Some of the best exchanges on the Web begin with simple proposals, and one of them appeared on the AskReddit subreddit: Name something that was used heavily in the year 2000, and that is almost not touched today. With more than 37,800 comments, users shared examples that take us on a fabulous journey through time of two decades… and it's not to be missed.
GeoCities
The last version of GeoCities survived in Japan until March 2019, but its early years basically defined the old Web, with colorful, strange, chaotic pages, and much more human.
The Animated 'Under Construction' GIF
And not only that: those web pages also had hit counters, the webmaster's address was public, and there were even guest books to leave a message. A different era…
CRT and Projection Televisions
Having a 29-inch monster or more was pure glory at the beginning of the century. Today, their owners don't know what to do to get them out of the house. Some are worth rescuing, the rest are a nightmare of transportation and recycling.
Dial-Up Connections
Oh. My. God. The fights with mothers and sisters over the phone line, the horror of the bill at the end of the month, waiting for the unlimited plan schedule, praying next to the modem to get an extra kilobyte... (chills)
Napster
For some, Napster allowed an entire generation to steal music. For others, it was the first step that forced a crappy industry to radically change and finally enter the 21st century.
CD-RWs
That's right: before pendrives and external drives, we used these. They appeared in '97, established the requirement for special burners, and we abandoned them in record time.
PDAs and Palm Pilots
I have very good memories of my Palm Pilot Professional, writing science fiction with the stylus at midnight while the green light burned my eyes, although it devoured batteries like crazy…
Zip Disks
The idea of having 100 megabytes stored on a single disk in the year 2000 was revolutionary... until the damn thing stopped working and you lost 100 megabytes of data in an instant.
Public Payphones
In some countries they turned them into WiFi stations, and other regions decided to enable free calls because the revenue didn't cover the cost of collecting the money.
America Online
Hollywood even suggested that people could fall in love using America Online. What the movies never told was the storm of floppy disks and CDs with free hours that were pure physical spam, and we can't forget all those computers destroyed by its lamentable software.
Blockbuster
I personally preferred the local video store, but it was hard to resist Blockbuster's variety... until it filed for bankruptcy in 2010, and its stores closed in the following years. Only one Blockbuster remains in Oregon, and it has become a whole tourist attraction.
VCRs and VHS Tapes
If we talk about Blockbusters, VCRs and VHS couldn't be missing. Few things were as satisfying as understanding its damn programming and recording reruns of series in the middle of the night, but the tracking and tapes devoured by humidity... ugh.
The Year 2000: What Did We Forget?
Pagers, landlines and phone books, Winamp (which is about to come back), ball mice, ICQ, mIRC and other messengers, Kazaa/LimeWire/Audiogalaxy... the list goes on, and we want you to complete it with everything you used in the year 2000. Leave a comment!
