22 Early Internet Memes That Take Us Back to Our First LOLs

If you grew up on the early internet, you probably remember waiting for pages to load, trying to download music and getting like 57 viruses at the same time, restarting your computer when your screen froze, chatting with your friends on MSN, sending your first emoticons :) :P and sharing early memes!

The oldies, the ones that made us fall in love with this art form of humor. Old memes didn't need fancy editing or perfect timing; they could be just simple drawings of exaggerated facial expressions with a short, relatable catchphrase, and that was it. That's how our sense of humor started developing online, and how we began our obsession with sharing relatable, funny jokes we felt the whole world could understand. This, ladies and gentlemen, is online culture! Let's take a trip back to our very first LOLs.

01

via Nicole Jack
Early internet gems were weird, simple, and impossible to forget. One funny picture could live in our heads for years, and that's why we still remember them today. There were hilarious main characters like Trollface or Lolface who starred in our first meme shares. We sent them to our friends through email chains or message boards, saved them on our family computers, or maybe we saw them in a YouTube video.
02

via Anna
03

via YMNES
04

via Kalyan Stanliey
05

via Kanishka Sisodia
06

via Megana E.
07

via Jacky LePore
08

via Misty Matthews
09

via Sinem
10

via howtogrowbud.com
11

via Shaylee Ashby
The internet felt smaller and stranger back then, before social media feeds and algorithms decided what we saw, before the internet was full of influencers. Discovering memes felt like sharing an inside joke with other early internet kids, as if we all spoke the same language, even if we lived on opposite sides of the world and had never met.
12

via XXXlucidmaneXXX
13

via Yanilka Sosa
14

via ragebuilder.com
15

via Jess U.
16

via Casey Bray
17

via Rene I.
18

via Rach
19

via Alley Kolstad
20

via abby.miller
21

via Toasterwarrior
The fun thing about memes is that most of them show bizarre moments we all recognize but never really thought about until we saw them turned into a visual joke. Those relatable situations we can still share today bring back memories that make everyone who lived through that era feel like one big, borderless digital family. Because everyone who experienced this era made internet culture happen. Because we didn't just watch memes, we helped create a culture. Because if you were there, you get it. Thanks for coming to my TED Talk. *mic drop*
22

via SceneKaiji