The nineties was a decade of contrasts. The hyper colour residue of the late ‘80s, the grunge and grit of a new pessimistic brand of musical expression. Wealth and affluence, poverty and oppression. Freedom and war in Europe, boom and bust in Asia, and scandal in the States.

Generation X, the teens of the '90s brought up on MTV, embraced the rule of cool - be radical, be awesome, don't let the man hold you down. All that paperwork and numbers, it's all just hot air man. Learn the guitar, shred some sick moves on your skateboard, roll your eyes at your lame parents 'cause they just don't get it, man. Got an “Explicit Content” poster on my door, a bong under the bed, and a stack of Marilyn Manson tapes (and a couple of CDs to boot) as long as your arm. Turn it up, break it down, fuck The Man.

The nineties was the decade when the internet started to revolutionise the world, just a few years into its existence. New scope for fan communities, dissemination of information, and political activism. Amongst it all, the world of conspiracy, mythology and folklore finds a new digital home. Communities that previously formed around badly written rag newspapers, tape traders and half-remembered weed-clouded conversations can now be expanded to a much larger audience. As the internet is a new dawn for the sharing of information, as it is for rumour and unsubstantiated urban legend.

Right now, in the year 2018, there are nearly 2 billion websites currently on the world wide web. Out of those, maybe 1% are actually active. In 1997, there were about 150,000. The most popular internet browser was Netscape Navigator, followed by Internet Explorer (a new piece of software that hadn’t yet picked up momentum). The fastest modems available in ‘97 provided a whopping 56 kilobytes per second of internet, and the largest computer monitors available were about 800×600. Dial-up internet was still the norm, which used the phone lines to establish a connection to the ISP. Although you couldn’t use the phone while connected and the connection was slow, the sound of a dial-up modem connecting became a cultural touchstone.

Yahoo was the web’s most popular search engine and web portal, but Webcrawler and Altavista were the favoured engines of the consummate surfer, Webcrawler being the first search engine to feature full text search. Bedroom coders were already making their own websites with a little help from popular hosting services, Angelfire, Geocities and Tripod. eBay had just recently launched, and was starting to take off, while Google floundered in obscurity for the time being. In ‘94, The Telegraph became the first UK newspaper to have their own website, and the BBC launched followed suit with a subscription based news-page in ‘96.

While there were some comparatively larger forum spaces, most of the internet’s social scene took place on independent forum message-boards, hosted on services like WIT and phpBB. Often forums organised around a specific niche interest. CryptoNet is one such niche community. As with any enclosed community, the members of these forums develop their own shared set of references, vocabulary, and experiences. In ‘97, going from forum to forum could be like crossing the border into a different country altogether.

You can find some archived geocities pages here.

Earlier in the year, the government changed in a landslide, and in November the Queen and Prince Philip celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary. The UK economy was booming, fueled by a burgeoning speculator bubble, not to pop completely for another decade. The first Harry Potter book is published, starting a cultural phenomenon, Pokemon was introduced to an American audience (leaving Europeans to wait for another year), and Dolly the sheep was cloned in Scotland.

In the Christmas musical charts, Aqua’s masterpiece of dance-pop, Barbie Girl, had finally been pushed out of a month long stint at number one by ensemble charity single, Perfect Day. At the box office, Alien Resurrection was soon to be eclipsed in success by Pierce Brosnan’s second outing as 007 in Tomorrow Never Dies. Neither would reach the lofty heights of record-setting movie, Titanic, from earlier in the year. Baywatch, the smash hit TV show that was already the most watched TV show in history, was about halfway through its eighth season, with Carmen Electra joining the show as the newest piece of family-friendly lifeguard cheesecake.

In electronics, the number of household personal computers was rising by the year. By the end of ‘97, nearly a third of UK households owned a PC, compared to the 15% in 1990. Tamagotchis had just made their way over from Japan, and were taking the toy world by storm, while the sales of the Game Boy Pocket were still holding strong a year on from its release.