The last 25 years has seen the internet go from a simple way of trading academic papers between university professors to an all-encompassing central facet of how many of us live.

Today's web is a huge money-making enterprise, with conglomerates like Google and Facebook forever extending their tendrils into the mechanics of interaction and how we consume media.

But it wasn't always thus. As the internet expanded beyond the select cadre of programmers and scientists, it became a haven for the weird and wonderful: creatives, artists and programming geniuses.

Also, there were some really weird memes. Here is a selection of the things you will remember if you spent any time online before corporate social networking added a sheen to online interaction.

Young music downloaders these days are stuck in a pincer movement of iTunes, Spotify and Tidal, who have cornered the market and uncooly make you actually pay for music.

In the late 1990s, alternative youth culture exploded, with Britpop in the UK and alt-rock in the US helping a generation of angsty teenagers gain an identity.

These kids used Napster, a file-sharing programme chiefly used for downloading and sharing music across the world.

While many bands backed and used the software as a good way to get their music heard, some took exception, notably corporate-rock titans Metallica, who sued Napster founder Shawn Fanning and the site into oblivion.

Today's memes have almost gone mainstream, with viral videos and pictures often picked up by desperate news networks looking to tap into the zeitgeist.

Early internet memes were a far more rustic affair, shared via email or word of mouth rather than Facebook and Twitter.

This also created the first generation of internet celebrities, like Numa Numa guy Gary Brolsma, or the unfortunate Star Wars kid.

Going even further back, the creepy Dancing Baby went viral in the mid-1990s, and the interminable Hampster Dance even spawned a spin-off single.

Remember before 'Google it' was a thing? When the all-powerful search engine was just a twinkle in the creator's eye.

Back in the 1990s, searching the internet was a far more genteel affair. You had a gentleman valet to help you answer your question.

Ask Jeeves was a reassuringly human way to enquire about indexed content from a graphic representation of a butler.

Before Facebook there was Bebo, before Bebo there was Myspace.

But the real explosion of the social media phenomenon which now controls the way we think and feel was Friends Reunited.

Started as a way to trace old school friends before Facebook made stalking semi-strangers more socially acceptable, Friends Reunited was the first network to take off in Britain.

One of the biggest changes in the the web has been cosmetic, with most websites now smoothly running creations worthy of Grand Designs.

Even user-created sites can take Wordpress templates to create a beautiful online space.

In the early part of the new millennium, anyone could make a website as well. But they had to use Geocities.

Geocities was a website-builder that noughties kids would spend hours on, creating vanity websites with awesome (Read: terrible) graphics and clipart.

What are you doing tonight after school? If you are a child of a certain era the answer would almost always be hanging out on MSN.

This precursor to WhatsApp and Facebook chat was the only means of idly talking to your friends about nothing and showing off your carefully curated music playlists.

Frequented nightly from the age of 13 onwards, MSN Messenger was also the place to gossip about school and try to catch the eye of a girl or guy you had a crush on.

Methods to do this included: Choosing a Linkin Park song lyric as your screen name so they thought you were deep; logging off and on again so they saw you were online, and spending an entire evening building up the courage to message them 'Wot u up 2?', then realising their status was set to 'Away'.

Perhaps the most evocative memory of old-school internet is the sound before you got connected.

This ungodly racket will give a warm feeling of familiarity to anyone whose formative years were spent in the dial-up age, and strike fear into the hearts of their parents who remember not being able to use the house phone for three hours.