Comment by keepamovin

YES! You were there. Takes one to see one. :)

Truly, I think you’ve over the target here. I think it's more than just being young. It was the transition from an analog life to a 'cosmic' one. We are the bridge generation! I remember waiting for a Zine or a Phrack manifest, or for an image to waterfall down the screen. It wasn't 'inefficient'—it was a frontier.

People comparing the 'load times' and 'inconveniences' are kinda missing the point. I grew up with a telephone. Remembered my friends' phone numbers. Then the interenet exploded down those phone lines. And the world was changed forever. From my desk, I could touch the world. A world i Had never seen. And it could all come to me...And I was reading about other people having similar experiences, similar excitement. There was an excitement in the air, except it wasn't in the air - it was in the space we all shared - that space that came down those wires, over those modems, with that distinctive siren-like mating call. It was the fucking 90s and the Internet came online. You had to be there. It was incredible. You have no idea if you didn't live through it.

That feeling of connection. Somehow it's tied up in the aesthetics for me, too. The juxtaposition between that aesthetic combining poverty-of-content with the compared-to-modern "visually stunted" aesthetics, compared with the shocking immediate global access of the analog to "cosmic" transition, somehow symbolizes it precisely and strongly for me. But the part that isn't conveyed (tho I try), is how I felt at the time. The graphics are the finger pointing at the moon. You had to walk that path, you had to have been there.

I tried to recapture that specific 'gateway' feeling in a Win98 demo: https://win9-5.com/desktop.html. I used modern sound and RBI to try to recapture the feeling of using the web when it was 1999. It's evocative, if you were there. Playing with it, sometimes i get a sense boundless horizon again. But then it flashes and is gone. That fire that I felt of excitement and expanse at that time is an endless source of inspiration for me. I long to somehow recreate an experience that gives it form, so others can know.