My first brush with the internet was in 2000. We had our family computer in the living room. Our dial-up ISP was Funcow. The local newspaper had a little section where they talked about fun websites to visit (family-friendly of course) and we would check them out in the evening. I know that Google existed but we didn't use it - we had AltaVista, then Yahoo. These were also website directories - basically lists of websites grouped by topics. So if you didn't find what you were looking for on one website, you'd try the next one, and so on. And the websites themselves were basically made by hand in html. To stand out some people threw in lots of little animated icons garish colors, weird website layouts, background music that couldn't be turned off... It was 100% amateur and unpolished, and much much MUCH more diverse than today's internet. But slowly, massively popular websites and tools started to dominate. Microsoft had a huge presence through Hotmail, MSN.com, and MSN Messenger. But Yahoo Messenger had video chatting first (IIRC). There were fansites about everything under the sun but no Wikipedia so researching any given topic in depth was a mammoth, tedious task. In 7th grade I wrote a research paper on ferrets and referenced about half a dozen websites but only collected about two sentences worth of useful information from each - so research was still heavily reliant on books and libraries. Speaking of libraries: that's where almost everyone went for free internet. Schools and colleges also had computer labs with free internet and woefully inadequate content filters. It was crazy. It was awesome.