[jdworrells]

The early to mid 90's through the very early 2000's were a /real/ creative explosion, before the vultures descended on the Internet and took it in a revenue-seeking direction. Most netizens had personal webpages, chock full of their passions and sharing information. Now it's a vast wasteland of constantly regenerated rage-inducing content and vapid self-promotion and attention seeking. Our search engines have become ad businesses. Our "social media" only exists to siphon off our information and build dossiers on us to more precisely target ads to us and get us to buy worthless crap. There's been an explosion all right, but one more akin to a burst sewer pipe.

[at_a_remove]

I am an Old. Pre-ads, before the <img> tag made someone out there think banners (and then animated banners, and then Flash, and then flash ads at the side of dancing silhouettes that sent your CPU fans whirring), this was still Someone Else's Hardware. Typically a university.

Most of those old IRC networks ended in .edu, as a good example. We never really paid for what we got on the internet, it just switched from an "under the table" scam off of universities to ad-supported.

[ROTMetro]

The internet then was an elite group of people that had 1. Disposable income for computers (or access at University) 2. Disposable income for Internet (or access at University) 3. The ability to put together the skills to create the things you listed. The more I reflect on the changes the more classist I realize this statement/argument is (not making a moral judgement just highlighting the reality).

[officeplant]

As a fairly lower class rural kid I had internet in the late 90s. I was just lucky my dad decided to start up a local dialup ISP and sell internet to farmers.