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Remembering the early years of IM...

by Kurt
8 replies
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It's close to my 17th anniversary of being online and doing IM. Any of you other old geezers have memories to share?

I remember Netscape was the browser of choice and it was something like $75. I was taking college classes at the time, and you could find a "student" download link buried on their site where you could download it for free.

AOL was something like $3 an hour to get online. It went to "unlimited" shortly after I came online and the other ISPs followed.

The cheapest hosting was about $30 a month. Network Solutions was the only place to buy domain names...Were they $70 a year or was it $35 a year, but you had to pay for two years? I can't remember...

The biggest (and just about only) SEO software was Web Position Gold. At that time, the SEs didn't spider sites so you would have to submit each page to the 7-8 search engines that could send you decent traffic.

While things were much more expensive back then, the prices also created a "barrier to entry" so there was far less competition.
  • Profile picture of the author Jonathan 2.0
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    In our Family home we had a ISP called something like Freeserve that charged by the minute for Internet access.

    I can't remember how it happened but I accumulated a bill to the tune of something like $570. (Lol.)
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  • Profile picture of the author Dennis Gaskill
    I got started in February of 1997 (that site is still going strong today). My first host was $29.95 a month. You got one month free if you paid for a year at a time. Of course, you could only host one site per hosting account back then.

    Was it even called IM (or Internet marketing) back then? I don't recall seeing that term until years later.

    I learned how to write HTML by looking at people's source code. There wasn't much in the way of instructions for anything beyond the very basics that I could find back then, and CSS didn't exist.

    If you had a 56k dial-up modem you were thought to have "blazing" internet access speed. An unoptimized graphic would take forever to download back then, so everyone was concerned about the file size of the graphics they used.

    I didn't have a merchant account when I first started, so everyone who bought from me paid by check or money order via mail order.

    My first newsletter host was eGroups, a free list host. Yahoo bought them out and I could no longer access my mailing list. Support was no help, so I then signed up for my first commercial mailing list host and started over.

    Compared to today, short, one-word domain names were EASY to find back then. Too bad I wasn't smart enough to realize how much those could be sold for years later.

    Those were the things that popped into my head right away.
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  • Profile picture of the author MikeTucker
    Oh wow, the memories... Back then I had no idea that so many people
    were so far ahead of me in the Internet Marketing game. Sure, I knew
    there were a bunch of Spammers and Banner advertisements, but I thought
    I must have been the only genius in the world doing Forum Marketing
    on a large scale, lol

    Hell, I only stumbled upon the WF a couple of years ago, and my
    mind was blown with all of the different ways to make money, and
    all of the niches that people were working in.
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  • Profile picture of the author HeySal
    Makes me feel lucky that I wasn't online until 2005. I don't know if I could have handled the learning curve back then. You pioneers made things easy by the time I got here.
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    • Profile picture of the author tagiscom
      Originally Posted by Dennis Gaskill View Post

      I got started in February of 1997 (that site is still going strong today). My first host was $29.95 a month. You got one month free if you paid for a year at a time. Of course, you could only host one site per hosting account back then.

      Was it even called IM (or Internet marketing) back then? I don't recall seeing that term until years later.

      I learned how to write HTML by looking at people's source code. There wasn't much in the way of instructions for anything beyond the very basics that I could find back then, and CSS didn't exist.

      If you had a 56k dial-up modem you were thought to have "blazing" internet access speed. An unoptimized graphic would take forever to download back then, so everyone was concerned about the file size of the graphics they used.

      I didn't have a merchant account when I first started, so everyone who bought from me paid by check or money order via mail order.

      My first newsletter host was eGroups, a free list host. Yahoo bought them out and I could no longer access my mailing list. Support was no help, so I then signed up for my first commercial mailing list host and started over.

      Compared to today, short, one-word domain names were EASY to find back then. Too bad I wasn't smart enough to realize how much those could be sold for years later.

      Those were the things that popped into my head right away.
      Hmmmm, l suppose some will still pay $400 for a domain name.

      Whenever l set up a new site, and the best are taken by these vultures, l just go for the next best thing, and ignore them.

      And if they constantly send me emails, saying this is available for only $399 l really ignore them.


      No doubt some make good money with this, with cashed up company's buying them, but l think that most people would ignore them like the plague.


      Yep, l started in December 2007, so l am fairly new to this, but not a newbie!


      Shane
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      • Profile picture of the author Midnight Oil
        Kurt: I remember using Netscape, but don't think I ever paid for it. AOL did come out to $3 an hour, but I remember they marketed it at a nickle per minute so it didn't sound so bad. Will never forget the AOL floppies from hell. Network Solutions was indeed $70 a year and then dropped to $35.

        Dennis: Like you, I learned HTML by looking at the source code on other sites. I actually still have a few sites running that were built on snippets of code I lifted in the 90s.

        Bought my first domain in February of '96 and still have it today. Another bought in the 90s is still my primary site today and allows me to work from home.

        As far back as '96 I was running local and general business directories and classified ad sites. I was doing local when local wasn't cool.

        I remember learning the ins and outs of marketing on newsgroups, on CompuServe and Prodigy, and the old AOL classifieds. Newsgroups were a blast. The Wild, Wild West of the Internet.

        I'm still on at least two marketer's email lists that I subscribed to around '97 or so. Believe it or not, I still use Eudora as my primary email client. Still works great. I stopped using it for my list several years ago, but could if I needed to.

        Late 90s and early oughts, I hung out on a lot of boards. ABlake, Sowpub, Myers, Willie's and more. And, of course, the old WF: Warriors of Internet Marketing.

        In '99 or 2000 I was a DMOZ editor, and used it to my advantage as I built a category for it and further developed a niche for myself.

        I remember 300+ money making reports on disk, a slew of other businesses on disk, Internet Malls, Virtual Offices, Instant Sales Letters, Million Dollar Emails, eBook compilers, Link-O-Matic, Matt's Script Archive, guestbooks, Sanford and on and on . . .

        At least a good handful of marketers that I knew of then are on the WF to this day. Probably more.

        The history of internet marketing . . . what a cool authority site that would make.
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  • Profile picture of the author KimW
    I don't know if I got on before others, but when I was first on AOL is was $6 an hour and the dial up was 14.400
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