Asklemmy

@Provider Written recipes where you didn't have any images or photos and didn't have to scroll down 14 pages of life story.

Just require a list of ingredients (using metric weights as only about 2 countries in the world use spoons and cups as a measure and every cook has scales), followed by a list of actions with time and temperatures where required.

E-mail pen pals. I made friends from all over the world, it was a great way to get to know other people and their culture. Writing huge e-mails about where you're from and what life is like where you live. Because you usually only write one every couple of days, it was something to look forward to.
I guess social media kind of ruined that part, why write to someone when you can just post it for the whole world to see.

IRC when it was truly big and building your own homepage at Geocities

Imagine a bookworm that suddenly has access to an effectively infinite library that they can access almost any time that they want. And it felt like there was a lot to explore and didnt feel as centralized. I.e today it feels like youve got 5 maybe 6 really big sites rather than hundreds, thousands, millions of distinct and potentially interesting places to explore.

Do I want that back? Yes and no. I miss the feeling of wonder and of exploring the unknown but I do not miss dial up. If your internet connection were 100x that today youd think something was wrong with the connection. i.e horribly slow. Images would take minutes to load, songs hours, video was unthinkable.

Traversing web and ftp sites by simple, progressive, suffix removal from the address. Sometimes very interesting what showed up that way. Security was spotty, an afterthought often.

Before the internet, there was this thing called Fidonet which is a BBS that also allowed transferring files. It was such amazing technology at the time. You had your computer connect to the network using an acoustic modem and then at 300 baud you were on a very early version of a peer-to-peer network.

I don't miss anything about it. And certainly not the modem dial sounds I knew from memory/intuitively.

Imagine having to dial into the internet and having to wait 30s with beeping and whooshing sounds.

/e: It seems OP question was stated more broadly than the linked article addresses and people seem to reply to.

Did anyone else play digimon quest to save the net? That was one of the first online games I played on dial up.

IRC and playing Warcraft “online” by dialing my friend’s house. One time we messed with a telnet client. That was neat.

You guys remember pMachine (evolved into ExpressionEngine)? That shit blew my mind when I got it installed. No more Adobe Pagemaker.

I miss the HTML chats. It was like a whole world to explore.