If you bought your dial-up internet from your local newspaper, there’s a pretty good chance I was doing tech support for it.
Yeah, seems there is a belief that past a certain age, you should have zero fun, be nothing but a wage slave, and die somewhere quietly, where no one will see what fate awaits you.
Well, I happen to think minors especially should not have access to social media, or at least somehow have minor only social media.
Prevents them interacting with predators, getting brainrotted, and most importantly: leaves us with more mature people to interact with.
I will invoke the old words
A/S/L
WhiskyTangoFoxtrot slaps CaptPretentious around a bit with a large troutIt’s like I’m back on quakenet!
18/F/Cali
Weren’t they all…
My ICQ was 1428816.
And when young people ask me if I ever play multi-player games… my dude, I played the first one. Midimaze on Atari ST.
Adobe flash games and adobe flash videos. Beige computers. Monochrome monitors. Trackball mice. DOS. The original Doom. Newgrounds. Joe Cartoon, Killfrog, and Stickdeath. Napster and Limewire. Geocities. Forums for days. Browser games like Utopia.
Oh shit! I had completely forgotten about Utopia until this post. The hours I wasted. Haha! MUDs before that…
And still falling for the bait
deleted by creator
These kids have never been slapped around a bit with a large trout and it shows.
W98BSoD slaps usualsuspect191 around a bit with a large trout
Single colour monitors, kids! Single colour monitors!
Team orange or team green?
Oh man, I had to use the orange ones sometimes at my first programming job. They were VAX/VMS dumb terminals. It sucked getting stuck with one of those, because the job was making a visualization GUI for some data, and these ones literally couldn’t run the GUI; they were text-only. Eventually they started reserving one of the GUI-capable machines for me.
Assuming y’all aren’t just fucking around, reading the comments here is actually really cool, tangentially interacting with people who have internet stories from well before I was born
I’m just from the dialup era, and I still feel old online a lot of the time, but then someone here is like “yeah, Berners-Lee invented HTTP just to make a website to mock me”
I got my first “home computer” in the days of the BBS’s when there was such a thing as a “long distance call”. Internet access was crazy expensive and not for the average geek. Back then it was a bit “underground”. There were professionals and there were passionate hobbyists. Most people didn’t have or need a computer in their lives. Things changed in the late 90’s boom. A cultural shift when suddenly everyone joined in. The geeks were no longer king
We are of similar eras. I just missed the days of building phreak boxes and it was always a bit of wonder to me.
While it’s harder these days for a litany of reasons I think it’s still in our collective interest to be bearers of stories, old and new, to the neophytes of the current generation.
I guess what I’m saying is, I am in your camp but to my kid’s generation we are still warlocks
So much of the wonder of computers and networks and just… all of it has been abstracted away
So many people just have phones or tablets as the majority of their computer experience
Get into Lora (meshtastic/core). When I settle into bed I check to see if my solar powered nodes made any friends or if the heltec I keep in the car pinged anything cool.
I did a meetup a few weeks ago and its a cool smattering of younger folks and HAM folks who go wayyyyy back.
People talk about it being useful in an emergency, and sure, but mostly it’s just cool.
I’m so sad that I missed out on this era of the internet. I only got online in 2020, just horrible timing. all you older folk were so lucky
If it makes you feel any better, while I got to experience it, I’m also so sad that it’s gone and not coming back :(
Why’s that? What part from that era would you like to see again today if you could?
Forums. Gaming guides made by actual gamers. Clans that are recognizable and actually respected, playing against the same. Email being the main method of ‘notifications’. MSN Gaming Zone. PS2 network gaming, and not having to pay a fucking fee to play with your friends and those halfway around the world. Hosting dedicated servers. Lists of available servers and games to join, instead of this bullshit ‘matchmaking’. Modding games, and to an extent programs. Websites not having 50 fucking layers of Javascript garbage just to load what is effectively a static page. Before analytics were everywhere, before ads took more real estate than the content. When Google was just a search engine.
E: Gamespy. Also, I also had someone in vrc recognize my name, and also recalled my clan, from back when we were just a Halo/Custom Edition group. I was so fucking excited, to be recognized, almost 20 years later. My clan is still going, though the numbers are single-digit now. Life happens.
A lot of stuff, but basically, before the internet was shit, and simultaneously, corporations taking over humanity.
Sad no one will experience it again.
The modern internet can be more interesting than the old one ever was once you start to explore it, rather than hanging out on like three websites total.
fuck. i can’t remember my icq # anymore. it was 6 digits and started with an 8.
Mine was somewhere in the 2 millions. I probably still have it saved somewhere.
867530
That I could remember
Nein!
Aol mp3 channel 1
I was on BBS forums in the '80s.
wasn’t usenet fun?
Well not sure about the other poster but the BBSes I used were ones you had to dial into and you were the only one there. Well unless it was a fancy one that had multiple phone lines. I even ran one for a short bit my junior year of high school on my commodore 128 and a 1200 baud modem. Good times. Then I got to college and learned about usenet and IRC. This was like ‘89.
Still is. Y’arrggghhhh!
woah. i thought alt.tv.simpsons died
I remember my CompuServe id. I remember the sequence to kick the operator off a call and jump into AT&T’s switching network for the free calls. A 300 baud modem was the shit in 85. Most these fetuses have no idea how anything works and what I used to do to get a connection would make their mind explode.
