and maybe the voltage in a few higher end cases. The RAM and GPU are pretty much plug and play with the only setback being possibly throttled by the board if the board isn't strong enough, but at least the computer will work. For older systems, a mismatch like that could cause it to not even start.
And then the SCISI card... oh the SCISI card. It's an expensive piece of hardware that was terribly finicky. I had to write a BASH script to stop something related to the Scanner from initializing so that I could actually boot into windows without safe mode because it'd fail every time otherwise. Little errors on devices these days pale in comparison to the catastrophic failures hardware from 1995-2005 were capable of.
After 2005, USB was more ubiquitous, scanners were both affordable and easier to use, and computers were easier to build and troubleshoot.
I don't know how many people even in their 30's really appreciates the breadth of software we have accessible to us now. When I was getting into this, there was Photoshop, PaintShop Pro, the extremely rudimentary OS-provided imaging programs. Both Photoshop and PaintShopPro would set you back a couple hundred dollars. I will say the upside to this era was the copy protection wasn't nearly as extreme. You could get away with burning a disc and pass around the same key and get it installed on all your friend's computers without issue. GIMP entered the scene around 1998, but access to it was pretty much only for the especially tech savy that could compile their own version for their OS, or for those on an OS that was supported by others. But if you think GIMP was limited now, it was more limited, then. And while technically Pixia was around, unless you were at least somewhat familiar with Japanese, you were unlikely to be aware of the software, let alone be able to use it, but if you could it was one of the few free options that real. I am of the opinion the existence of Pixia in 1998, is why the digital art scene in Japan was so big.
openCanvas released in 2000, and became wildly popular for it's networking and overall nicer brush controls. Paint.Net hit the scene in 2004, followed by Mypaint in 2005, Krita in 2005. So as you can see, options were pretty thin until the end of this era. Now a days, there are a wealth of both free and affordable applications for anyone can use and I feel like this gets taken for granted far too often.
In the internet around 1995-2005, the options you had for sharing your art were... slim. After you got past the hurdle of technology and software to even make the art in digital form to begin with, the places where you could share and host it was minimal. You could.. build a website (which many did), post to a forum (which still often required that you have that art uploaded somewhere first, in order to even show it because many 'forums' did not have direct uploads), or be good with IRC and it's file transfer. (I did not use IRC). But your options were limited and required some amount of technical skill, and if you didn't have those technical skills, well.. your options were more thin. I'm going to list a timeline of what was available, and maybe you'll see what I mean. (I can only speak for the English side of things, I'm afraid)
Newgrounds 1995, Okay so technically this site itself pre-dates the others but it started out as only a collection of Flash works and they had to be manually submitted and uploaded to the service. Art wasn't openly accepted until about 2000 and accounts didn't happen until about 2001 but art submissions were still directly sent. Direct uploads for art to Newgrounds itself didn't happen until 2010. (from what I've been able to garner from a cursory glance on web archive, because FOR SOME REASON, THERE IS NO HISTORY OF NEWGROUNDS ON FANLORE.ORG)
Elfwood 1996, a gallery that was high-fantasy-only and then kinda branched out into scifi later, was jurried, (in other words every submission was reviewed) and required the disclosure of your legal name in order to make an account. They didn't allow fanart until 2002 (my guess was the advent of DeviantArt pulled a lot of their Traffic)
Epilogue.net 1998, A competitor to Elfwood in that it was even more strict on what it accepted because it only wanted 'the best' art.
MediaMiner 1998, This was first a fan fiction service and then later added a fanart gallery. It was so much easier to use than Elfwood that it was such a big deal to me at the time.
Side 7 1998, a fan BBS turned art gallery, that I only knew as a Sonic Fan Art gallery so I never used it.
VCL 1999, A very rudimentary gallery site for furry art. No comments, but made for a nice archive. But only furry art.
DeviantArt 2000, Unless you were on the net at this time, it's difficult for me to describe just what a Big Deal DeviantArt was. Up until this point the galleries most people had access to were restricted in some way either by access or subject. (as you can see from the list above) DeviantArt was the first multi-media gallery site that you could just make an account and directly upload to. Every other site before it was Juried, had strict restrictions on subjects, were cumbersome to use, or lacked a feature here and there. DeviantArt had ALL the features, NO subject restriction, and was a place that Writers, Photographers, Sculptors, Designers, Crafters, and genuinely any medium that could be artistic. (There was an absence of music but that's because of some weirdness with the other project DA had going which honestly is a shame.) Many of these niches had NO WHERE to share their work before this as so many curated art services were only Illustrations or Fiction. Photographers, Crafters, Interface designers, were all forgotten.
And then, SELLING stuff? Well, there were no easy plug and play merchant services until PayPal hit the scene in 2002, and even then it was feature limited compared to today. Before that you had to apply for a merchant service, I don't know if you've ever done that but it's a pain. And the cart services they had available at the time? Absolutely jank. To make your own store you had to pay for hosting, set up your own cart, purchase an SSL cert (most services didn't offer free ones at the time), pay for the merchant service, and then have the technical skill to keep it all running. And of you wanted someone to do all that for you. And hey if you wanted to do it on the cheap, you could take credit cards over the phone or have people mail you checks. A surprising amount of people did both these things. You have no idea how PayPal's embedded purchase buttons changed the scene unless you were deep in the weeds of everything else, but that wasn't until near the end of that 10-year span. Self-service sales platforms like Etsy didn't exist until 2005.
And then, use of assets without attribution was rampant between 1995-2005. There was a whole movement in 1998 to protest this problem called Grey Day, where artists would collectively change their site to remove all graphics from the site to show what it would be like if they all stopped making what they do. The only request was attribution. There's def still an issue with use without attribution but image search makes it a lot easier to find the source. That didn't exist in 1995-2005.
--
These days, people take for granted the ease of access. Coding a website now is easier than it ever has been, even side-stepping the fact that there are very few WYSIWYG options, there are still free CMS and the code itself is easier to understand than it used to be and I say this as someone that's always struggled with code. There are more options to set your roots down, you have more control over where you want to go. Hosting is incredibly cheap, as are domains, nothing is stopping you from making your own house and that used to be much more difficult in 1995-2005.
It's easier to build a PC than it used to be, there are videos with guides, archives of drivers, and a whole bustling community of alternative OS options with more users dedicated to making drivers for those OS than there ever used to be in decade I'm referring to. And we are spoiled for choice for both software and hardware. 3 viable competing tablet companies! Making stuff that won't knock out your entire paycheck!
Even with the way things are now, with the content restrictions and age verification, we've been through this before. There was a whole era of Credit Card Verification, and that crashed and burned as well. Of course, that doesn't mean it doesn't require us to fight for it :U As difficult as some things are, turmoil is important for lasting change, but you gotta do something about it. It sucks right now, but I know I for one am determined to make sure the now isn't permanent.
The internet has never been a perfect place for anyone. There are some aspects that had their heyday were great and better than some of what's going on right now, without a doubt, but like everything, once capitalism sinks its claws in, it dies.
IDK I think it's better to learn to the past than yearn for it. Romanticing the past doesn't help our current or our future, it prevents us from learning from our mistakes.
Now, there is a lot I like about the old internet, don't get me wrong. I like that capitalism hadn't got it's claws into it, and the lack of centralized services made people forced to carve out a place for their own. But it had.. so many hurdles and was so inaccessible in a lot of ways. So, here's a bunch of things that irritated me about the internet in 1995-2005 that I think is, in-fact, a lot better now. I'm gonna babble about my own experiences with this era to give an idea for those that didn't experience this.
Technology
The truth about the internet is that to use it, it is in conversation with the technology you use. Want to digitize your art? That's gonna cost you a 1400$ scanner and a SCISI card. Want to draw on the computer directly? Well you better hope you know someone in the AutoCAD industry to hook you up with an Intuos tablet and that you have a free serial port to use it. Or wait a few years and get one of the USB ones. (Also likely setting you back a few thousand dollars) For people that didn't grow up in this era, they have no idea how incredible it was to see drawing tablets in any sort of tech shop, this used to be a direct order specialty shop sort of deal.
And then there's the computer that runs it all that you use to access the internet in the first place. Putting together a computer was more of a hassle then, than it is now. I'm sure people that didn't grow up with it find it confusing now, but back then? There were way more points of failure and chance for incompatibility between boards, CPU, and RAM. Now, you just have to make sure the motherboard's socket matches the CPU and maybe the voltage in a few higher end cases. The RAM and GPU are pretty much plug and play with the only setback being possibly throttled by the board if the board isn't strong enough, but at least the computer will work. For older systems, a mismatch like that could cause it to not even start.
And then the SCISI card... oh the SCISI card. It's an expensive piece of hardware that was terribly finicky. I had to write a BASH script to stop something related to the Scanner from initializing so that I could actually boot into windows without safe mode because it'd fail every time otherwise. Little errors on devices these days pale in comparison to the catastrophic failures hardware from 1995-2005 were capable of.
After 2005, USB was more ubiquitous, scanners were both affordable and easier to use, and computers were easier to build and troubleshoot.
Software
I don't know how many people even in their 30's really appreciates the breadth of software we have accessible to us now. When I was getting into this, there was Photoshop, PaintShop Pro, the extremely rudimentary OS-provided imaging programs. Both Photoshop and PaintShopPro would set you back a couple hundred dollars. I will say the upside to this era was the copy protection wasn't nearly as extreme. You could get away with burning a disc and pass around the same key and get it installed on all your friend's computers without issue. GIMP entered the scene around 1998, but access to it was pretty much only for the especially tech savy that could compile their own version for their OS, or for those on an OS that was supported by others. But if you think GIMP was limited now, it was more limited, then. And while technically Pixia was around, unless you were at least somewhat familiar with Japanese, you were unlikely to be aware of the software, let alone be able to use it, but if you could it was one of the few free options that real. I am of the opinion the existence of Pixia in 1998, is why the digital art scene in Japan was so big.
openCanvas released in 2000, and became wildly popular for it's networking and overall nicer brush controls. Paint.Net hit the scene in 2004, followed by Mypaint in 2005, Krita in 2005. So as you can see, options were pretty thin until the end of this era. Now a days, there are a wealth of both free and affordable applications for anyone can use and I feel like this gets taken for granted far too often.
The Internet Itself
In the internet around 1995-2005, the options you had for sharing your art were... slim. After you got past the hurdle of technology and software to even make the art in digital form to begin with, the places where you could share and host it was minimal. You could.. build a website (which many did), post to a forum (which still often required that you have that art uploaded somewhere first, in order to even show it because many 'forums' did not have direct uploads), or be good with IRC and it's file transfer. (I did not use IRC). But your options were limited and required some amount of technical skill, and if you didn't have those technical skills, well.. your options were more thin. I'm going to list a timeline of what was available, and maybe you'll see what I mean. (I can only speak for the English side of things, I'm afraid)
Newgrounds 1995, Okay so technically this site itself pre-dates the others but it started out as only a collection of Flash works and they had to be manually submitted and uploaded to the service. Art wasn't openly accepted until about 2000 and accounts didn't happen until about 2001 but art submissions were still directly sent. Direct uploads for art to Newgrounds itself didn't happen until 2010. (from what I've been able to garner from a cursory glance on web archive, because FOR SOME REASON, THERE IS NO HISTORY OF NEWGROUNDS ON FANLORE.ORG)
Elfwood 1996, a gallery that was high-fantasy-only and then kinda branched out into scifi later, was jurried, (in other words every submission was reviewed) and required the disclosure of your legal name in order to make an account. They didn't allow fanart until 2002 (my guess was the advent of DeviantArt pulled a lot of their Traffic)
Epilogue.net 1998, A competitor to Elfwood in that it was even more strict on what it accepted because it only wanted 'the best' art.
MediaMiner 1998, This was first a fan fiction service and then later added a fanart gallery. It was so much easier to use than Elfwood that it was such a big deal to me at the time.
Side 7 1998, a fan BBS turned art gallery, that I only knew as a Sonic Fan Art gallery so I never used it.
VCL 1999, A very rudimentary gallery site for furry art. No comments, but made for a nice archive. But only furry art.
DeviantArt 2000, Unless you were on the net at this time, it's difficult for me to describe just what a Big Deal DeviantArt was. Up until this point the galleries most people had access to were restricted in some way either by access or subject. (as you can see from the list above) DeviantArt was the first multi-media gallery site that you could just make an account and directly upload to. Every other site before it was Juried, had strict restrictions on subjects, were cumbersome to use, or lacked a feature here and there. DeviantArt had ALL the features, NO subject restriction, and was a place that Writers, Photographers, Sculptors, Designers, Crafters, and genuinely any medium that could be artistic. (There was an absence of music but that's because of some weirdness with the other project DA had going which honestly is a shame.) Many of these niches had NO WHERE to share their work before this as so many curated art services were only Illustrations or Fiction. Photographers, Crafters, Interface designers, were all forgotten.
And then, SELLING stuff? Well, there were no easy plug and play merchant services until PayPal hit the scene in 2002, and even then it was feature limited compared to today. Before that you had to apply for a merchant service, I don't know if you've ever done that but it's a pain. And the cart services they had available at the time? Absolutely jank. To make your own store you had to pay for hosting, set up your own cart, purchase an SSL cert (most services didn't offer free ones at the time), pay for the merchant service, and then have the technical skill to keep it all running. And of you wanted someone to do all that for you. And hey if you wanted to do it on the cheap, you could take credit cards over the phone or have people mail you checks. A surprising amount of people did both these things. You have no idea how PayPal's embedded purchase buttons changed the scene unless you were deep in the weeds of everything else, but that wasn't until near the end of that 10-year span. Self-service sales platforms like Etsy didn't exist until 2005.
And then, use of assets without attribution was rampant between 1995-2005. There was a whole movement in 1998 to protest this problem called Grey Day, where artists would collectively change their site to remove all graphics from the site to show what it would be like if they all stopped making what they do. The only request was attribution. There's def still an issue with use without attribution but image search makes it a lot easier to find the source. That didn't exist in 1995-2005.
--
These days, people take for granted the ease of access. Coding a website now is easier than it ever has been, even side-stepping the fact that there are very few WYSIWYG options, there are still free CMS and the code itself is easier to understand than it used to be and I say this as someone that's always struggled with code. There are more options to set your roots down, you have more control over where you want to go. Hosting is incredibly cheap, as are domains, nothing is stopping you from making your own house and that used to be much more difficult in 1995-2005.
It's easier to build a PC than it used to be, there are videos with guides, archives of drivers, and a whole bustling community of alternative OS options with more users dedicated to making drivers for those OS than there ever used to be in decade I'm referring to. And we are spoiled for choice for both software and hardware. 3 viable competing tablet companies! Making stuff that won't knock out your entire paycheck!
Even with the way things are now, with the content restrictions and age verification, we've been through this before. There was a whole era of Credit Card Verification, and that crashed and burned as well. Of course, that doesn't mean it doesn't require us to fight for it :U As difficult as some things are, turmoil is important for lasting change, but you gotta do something about it. It sucks right now, but I know I for one am determined to make sure the now isn't permanent.
The internet has never been a perfect place for anyone. There are some aspects that had their heyday were great and better than some of what's going on right now, without a doubt, but like everything, once capitalism sinks its claws in, it dies.
IDK I think it's better to learn to the past than yearn for it. Romanticing the past doesn't help our current or our future, it prevents us from learning from our mistakes.
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