Prior to the internet condensing into just 5 or so websites, what do you remember fondling about being online?
I remember winning a raffle contest on the old Terraria forums and getting to pick my own title (instead of just New Member, Member, Well-Known Member). Of course, since I was like 13, I picked a random collection of letters that only I knew was an acronym of my signature on said forums.
I don’t know about favorite but I will give my first memory:
This was at a time when our lab had X.25 terminal access (9600bps I think) to some Unix hosts that were on the Internet but we didn’t have proper TCP/IP connectivity to the lab itself. I’d already used a bunch of terminal based stuff: Email, Usenet, IRC, FTP/Archie. At some point I downloaded Mosaic because I was vaguely aware of the buzz around it. I managed to compile it (or was it pre-built? I would have needed Motif to build it), fired it up, figured out how to open some local HTML files that came with it and I could tell that it was some kind of hypertext system. But it had no authoring and without proper Internet access the external links didn’t work. So I didn’t really get what it was about.
But I figured it out later on.
Oh I remember how cool it was when Mosaic landed. Web pages were so much cooler than boring 'ol Gopher or let alone FTP