Runet at the turn of the millennium: what do you remember about it?

Generations born after 2000 are called “founders.” They have no idea what life is without the Internet. However, older people, too, have already begun to forget. Life gallops at such a gallop that we — who are older — have even forgotten what the Runet was like in its first years, when the parents of some of the founders had not even met. We decided to ponoosit a little here, and we invite you to remember what a Russian piece of the network looked like about one full age and how people used the Internet in general.

We will not turn to the times before historical materialism, that is, by the 1990s, for the sake of beauty, we’ll dwell on the year 2000. Before the advent of these of your smartphones, there were still 7 years left, and mobile phones for the most part looked like this:


Remember all these dumb covers, which thrust mobiles and cling them to the belt?
')
In those years we went on the Internet to walk from ordinary computers, as in the first picture of the post. Wi-Fi? Do not make me laugh. In the apartments of many Russians, the cable of the dedicated Internet was not even stretched (you can write a novel about local providers of those years). The happiness of communicating to the worldwide network was given to us by modems, and the actual bandwidth was around 30-40 kilobits per second. Take a calculator and calculate how long the mp3 file was downloaded for five megabytes with such a crazy channel (if without disconnections).

By the way, in those years, many of us paid for the Internet ... by the time of use. Yeah, the longer you go through the sites, the more you pay. At night it was cheaper. Therefore, the most advanced for the night started downloading some sites entirely. It is quite a feasible task for those times, even despite the heartbreaking modem speed.



Where was the man on the Runet in 2000? Until the boom of social networks had a few more years. Even about LJ few still knew:



And we communicated mainly in ICQ (especially advanced - in mIRC) and on chat sites, the largest of which was the “Crib”:



But still the main life was in “ICQ” - without any irony and stretch of the national messenger. There was a whole subculture of dating in ICQ, the numbers of their accounts were printed on business cards, and for six digits (six-digit account numbers) people laid out big money. By the way, I still remember my nine signs by heart until now, and I met my future wife in ICQ (she was looking for a new interlocutor on a suitable nickname).

Most of the portals and services known today simply did not exist. The most popular search engines were Rambler and Aport:


Please note that in the upper right corner you could choose the encoding of the page display. And it was really in demand.

Those who did not want to use the bourgeois hotmail mail service, the most popular in the world at that time, were mastered by young mailbox hotbox.ru and mail.ru:



For fun, we went to the sites "Anecdot", "Kulichka" and "Fomenko":




But the Maxim Moshkov Library has not changed at all over the years, so if you want to see a conserved web design dinosaur, then go to lib.ru:


Advanced citizens preferred news sites to television and newspapers:




Approximately the Internet lived in our country a year with three zeros. For the upcoming birthday of Runet, we are preparing a large study and want to ask you which sites you used in those times? There are a few, only 4 questions.