Longandshortreviews hosts a weekly blogging challenge with prompts for readers to response to. This week’s topic hit a sweet spot for me: the Internet! Nevermind that it’s Thursday. I had a computer before I had the internet, and having gotten tastes of it at friends’ houses I was squirmy with anticipation about the places I might explore once my parents decided to spring for dial-up at our house, keeping a little notebook with websites I heard about. The only ones I remember are scholastic.com, frenzmail.com, and whitehouse.com. The last was my seeing an official website for the White House in a book on the presidents, and not paying attention to the .gov. Back then, it was….well, not fit for an eighth-grader to visit, let’s just say. I can’t remember for certain which website I visited first, but a neighbor-friend of mine who showed me how to get started with computers and the internet was using Yahoo.com at the time for chatting, so if I were a betting man with a time machine that’s where my money would be. (Well, if I were a betting man with a time machine my money would be in Apple & Amazon!)
Although I did visit scholastic.com, it would have been a one-off thing. The websites that young me spent time on were The Sims.com and the multitude of fan websites offering downloads for the game; 3DO.com, for its unique forum system and thriving community of gamers; and Rinkworks’ “Computer Stupidities“, which I’m delighted to report looks exactly the same as it did way back when.
Just for fun: I found a website that tracks the most popular websites since 1993 on a month to month basis, a moving bar graph. Watch how Google just explodes in 2004-2005. Also, the host of the InternetHistory podcast has a superb book called How the Internet Happened if you want to go riding down memory lane. It’s about how we experienced the internet, not the technical bits. (For that, read Where Wizards Stay Up Late at Night.)
Reading Freely 
I also used Yahoo for chat and things, and I was borderline obsessed with The Sims.
How long did you play the series? I fool around with the current iteration, but it’s more something to do when I’m listening to a podcast than for it’s own sake — very different from my experience with the first two games, where I dug around in game files and made mods and the like.
I played the first 2 for a few years. I tried The Sims 3 which was great, but with each new iteration, it feels like there’s too much going on. I never messed with game files but I was a fan of the cheat codes! 🙂🙂
Do you remember klapaucius or had rosebud already taken over? Klapaucius was the original money cheat, named after a character in a novel that Will Wright was fond of, but it was changed with the first patch to avoid copyright issues or somesuch. I don’t know why rosebud is better, given its cinematic source, but hey.
I’m sure it was rosebud. I’d keep building the cash up and spend hours, days even, building a mansion 😄
A notebook of websites, so cute haha!
I’m trying to think what my first sites were… Probably the original Hamster Dance and Cuppy Cake web pages. Dee da dee da dee da do do….
Oh man … I remember the scandal of whitehouse.com (vs. whitehouse.gov), lol. Re: Sims — I played a little but I’m old… my kid played quite a bit and still talks about how she was proposed to in the bathroom!
For whatever reason, Sims all congregated in the bathroom and kitchens in those early games. Now they walk across the neighborhood if you tell them to talk to someone in the living room downstairs!
I’m super late because I just noticed your entry on last week’s prompt now, but I loved the Sims back in the day!