I never wanted to mute, because with sound you could hear a bad connection early and retry faster.

Yeah I don't think we ever got that fast in South Africa. I started out on a 1200 baud modem on something called Beltel which is like Prestel which was the UK equivalent. At the time our entire country's international internet connection was via a 9600 modem based at Grahamstown university and the other universities shared that link AFAIK. Then I got a borrowed VMS account at university of cape town which I could use to telnet to a sun unix box and run IRC and my life changed. Was also phone phreaking from Cape Town at a little later on using BlueBeep to connect to a BBS in Orange County called Digital Decay. Was suuuper lucky when I'd get a 14.4 connection on the international trunk. Mostly it was slower. But the AT&T home country directs had the best lines when they were seizable.

Somebody else must've already read mine.

Seconded. Blogs are great but the old school blogs were David vs Goliath. I remember how much fun it was to cycle through my web ring and see all the extremely creative sites. Some flash, some just clever JavaScript, none of it used jquery or react or components. In fact, one was a giant anchor area image divided up into sections (not sliced designs, one whole image! With target boxes for clickable regions).

I still have my deviantart profile from the inevitable collapse into corporate. Web design took a turn for the smashing and now it all looks the same.

Everyone was still too cautious to type their credit card in or something. There was nothing to monetize. So, yeah, every website was someone's small passion project, with handwritten HTML.

State of the art for discovery used to be browsing a (manually?) curated directory on Yahoo. Google appeared and was a mind-blowing sea change. That's probably the peak, Google's inception up until jackass SEO marketers appeared. During that window, search worked fantastically over content that was fun to read.

I remember using a “high-speed” 14.4 kbps modem. I mean, these were thousands of bits per second, really insane. Faster than many LLMs.