Likely Normal

Do you remember 1995? It was the golden age of dial-up screeches, AOL floppy disks that doubled as coasters, and an internet that moved at the speed of a sedated sloth. For most people, getting online meant connecting an ISP phone number while your modem made strange telephonic mating calls. AOL reigned supreme, flooding mailboxes with free trial discs and filling chat rooms with quirky usernames like MufflestheKitten16 . The iconic “You’ve got mail!” notification was a thrill, even if half your inbox was just spam for more AOL hours. Meanwhile, businesses were still skeptical of this email nonsense, preferring the trusty fax machine—or, in a pinch, yelling down the hallway.

Corporate IT was a wild frontier, often handled by whichever employee had once successfully installed a printer. Servers were mysterious beige boxes that occasionally went down (translation: someone kicked the cables), and cybersecurity meant taping a “DO NOT TOUCH” sign to your monitor. Websites looked like digital ransom notes, plastered with flashing “UNDER CONSTRUCTION” GIFs and visitor counters that proudly announced you were the 12th person to suffer through their GeoCities page. Downloading anything required the patience of a saint—if your 3MB Pamela Anderson wallpaper didn’t get nuked by a surprise phone call, it was a miracle. And yet, despite the chaos, we braved the pixelated unknown, blissfully unaware that Y2K panic lurked just around the corner. Cheers to AOL. Without their persistence, a generation may have never experienced the Internet.