There’s something oddly romantic about the screech of a dial-up modem. That awkward, glitchy handshake sound was the gateway to another world—a world where I, a kid growing up somewhere between floppy disks and FireWire, felt completely at home.
Being a computer nerd back then was a full-on personality. It wasn’t cool. It wasn’t mainstream. While most kids were out playing football or learning to skateboard, I was figuring out how to build websites in HTML or installing obscure Linux distributions just because I could.
We didn’t have tutorials on YouTube. We had forums, clunky PDF manuals, and a whole lot of trial and error. I learned how to code by breaking things. Then fixing them. Then breaking them again, but on purpose this time—just to see what would happen. The sense of control, of bending machines to your will, was intoxicating. And let’s be honest, sometimes frustrating as hell. But that made the victories taste even sweeter.
There was a kind of punk spirit to the early internet. We made fan pages for our favorite TV shows with animated GIFs and “under construction” signs. We chatted on ICQ, built avatars for MSN Messenger, and joined shady warez forums just to get our hands on Photoshop 5.5. (Sorry, Adobe. We were poor and hungry for creativity.)
I’ll never forget the first time I saw a Geocities site and thought, Wait… I can make one of these? And then I did. Probably ten of them. One was a digital diary, one a fan page for – I guess – Britney Spears, and another was just… blinking text and MIDI music. But that was the beauty of it—you could.
There was a freedom in that era. Fewer rules, more exploration. You wanted a font? You found some sketchy website and downloaded it, virus included.
You just had to find a way to explain to your parents why nothing worked anymore.
Looking back, those late 90s and early 2000s nights—hunched over a monitor, tabs open in the browser, a folder full of weird desktop widgets—shaped how I think, create, and communicate today. That era taught me how to teach myself. How to be curious. How to problem-solve without always needing a clear answer first.
And yeah, today’s tech is faster, sleeker, more “user-friendly.” But I still miss the old chaos sometimes. The weirdness. The challenge. The joy of figuring it out yourself, even if it took all night.
To everyone who ever stayed up way too late tweaking their Winamp skin or writing a blog post in Notepad: I see you. We helped build the internet. And somehow, it still feels like home.