Dial-Up, MSN Messenger, Bebo And MySpace

There was a period of about ten years where the internet was somewhere you went, rather than something you were always in.

This is what that was like.

Dial-up

• The handshake tone. A specific sequence of screeches that a whole generation can reproduce with their mouth.
• Nobody could use the phone while you were online, and somebody always picked it up and killed the connection.
• Connecting in the evening or at weekends because of call charges, which is why the whole internet felt busier after six.
• Images loading line by line, from the top down, so you learned what a page was before you could see it.
• AOL free trial CDs, which arrived with magazines, in the post, and taped to cereal boxes.
• 'You've got mail.'
• Broadband arriving through the early 2000s and quietly ending all of it.

MSN Messenger

• Signing in after school, and the sound it made when a friend came online.
• The nudge, which shook the whole window and was used purely to annoy.
• Status messages that were song lyrics aimed at one specific person.
• Appearing offline while actually being online, which was the entire social politics of being fourteen.
• Signing out and straight back in so somebody would notice.
• Winks, emoticons, custom display pictures and the handwriting font.
• It shut down for good in 2013, having been the centre of a generation's evenings.

MySpace and Bebo

• MySpace let you edit your own page with HTML and CSS, which is how a surprising number of people learned to code.
• Top 8 friends, ranked publicly, which caused real fallings-out.
• A song that autoplayed when someone visited your page, at full volume, in a quiet house.
• Tom, who was everybody's first friend by default.
• Bebo's luv, given three a day, and the skins, and the whiteboard.
• Bebo was much bigger than MySpace in the UK and Ireland, which people outside those countries never quite believe.
• Facebook opened beyond universities in 2006 and took everything.

Everything else from that era

• Habbo Hotel, RuneScape and Neopets.
• Limewire, Kazaa and Napster, and downloading a song that turned out to be four minutes of silence.
• Ask Jeeves, where you typed a question in plain English.
• Geocities and Angelfire personal pages, with animated GIFs and a visitor counter.
• Hotmail addresses that are now deeply embarrassing to say out loud.
• Forums with signatures longer than the posts.
• Burning a CD for someone, which was the mixtape of that decade.

Shop cards

How to write it so it lands

• MySpace taught a generation HTML by accident.
• Appearing offline was the entire social politics of being fourteen.
• Bebo beat MySpace in the UK and Ireland.

Where to shop next

• Sweets that disappeared
• School dinners we all remember
• Toys of the 80s and 90s
• Christmas presents every child got
• Computers and consoles we grew up with
• Phones before mobiles
• Cassette tapes and taping the charts
• Video shops and late fees
• The Argos catalogue and the wishbook
• School stuff we all had
• Cars, caravans and the British seaside
• Things kids today will never understand
• Out until the streetlights came on
• What childhood cost then vs now
• Sweets quiz
• Guess the year quiz
• Growing up in the 80s and 90s
• Free feel good tools
• Shop cards
• Planning the party? Birthday party ideas
• How to make a balloon arch
• Photo booth prop ideas
• All guides

Frequently asked questions

What was the dial-up noise?

A modem handshake - two modems negotiating a connection by exchanging tones over an ordinary phone line. It was audible so you could tell whether the connection was working.

Why couldn't you use the phone during dial-up?

Because the connection ran over the voice line itself. Picking up an extension interrupted the signal and usually disconnected you.

Was Bebo bigger than MySpace in the UK?

In the UK and Ireland, yes - Bebo was the dominant teenage social network for a period in the mid-2000s before Facebook took over.

When did MSN Messenger shut down?

Microsoft retired it in 2013, migrating users to Skype. For a lot of people it had been the main way they spoke to their friends for the whole of their teens.