We had memes in the 90s. But you had to use Photoshop like a grownup not some cheap meme generator site. It only cost $1200 for a license, and most of us were broke kids (not actual grownups) so you had to join a WAREZ chat room on AOL and beg for a crack, then you'd spend a week downloading it on your 28k modem. Then you'd skillfully construct a meme from scratch based on some images you collected off personal home pages on Geocities because Google image search didn't even exist back then.

Before that you had to create a chain letter, with a strongly worded section to forward the letter to 10 friends, and detailing the penalties for breaking the chain.

Dancing baby and "All your base are belong to us" are definitely from the 90s.

It's very appropriate that the concept of "meme" itself is an example of memetic drift.

Usenet had what were effectively memes. "Make Money Fast" comes to mind.

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Make_Money_Fast>

Kibo: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Parry>

And elephant jokes.

'internet memees' aren't what you're describing.

Do you mean "i can haz cheezburger"

or rage comics,

or that thing from the walking dead of the older dude yelling at the kid? or

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8VrCCpaEoxI

Or natalie portman hot grits.

'internet memees' aren't what you're describing.

Do you mean "i can haz cheezburger" or rage comics, or that thing from the walking dead of the older dude yelling at the kid? or "yo quiero taco bell?" or "YEEeeaaahhhh baby"

Or "i just poured hot grits down my pants"

?

Other replies have given examples of "current-style" memes from the 90s. The term itself was also in popular use, as evidenced in e.g. the website memepool.com.

They most definitely were, just text based. Pictures took too long to download and were reserved for important things like porn.