For reference, I used BBSes before the Internet around 1993, in middle school/high school.

When I got the Internet in 1994 or 1995, I used Gopher as well as the web.

College was a big upgrade with broadband, and I used it all through-- 1997-2002. Everybody used e-mail at college, but there were few "regular people" on the web, except maybe professors/scientists and programmers. It was mostly "web pages".

I started my first job in 2002, programming in the Bay Area, and the funny thing is that I didn't have Internet access at home for 3 months. I guess it wasn't really necessary or worth the cost for a temporary place.

I just used the Internet at work. These days I think people would look at you funny if you only used Internet at work.

So it's hard to say, but yeah in 1997 the web was all over the news, because companies like Yahoo started to make money. EBay was kinda popular. There was all the IPO talk, so the Internet was in the public consciousness.

But most people still weren't on the Internet. It was more like the news was reporting on this trend, and I wouldn't say it's essential to daily life.

I also think the daily "news" conversation was still on TV at that point, not on the Internet.

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It's hard for me to remember now, but now I kinda want to read what the Internet was like in 2002. Definitely Google was a huge thing back then. It made the Internet more popular, because it was easier to find things.

I started using it in summer 2000, when I lived at Stanford, after a research co-worker told me about it!

There was no Facebook/Reddit/Twitter/Stack Overflow, etc. The whole thing was just less important, and you did less on it. The web continuously grew over 20+ years, so yeah everyone feels they were "early" because it kept growing a lot after they started using it! It kept taking over more and more of life.

But I think I saw more or less the whole thing since I used gopher before the web. I didn't see all of the Internet though. I remember talking to people on Usenet that had been on the Internet since the 80's, 10 years before me.

Usenet was really big for me -- I learned a ton of stuff about playing guitar and drums -- but I think the 1989 generation probably never touched Usenet. For that generation maybe ICQ was more formative, etc.

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For someone my age, Klosterman's recent book the 90's is kinda fun for remembering what things were like before the Internet

https://www.amazon.com/Nineties-Book-Chuck-Klosterman/dp/073...

He's kind of an information hoarder, an extreme trivia master (of musics and sports and pop culture), and he makes some interesting points about the nature of memory and how the Internet changed us and our memories.

Kinda summed up by this comic - https://www.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/tuy27/thats_a_damn_s...

In the old days, there was this idea of “selling out” and we as a culture decided that it was bad. Monetizing a thing immediately called into question its integrity, and more importantly, the integrity of the artist. But then an interesting thing began happening in the late 90’s and early 00’s. The idea of selling out lost its negative connotation.

Chuck Klosterman's recent book "The Nineties" talks about this a lot! And honestly it's spot on. I had forgotten about this, and not realized how much it disappeared as a cultural concept.

https://www.amazon.com/Nineties-Book-Chuck-Klosterman/dp/073...

We all used the phrase "selling out" frequently (on the east coast of the US), but I remember one high school friend who invoked it constantly. Calling people "sell outs" (i.e. lacking in authenticity) was a common insult.

Grunge bands and in particular Kurt Cobain had almost a pathological obsession with "selling out", to the point where it had some part in his death. Even popularity was seen as a sign of selling out -- it was better to be true to your indie roots.

There are some interesting quotes in the book from Cobain and contemporaries, and the author talks about influential movies at the time that dealt with the concept.

I was never a Calvin and Hobbes fan, but it's definitely interesting and notable that the creator avoided "selling out".

While I think we were too obsessed with it back then, I think a concept that probably needs more respect today. You could even talk coherently about Google "selling out", although that concept may now be foreign to many people. There was a notion of authenticity and that you cared about the mission, i.e. organizing the world's information. But that is long gone :-(

In retrospect the obsession with "selling out" in the 90's was a reaction to capitalist values affecting more and more parts of life. Though, being a teenager, I didn't realize that, and I just said what my friends said!

It was a way to keep your peers in check. But it's sad that people don't even notice it anymore. They would wonder why you did NOT "sell out".