Flash player and splash pages dominated the internet. Everything was either Matrix blue or punk magenta. Google competed with AOL and Ask Jeeves and somehow, we didn’t know who’d win. Webcomics rose and found their niche. There’s a Homestar Runner fan reading this somewhere right now. You could comment on anything: trash an album you hate, fangirl over an album you love, argue about the news, talk about food, make a friend from a message or two on a Yelp! review. You could finally hop on a message board and find that one movie you saw when you were little. Everything had to be slick, but busy. Every button was a bubble, everything was water themed for some reason, and if it wasn’t it was full of pipes and dials that made cyberspace really feel like a place. Maybe that’s why so many people connected. Maybe that’s why you still remember the friends you made on Runescape, or WoW, or Neopets. It’s the internet we were promised when Microsoft asked you “Where do you want to go today?” The internet became a place to stay, rather than to visit.

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When you just got home and absolutely HAD to hop on whatever Newgrounds game was hot, because what else were you going to talk about? When tech actually worked, because if it didn’t the entire company would fail. Even with its clickbait, and even if you had dialup, and even when it was impossible to listen to the new Green Day album without everyone else in the house hearing it too... through all of that, you had something special. We all did.