What Did We All Do Before YouTube? – Infographic

YouTube is insanely popular, as we’ve discussed before. Millions of users watch videos there every single day, spending hours digesting the content posted by musical artists, the movie industry, and even independent cartoonists, artists, and filmmakers.

What on Earth did we do with our online time before that grand time-spender, YouTube? Those of us who can think back can definitely remember spending just as much time on our computers, so what did we do?

Back in the 90’s, the ultimate holiday gift was a new CD-ROM to stick in your computer’s CD-ROM drive and play. All of our games, and even some video content, came on CD-ROMs (after the floppy disks proved too small for video games to fit on, that is.)

There were a ton of popular titles, but some of the most popular included Sim City and The Sims. Another popular title was A.D.A.M., a useful tool for learning about the body and the 90’s version of WebMD.

When videos first started appearing on the Internet, we’d find them on AlbinoBlackSheep, a web site that posted member-submitted digital media. This was a big portal for Flash animation, so we’d get our Flash fix here. For the more morbidly-minded, we had Rotten.com, whose slogan was “An Archive of Disturbing Illustration.”

For even more videos and Flash, we had Homestar Runner and Ebaum’s World, and then we got StumbleUpon. StumbleUpon is still a popular site, helping people find videos they might not have found before YouTube.

Shortly after that, MySpace was founded, as a social media site that quickly became a way for independent (and not so independent) artists to stream their music and music videos to the public. Finally, we got YouTube. The rest, as they say, is history.

What Did We All Do Before YouTube?

The above infographic, brought to you by the fine folks at youtubedownload.altervista.org, shows us just a few of the things we did with our computer time.