What decade were you born in?

[Guest]

When I joined this forum, I expected it to be filled with a bunch of Millennials and Gen Xers nostalgic for their childhood and teenage years. But as I read through your introductions, there seem to be a lot more younger people who are here to appreciate the Web 1.0 era they missed out on the first time around.

So I'm just curious how the demographic actually skews. It'd be funny to find out that I'm one of the oldest people here, but I'm sure some of you must be those cool Gen X kids that I always wished I was. I weighted the poll toward the younger generations, so if you're a Baby Boomer please speak up.

I was born in '87, making me a mid-range millennial. I grew up in the '90s but get to pretend I have a claim to the '80s.

[Frost Sheridan]

i was born in the late 90s, and i spent my childhood browsing random stuff on the web and hanging out on forums and in IRC chatrooms. i missed out on the personal site heyday of the late 90s, but i still got to experience the tail end of the personal web, and the desire to be a part of it never left me. i remember making terrible websites using microsoft word 2000 (!!!) and later real HTML after i found one of those teach-yourself-HTML4 books at the local library.

[Guest]

I was born in 2001, making me 21 at the time of writing this.
I fortunately grew up just as the old web was making its exit, so I caught a glimpse of it here and there in my childhood. I spent most of my formative years no-lifing on forums. But that was when forums were already dying.

[Melooon]

Excuse me this poll is discriminating against kids like me who were born in the 2020s

That said, I think its really important for a community like this to have a mix of young and old; I hope there is a forum granny out there as well as forum tweens; it's important to break that bubble that groups that are too similar create.

[manpaint]

I was born in 2000s. I believe I witnessed the tail end of web 1.0.

I don't like how boring and sterile the web is nowadays. I like browsing the Yesterweb as pretty muvh you encounter as a soul.

I don't think I was ever exposed to things like Geocities or MySpace, but now I see why people missed platforms like these.

[DJoftheCoven]

I've mentioned this before but I was born in 2003. Everybody born in the 90s and earlier thinks I should be a fetus right now lol. I'm 18 years old (turning 19 in december)! Pretty young, sure, but still technically an adult in the United States.

I was one of those kids who got lucky enough (or unlucky depending on how you look at it) to have access to the internet really young. My formative memories of the web were mostly on dress-up game sites and kids roleplay sites like animal jam, petpet park, and at some point pixie hollow. I was also suuuper active on the pokemon website back when it had games and little bits of fun content for the chil'ren. Personal sites only exist in the very back of my memory--stuff that I'd almost forgotten about entirely until I started looking up some names on the wayback machine. It's a sort of surreal experience to see those websites locked up in a perfectly-preserved museum state when I remember, even if a little fuzzily, what it was like to just stumble across them on total accident and spend hours reading through as much content as I could understand.

I really want to give that magical feeling back to the generation after me. The internet they've been forced into is worse in just about every single goddamn way except for loading times.

[CyberCat2000]

I was born in the mid 90s! I admit, I MIGHT be one of the first "kids who were too young for the Internet", having first gotten on in 2000 or so. As such, I was able to witness the days of personal websites like you'd see on GeoCities, as well as discover random webpages (and the occasional forum) via the Yahoo directory, as well as playing random Flash games on sites like Shockwave.com, NotDoppler, Neopets, and kids channel websites. I one time even made a very simple webpage via the GeoCities page editor. I kind of miss these days, admittedly, which is why I'm in the retro web revival communities!

[Cobra!]

I was born in the 1994. We got our first computer in 2001, with Windows ME. I experience Web 1.0 in most of it's glory. Chatting online on AOL, sending emails. Making websites with GIFs and images everywhere. I loved it!

I'm very happy to see the website aesthetics make a comeback, and the younger generation is carrying the torch!

[wodaro]

I was born in 1997, so I wasn't really aware of a lot of early web stuff, but I do remember spending a lot of time on Gaia Online roleplay forums and various flash game sites. I also used to build websites with friends for random clubs we would make. I remember we made one to host my friend's naruto fanfiction on! I got to experience the web before modern social media, and I do miss the sort of adventure and exploration it used to hold and encourage. Places like this forum, the Yesterweb, the broader web revival movement/indieweb are doing a lot of important work to make the internet feel like it's still a space for people, rather than just brands and corporations.

[Absentmind]

Born in the 90s, saw a little bit of geocities when I was V young because my uncle had a computer. The 2000s were me playing runescape, going on newgrounds' flash portal and browsing on forums. I always find it odd that something as simple as enjoying a "crappy" flash game or a choppy forum discussing whatever would become a nostalgic delight.

I always wonder what GEN Z or later will be nostalgic about. I guess things like vine and facebook when it eventually dies

[NullCertifier]

I was born in 1990. My first conscious memories involve playing Super Mario Brothers on my dad's NES. Throughout my early years I could divide my life into different periods around the progression of Nintendo consoles that came out. NES for the innocent early childhood era, and then the Super Nintendo. Life and video games both grew more complicated, perhaps I had to do little more, in life and in the games, but it wasn't a drag because things were also getting more interesting.

I didn't watch TV quite so much. My mom came from a very conservative background - my mom and dad both really - but her family had an overwhelming suspicion of popular culture and entertainment, which I have never observed to the same degree in my dad's family (They have their own problems with their relation to media and culture, easy marks for Fox News lol). My mom tried to limit TV to educational programming for the most part. Which wasn't all bad, I dig the hell out of PBS to this day, which I could discuss at length. A lot of the TV I remember as a kid was the stuff my dad would watch in the evenings, and I'd sometimes pretend to be asleep on the couch so I could watch it without my mom worrying about it being a bad influence. I saw Star Trek: The Next Generation when it was new. The intro is deeply burned into my memory - "Space: The Final Frontier..." and so on... I think it was one of my dad's favorite shows. I was always scared shitless by the Borg lol.

I have hazy memories of DOS, my dad as well as my grandpa on my mom's side were both IT guys. But I didn't really start getting into computers proper til the Windows 95 era. I definitely remember that dial-up modem sound lol. I wasn't around for the early web so much. I really started getting comfortable browsing the web on early 2000s fansites. The kinds with forums like this one. I was active on BZPower for Bionicle (Lego nerds here anyone?), Gamefaqs, a couple Sonic The Hedgehog fan communities which I can't remember the names of, and same for Teen Titans. That's pretty much the Web before Myspace as I experienced it.

Anyhow, this is far from the full story, but I think it's a good sampling of generational touchstones to kind of explain who I am and where I'm coming from. Nice to meet all of you fellow travelers through space and time

[springhand]

To add to the statistics, I was born in the mid-2000s, but even if I had been born earlier my experience wouldn’t have been like what you’d expect*. Here Internet access became wild spread much later compared to, say, the U.S, which means the entire history of our relationship to the web is different - I’m not sure if the act of creating a page on Geocities or going onto Myspace was ever a thing here at all, much less prevalent. Yet I’m still here, so you can say the older web appeals regardless of the perceiver’s age or nationality 🍻

*Which involves Geocities, Myspace, blinkies, dollz, etc. I read a really relatable article/blog post someone wrote about only portion of people experienced those yet they are the apparent mainstream, but I can’t remember where I read it >< Please message me with the link to it if you happen to know! Thank you in advance 🙏

[Oppositekeith]

didnt really have much access to the internet until i got my first phone at 13 years old so i missed out on a lot and wouldnt know about much about old internet until my quarantine days where i discovered projects like flashpoint through a friend and sites like newgrounds. it only grew from there and soon enough got me to discover spacehey and neocities and now here.

[Deckade (Tolo)]

as 2002er my experiences with creative spaces on the net were large flash game websites like miniclip, armor games, kongregate, gamefudge, youtube channels, and vsauces DONG series. I guess I caught the tail end of the personal web but there was still much change even after social media became the focus. I witnessed people progressively become much more self conscious on social media (not commenting meaningful things under posts) (not using black and white or overly edited photos anymore) and there is much more of an effort on having a cohesive style than early 2010s social media, which i think is more of an act of limitation than something creative.

It's great to hear input from people of all eras of the internet as it gives us a better sense of how different iterations of the internet make us feel and what works and what doesn't. Also I love hearing you all regale about the expansive mysterious, and incomprehensible beast that was the internet circa 1.0

[Neonriser]

I was born in the 1990s, a time when computers became more accessible with casual users. This was evident with operating systems such as Microsoft 95 and 98, which I recall using during my toddler years.

It was also a time when Netscape and Internet Explorer were the biggest internet browsers, and it was also a time when anyone could make their own websites as long as they had a Geocities account. But I didn't know that, for I was only a child...