The old internet. What are your memories of it?

reply to post by Frankenchrist


When I could read anything I liked without paying a fee for it.
When I didn't have to have a fortune spent in internet security
to read it.
That cute little paperclip on my old pc with windows ME.

reply to post by Frankenchrist


1994, dialup, two servers, when you did get online you tried not to go offline because there were more people then servers. Also when I was online if someone was trying to call me I would be disconnected. Then it took forever to get back online. No chat rooms, messangers, forums twitter. Very limited resources available. Runescape I was one of the first 1000 members and there was 1 world, soon after I joined runescape a second world came in then within about a year there was numerous worlds, back when it was still a fun game then they went and added all those missions and i stepped away from the game. ya the internet is beyond unbelievable.
( when i first got on internet the fees was by the minute you shoulda seen my first phone bill it was like $900.00)

Originally posted by Forevever
reply to post by TodoMedio

 

LOL star for you!

Seems like only yesterday I was trying to figure out how to get some DOS games off a 5.25" onto a 3.5" floppy

Oh my gawd I forgot about those floppys, first you had to learn how to format them, then you had to hope no one copied over them, then they put in that protection tab on the right side...lol ya I remember

Originally posted by ohyouknow
Yahoo user chatrooms,

OH god...... The days of the "fight rooms" and stuff on Yahoo.... just awful, but strangely addictive.
My mate had the internet before me and we'd spend hours on there, arguing pointlessly with people from all over the world, everyone on mics and just arguing ... and it got nasty sometimes.


Man... what's changed in like 10-15 years?

reply to post by Havick007


I remember my uncle doing that. Hooking up the telephone and typing in dos prompts, I think I was only like five. He was talking to one other person on the planet on there.

How cool it was when my teacher was talking to someone in Quebec at another school.

Doing searches to see if a company had a website. I remember Keebler being the first one we could find.

I kinda miss the screech of dial up.


Believe it or not, internet has only been mainstream for about 12 years, LOL.

Seems like forever.
Oh, when you had to roleplay in text. I remember the IRC but never figured out how to get to them. and it took 20 minutes for a picture to load and you would watch it come up line by line.

You people are bringing up bad memories about getting kicked off the phone line. The computer wars in the house, and how insanely expensive it was.

oh yea, all the stupid aol cds. I signed up with aol once and they called me for a year after that. They gave me such a nightmare I never came near it again. No I don't want your book!

People started reusing them as coasters.

I want to get a ring tone that sounds like dial up so I can make all the people 30 and over, cringe.

reply to post by blupblup


- FREENET ! (ok, so I remember when Adam was a baby )
-When my Freenet login ID was changed up to a two letter combo followed by a triple number.
-Freenet, when maximum daily login time was an hour at a time but no limit on logins, then three hours a day, then two, reduced to an hour a day. (If they could see me now!)
- Throwing out a question in an .alt.mechanical engineering usegroup in the evening and getting a reply within the hour from the guy in Boston who wrote the book on the subject! Then connecting to the university library and ordering a reserve on the book, picking it up at 8AM and photocopying pertinent pages for the boss that day. Sweet!
sarcasm on/ I knew then for sure that Al Gore was on to something then /sarcasm off
-Not having to pay a fee at all to be connected.
-Getting censored by the US military in a usenet group because my question would provoke too much discussion!

When I was in prison (work release), I was secretary/treasurer of the camp church. This gave me access to the computers used for the guys who were trying to get their high school diploma equivalency while locked up (which was mandatory if you weren't a graduate). Although we didn't have internet, I created a faux internet using batch files, which had everybody convinced I was talking to people outside of camp. I created a story that had a government figure who was trying to get me out early, and two weeks after when I got parole, everyone was giving me their names and prison id's so I could help get them out. I didn't have the heart to tell them it was all BS. The story was that one of my sons had brought me a floppy with software on it that allowed me to route through the 120 volt AC power cable to access the internet. Strange what people will do when they're bored slam to death isn't it? Ahh, the power of DOS...

I remember lots of things about the "Old Internet", I was talking about the subject the other day actually. Memorable things for me include:

The sound of 56K modems.

Being able to search for almost anything (some people have stated the opposite ) You could literally enter "how to make bomb" on Google and get a valid hit.

IRC wars.

Old skool BBS's.

The fact that nearly everything available to download was infected with a trojan/virus.

Ping of death's.

The collections of GTMHH

I remember before there was an internet. I would dial in to a local BBS and chat with other dorks. Some of my oldest friends today came from this group. I was about 15, using my frankenstein 486. I convinced my parents to get me my own phone line so I didn't interrupt the ability to use our home phone. The local BBS I frequented only allowed so much time online daily, so I eventually started calling long distance to connect to BBSes in other states. My second month of having my own phone line came with a $600 phone bill, so that didn't last very long.

My boss still uses the "You've got mail!" sound every time he gets an email. So annoying!

I remember spending days on IRC, wrote my own scripts, set up file servers and file search utilities. I remember downloading mp3s at 15kbs and thinking that it was blazing fast.

reply to post by Backslider


I remember using HyperTerminal to dial a PAD in the US and also calling a Whitehouse computer

Mother wasn't very happy when the phone bill arrived that month...

This may sound weird, but I only remember that eerie dial-up sound signifying that your connection pretty much sucks and playing Big Game Hunter.... oh the memories.

Freenet is defintely ringing a bell.
I might of had that at some point.But the ads would slow the connection.

If anyone listens to Science Friday on NPR, they reran some old segments on their broadcast, and were talking about how they started streaming over the net and had a whole 500 listeners. Its very interesting to listen too.

reply to post by Frankenchrist
S-L-O-W,clicking,getting up cooking dinner,coming back to see if the page is up yet.S-L-O-W

Atari's Asteroids game was the craze...high tech stuff back then. Pong was before that. Getting Earthlink when it first came out....oh the memories.

Crappy Dial Up Modem, later crappy but at least a bit faster ISDN
Slow Speeds.
Ugly websites.
Ugly websites but at least they weren't filled with videos, sounds and other useless crap
Audiogalaxy and me hating the Crappy Dial Up Modem because they had so many Live Bootlegs and i wanted them all.
Not as much advertisements on websites as today
Stupid AOL and all the problems we had with those stupid idiots.
Online gaming was nearly not possible
extremely high costs because there was no flatrate
Me using the Internet only 3-4 times in the week and maybe 1-2 hours a day. Today it's more like 24/7
What i fondly remember: When we got DSL with a Flatrate (about 10 years ago). Damn, the 1Mbit thing was FAAAAAAST, i filled my hard drive in a week with music, stuff for games and played Counter-Strike for so many hours
And the Dial Up Sound was horrible, i was great when we got ISDN, it was silent.

I'm glad those days are over and just a fading memory.

Endless hours spent creating new tunnels and blasting my buddies in Infinity Complex back when the 32 line Galacticom systems seemed like a huge world to dial into.

I remember finding those 15 second long porn video clips for the first time. I was probably more excited than Colombus was when he discovered America.

Also, Kazzaa, MSN Messenger and trolling yahoo chatrooms.

Geocities and.......who could forget.......

Blink!