5 websites you visited when you first discovered the Internet
Another installment in our "nostalgia" series
Ah, the internet...Below you can continue
reading the article
A vast place with countless content from around the world, making it hard to choose just one source of information. With the boom of its arrival here in Brazil, more specifically starting in the 2000s, the number of web pages to browse skyrocketed. But for those of you from the time when "all of this was just wilderness," some pages stood out more than others in that distant past.
Now relive 5 websites you visited when you first discovered the internet.
Charges
[caption id="attachment_4936" align="alignnone" width="499"]
Charges.com.br website.[/caption]
The humor website featuring cartoons by cartoonist Maurício Ricardo, was created in February 2000, and brought humor snippets featuring famous figures from our daily lives. Still with limited variety of websites available for Brazilian users, the portal became a reference for humor among web newcomers at the turn of the century.
Cadê?
[caption id="attachment_4937" align="alignnone" width="499"]
"Cadê?" search engine website.[/caption]
Created in 1995 by Brazilians Gustavo Viberti and Fabio Oliveira, the search engine Cadê was the leader in usage by users in the country. Long before Google dominated the world in search technology, Cadê was the most sought after when it came to finding content. Unfortunately, due to difficulties in making the product profitable—since at the time Brazilian advertising didn't believe in the internet's potential—Cadê was sold to the foreign Yahoo!, becoming Yahoo! Cadê.
Orkut
[caption id="attachment_4938" align="alignnone" width="500"]
"I Hate Waking Up Early" community, popular on the social network.[/caption]
The social network we barely knew about and already considered super cool, right? Orkut was a dating site affiliated with Google and created by Orkut Büyükkökten in January 2004. Based in California, the site had a high number of Brazilian users. Initially, you needed a "virtual invite" from users already registered on the network to be part of the select group of participants. Later, access was opened to anyone interested through a registration that required an email address. The site's success in the country was so great that on August 7, 2008, its responsibilities were fully transferred to Google Brasil. With access to chat through Google Talk, Communities with the strangest titles you could imagine, infamous games, and the famous app Buddy Poke, the site said its last goodbye in 2014 when, facing competition from Zuckerberg's Facebook, the page's existence came to an end.
Fliperama
[caption id="attachment_4939" align="alignnone" width="565"]
Fliperama games website.[/caption]
The Fliperama games website was a page that emerged in the early 2000s offering arcade games and games from various consoles in a revisited way, as well as games that loaded quickly for the slow internet of yesteryear (we miss Speedy... or not). Who doesn't remember the classic "close the pop-ups," the Sonic game with the bunny Cream as one of the playable characters, or even the guy from Gold Miner, who spent hours trying to rescue all the nuggets from the platform. A hit among kids and teenagers, it was one of the first websites accessed by many Brazilians who are now in their twenties and even thirties.
Assustador
[caption id="attachment_4940" align="alignnone" width="555"]
Sinister Assustador website.[/caption]
A wild page you accessed when you first discovered the internet, and also quite sinister. The page of scary and bizarre content showed everything from brutal deaths to scenes of mutilation and ghostly apparitions in photos. It was the perfect kind of forbidden site for you to check out with friends and hidden from your parents. The content was so bizarre that even the deepweb doubts it. Go figure why we spent long moments watching this. Scary.
That's all for today, folks. I bet you felt like you were somewhere in the first decade of the 2000s right now, didn't you? Did we miss any websites? Comment below which page you'd include on this list. Share it with your friends and follow us on social media too. After all, nostalgia is living.
Charges.com.br website.[/caption]
The humor website featuring cartoons by cartoonist Maurício Ricardo, was created in February 2000, and brought humor snippets featuring famous figures from our daily lives. Still with limited variety of websites available for Brazilian users, the portal became a reference for humor among web newcomers at the turn of the century.
Cadê?
[caption id="attachment_4937" align="alignnone" width="499"] "Cadê?" search engine website.[/caption]
Created in 1995 by Brazilians Gustavo Viberti and Fabio Oliveira, the search engine Cadê was the leader in usage by users in the country. Long before Google dominated the world in search technology, Cadê was the most sought after when it came to finding content. Unfortunately, due to difficulties in making the product profitable—since at the time Brazilian advertising didn't believe in the internet's potential—Cadê was sold to the foreign Yahoo!, becoming Yahoo! Cadê.
Orkut
[caption id="attachment_4938" align="alignnone" width="500"] "I Hate Waking Up Early" community, popular on the social network.[/caption]
The social network we barely knew about and already considered super cool, right? Orkut was a dating site affiliated with Google and created by Orkut Büyükkökten in January 2004. Based in California, the site had a high number of Brazilian users. Initially, you needed a "virtual invite" from users already registered on the network to be part of the select group of participants. Later, access was opened to anyone interested through a registration that required an email address. The site's success in the country was so great that on August 7, 2008, its responsibilities were fully transferred to Google Brasil. With access to chat through Google Talk, Communities with the strangest titles you could imagine, infamous games, and the famous app Buddy Poke, the site said its last goodbye in 2014 when, facing competition from Zuckerberg's Facebook, the page's existence came to an end.
Fliperama
[caption id="attachment_4939" align="alignnone" width="565"] Fliperama games website.[/caption]
The Fliperama games website was a page that emerged in the early 2000s offering arcade games and games from various consoles in a revisited way, as well as games that loaded quickly for the slow internet of yesteryear (we miss Speedy... or not). Who doesn't remember the classic "close the pop-ups," the Sonic game with the bunny Cream as one of the playable characters, or even the guy from Gold Miner, who spent hours trying to rescue all the nuggets from the platform. A hit among kids and teenagers, it was one of the first websites accessed by many Brazilians who are now in their twenties and even thirties.
Assustador
[caption id="attachment_4940" align="alignnone" width="555"] Sinister Assustador website.[/caption]
A wild page you accessed when you first discovered the internet, and also quite sinister. The page of scary and bizarre content showed everything from brutal deaths to scenes of mutilation and ghostly apparitions in photos. It was the perfect kind of forbidden site for you to check out with friends and hidden from your parents. The content was so bizarre that even the deepweb doubts it. Go figure why we spent long moments watching this. Scary.
That's all for today, folks. I bet you felt like you were somewhere in the first decade of the 2000s right now, didn't you? Did we miss any websites? Comment below which page you'd include on this list. Share it with your friends and follow us on social media too. After all, nostalgia is living.
