I was talking with one of my very dearest friends this morning about various things, and the subject of the 90s Web came up again. Likely not a coincidence, since one of my hobbies is retro computing. At any rate, he reminded me of the fact I had a GeoCities page in 1997.
Little Spots was 6 years old at this point. And sure, some of it was what you expect a 6 year old in 1997 to have. If it didn’t deadname me, I’d probably even link it here. I had links to my favourite games, a Backstreet Boys fan page, and some of my favourite MIDI files. (Reviewing it in the Archive, I apparently also had a list of my favourite search engines, too. Wow. That’s a useful bit of archaeology now.)
But something else I had was a penpal page. My parents set up a monitored email box – they always read the messages coming in before I could – and I joined a webring of other kids with pages that wanted penpals.
This is definitely not something you can do on the modern Web. I don’t even know how good of an idea it was back in 1997, but it definitely isn’t a good idea in 2026. (How has it been 30 years, by the way?!) I would unfortunately not feel comfortable giving a proverbial child exposure on the Internet like that, not now. There are too many scams, too many data harvesters, too many nonces, too many risks.
But back then, it was a bit different. And I genuinely did make some friends with actual children around my age this way. It was a really special experience that I only wish the youth of today could share. It was such a deeper and more meaningful connection than what you can get from social media. It was a way to actually develop friendships with other kids from around the world.
I was also reminded of Little Spots’ first encounter with IRC. My aunt actually ran an IRC channel for the family to chat on. I wasn’t really supposed to do anything else with it, but one day I ran a channel list and found a programming channel. This seemed super cool! I was super in to Visual Basic! …which of course got me laughed out of the programming channel. But it was still neat to see that there was a whole wide world of different people to connect with.
And I think that the Internet can still be that. In fact, I think it still is that; I’ve made a lot of new friends in various Discord guilds ranging from weird hyper-specific retro computer communities to everyone’s favourite spotted dogs. It’s been a pleasure and a joy to connect with others. I only wish more people could use technology in a way that brings us together, instead of in ways that divide us apart. That is the true power of what the Internet was, is, and could be.