Of course, it took a while for it to become the all-consuming part of our daily routine that it is now, but even fairly early on it was already encompassing the same breadth of human awfulness and inanity that we see today.
Here are 10 pioneering websites which we all visited at least once.
Eric conveyed emotions from 1998 to 2004, and his website is still online. However, despite making the occasional promise over the years, Eric has yet to convey another emotion. Perhaps the most ironic thing that could ever happen is if Eric were to have a stroke, paralysing his facial muscles, thus making him unable to convey any emotion ever again.
Let's hope that doesn't happen.
A precursor to the meme-saturated culture of today, Bert is Evil was finally stopped in its tracks by 9/11. An image showing Bert with supposed 9/11 mastermind Osama bin Laden was the result of legal threats by Sesame Street owners Sesame Workshop, leading to the removal of the site.
In a telling reflection of that time, Sesame Workshop had never seemed to mind when Bert was pictured with Adolf Hitler or the Klu Klux Klan.
Of course, Friends Reunited is best known these days as one of the greatest examples of missing an open goal; from a seemingly unassailable position, FR gradually lost ground to more aggressive social media platforms.
Bought inexplicably by ITV for £120 million at the point where the site seemed to be in an unstoppable decline, ITV sold it four years later to the owners of the Beano for £25 million. A year later, its worth was said to be a mere £5.2 million.
After a failed attempt to refocus on nostalgia, the site eventually closed in 2016, by which time everyone was on Facebook, show off about how amaaaaaaazing our life was to all those people we hated in school.
I don't care how old your child is!!!!!
Back in the 90s there was literally nothing funnier than sending a link to the dancing baby to your friends and family, with a typical subject line reading "This is sooooo funny", even though it obviously wasn't. It was just a CGI dancing baby.
Life was so much simpler back then...
Of course, in the wake of Trump, Bush has undergone something of a reappraisal, and is now seen as a sort of harmless, kindly uncle, who does bad paintings, rather than the clueless, out-of-his-depth, buffoon who helped destabilise the world with his murderous foreign policy.
Still better than Trump though.
Her always-on webcam ensured that no part of her life was off-limits - even the less flattering aspects - in stark contrast to the more carefully curated vlogger branding more common today. However, after seven years, Ringley stopped broadcasting - citing a change in PayPal's policy, banning services which might feature nudity - and disappeared almost completely from the Internet.
Most visitors to Jennicam were treated to a low-resolution image of her empty bedroom, and swiftly decided that they couldn't understand what the fuss was all about.
It became such a phenomenon that the "Hampsters" even released a single that got to number 1 in Canada, eh.
The page took just five months to fill up completely. Perhaps tellingly, Tew dropped out of his university course after a year, and attempted to recreate the success of his homepage with One Million People - in which visitors could pay to have their photograph, rather than an ad, placed on the page.
It wasn't the success Tew wanted, and he now lives in San Francisco, working as an "entrepreneur", and selling guided meditations through his app Calm.
Featuring real pictures and videos of accidents, atrocities and executions, on my one and only visit the first thing I saw was somebody who had been decapitated by the blades of a helicopter rotor. It still bothers me to this day.
When it was connected to the Internet a few years later, the pot became a bona-fide online phenomenon, as millions around the world switched on to see the current coffee level.
The camera was switched off in 2001 after 10 years, and the pot was auctioned off, being bought by German news website Spiegel Online for some reason - for £3,350.