Runet at the turn of the millennium: what do you remember about it?

The generation of births after 2000 is called the “founders”. They can’t imagine what life is without the Internet. However, older people, too, have already begun to forget. Life gallops in such a gallop that we — the older ones — have already forgotten even what the RuNet was in its early years, when the parents of some founders had not even met. We decided to make a little nostalgia here, and we invite you to recall how the Russian piece of the network looked about one coming of age back and how people generally used the Internet.

We will not turn to the times before historical materialism, that is, to the 1990s, for beauty we will stop in the 2000th year. Before the appearance of these of your smartphones, there were still 7 years left, and mobile phones for the most part looked something like this:


Remember all these dumb covers, in which the mobile phones were pushed and clung to their belts?

In those years we went on the Internet for a walk from ordinary computers, as in the first picture of the post. Wifi? Do not make me laugh. In the apartments of many Russians, there was not even a cable for a dedicated Internet (they could write a novel about local providers of those years). Modems gave us the joy of joining the world wide network, and the real bandwidth hung around 30-40 kilobits per second. Take a calculator and calculate how long it took to download a megabyte mp3 file by five with such a crazy channel (if without disconnection).

By the way, in those years, many of us paid for the Internet ... by the time of use. Yeah, the longer you crawl on sites, the more you pay. It was cheaper at night. Therefore, the most advanced overnight started downloading some sites entirely. Quite a feasible task for those times, even despite the heartbreaking modem speed.



Where did people go on Runet in 2000? Before the boom of social networks, there were a few more years. Even few learned about LJ:



And we talked mainly in ICQ (especially advanced ones - in mIRC) and on chat sites, the largest of which was “Crib”:



But still, the main life was in “ICQ” - without any irony and stretch of the people's messenger. There was a whole subculture of dating establishments in ICQ, their account numbers were printed on business cards, and for “six-character” (six-digit account numbers) people laid out a lot of money. By the way, I still remember my nine-character by heart, and I met my future wife in ICQ (she was looking for a new interlocutor for a suitable nickname).

Most of the portals and services known today simply did not exist. The most popular search engines were “Rambler” and “Aport”:


Please note, in the upper right corner, you could select the page display encoding. And it was really in demand.

Those who did not want to use the bourgeois Hotmail mail service, the most popular in the world at that time, mastered the young mailers hotbox.ru and mail.ru:



We went to the Anekdot , Kulichki and Fomenko sites for entertainment:




But the “Maxim Moshkov Library” has not changed at all all these years, so if you want to see the canned web design dinosaur live, then go to lib.ru:


Advanced citizens preferred news sites to television and newspapers:




This is how the Internet lived in our country in a year with three zeros. For the upcoming birthday of Runet, we are preparing a large study and want to ask you what sites you used in those days? There are few, only 4 questions.