Mid 90's internet user here. A lot of CD's in the mail from ISP's and AOL, we'd try a new one out periodically that offered free internet access. For a while w

Mid 90's internet user here. A lot of CD's in the mail from ISP's and AOL, we'd try a new one out periodically that offered free internet access. For a while we used Juno's free internet tier. It had a permanent pop-up you couldn't remove from your desktop, but it was free internet so we kept it for a long time. There were also weird local ways of getting online. Our small town had a school supplied ISP type thing. It loaded up a local town bulletin board, and I don't think you could access other sites. Within a few years it was phased out. The content was sparse, but always engaging. Before there were blogs, people just had sites and the sites had interesting content. As I recall it went far beyond nerd/sci-fi stuff. I remember finding a site that had images of scans of things people put up their rectum, it was wild. I remember going to my local gas station to get a money order to pay for a Japanese Sega Saturn game I bought on Ebay with a money order. I mailed the money order and got the game. Nothing was openly monetized, but ads were ever present, and by the late 90's pretty hard to avoid. It was hard to imagine the ads would wind up as openly malevolent as they are now, but I guess young kids don't have that type of imagination. I'm sure many saw the writing on the wall. I miss that internet. That internet immediately reminds me of home. It's an internet that is largely gone, but not because it's destroyed, but because we moved on. We could all still spin up sites in html/css, but we don't. That's ok, time changes and folks move on.