There was a time when having a website made your business look positively futuristic. There was a time when people asked whether the internet was a fad. There was a time when getting online required patience, a phone line, and a modem that sounded like two fax machines having a heated argument.
We remember. We were there.
Welcome to The Old Days of the Internet, a little corner of AuditThenFix.com devoted to the strange, wonderful, occasionally ridiculous years that got us here.
Ask Jeeves, anyone? HotBot?
We watched search engines evolve, appear, disappear, merge, and come back with fresh branding and a new business plan. Ask Jeeves? HotBot? AltaVista? We remember them.
Want to go further back? Archie. Veronica. Jughead. Those names mean something very specific to a particular generation of internet explorers. Before finding information online became second nature, finding information online was an adventure all by itself.
And not everything worth exploring was on the World Wide Web. IRC? MUSH? MOO? If you're nodding, you know what we're talking about. If you're not, don't worry. We'll tell you the stories, including a few that probably should have stayed buried in an old server log.
Some of us weren't just visiting. We were building.
I spent time creating things inside a Star Trek MOO, a shared, text-based world where imagination did a lot of the work modern graphics do today. Eventually, I became an administrator. Which is a polite way of saying somebody gave me far too much power.
Among other things, I built a Starfleet cadet shooting range with a little surprise hidden inside. On shot number 42, a cadet didn't simply hit another target. They found themselves transported to essentially the end of the universe. Douglas Adams fans will understand the number.
There was just one small engineering problem: I never did figure out how to bring everyone back.
We'll get into that particular Federation incident in a story of its own. To any cadets still out there, apologies. Mostly.
Then everybody else arrived.
We were there when Facebook opened beyond college campuses and the rest of us joined the party. There were pokes, peculiar games, and yes, we threw our share of digital sheep. It was a different time. Let's not examine the productivity numbers too closely.
Meanwhile, the internet was changing real businesses. Websites stopped being online business cards and became storefronts. Shopping carts became essential. Databases, forms, customer systems, and all the plumbing behind the scenes became the difference between a business that could grow and one that kept tripping over itself.
For more than 25 years, we've helped businesses navigate that changing world. We've built, repaired, connected, cleaned up, and untangled websites, e-commerce systems, databases, forms, and the other things that are supposed to make business easier.
We're not nostalgic because we think the old internet was better.
Some of it was brilliant. Some of it was painfully slow. Some of it was a complete disaster with blinking text.
We love what today's technology can do, including AI. But decades of experience teach you something a shiny new platform can't: how to tell a genuinely useful solution from an expensive problem wearing a new outfit.
That's also why we started AuditThenFix. Most businesses don't need another buzzword or a never-ending contract. They need someone who can look at what's happening, explain it in plain English, and help make it work.
Yes, there are real people behind this little screen.
We're based in Massachusetts, and we work exclusively with American businesses. We're not an anonymous operation hiding behind a slick landing page. We're people who have lived through the technology, made the mistakes, fixed the mistakes, and occasionally stranded innocent Starfleet cadets in deep space.
That's what this blog is about: the tools we used, the communities we built, the spectacularly weird corners of the early internet, and the lessons that still matter to businesses today.
So pull up a virtual chair. And tell us: what's your weirdest memory of the old internet?
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