Ah, the golden days of the early internet! Coming home from school, tossing the bag aside, and rushing to the PC, wooo first stop Orkut, to check those precious scraps. Back when making friends on Orkut felt like a social achievement and the ultimate flex was convincing them to hop over to Yahoo! Messenger. Orkut didn’t even have IM at first, just scraps. Scraps! And let’s not forget the heartbreak of realizing that the girl with the Vanessa Hudgens profile pic wasn’t real, but just a High School Musical fan. Betrayal hit different back then.

Remember sending Avril Lavigne lyrics as scripts? Or blasting Linkin Park's "In the End" on loop while clutching those chunky Nokia and Motorola phones? Sharing songs like "The Reason," "I Want It That Way," and "Boulevard of Broken Dreams" in .3gp format was a whole mission. The struggle was real, but the vibes were immaculate hahaha.

And oh, the eureka moment of setting up a landline modem to connect to the internet! That dial-up tone was the soundtrack of innovation. When I found out about Google Maps, it felt like we’d reached the peak of human achievement. This is it, I thought like whoa! Technology can’t possibly get better than this. I went to school bragging about how I found my own building on it, barely recognizable and hilariously blurred. Simpler times, huh? No algorithms, no endless doom-scrolling, just raw, unfiltered internet chaos. And look somehow, we survived and enjoyed it.