A Pre-Teen Internet Wonderland

by Brian Hioe

Welcome to The Lost Internet, a month-long series in which the members of Flaming Hydra revisit internet marvels of the past. 

I remember the internet of the late 1990s and early 2000s as a place of just so many awkward weirdos, my friends and I among them. This was the era of Geocities, AIM, and the like: a lot of people my age look back with nostalgia on MySpace and Tumblr, but all that came later, well into the age of social media. My own fondest memories are of the days before platforms came to dominate, because my friends and I were “early adopters” whose internet lives began in elementary school.

Back then, we were very into building terrible websites. When we were in the fourth or fifth grade, we built one called the “Four Hawks”—our name for ourselves, a group of four socially awkward boys who went to the same elementary school. We thought ourselves rather clever for having a secret members’ section on the site in the form of a login screen that didn’t really lead anywhere. Instead, you got access through a small secret link. In retrospect, we likely adopted this design feature because we didn’t know how to password-protect websites. I don’t recall much about the members’ section, except that it was full of pixelated sprites of dancing penguins. 

At first I could barely access this irresistible world, because we didn't have dial-up or any other form of internet at home. Eventually I persuaded my parents to get a connection so that I could keep up with my friends—and convincing them took a lot of work! Early on, they were against the idea of having even a television in the house, thinking that it would distract me from my studies. Because of this, as an immigrant kid, I had very little to talk about with my peers, who were watching sports and all kinds of television shows. I think that’s how I eventually sold them on getting cable and dial-up—playing on their fears that I wouldn’t fit in, or make friends.