I remember using images that looked almost identical to in place of an actual tag. Plus the million variations (you didn't have a real site until you have a image that matched your theme). I remember the 1x1 transparent pixel with great affection---it was the output of my first significant CGI script (in Perl, of course) that I used as a site counter. Winsock! Fuck yeah! I remember when a web page and a gopher site l…
Trumpet Winsock on Windows 3.11, dialing into a small mom and pop ISP in my town in Tennessee (I think they were pretty much all mom and pops back then). Then fire up Netscape and surf as well as you could at 2400 baud. Which actually worked pretty well because everything was slow and you just kind of expected it.
Or learning cool HTML tricks by looking at the source, then practicing it myself on the 1mb of storage space my ISP gave us. These days, most of the time, simply viewing the source doesn't tell you a whole lot about what's going on without spending some time digging into JS and CSS for a page. I remember being thrilled when we got an upgraded Netscape version that actually allowed you to save images.
It wasn't just the web, either. I miss spending hours and hours playing MUDs. Some of the best times I had in my teen years were on MUDs; 20 years later I still keep in contact with some of the people I met.
The Internet's pretty awesome now, don't get me wrong. I get to write code and make money doing it, in an economy that didn't exist, really, back then. But there's a part of me that really misses that early wild west Internet that existed just prior to the first dot-com boom. Back when we were just first figuring this stuff out...