What websites pop into your mind when you think about the early days of the web, or maybe just the first websites you visited regularly. I always think of two websites from the mid-90s:
Mirsky’s Worst of the Web, a collection of awful/poorly designed webpages.
The Loser Living Upstairs, a mammoth web journal about a homebody upstairs neighbor. After days and months of excruciating detail about how the neighbor paced back and forth and played his “K-Mart stero”, you wondered who’s the real loser–the neighbor or the guy who bothered writing it all down?
The Stile Project, Linux Loving Sluts…
What was that site that was an archive of all the most disgusting pics on the internet? Where you’d run into goatse and girls sticking huge things in their vaginas…
Eta: rotten.com I think.
gaffa.org, a Kate Bush fan site launched in 1996, and still up and running.
Well, for me it’s Prodigy and the IRC and some dialup BBS’. Then AOL. But if we ignore those and go to the WWW, it’s Webcrawler (which I see still exists). And when I was using that, all the cool kids were using AltaVista, just like all the cool kids were using Google when I was using Yahoo.
So, take your pick, the first time I accessed the internet in any way, shape or form was via Prodigy (and however it’s home page looked). The earliest WWW memories I have are searching it via Webcrawler.
HA, I found the log in screen for Prodigy, remember it like it was yesterday, even my ID. I think this is basically what the homepage looked like when you logged in.
I just want bang bang bang
Mostly the portal sites, I guess. Yahoo!, Excite, Infoseek, Best of the Web. Altavista for search, before they managed to get their hands on the altavista.com domain.
Also, Bomis, and the concept of web rings in general.
JenniCam, which even though I only visited once out of curiosity, left an impression because it was one of the first personal web sites to get mainstream media attention. (I think I found out about it in Time magazine.)
Nando was my first news site (around 1997). They closed after a couple years.
Alta Vista
Geocities
Tripod
The Schumin Web (vanity site from some guy who documented the minutiae of his life)
Lileks.com (still around!)
I’d forgotten about Mirsky’s Worst of the Web!
Lycos, Excite, Ezboard. Geocities and Tripod, of course. There was another big one like them.
Versiontracker and Macfixit and tons of mac sites I’ve long since forgotten.
Maddox. FARK. Geocities. The Metroid Database.
http://www.zombo.com/
currently down due to bandwidth. Which is in and of itself funny as hell.
I had purchased a computer that came with a CompuServe disk, so I used it to get on the internet (dial up). I ended up in several CompuServe chat rooms and then switched to their forums.
The first month was so heady I was online every spare moment, hardly ate, lost weight and began finding articles on internet addiction on my desk at work. 
The original Hamsterdance!
Anyone remember this guy?
Usenet message boards. My first online account was with Prodigy in '94 and I dumped them pretty quick (in favor of AOL) because the only message boards I could access were Prodigy-owned. Usenet was great, but every group I used got overrun with sleazy spam messages to the point of uselessness and I haven’t checked in in probably a decade. alt.culture.cecil-adams was a big fave. So were all the rec.arts.comics.news groups.
Satchelsports, which I think was created for the purpose of being sold to ESPN. Which it was, so it is now known as espn.com. I was puzzled by the name until I once referred to it as “the satchel page”. Oohhhhhh…
I think the first “useful” web page I remember is the internet movie database, which was originally hosted at the University of Cardiff and mirrored by a few other universities.
Beat me to it. - actually the very first meme (beyond basic text jokes) I remember.
Were’nt they all in the mid-90s? (all those flashing gifs and frames. Ouch.)