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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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
making a geocities with friends
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.
Pshhhkkkkkkrrrrkakingkakingkakingtshchchchchchchchcchdingdingding
I miss old school Neopets a lot!
Fan message boards where people actually loved what they were fans of. Now you go onto the internet to talk about that show or game you love and it’s nothing but people shitting on your joy.
My favourite memory is also one of my funniest.
When I first got my computer Hotmail was the e-mail of choice. Everyone had to have a Hotmail account, it let you use MSN Messenger!
I didn’t write down the spelling, and as a 12-13 year old I typed in “hot male dot com”
Coincidentally that was also one of the first times I realised I’m probably not straight.That last sentence made me crack up
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.
The owner of a site called zug dot com wrote a lengthy and hilarious essay on his treatment for an anal fissure. There were MS Paint illustrations of the procedure.
I was enthralled but also learned a lot about using humor to discuss situations that a person would otherwise be ashamed of.
