So, here’s a bit of what I remember using all of the queues included in the website snapshot I posted yesterday from 2003: We obviously owned our PT Cruizer back then. A purple one (Sandy’s). I keep thinking we had two of them, but I think that was only for our Neons – I had a black one and she had a blue one.

There was no Android OS, so we got our driving directions off of the web. I don’t recall if there was even a Google Maps back then, but I do vaguely remember getting directions from two different sites, one being much easier to use and providing better directions than the other. Sandy like Emeril of Food TV (now the Food Network), several of our friends had their own personal websites (Facebook didn’t exist yet), and our game consoles were the original Playstation, the Playstation 2, and the original X-Box.

We communicated a lot via Instant Messenger applications like AIM (AOL Instant Messenger), ICQ (I Seek You), MSN Messenger, and Yahoo Messenger. Eventually a few clever people decided to combine as many messenger services into one much-better service, and the likes of Odigo and Trillian became pretty popular. I remember using Trillian for quite some time, since I had friends and family on several of the different messengers–some on AIM, some on Yahoo, some on MSN… Trillian was of huge value for me.

ReadyHosting was my webhost back then, and I remember the main reason being that they were located in Kenosha. I remember taking a tour of their Kenosha facility back then and I was pretty disappointed. It was basically just a call center. The servers were located elsewhere, clearly not in Kenosha.

Most of my tech orders came from TigerDirect or CDW. Best Buy didn’t exist. I went to Radio Shack a lot though, as well as Chester’s Electronics, a local Kenosha-based electronics store that my dad and I loved to visit.

Search engines were considered “portals” and Google was either pretty small or non-existent, as you can see by my list of “Portals”. They included AltaVista, Excite, Lycos, MSN, Webcrawler, and Yahoo. Google is, however, listed under “Reference”, so they must have existed.

American TV and Circuit City existed back then along with Best Buy. Best Buy clearly outlived them, and Amazon will most likely outlive Best Buy the way things are looking.

Our favorite TV shows included The Practice, The Shield, Six Feet Under, Sopranos, Touched By An Angel, and The Screensasvers, a show on TechTV I loved. I was very sad to see that network die, I loved that show. It eventually came back, resurrected by Leo Laporte as “The New Screensavers”, which was also a great show I watch religiously, but that one was cancelled recently as well. Leo’s still around though, and still doing several tech shows from his TWiT studios and show named “TWiT” (This Week in Tech). He also does several other tech shows as well as a radio show.

There’s a lot more in that screenshot, and it feels really good to be able to recall so much just from a single screenshot… I guess a picture really is worth a thousand words. Or, in this case, about 542 words. Gawd, what a nerd.