Three Websites I Visited in the Late 90s and Early 2000s

 Hey everyone, how's it going? I'm doing pretty well. I had a nice, lowkey, Canada Day yesterday and now, it's super hot outside today. Today I'm gonna be talking about three websites that I visited all the time in the late '90s and early 2000s. Let's get into it.

The first website that I loved visiting in the late '90s and early 2000s was the Official Star Wars Website. I'm going to be doing a larger look at this website over on The Star Wars Journal at some point, but I wanted to include it here because it was such a huge part of my pre-teen and early teen years. I didn't have internet at home at this point in my life, and Star Wars Insider magazine wasn't a huge constant in my life yet. However, I remember sitting in my grandfather's office at the lake, reading character bios, movie synopses, and some behind the scenes info on the Star Wars movies that were out at this point. Episode I had come out, and Lucasfilm and ILM were preparing to make Episode II, which didn't have a title yet at this point.

The next website I visited all the time during this period of my life was Scholastic's official website for Animorphs. As I talked about in my last post here at Josh's Geek Cave, I watched the Animorphs TV series all the time when I was a kid. I also read the books. The website was pretty cool because not only could you find out information on the latest book in the series that had just come out or was about to come out, but you could also find out about behind the scenes stuff about the show's main cast. Fun stuff though, since this website was meant for kids. Specifically the kids who were fans of Animorphs. There was even a section called According to K.A. Applegate, which was an ongoing FAQ section with Katherine Applegate, one of the authors of the books.

My favourite website though was the Official Star Trek Website. Part of it is because the website's design was based on the LCARS computer system seen in TNG, DS9, and Voyager. Like with the database on the Official Star Wars Website, this site had a library section which included information on ships, planets, technology, alien species, and characters. For each of the main characters of the shows and movies, the bios are set up like the crew's service records that we got a glimpse of in the season 5 TNG episode, "Conundrum", which is really cool. Even when we got internet at home, I spent so many hours exploring this website. Even moreso than the other two that I talked about in this blog post.

So, because we didn't have internet until the early 2000s, the only place I could look at these websites was at the cottage, when I was visiting my grandparents. One of those times, I actually printed off a bunch of pages from all three websites to store in a binder so I could read them anytime I wanted. My grandparents had a printer that was just black and white ink so the pictures on the pages were in black and white. But, that's what you did back then because colour ink was expensive. But, these three websites were the internet to me in the late '90s and early 2000s. IMDB was a thing, but I didn't know about it, Wikipedia wouldn't become a thing until 2001, and sites like Wookieepedia, Memory Alpha, and Seerowpedia (the Animorphs Wiki) wouldn't launch until sometime between 2002 and 2004 and YTV's website was just starting up. So for the interests that I had personally in the late '90s and early 2000s, these three websites were it for me.

That's going to be it for me for today. I'll be back soon with more great posts. So until then have a great evening and I will talk to you all later. Take care.