It wasn't until 2009 - which is also when my family got WiFi (and switched from dial-up) - that I got mine: a Nintendo DSi.
Objectively, that browser was terrible, even at the time. But the ability to just read text on my own (and not have to ask to use the family computer - and to stay up all night reading under the covers, which was much harder with books) was amazing then! Of course, it would seem so quaint to kids today.
That 2.0 update was mind-blowing on its own. Smallest device you could browse the web with, I think? Pretty sure it was still the time of PDAs, before smartphones.
EDIT: Yeah, July 2005, 2 years before the iPhone came out.
> Smallest device you could browse the web with, I think?
I'd contest that the Blackberry devices were smaller and earlier, e.g the 7230 from 2003[0]. Pretty sure some of the iPAQs (and other CE devices) arrived with wifi and a browser before 2005 as well since Pocket PC 2000 shipped with a version of IE 3.1.
Yeah. As a high schooler I just wanted to use AIM on it, but all the web-based AIM clients required Flash at the time, which wasn't supported in the PSP browser.
So I ended up hacking together a site called AIMonPSP with PHP and MySQL that did all the AIM communication on the server instead of client-side. Made a decent amount of money (for a high schooler) on AdSense banners, and learned a lot about software design the hard way.
Started on a VPS and then scaled to a single larger dedicated server through a hosting company. It was never doing crazy amounts of traffic, maybe 1-2k concurrent users at peak, and the frontend was just doing slow polling every few seconds.
