The landscape of the internet has changed quite a bit since I was a kid, to say the least. Gone are the days of the 5-minute loading time while your dial-up modem connected you to the internet, when we made the original memes on Microsoft Paint or the early versions of Photoshop, before YouTube was even a seed of an idea in someone's brain. Now anyone with a phone has immediate access to the internet, and memes are a dime a dozen. It's so easy to make them that the internet is literally saturated with them, and they've lost a bit of the soul they had when they were first created.
It's natural that the internet today looks completely different from what it looked like 20+ years ago. Technology advanced, and so did our tastes. No one has the attention span to watch hours of Nyan Cat racing through his pixelated universe or the patience to hear the Hamster Dance play over and over again while scrolling. But there is a big part of me that misses the human element that went into the creation of all of these early memes of the internet. They weren't purrfect, they weren't tailored for viral success - they were just silly and caught on because they were ridiculous.
So for all you aging millennials or folks born in the 1990s or earlier, I brought back some nostalgic cat memes that you might recognize that I feel really encompass the taste of the early internet. They would fail horribly if I posted them on social media, but for you true fans, they might transport you back to those days on your family computer and clogging your phone line, all for the sake of a little harmless fun on the World Wide Web.
And if you recognize some of them, it's time for your 40+ multivitamin and your daily stretches so you don't accidentally throw out your back.