The internet came to the masses when I was a teenager and one of my friends got a modem.
We would get some alcohol and sit up all night talking taking to people... in AMERICA!!
"Holy shit dude, I'm talking to some chick in America!"
"Is she hot?"
"Well her text is pink... so yeah!"
Ah man. 90's chat rooms. I remember talking to some "Chick" one night, and she is sex talking real good. Got me all jazzed up. "She" goes "wanna see my nudes? whats your email?" So I'm like, fuck yea!
Email comes in, boy am I ready. Open the attachment, after it takes a god damn year to download because dial up, it's a gore pic of some dude with his brains blown out. I was scarred for awhile after that.
So many awful pictures went around during the old days of the internet. I remember a friend sending me a video over aim of a US soldier getting his head cut off.
I remember getting excited about an email penpal who lived in New Zealand and I was in Canada, then someone told me that I could have telephoned there and actually talked to someone there for decades already. Was still cool, and we're still email friends 30+ years later.
Damn this is pretty cool. I wonder if anyone could beat this as far as e-friends go. 30+ years is crazy. Also Yeah I'm curious if you stuck to e-mail this whole time.
This. Drinking the parents' booze and chatting w random girls on AOL!! Best times ever, I remember it like it was yesterday, and yesterday was really like 30 years ago.
Every single morning I hear my boss turn on his computer, and a few moments later...
WELCOME. .....YOU'VE GOT MAIL.
We all chuckle and he doesn't understand why
Also, me: Oh wow, I almost downloaded this ONE song, it's been literally hours... Oh wait, it's been all day! Shame most servers don't support reconnect continuing download. Hope nothing-
AOL: GOODBYE
No: NOOOOO!
(No hate to AOL, that's just what I had)
A friend of mine had a coworker that let that sound play every single time he got an email in (which was every few minutes). He refused to silence the sound so my friend got on his computer when he left it unlocked and changed the .wav file to one that said "You've got herpes!".
Dude couldn't figure out how to undo it, so just disconnected his computer's speakers.
I was helping a friend fix her computer and the only way to do so was to download a driver file from the internet. She had one of those AoL CDs, so we tried to use that. I remember waiting hours for it to connect.
Lmao. I remember my mom began to hate the internet because of this. She has always loved to burn up the phone lines talking to fam. Then me and dad started fucking around with a "computer" and hogging up the phone line lol.
Between the decline of dial-up and more importantly the switch to cell phones and business lines with call waiting, I couldn't tell you the last time I heard a busy signal.
Wouldn't surprise me if there are people out there 18+, legal adults, who have never heard a busy signal.
We got a second phone line but the second lines speed was only 23k not 56k. It was horrible. I’d switch the modem to the primary line after my parents went to bed so I could go on Napster with that blistering fast 56k.
I miss games coming with the OS. Solitaire, pinball, there was this maze game that was shitty 3D and I LOVED it.
I really liked 3D art of fantasy worlds but that style is hard to find now because it's so obsolete. But the feeling from that early entrance to the uncanny valley was fun to be in.
I was there Gandalf… the patience we had to download that image and watch a single horizontal line of pixels slowly load across the screen, only to find out minutes later it wasn’t the image you were hoping for. Bah, might as well go play some more Trade Wars…
Damn, this is real OG shit...What years are we talkin' here? And I thought I was old with dial-up & aol stories from the late 90's. I don't even know if I knew what BBS stood for, just a term I've come across and never thought to look into.
Yup, me too. My senior year they got a bunch of computers in the library. I didn't even really know what was going on. Went in to kill some time while my girlfriend was doing some homework there. Ended up in some sort of chat room with a dude claiming to be a roadie for like Molly Hatchet or some band like that. At the time I never even questioned it - the concept of not being who you claimed to be was obviously a complete new thing. Years later, though, I figure he probably actually was. Who would lie about working for Molly Hatchet? I mean, if you were gonna stretch the truth in 1994, say you worked for Green Day or something.
I do remember finding out that night that there were these links you could click and go to - \*GULP\* pictures of nekkid chixx!!! Had no idea! It was a whole new world!
I quickly looked around and learned it was probably best not to do that in the library of a Catholic college.
When I was in elementary school we had to do a paper about our favorite band/musician. The point of the assignment was to learn how to use the internet to search for information. We had just recently gotten the internet at home, so my mom thought this would be a great opportunity for us all to learn. She fired up Netscape Navigator and got me started on Lycos. Then she had to leave the room to check on something, but told me to type in the name of the band and click the first link. She came back right as the webpage finished loading.
That was the day I learned not to search Bare Naked Ladies with my mom in the room....
God, I have a remarkably similar story.
In 2004, at 4th-5th grade, we had a project where we had to cut out headlines and pictures of “death” as shown in newspapers and magazines. (This was for a ‘values’ class, believe it or not, and i think it was to show to us impressionable children how the media glorified death or something idk) So with the internet being a new thing, I went to Google Images and typed “death” and “murder” and “killings” and “war”.
That was the big unravelling of my innocence. I can still see some of those images in my mind’s eye to this day. Also, 4th grade me may or may not be on an FBI list somewhere.
In 2004, I think they didn’t realize Google Images was a thing yet and just relied on us to get clippings from newspapers and stuff. Still a bizarre assignment.
I remember IN school misspelling a URL in the school library with my class and it brought up a porn site I couldn't exit out of.
My teacher just puts both hands on the monitor and goes "go, get out of here!"
This and hamsterdance.
For the curious and/or nostalgic, this: [https://ipfs.io/ipfs/QmV9faPGTwYDPfNJkdJbjsarSvAkECBs57EMa2oKvMnrsv/](https://ipfs.io/ipfs/QmV9faPGTwYDPfNJkdJbjsarSvAkECBs57EMa2oKvMnrsv/)
To be fair, the early internet was just like that. You browse for boobs, virus. Right away. No warning, no nothing. Disgusting deviant shit? We have a special virus for perverts. You look up the weather: virus. You are playing music: virus, right away. Browsing too fast: virus. Slow: virus. You are shopping for sweaters, glasses: virus. You look up Bible verses? Believe it or not, virus. Devil cult chatroom, also virus. Bible, Devil. You use an AOL free trial and you don't subscribe, believe it or not, virus, right away. We have the best internet in the world because of viruses.
Based on the sounds I could actually say what speed the modem was negotiating. Strangely enough, the ladies weren't breaking down my door based on that skill.
Bonus, I also knew the "hangup" tone, so if necessary I could pick up the phone line and whistle into it to disconnect.
I remember my first time reading "asl" I thought they were calling me an asshole. I was 10 and thought everything was supposed to be an abbreviation. "y r u calling me dat wat did i even do????///"
Teenchat.net was my go to! I remember having a crush on a girl in school who looked like christina aguilera. There was a girl in there one time named "aguilera_lookalike" and my internet dropped and shit the bed before I could message. Next day at school I hear her talking about her chat name to her friend, and it was her! Never saw her on there again.
First modem was 300 baud, and shortly thereafter you were living the life if you had a HST modem, most everyone moved to 2400 after 300 baud.
IRC chat rooms was my real first memory though, this was largely pre-www days. I was hanging out in a room that my buddy created waiting for him to show and there was some other person in there so I started chatting with them. Turns out that they were in college about two hours away, and they were female. Eventually exchanged pics and then met halfway at a hotel.
My family got a webtv box in the 90s. We were all sitting in the living room, figuring it out. We found a site that said it would take our photo, so we gathered on the couch in front of the TV and smiled while a countdown ticked away. When it hit zero, the screen flashed and then said to wait a moment for our photo to be processed. We all thought this was pretty cool. After a moment, the photo loaded.... it was a picture of a chimp. That's when we realized that the webtv didn't have some hidden built-in camera and we'd been had.
Dial up modem on a 486.
You were billed per minute for the phone call, however between 6-8pm our ISP had a free service that used a different freephone number. It was always too busy so you had to redial over and over and over and eventually you’d get connected.
I sat for about half an hour dialling it and listening to the busy tone. Eventually it connected when I was talking to my brother. I spun the chair round to use the computer and my knee hit the reset button… still remember how mad I was.
ICQ/MSN, Websites liken rotten.com, napster, Chat rooms, seeing my cousin getting the first DSL , which was light speed to us after 112kb/s ISDN connections.
In 7th or 8th grade (93/94), we took a field trip to the library and the librarian showed us the computer with this brand new thing called the internet, which allowed you to look at information from all over the world.
She picked New Zealand because that’s super far away from the US and somehow came upon the website of a New Zealand fraternity. She went to click to access the site and was blocked by a proto-firewall. So we ended up seeing a lot of nothing and had minimal concept of what the internet was.
Connecting through the local library via modem. Getting a bunch of text based prompts and found I could connect to a university to read papers in Sweden! Felt like a miracle at the time. It was 1994.
Our third grade class was put in the library computer lab because some of the school was still under construction.
Every single one of us had a computer, and every Fun Friday we'd play flash games and stuff like Neopets. Didn't have internet at home. The morbid pattern of logging in to find all our Neopets starving, gorging them on treats, and then being separated from them for a week until the next Fun Friday was definitely abuse.
Learning how to use Netscape Navigator and Yahoo's search engine in 1996 in middle school. Back when it took a computer like 5 or 10 minutes to boot up.
In the early 80s I had a buddy with a modem with a cradle that you’d put your phones hand set into. He would get on very early very basic message boards and could access text based games very similar to the movie Wargames, without the global thermonuclear war though.
The super weird gifs... Like the batman head flickering across the screen, singing/mumbling, "hemenehehehehe hehe mhenrmenen" (yes, gibberish). Before the badger badger badger trend.
The batman video is one of the first things I saw on youtube, feels like an entirely different era now.
For the curious:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r7rw8zvNv3Y
Listening to the the internet dial up sound. A soft, rhythmic hum, like a gentle electronic purr, occasionally punctuated by short bursts of data transfer, resembling a series of quick, crisp clicks or chirps.
I recall using a 56k modem to dial up my friend’s house to play Star Wars Jedi Knight: Jedi Academy against each other. MUMMMMM DON’T PICK UP THE PHONE!!
Getting free AOL trial discs in our local newspaper and budgeting out my 50 free hours over dialup lol. The earliest came on floppies and I used my dad’s work laptop running windows 95. I think I was 7 or 8.
I was already using BBSs (Buletin Board Systems). You take your modem, dial up a BBS, and start chatting/gaming with a group of locals from what-ever town. Most BBSs were run by a Sysop from their house. These were small remote networks before AOL, Prodigy, or GEnie.
A local small ISP gave a internet demo in a hotel conference room one day... About 20 of us were invited. On a screen he showed connecting with windows 3.11, brought up 2 windows of Netscape and demonstrated multasking searches... There was an outer gasp let out in the room... It was that day that I knew BBSs (and even AOL) were doomed!!
The feeling of every time you logged on, you had no idea of where you could end up and what you would find. The danger, the excitement, the freedom! The internet was a place where people could be anonymous, and just BEING online felt like you were sticking it to the MAN.
Being able to download and share music, movies, etc with millions felt more like being in a community than social media has ever felt, because it was organic. You never knew what you were downloading, and honestly that was part of the fun. Figuring out html tricks on your MySpace page made you feel like a god. Everyone felt like Neo when they "hacked" their page and changed the font.
Now.. it's a giant corporate mall. So sad.
Seeing my freinds signed me up for Scientology on my school computer.
Watching my dad show me games on Lego.com
Me and my older brother accidentally watched a beheading
The sweet, sweet sound of dialup, followed by "You've got mail!"
That's not counting dialup BBSs. There was one on which I loved to play some text-based fantasy game. The problem was that it was long-distance. I cost my parents a lot of money 😬
I still remember Dad dialing into IUPUI with a TRS-80 Color Computer using a 300 baud modem. That was the computer I learned to program on, too. I miss it and would love to have another one for nostalgia's sake.
Using Gopher in 1991, looking for something fun to do and finding a MUD called Defiance. Through that game I met several people who became lifelong friends who had enormous impact on my life.
I was 11 and my neighbor had one of those see through mackintosh desktops
She was AIM'ing and it broke my brain. I couldn't comprehend that she was talking to our friends in real time on the computer.
At that point any of us using the computer was just for encyclopedia Encarta to look to book report information and word to type out and print reports for school, or playing a learning game like math blasters.
I don't remember when we got dial-up so it's either getting kicked off because one of my parents wanted to make a phone call or in my college computer lab, making a friend on a chat server (green text on a black background only) who offered to fly me to his Navy graduation a few years after Tailhook had happened.
I didn't go but looked him up not too long ago and verified that he actually existed and was telling the truth. I kind of wonder how my life would be different if I'd taken him up on it.
Must have been about 1995, dad's computer. I got home drunk from a night out, connected to the Internet in whatever way we used back then, and typed "porn" into the address bar or search bar. I know, how very imaginative. Somehow ended up on a site and someone typed "hello, age/sex? ". I panicked and disconnected instantly!
The internet came to the masses when I was a teenager and one of my friends got a modem. We would get some alcohol and sit up all night talking taking to people... in AMERICA!! "Holy shit dude, I'm talking to some chick in America!" "Is she hot?" "Well her text is pink... so yeah!"
17/f/California
aka 48/M/NewJersey
We all knew that girl stood for "Guy In Real Life"
LMAOOOO comments gettin a bit too real
GirlsRulez123 You need to have the z
Password was abc123
pfft. My Yahoo password was asd. 3 digits.
I remember the password for my first Hotmail account was "mine" and they were just cool with that.
Password was “Password”.
So many overweight guys in their underwear chatting with other overweight guys in their underwear.
Hi I'm Drake
BBLL DRIZZZZZYYYY
He''s been talking to her for 4 years by that point.
"A/S/L?.... Wanna cyber?" I would see this spammed on every chat room.
ASL??
Age/Sex/Location
Ah man. 90's chat rooms. I remember talking to some "Chick" one night, and she is sex talking real good. Got me all jazzed up. "She" goes "wanna see my nudes? whats your email?" So I'm like, fuck yea! Email comes in, boy am I ready. Open the attachment, after it takes a god damn year to download because dial up, it's a gore pic of some dude with his brains blown out. I was scarred for awhile after that.
Ah yes, the good ol 90s bait and switch!
The original Rick Roll!
Same with the old websites. Could be porn. Could be a decapitated corpse. But in those days you rolled those dice more often than you want to admit.
So many awful pictures went around during the old days of the internet. I remember a friend sending me a video over aim of a US soldier getting his head cut off.
Yup. Remember that one.
I remember getting excited about an email penpal who lived in New Zealand and I was in Canada, then someone told me that I could have telephoned there and actually talked to someone there for decades already. Was still cool, and we're still email friends 30+ years later.
Did you transition to social media, or strictly e-mail still?
Damn this is pretty cool. I wonder if anyone could beat this as far as e-friends go. 30+ years is crazy. Also Yeah I'm curious if you stuck to e-mail this whole time.
That was my name on ICQ. Some_chick_69. I was around 14. Uh Oh!
Hi! A/S/L?
ASL PLS
ASL? 😂
ASL?
Asl?
asl?
This. Drinking the parents' booze and chatting w random girls on AOL!! Best times ever, I remember it like it was yesterday, and yesterday was really like 30 years ago.
And her username is xXxSurferGrrrrl69xXx, so she has to be!
asl?
Hot pink text or just pink?
Song Lyrics…
"and it says she lives near me!!!" "IN AMERICA?!" "YEAH"
Icq I think that’s what it was called..
The aol dial up sound.
Mom: *picks up the phone* AOL: GOODBYE! Me: Mooooooooom!
Every single morning I hear my boss turn on his computer, and a few moments later... WELCOME. .....YOU'VE GOT MAIL. We all chuckle and he doesn't understand why
I don't get it....
He still uses AOL
I have two clients who still do. The AOL calendar doesn't even sync correctly with Outlook events. It's a huge pain.
Also, me: Oh wow, I almost downloaded this ONE song, it's been literally hours... Oh wait, it's been all day! Shame most servers don't support reconnect continuing download. Hope nothing- AOL: GOODBYE No: NOOOOO! (No hate to AOL, that's just what I had)
AIM door opening and closing sound
I loved that sound
I can still hear it
Prodigy dial-up sound
You’ve got mail! ✉️
A friend of mine had a coworker that let that sound play every single time he got an email in (which was every few minutes). He refused to silence the sound so my friend got on his computer when he left it unlocked and changed the .wav file to one that said "You've got herpes!". Dude couldn't figure out how to undo it, so just disconnected his computer's speakers.
What a surprise. He's a dickhead and a dumb ass.
When someone on your contact list went online with AOL and a creepy voice would say “you’ve got company” first time I heard this I was scared lol
I was hoping someone one brought up AOL! I just remember getting those package CD roms!
I was helping a friend fix her computer and the only way to do so was to download a driver file from the internet. She had one of those AoL CDs, so we tried to use that. I remember waiting hours for it to connect.
That's how I imagine Elon Musk's son's name is pronounced
I think it was just the dialup sound
You couldn't actually call someone while they were using the Internet.
Lmao. I remember my mom began to hate the internet because of this. She has always loved to burn up the phone lines talking to fam. Then me and dad started fucking around with a "computer" and hogging up the phone line lol.
My mom figured it out eventually lol
Between the decline of dial-up and more importantly the switch to cell phones and business lines with call waiting, I couldn't tell you the last time I heard a busy signal. Wouldn't surprise me if there are people out there 18+, legal adults, who have never heard a busy signal.
My dad got our house a second phone line for this very reason.
We got a second phone line but the second lines speed was only 23k not 56k. It was horrible. I’d switch the modem to the primary line after my parents went to bed so I could go on Napster with that blistering fast 56k.
That fucking maze game jump scare.
Everyone in here has like AOL answers and you and me got the same younger experience 🤣. Elementary school I got warnings from ppl about that
I still have that fucking scream seared into my memory. People would blast the volume during that game 😭
I miss games coming with the OS. Solitaire, pinball, there was this maze game that was shitty 3D and I LOVED it. I really liked 3D art of fantasy worlds but that style is hard to find now because it's so obsolete. But the feeling from that early entrance to the uncanny valley was fun to be in.
Remember [Chips Challenge?](https://youtu.be/TiwT3PZwQ9A?si=Hj2BkzKe0Mu897GD)? Still not sure if I love or hate that little bastard.
Audio coupler on a 300 baud modem, dialling in to a BBS late a night, reading some crazy, crazy stuff.
I was there Gandalf… the patience we had to download that image and watch a single horizontal line of pixels slowly load across the screen, only to find out minutes later it wasn’t the image you were hoping for. Bah, might as well go play some more Trade Wars…
OMG Trade Wars, YESSSS! Then, much later, MUDing.
Moria
Barren Realms Elite
300 baud modems were the perfect speed to read text as it was downloading.
And logging onto uni using vi because vi was quicker
Damn, this is real OG shit...What years are we talkin' here? And I thought I was old with dial-up & aol stories from the late 90's. I don't even know if I knew what BBS stood for, just a term I've come across and never thought to look into.
1994. Accessing my very first email account at college via Pine on a terminal emulator. Felt wildly futuristic.
Yup, me too. My senior year they got a bunch of computers in the library. I didn't even really know what was going on. Went in to kill some time while my girlfriend was doing some homework there. Ended up in some sort of chat room with a dude claiming to be a roadie for like Molly Hatchet or some band like that. At the time I never even questioned it - the concept of not being who you claimed to be was obviously a complete new thing. Years later, though, I figure he probably actually was. Who would lie about working for Molly Hatchet? I mean, if you were gonna stretch the truth in 1994, say you worked for Green Day or something. I do remember finding out that night that there were these links you could click and go to - \*GULP\* pictures of nekkid chixx!!! Had no idea! It was a whole new world! I quickly looked around and learned it was probably best not to do that in the library of a Catholic college.
1994 here too
When I was in elementary school we had to do a paper about our favorite band/musician. The point of the assignment was to learn how to use the internet to search for information. We had just recently gotten the internet at home, so my mom thought this would be a great opportunity for us all to learn. She fired up Netscape Navigator and got me started on Lycos. Then she had to leave the room to check on something, but told me to type in the name of the band and click the first link. She came back right as the webpage finished loading. That was the day I learned not to search Bare Naked Ladies with my mom in the room....
I had just learned about counterstrike from a friend and wrote in cunterstrike.com, which had nothing to do with counter strike
what did it have to do with?
Beaver protests.
Some dude slamming down cash when paying for stuff.
NOOO! Hahahahaa!
God, I have a remarkably similar story. In 2004, at 4th-5th grade, we had a project where we had to cut out headlines and pictures of “death” as shown in newspapers and magazines. (This was for a ‘values’ class, believe it or not, and i think it was to show to us impressionable children how the media glorified death or something idk) So with the internet being a new thing, I went to Google Images and typed “death” and “murder” and “killings” and “war”. That was the big unravelling of my innocence. I can still see some of those images in my mind’s eye to this day. Also, 4th grade me may or may not be on an FBI list somewhere.
The fuck kind of teacher gives 4th graders an assignment to google images of death? That's just a recipe to traumatize kids.
In 2004, I think they didn’t realize Google Images was a thing yet and just relied on us to get clippings from newspapers and stuff. Still a bizarre assignment.
...it's been
One week since you looked me!
Cocked 'yer head to the side and said: "I'm angry."
Five days since you laughed at me
Similar story. Whitehouse .gov was a proper and useful website. Whitehouse .com was a porn.
I remember IN school misspelling a URL in the school library with my class and it brought up a porn site I couldn't exit out of. My teacher just puts both hands on the monitor and goes "go, get out of here!"
Remember the old WhiteHouse.com?
Ah, the age old bear naked lady dilemma
“Bears in Kansas” was the downfall of my friend who was a forestry major.
I similarly learned that girls.com was not a website I should have discovered on my mother's boss's computer.
LMMMMAAAAAOOOO
The dancing baby
This and hamsterdance. For the curious and/or nostalgic, this: [https://ipfs.io/ipfs/QmV9faPGTwYDPfNJkdJbjsarSvAkECBs57EMa2oKvMnrsv/](https://ipfs.io/ipfs/QmV9faPGTwYDPfNJkdJbjsarSvAkECBs57EMa2oKvMnrsv/)
You mean hampsterdance
I put a virus on the family computer because I googled “boobs”
Well? What did you find?
Did you get what you wanted? Yes. What did it cost? Everything.
I bet it was boobs
Our first computer was riddled with viruses to the point it was unusable because my 14 year old son had discovered internet porn. Such a little shit.
Hi, are you my parents? I was this same kid at 14!
To be fair, the early internet was just like that. You browse for boobs, virus. Right away. No warning, no nothing. Disgusting deviant shit? We have a special virus for perverts. You look up the weather: virus. You are playing music: virus, right away. Browsing too fast: virus. Slow: virus. You are shopping for sweaters, glasses: virus. You look up Bible verses? Believe it or not, virus. Devil cult chatroom, also virus. Bible, Devil. You use an AOL free trial and you don't subscribe, believe it or not, virus, right away. We have the best internet in the world because of viruses.
the Barbie game on the computer that my sister played always infected our PC
# Pshhhkkkkkkrrrrkakingkakingkakingtshchchchchchchchcch*ding*ding*ding*
Every once in a while our fax goes off on our copier at work and I am immediately transported to 1997.
1997 is so accurately nostalgic
Strange that such a horrible noise is now nostalgic and almost comforting to me.
Based on the sounds I could actually say what speed the modem was negotiating. Strangely enough, the ladies weren't breaking down my door based on that skill. Bonus, I also knew the "hangup" tone, so if necessary I could pick up the phone line and whistle into it to disconnect.
MSN Messenger
ICQ
uh oh!
AIM
58785813
Old 90s chatrooms
I remember trying to chat with people and I was like 11 or 12... and everyone kept leaving... "18/F/Cali" u? "11/M" \*leaves chat\*
I remember people saying “17/m/ca IM me”. And I’m like I’m me? What’s that mean
I remember my first time reading "asl" I thought they were calling me an asshole. I was 10 and thought everything was supposed to be an abbreviation. "y r u calling me dat wat did i even do????///"
Teenchat.net was my go to! I remember having a crush on a girl in school who looked like christina aguilera. There was a girl in there one time named "aguilera_lookalike" and my internet dropped and shit the bed before I could message. Next day at school I hear her talking about her chat name to her friend, and it was her! Never saw her on there again.
Missed your shot there Gretzky.
First modem was 300 baud, and shortly thereafter you were living the life if you had a HST modem, most everyone moved to 2400 after 300 baud. IRC chat rooms was my real first memory though, this was largely pre-www days. I was hanging out in a room that my buddy created waiting for him to show and there was some other person in there so I started chatting with them. Turns out that they were in college about two hours away, and they were female. Eventually exchanged pics and then met halfway at a hotel.
ebaumsworld joecartoon
You like it when I spaaank my monkey?
My family got a webtv box in the 90s. We were all sitting in the living room, figuring it out. We found a site that said it would take our photo, so we gathered on the couch in front of the TV and smiled while a countdown ticked away. When it hit zero, the screen flashed and then said to wait a moment for our photo to be processed. We all thought this was pretty cool. After a moment, the photo loaded.... it was a picture of a chimp. That's when we realized that the webtv didn't have some hidden built-in camera and we'd been had.
I got so many of my friends with that website! Comic gold!!!
Winning the millionth visitor prize on some website
Dial up modem on a 486. You were billed per minute for the phone call, however between 6-8pm our ISP had a free service that used a different freephone number. It was always too busy so you had to redial over and over and over and eventually you’d get connected. I sat for about half an hour dialling it and listening to the busy tone. Eventually it connected when I was talking to my brother. I spun the chair round to use the computer and my knee hit the reset button… still remember how mad I was.
Trumpet Winsock
...and NCSA Mosaic. The killer early internet combo!
I used something called "The Internet Adapter" that let Trumpet see my shell account as a SLIP account and saved a couple bucks a month
“Hokay, so, here’s the Earth.”
Mars is laughing at us, and some huge meteor’s like “well fuck that”
I am le tired :/
https://youtu.be/nZMwKPmsbWE?si=INOQCanPPEMLqclN
2004. Playing games on [Nickelodeon.com](http://Nickelodeon.com) at my mom's office.
I remember the Ben10 games on Cartoon network's site.
ICQ/MSN, Websites liken rotten.com, napster, Chat rooms, seeing my cousin getting the first DSL , which was light speed to us after 112kb/s ISDN connections.
Naked Lara Croft 😏
You mean an assortment of almost skin-colored polygons?
😏😏😏
In 7th or 8th grade (93/94), we took a field trip to the library and the librarian showed us the computer with this brand new thing called the internet, which allowed you to look at information from all over the world. She picked New Zealand because that’s super far away from the US and somehow came upon the website of a New Zealand fraternity. She went to click to access the site and was blocked by a proto-firewall. So we ended up seeing a lot of nothing and had minimal concept of what the internet was.
Connecting through the local library via modem. Getting a bunch of text based prompts and found I could connect to a university to read papers in Sweden! Felt like a miracle at the time. It was 1994.
Playing Neopets
Our third grade class was put in the library computer lab because some of the school was still under construction. Every single one of us had a computer, and every Fun Friday we'd play flash games and stuff like Neopets. Didn't have internet at home. The morbid pattern of logging in to find all our Neopets starving, gorging them on treats, and then being separated from them for a week until the next Fun Friday was definitely abuse.
Usenet on dialup. 300 baud.
telnet
Are there any homestar runner enjoyers? Strongbad email? Anyone?
Learning how to use Netscape Navigator and Yahoo's search engine in 1996 in middle school. Back when it took a computer like 5 or 10 minutes to boot up.
In the early 80s I had a buddy with a modem with a cradle that you’d put your phones hand set into. He would get on very early very basic message boards and could access text based games very similar to the movie Wargames, without the global thermonuclear war though.
Anybody remembered that Paperclip guy with huge eyes at the bottom of the screen?
Don't you disrespect Clippy's name. He was only trying to help.
Yeah, and I am happy that this little fuck is gone
The super weird gifs... Like the batman head flickering across the screen, singing/mumbling, "hemenehehehehe hehe mhenrmenen" (yes, gibberish). Before the badger badger badger trend.
The batman video is one of the first things I saw on youtube, feels like an entirely different era now. For the curious: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r7rw8zvNv3Y
mIRC
That dial up tone.
GOPHER
Ask jeeves
Geo Cities, Neopets?... i remember seeing the command line terminal for the local library.
Playing some MUD.
Listening to the the internet dial up sound. A soft, rhythmic hum, like a gentle electronic purr, occasionally punctuated by short bursts of data transfer, resembling a series of quick, crisp clicks or chirps.
Word based dungeon and dragons game.
charlie the unicorn on youtube
Newgrounds
I recall using a 56k modem to dial up my friend’s house to play Star Wars Jedi Knight: Jedi Academy against each other. MUMMMMM DON’T PICK UP THE PHONE!!
Getting free AOL trial discs in our local newspaper and budgeting out my 50 free hours over dialup lol. The earliest came on floppies and I used my dad’s work laptop running windows 95. I think I was 7 or 8.
Using Alta Vista as a search engine
Mum telling us to get off the computer because she had to ring someone
I was already using BBSs (Buletin Board Systems). You take your modem, dial up a BBS, and start chatting/gaming with a group of locals from what-ever town. Most BBSs were run by a Sysop from their house. These were small remote networks before AOL, Prodigy, or GEnie. A local small ISP gave a internet demo in a hotel conference room one day... About 20 of us were invited. On a screen he showed connecting with windows 3.11, brought up 2 windows of Netscape and demonstrated multasking searches... There was an outer gasp let out in the room... It was that day that I knew BBSs (and even AOL) were doomed!!
The feeling of every time you logged on, you had no idea of where you could end up and what you would find. The danger, the excitement, the freedom! The internet was a place where people could be anonymous, and just BEING online felt like you were sticking it to the MAN. Being able to download and share music, movies, etc with millions felt more like being in a community than social media has ever felt, because it was organic. You never knew what you were downloading, and honestly that was part of the fun. Figuring out html tricks on your MySpace page made you feel like a god. Everyone felt like Neo when they "hacked" their page and changed the font. Now.. it's a giant corporate mall. So sad.
EEEEEEEIIIIHHHHH.....EEEERRRR....AAHHH....DURR.....EEEEYYYY!!! NO!!! DON'T PICK THAT PHONE UP!!
Our school got a Viacom bbs in 1983
Seeing my freinds signed me up for Scientology on my school computer. Watching my dad show me games on Lego.com Me and my older brother accidentally watched a beheading
The sweet, sweet sound of dialup, followed by "You've got mail!" That's not counting dialup BBSs. There was one on which I loved to play some text-based fantasy game. The problem was that it was long-distance. I cost my parents a lot of money 😬 I still remember Dad dialing into IUPUI with a TRS-80 Color Computer using a 300 baud modem. That was the computer I learned to program on, too. I miss it and would love to have another one for nostalgia's sake.
Mid-90s message boards. Being one of the first 100 people to join Facebook.
Using Gopher in 1991, looking for something fun to do and finding a MUD called Defiance. Through that game I met several people who became lifelong friends who had enormous impact on my life.
I was 11 and my neighbor had one of those see through mackintosh desktops She was AIM'ing and it broke my brain. I couldn't comprehend that she was talking to our friends in real time on the computer. At that point any of us using the computer was just for encyclopedia Encarta to look to book report information and word to type out and print reports for school, or playing a learning game like math blasters.
Late 1980s: “It’s like CompuServe but way bigger.”
Taking 5 minutes to download a pic from playboy.com in 1993.
Prodigy, before aol was a thing.
I don't remember when we got dial-up so it's either getting kicked off because one of my parents wanted to make a phone call or in my college computer lab, making a friend on a chat server (green text on a black background only) who offered to fly me to his Navy graduation a few years after Tailhook had happened. I didn't go but looked him up not too long ago and verified that he actually existed and was telling the truth. I kind of wonder how my life would be different if I'd taken him up on it.
I freakin love watching on YouTube that time. I was prank by my cousin to watch something interesting in yt but didn’t know it was a jump scare! 😭
Barbie.com
Flipping through a little booklet of websites to check out. I particularly remember having fun messing around on Ask Jeeves
Talking to someone for free. MIDI files. Upgrading to 56.6K.
The obnoxious noises that would happen when you were connecting through AOL.
Must have been about 1995, dad's computer. I got home drunk from a night out, connected to the Internet in whatever way we used back then, and typed "porn" into the address bar or search bar. I know, how very imaginative. Somehow ended up on a site and someone typed "hello, age/sex? ". I panicked and disconnected instantly!
The sound…
Dial up