Everyone was nice to each other and followed unwritten rules in communication. :)
Super curious how old you are, we got aol in about 1991 and chat rooms were… Not like that lol
Well I’m not an American so I have not used AOL-services.
a/s/l?
Age, sex, location
No, no. The correct response is always 19/f/cali.
This is why no-one ever wanted to chat with me!
The amount of people I had to plonk on Usenet tells a different story.
The sound of a Pentium computer booting up.
Learning DOS commands from an actual book I borrowed from a neighbor.
The first days of learning programming.
The sound of a dial-up modem while falling asleep on my desk waiting for a connection at a high usage hour (11 PM) when everybody was trying to get in on a lower tariff.
Downloading code for 3D demos - they were called “4k intros” (the challenge was to make the most complex graphics in only 4 KB), and changing equation parameters without any clue of what they do, compile and see the effect. That’s how I learned. Good days.
Prehistorik 2 with a “latest generation sound card” Creative Sound Blaster on cheap speakers.
Coding in Pascal (and later Delphi) my own tools / projects while listening to 80’s music in Winamp.
Being patient to download an mp3 in multiple sessions during 3 days, only to realize it’s a different song with the same name but by another singer.
Ripping CDs and cataloging your collection in Where Is It?
Hearing “who is the fox?” in an internet cafe room while playing Carmageddon.
Magazines with demo CDs, like PC Gamer.
The AltaVista search engine.
Parties where 5 people had to bring their 1GB HDDs so there would be enough music diversity. Of course, using Winamp visualizations as disco lights.
One of my first internet experience was on a forum for a kid tv channel. There was a point system where posting a message would give you a point and certain amount of points would grant you ranks. I discovered that sending private messages also counted and clicking space repeatedly when submitting a message would multiply the message and the points. I am sorry to whoever received thousands of mps every single day back then but I had a lot of fun increasing that rank.
That may also explain why I still like incremental games nowadays
In the 90s, before the social media and Google existed, it was customary to create your own home page. My page was about koalas. I was really into koalas. I had a crush in the digital art class, and she made her page about Hanson (a boyband). I remember feeling jealous about the attention they were getting hehe.
It was all about getting on a good web-ring. I had a few sites across Geocities, Tripod and the like, but getting on a good web-ring brought the best traffic. Don’t forget to put a visitor counter on the page, and a cursor trail will impress everyone. This advice brought to you 25 years too late.
Hehe of course I had the visitor counter! It’s essential like the under construction text/gif! I think my main page reached nearly three digits in its’ life time, and I was happy about it. These days I get that many likes on a single post in social media at good days.
My first experience with the internet was using a Unix shell account that I used to dial into using “Telix for DOS”. For browsing I had Lynx, for mail PINE, and for IRC it was some client called “irc” and so on. This was in the early 90s, maybe 1991 or 92.
Everything was text only, dial-up with 9600 baud, and it was glorious because before that all we had was BBSes (which were even more glorious in some ways actually).
I use Mutt and Lynx on a Linux box just to remember the good old days. I have a text-mode Mastodon client too, a little difficult to navigate, but it kinda replicates the old IRC feel.
I do have an IRC client, but I’m not patient enough to remember the keybindings to switch channels. Lol.
Posting to a Usenet newsgroup to inquire about a research paper I was interested in, and having the author snail mail me a printed copy of the paper. The power of community blew my mind.
I miss old school Neopets a lot!
My dad trying and failing to dial out and connect to AOL italia to send his sister an email. I have no idea how much he paid for the service and the fact that local calls still cost money and I’m not even sure AOL was local, but it was so slow it took forever to send anything. Forget pictures.
Roleplaying in AOL chatrooms. I remember joining this group who roleplayed as vampires and hanging out in the “local tavern.” I was only 9 and in hindsight half of what people were doing was hooking up, but it made me love writing.
Later on, I really enjoyed LiveJournal and staying up way too late reading fanfiction with my friends on AIM/MSN messenger.
Early Google. When AskJeeves fizzled away but SEO and ads hadn’t taken over.
@lamentforicarus @5redie8 I wonder if we were in the same chatrooms haha
Pshhhkkkkkkrrrrkakingkakingkakingtshchchchchchchchcchdingdingding
Beseen internet chatrooms, ICQ, every website was someone’s personal project, they just made it for fun. Yahoo messenger pool games and online chess. Php message boards and the communities that formed around those.
The early internet was so slow that everything was text based. Talking to other people was the primary form of interaction and nothing was really monetized. Everything was just there because it was nerd shit and people found homes, and communities, and belonging. It was real world values on a screen, not the influencer driven, 30sec video affiliate links shallow, corporate conglomerate that it is now.
That’s why I appreciate the fediverse. It feels like real people just playing with technology and talking to each other.
Primitive search engines often allowed you to browse websites by topic. You could click on stuff like different music or film genres, specific movie or book titles, or celebrity names, and youd be presented with a list of all websites on that topic.
Since it was the early internet and everyone had multiple personal geocities or angelfire sites, you’d churn up pages upon pages of results for everything. Each search engine produced vastly different results, so you could waste a day on Alta Vista, then go to Excite and do it over again, finding a bunch of different stuff.
I’d spend hours opening websites for shitty (and some surprisingly excellent) bands from all over the world. A handful even went on to real life notoriety.
My biggest flex along those lines is I became a huge fan of AFI in 1992 or 1993 because there were some folks in California writing about the punk scene, and they came up a lot. Sometimes somebody would host 30 second .wav (.ra, maybe?) files recorded on a crappy tape recorder or something from a live show or local radio station. It was a cool time to be young and excited about music.
The Netscape loading logo was pretty cool, and of course it took a while to load every page!
A bit later than what I’d call the early internet, I’d say my favourite memory was winning a Super Soaker CPS 2500 when I was 13.
Vbulletin boards and general forum sites before the likes of Facebook and Reddit got big. Made a lot of friends on there.
Neopets was great as well. Loved the minigames.
I admin-ed my own vBulletin board around 04-06. The script itself cost about £90 back then. It was so great though. Small community of like-minded people all chattng. It was like a slow-Discord or a more intimate Reddit.
I installed a ton of extensions for people to play Flash games at one point too.
One day I accidentally forgot to pay hosting and the site vanished. Lost it all. Never bothered relaunching.
This was in one of the first emails my dad ever got. We had the video saved to our desktop and would bug our dad to show us “the bear video” over and over again.
