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The story
A thread titled “Memories of the Early Internet” popped up on 5ch’s Live Anything board, drawing in stories from the days before everyone had always-on broadband — dial-up connections, NTT’s late-night flat-rate “Telehodai” plan, even getting online through a Dreamcast. Some posters recalled “logging on every day buzzing with excitement,” while others lamented how dull the internet feels now by comparison. The thread also split over where exactly the early internet era ends, and whether users back then really were sharper than today’s.
What people said
That's what Telehodai (the flat-rate night hours) was for
Though of course, while you were dialed up the phone line itself was tied up the whole time
Jealous of my youth?
Suck it, old man 🖕
I used to be a true believer in netiquette
but I honestly couldn't keep up with the whole "spit venom" style of net manners — if anything, that's what got me questioning netiquette in the first place
You could do that with a PS2 too
Though I never met anyone who actually did 🥺
Brings back memories
I feel like I spent forever playing the trial version of some game called "Guruguru Onsen" (an old online board-game site) after getting connected
I used to do that during Telehodai hours
Isn't that only for the slim model?
There's an external add-on unit for it
They were run by people who actually knew their stuff, so the info was solid, and there weren't nearly as many ads as now.
Things were pretty comfortable and fun back then.
In the beginning, basically only rich people could even get online.
Even in 2ch's early days, I think it was mostly content made by single men who had some money and knowledge to spare.
Sure, there were odd expressions and weirdos, but deep down a lot of them were people with room to spare in life.
How do you figure? Unlike now, it was a total lawless wasteland.
It's still not free even now.
Probably sometime after we hit the 21st century.
Even flip phones had 2ch browser apps back then
I used one called "i-Mona" (named after 2ch's "Mona" mascot character)
Things really do go downhill the moment money gets involved.
Wiki-style sites didn't even exist yet in the early internet era.
You can't view them at all now unless you install special software 🥺
Flash is dead, after all.
That still counts as "early" too
All the way up until blog culture came along and diluted the whole flavor of the internet.
So you're drawing the line by internet culture, not by connection type?
Still not totally clear where the cutoff actually is.
My take: the "early" era lasted until people stopped painstakingly hand-coding personal sites in HTML or installing Movable Type to run their own blog-like page.
There were newsgroups too, weren't there?
Don't remember that one, lol
Background and Key Points of This Topic
In the dial-up era, NTT’s flat-rate late-night service “Telehodai” (launched in 1995, offering unlimited connection from 11pm to 8am) was, for many users, one of the few windows to get online without worrying about the phone bill piling up. Connection environments then changed dramatically around the turn of the millennium as ADSL began spreading. In the thread, opinions split over where to draw the line on the “early internet era” — some measured it by connection technology (dial-up vs. ADSL), while others measured it by culture, drawing the cutoff somewhere between the age of hand-coded personal HTML pages and the rise of blogging platforms. There’s no fixed definition, and readers should note that where people draw the line tends to depend on when they personally experienced it. It’s also worth noting that the claim “average IQ was higher back then” drew pushback from another poster who called it “a lawless wasteland” instead — a reminder that the rosy, idyllic image of the early internet isn’t a universally shared memory.
※This article is excerpted and summarized from the 5ch (Live Anything board) thread “Memories of the Early Internet.”
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