REMEMBER WHEN THE internet first arrived in our lives?

It seemed like it would change everything. In some ways, it did. In other ways, not so much.

Here’s how we saw the internet in the 1990s, based on archival material:

We thought it was a brave new world

That would bring people together. Like the people in this stock image:

Imgur

We talked about ‘surfing’ it

Totally radical. Check out the guy grabbing mad air on the top right.

Imgur

But we didn’t really believe CD-Roms would ever be a thing of the past

They held so much information!

Flickr/rubenerd

We thought everything on the internet would begin with “e-”

Imgur

We thought this sound would define our lives

YouTube/willterminus

We thought Dancing Baby was incredible

Look, a baby! Dancing!

Imgur

And we despaired of photos loading line-by-line

We thought AOL would probably rule the world

michaelgalpert.com

That is, if it took over Indigo.ie

Either way, the @ symbol would be EVERYWHERE

Another amazing stock image:

Imgur

We talked about the ‘information superhighway’

worldofgoo.wikia.com

And sometimes we needed it explained to us

YouTube/PDCS216

We knew about ‘hackers’

YouTube/Matthew Trinsey

We thought Geocities was the future, and all websites would look like this

oneterabyteofkilobyteage.tumblr.com

(Ahem. Like this.)

Made using Geocities-izer

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