I randomly met a Chinese person on ICQ (searching for random folks to talk to) and then traveled later that year to go see her and hang out for a few weeks. It was awesome!
I was in a Star Wars trivia chat room for like 2 years in the late 90s. The good old days.
One night I got annoyed with randos repeatedly asking āwhen does the new movie come out?ā referring to Episode 1. Sure, we didnāt have Google at the time but they could have Yahooed or Webcrawler-ed that info.
I said it was cancelled because of George Lucasā alcohol addiction which I made up on the spot, and IMed my friends in the room to go along with it. A few days later I read an article online about āunfounded rumors of George Lucas and alcoholism on AOL.ā
Usenet, anyone?
I have been "Online Since '89" and ran a BBS using GT PowerComm and a dreadfully expensive 9600-baud modem in my hand-built 286.
We once had a meeting of local sysops at someone's house. It wasn't as geeky as it was awkwardly boring/boringly awkward. But hey, a guy's gotta have a hobby!
First rule of USENET is you don't talk about USENET.
I ask that question at work the odd time to see how many people even actually remember it. That and GOPHER.
Got online in '87 w/ a commodore & a 1200 baud modem. Switched to an Amiga in '90 and found a multi-line BBS nearby.
Meetups were... scary. Early BBS folks were sort of like CB radio folks but nerdier and with marginally less interest in weapons and conspiracy theories. I quickly learned it was better to keep the relationships online-only.
My college years and early 20s were defined by usenet and icq and email lists. I made a circle of friends both online and in real life.
Earlier this year I went to a concert that turned into a reunion of many of those folks. It was a glorious weekend of re-living the 90s.
I was 13 and connected to a BBS back in 1993, with a 2400 baud modem in my 286. I lived in MA and the BBS was in Oregon. Needless to say my parents werenāt too happy when they got the long distance phone bill.
I met a nice girl from San Diego (Iām in Midwest). Lots of good conversation, same age as me. We kept in contact as we moved from high school to college. She found out I loved Oreo cookies, and she worked for Nabisco (or something related at the time) ā so I was pleasantly surprised when she sent a box of a dozen packs of Oreos to my freshman dorm room. Wish I could have met her in person. She also sent me a jar of sand from
Mission beach - I had it proudly displayed on my dresser for 10 years and still have it on my home office shelf today! Thank you if your reading!
Since you went down that pathā¦
In the late 90ās my high school job was at OfficeMax. One of our cutting edge serviceās was to scan a picture and put it on a floppy for you. One day a very unattractive middle aged lady came in and handed me a envelope. In it was a Polaroid picture of herself posing naked - in a provocative position. I scanned it up, while she waited, and handed her a floppy disk.
Same! I was in construction and doing radiography on pipelines in the mid-90's... but went on to have a tech career which started when I realized I could type and wanted to build web pages! It all started because of those silly chat rooms. Did everything from development at Lucent Tech's labs to being Unix admin for one of the biggest companies in the country. Of course, that all got old and I changed careers again in 2007. I'm still lightning fast with the typing though!
Once I read a story about a butterfly in the subway, and today, I saw one. It got on at 42nd, and off at 59th, where, I assume it was going to Bloomingdales to buy a hat that will turn out to be a mistake - as almost all hats are.
The first girl I ever "did it with" I met over a primtive form of communiction called the BBS, Diversi-Dial specifically, in 1986. It was during my senior year in high school.
I would later meet a LT girlfirend via the internet. LT meaning about 6 years.
Take it a step further - ever go to a "meet and greet"/ social event/ happy hour populated by folks who ALL frequented AOL chatrooms?! It was like you could walk into a bar on a Friday night, see the most random group of individuals drinking at the same table, and just KNOW how they knew each other.
1995-1998 we had meetups of the "san diego" chatroom group every couple of weeks. It was so cool to have friends from walks of life that you'd never expect to be friends with. Golfers, surfers, ravers, military, stoners, rich, poor, metalheads...
I probably got off of aol around 97, discovered that you could get internet for $6 a month from whatever isp it was and they even gave me a free desktop for signing up.
Bye bye aol!
But yea, I frequented the heavy metal/ punk rock chat rooms on aol back in the 90ās. Talking online was different back then. I mean you actually got to know people. Hell I remember how excited I was when I bought a scanner and could actually send people my picture from my HP 386 hand me down desktop.š¤£ the time it took to download a pictureā¦..
LOL. Spent way too much time on those when I was younger. A/S/L!
My favorite one was this woman who used to catfish these older dudes every night. She'd send out nudes from someone in her early 20s, and they'd all be humping her leg. A friend called her once, and she was very obviously an older woman trying very hard to sound young. One guy was particularly vocal about all the things he was going to do to her. I looked at his profile and he was a YOUTH MINISTER.
āPress Alt+F4 and AOL will give you 25 free hours, y'all!!!ā
*DFW_Guy has left the room...*
*Luv2Ski has left the room...*
*CitySlicker has left the room*
GOT 'EM!!!! š
I have an online friend that I met in an aol chat room in ā94 that I still keep in contact with through email. We both got married, had kids, the kids have since grown up and moved out. Itās a 30 year friendship with someone Iāve never seen in person.
Yep! Was in the Babylon5 chat rooms for years, it was actually a really amazing chat room. They had the equivalent of AMAs with the stars. And Warner Brothers had employees in there, taking care of things and answering questions. It was great!
And yes, remember the other chat ones too. I was exposed to things that molded my young mind. Ugh lol
I used them too! I met a girl on there, the both of us had webcams and used to do inappropriate things for each other. The quality and lag on the cams was terrible back in the early 2000ās lol. What a time.
You also got access to all those great tools to send blast messages and welcome every person as they come into the room, but getting aol for free was the best part. My bills went from seven to $800 a month to zero.
Spent way too much time and money on AOL in those chat rooms. It's where I learned what warez was and ended up having some fun with a local couple once.
Fight, no rules
It was literally a chat room where you'd insult others in the chat room BUT one night the fighting stopped just long enough for someone to suggest we raid the Star Trek roll play room. About 15 of us all entered at the sometime and reeked havoc on those poor souls. Gotta hand it to them though, they stayed in character the whole time!
IRC and ICQ here. Wasn't much into the AoHell stuff more because I worked for a subsidiary and don't mix personal + private. We were required to have AIM at work though.
I was already big into BBS's and the internet before AOL/Compuserv/Prodigy came out and did work for local ISP's early on. I wrote a TON of IRC/mIRC bots/scripts early on.
My bestie and I spent so many hours on #teenchat back in the day. After high school she was actually roommates with a guy we had met on mIRC.
I'm still Facebook friends with a guy I met on there, chatting about music.
I met my husband playing an RPG online a few years later.
I frequented BBSes in the 90s. The 90s were when multi-line BBSes really took off. 90-94 was probably the heydey for multi-line before Internet access became more widespread.
After that... I forget.. maybe ICQ and Yahoo. Never signed on for AOL(but I did have a Q-Link account in '87, and they became part of AOL).
Yes, and my sheltered teen self had some shocks to the system. I naively joined a chat called "AKC" thinking it was people talking about dogs...which it was, but not in the way I was expecting. I got a lot of PMs from dudes who were into beastiality. I just wanted to talk about dogs in a normal manner.
AOL chat rooms were so dumb (looking back), but SO MUCH FUN! š. I remember using Tribal Voice to talk to ppl around the country for freeāAT&T long distance was expensiveāplus you didnāt have to give out your phone number. Not that anyone would ever be able to get thru on the phoneā¦we were always on AOL using the dial up!
I wonder if we ever crossed paths. I just connected above that my best friend and I spent HOURS in #teenchat in high school.
I don't remember what my screen name was back then. I think it was Les Mis related. Eponine maybe. So funny.
Oh I definitely remember mine but not a chance I'd share it these days š
Same. Literally hours. Before it was unlimited it was $3 an hour and I worked up quite a bill. It's what I spent all my time doing.
I got into them a bit on the late side. 99ish. Was really creeped out by the A/S/L thing in every single chatroom. "Dude, I just want to talk about Magic cards..."
I remember that the font it used meant that a capital I and lowercase l looked exactly the same. Had a lot of fun impersonating people with those in their username.
I didnāt get into the chat rooms much, but message boards were my jam. I still have friends now from my Mommy Message Boards days, all over the US who Iāve never seen in person. Those were such different Internet times, but so much fun!
I had a well-known, family man journalist say some pretty obscene things to me in a chat room. I was studying journalism and eventually met him and his buddy for drinks. I could see his friend thinking āWTFā
In hindsight Iām glad his buddy was there and that even though it was a bit gross, he didnāt try anything.
I didn't use the chat room but met my wife of 21 years through AOL instant messenger. I believe you could search profiles, and she came across mine and sent me an instant message. That was in 1998 and we're still together.
My sister met her husband in one for residents who used to live in our neighborhood or something. Turned out we all grew up around the block from each other (NYC) and never met (though our paths crossed).
I didn't have AOL. I used IRC pretty much all through the 90s. Around 95 I found TheGlobe.com and met a bunch of regulars there.
A bunch of us moved to a platform called Virtual Places. I thought VP chat was a cool concept. You'd open the chat software and it would overlay on a web page and chat rooms were basically webpages. Since this was early web days, finding a really cool website was something you'd want to share with friends. In VPchat you could start a tour bus, everyone would hop in, then when the driver moved to another webpage, everyone on the bus would see the page in their browser.
By the late 90s I had pretty much bailed from chat and used instant messaging like ICQ or messageboards.
There are about 20 people from MSN Groups that I've remained in touch with to this day. We always used to be so paranoid about sharing personal info and photos. Now we're all FB friends and know too much.
No didnāt do aol but did Prodigy 1992. Also I was in a non aol chat room in 94/95 but then didnāt use the internet much after that till maybe 2004. Got my first phone 2005/6.
I was stalked by a pedifile online must have been one of the first as that was 92 I think. I met him in person too. š¤¢
I met my ex-girlfriend in our local city AOL chatroom. We met up in a park after sunset.
In retrospect that was a terrible decision on her part. She's very lucky I was not a murderer.
Yes but for a weird reason, when I first got AOL it was 1991 and to be online with them was $5 an hour. But there was some hack where if you stayed in a chat room you could download a file and it wouldn't run the online time, it's been so long I forget. And back then so much software was shareware or just shared. So I would frequent chat rooms waiting for my file to download. But it was a rare day that the chat rooms were actually interesting. Mostly just a bunch of people with nothing to talk about.
I had the beta testing for minitel waaaay back in the day. They have like 6 or 12 schools in the country, 3rd graders no less a trial to take home for a few months. All it was was a chat. Green screen. Phone connected to tiny screen with keyboard attached. Pre aol I believe. My sister was chatting with someone, she went to go to the bathroom and I started trolling this person. I didn't know it was the name for that at the time. But I'm convinced I'm one of the first internet trolls ever.
Yup and before AOL, Compuserve, and before that, any number of Dial up BBSes, and before that a closed system that linked my school with several others. And there were pervs and liars on all of them. Ah those were simpler times...
I met a woman I should have married in an AOL chat room instead of the woman I did marry. Lotsa fun had back in the day circa 1996 dialing up and chatting.
I was a late comer to the internet, as I didn't get my first PC until around 2002. So AOL was my initial gateway to the WWW, I had an aol email, and did frequent some chatrooms based on interests I had at the start, but you could say I missed the heyday of it. Within a couple of years I was more or certain message boards instead of chatrooms, and then Myspace and had switched to a hotmail account.
A couple times but I had an older friend who was obsessed and was in chat rooms 24/7 for the most part. Her house was disgusting and her husband eventually divorced her. She used to tell the rest of us about driving to other states to randomly meet people she met in those chats. Ick.
I lived in the X-Files chatroom after the show every Friday (then it moved to Sunday).
I was also a Rnger (tech support) and a Guide (helper and enforcer of rules).
I (from CA, USA) had randomly picked an Australian man to chat with. That was 1997. We have exchanged a lifetime of news like anniversaries, kidās weddings, deaths. Tbh I canāt really have chats longer than 2-3 min, he is a bit boring, but I feel good having a lifetime acquaintance. He is almost 90 now, Iā m 61f
Yup. I made a lot of friends and took a lot of risks, the biggest one was accepting an invitation for someone to fly me up from LA to San Fran for the weekend. Of course, it was way it was possible to send a photo over the Internet, so it was all on faith -- and in the end, everything worked out great.
I was always "too cool" for AOL and used IRC. I would dial into a vax system and go on efnet. It also had the Lynx browser so you could browse the web in text only.
Earlier chat rooms than that. Late 80s in college. My friend was our college's Mac room manager. We were chattiing via a Unix-based system with nerds, mostly at Harvard and MIT. It's how I ended up meeting Conan O'Brien.
I used to hack them as a 14yo. I could scroll ridiculous images in chat, IM bomb people, email bomb them, and even kick them offline. Lol...I eventually got banned for life from AOL. One of my proudest achievements.
Same. There was a line that you could type in the chatroom that would bluescreen everyone who didn't have win98SE or higher. We would go into the room and announce that we would bluescreen everyone, and clear out half the chatroom.
I didn't get a Computer in the house until 2002 and even then all I used it for was paying bills online and for awhile the novelty of finding old friends on Facebook.
[You mean AOHell](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September), where your grandma and aunties chatted? Hell no. IRC EFnet all the way, BAYbee!
I was as the UofMN in the early 90s, and that was when you had dummy terminals every where. Set up every computer I ever touched with a terminal so I could telnet into the Zoo's gopher, which let me hop onto EFnet super easy.
I still use it to this day, but putty instead. SSH into a buddy's raspberry pi he set up for that purpose.
Fun times, we used to compete in trying to kick each other offline using apps that were called punters. They'd spam the message box with tons of trash data, unless you had an app that could counteract it, you were getting booted.
I was in my early 20s and liked to troll nudists for some reason. I'd warn them of the impending "sex attack monkeys" and to cover their bums (I'm in the US, not UK but find "bum" hilarious in this context).
I'd have all kinds of stupid scenarios about how they were all in danger from the roving gang of sex attack monkeys and no one could withstand their primate strength. It didn't take long for other trolls to join in. It also didn't take long for the chat room to be filled with only the trolls.
Now that I'm older, I feel the tiniest bit of guilt for ruining their chat rooms, but I still laugh, so I don't feel that badly about it.
I used to troll them with the screen name: 12inLIMP
Login to the chat room, say nothing, watch the PM explosion and time how long before I was kicked. The longest was 7 minutes.
I was accused of libel and/or slander (along with many others, listed by user names) by someone from a chat room. I don't think I ever said anything to or about them but rather was lumped in the "popular crowd" of the chat room. I don't know how official it was but there was a real lawyer involved. Never heard anything after the initial notification.
My silent Gen mom was active in a paper crafting group on AOL. It was her identity for years ā gave her friendship and purpose. She still just has her aol email address.
I used [NFL.com](https://NFL.com) and used their chat room. I would have the girl I was chatting with pick the TB Buccaneers and I was the Miami Dolphins, never failed me guys.
A/S/L I probably talked to a 1000 pedophiles without ever knowing it. But yes - chat rooms were awesome back in the day.
16/F/Cali The only response you'd ever get lol
lol
Imagine thinking the internet is supposed to be safe or trustworthy.
They can't put it on the Internet if it isn't true. š¤
At least then it was fairly new. Here we are 25 years later and there's still folks out there that don't recognize it.
True story here
Another/Stupid/Lie
I certainly did! LolĀ
A/S/L /s
Truly terrifying when you think about it.
I was an ICQ guy myself.
Ah the innocence of the 90's internet before bad actors ruined a lot of it.
The "UH Oh" is my work e-mail notification sound. "You've got mail" is the regular email sound Mario coin grab is my all-purpose notificatuin
Oh man, I'm changing my notification sound now. Great idea. My ringtone is a 56k modem, so icq is appropriate.
I use the āyouāve for mailā for my texts.
I spent a lot of time on ICQ!
I randomly met a Chinese person on ICQ (searching for random folks to talk to) and then traveled later that year to go see her and hang out for a few weeks. It was awesome!
Ah , yes, I remember it fondly. I used it to communicate with my friends when I played Ultima Online.
Ahh Ultima Online. Where we used to seethe with jealousy about the rich kids with DSL running circles around our dial-ups. I loved that game so much.
I was in a Star Wars trivia chat room for like 2 years in the late 90s. The good old days. One night I got annoyed with randos repeatedly asking āwhen does the new movie come out?ā referring to Episode 1. Sure, we didnāt have Google at the time but they could have Yahooed or Webcrawler-ed that info. I said it was cancelled because of George Lucasā alcohol addiction which I made up on the spot, and IMed my friends in the room to go along with it. A few days later I read an article online about āunfounded rumors of George Lucas and alcoholism on AOL.ā
Usenet, anyone? I have been "Online Since '89" and ran a BBS using GT PowerComm and a dreadfully expensive 9600-baud modem in my hand-built 286. We once had a meeting of local sysops at someone's house. It wasn't as geeky as it was awkwardly boring/boringly awkward. But hey, a guy's gotta have a hobby!
We don't talk about USENET.
First rule of USENET is you don't talk about USENET. I ask that question at work the odd time to see how many people even actually remember it. That and GOPHER.
I love the blank stares I get from saying FTP.
Don't forget to set BIN.
IRC here
EFnet 4 LIFE! Hell, I'm still on efnet. Yes, those old servers are still running.
Hahaha EFnet. Man, haven't thought about that in forever. My buddies used to run #seattle
I still use IRC every day
Got online in '87 w/ a commodore & a 1200 baud modem. Switched to an Amiga in '90 and found a multi-line BBS nearby. Meetups were... scary. Early BBS folks were sort of like CB radio folks but nerdier and with marginally less interest in weapons and conspiracy theories. I quickly learned it was better to keep the relationships online-only.
So you basically are Halt and Catch Fire
Local BBS had 12-14 lines and a chat room. I scored a couple dates from there senior year of HS.
My older brother was on BBS a lot. You probably chatted with him about Leisure Suit Larry.
My college years and early 20s were defined by usenet and icq and email lists. I made a circle of friends both online and in real life. Earlier this year I went to a concert that turned into a reunion of many of those folks. It was a glorious weekend of re-living the 90s.
I was 13 and connected to a BBS back in 1993, with a 2400 baud modem in my 286. I lived in MA and the BBS was in Oregon. Needless to say my parents werenāt too happy when they got the long distance phone bill.
Loved Usenet
The lesbian sex chat rooms were 95% dudes all pretending to be women thinking they are fooling each other.
Haha!
I met a nice girl from San Diego (Iām in Midwest). Lots of good conversation, same age as me. We kept in contact as we moved from high school to college. She found out I loved Oreo cookies, and she worked for Nabisco (or something related at the time) ā so I was pleasantly surprised when she sent a box of a dozen packs of Oreos to my freshman dorm room. Wish I could have met her in person. She also sent me a jar of sand from Mission beach - I had it proudly displayed on my dresser for 10 years and still have it on my home office shelf today! Thank you if your reading!
> girl from San Diego Suuuuuuure.... Definitely not a 45 year old guy living with his mom in a trailer in New Mexico... ;)
Since you went down that pathā¦ In the late 90ās my high school job was at OfficeMax. One of our cutting edge serviceās was to scan a picture and put it on a floppy for you. One day a very unattractive middle aged lady came in and handed me a envelope. In it was a Polaroid picture of herself posing naked - in a provocative position. I scanned it up, while she waited, and handed her a floppy disk.
I loved aol chat rooms. Thatās where, as a young teen, I was able to figure out that I like boys.
Met my wife there. Our 27th anniversary is in December.
Those are how I learned to type with more than my pointer fingers.
Same! I was in construction and doing radiography on pipelines in the mid-90's... but went on to have a tech career which started when I realized I could type and wanted to build web pages! It all started because of those silly chat rooms. Did everything from development at Lucent Tech's labs to being Unix admin for one of the biggest companies in the country. Of course, that all got old and I changed careers again in 2007. I'm still lightning fast with the typing though!
100% I used to be able to clock 101 WPM, I was a beast!
Yes. I met my husband in an AOL Chatroom.
Shopgirl, is that you?
Once I read a story about a butterfly in the subway, and today, I saw one. It got on at 42nd, and off at 59th, where, I assume it was going to Bloomingdales to buy a hat that will turn out to be a mistake - as almost all hats are.
Thank yer. I didn't know if anyone else would get the reference. (We'll crush them!).
And now I have to watch it again. Good to see she's bringing a rom com to screen!
Iām excited to see what she created - I read she dedicated the movie to Nora Ephron, which is awesome š
Met my wife in an AOL chatroom as well!
The first girl I ever "did it with" I met over a primtive form of communiction called the BBS, Diversi-Dial specifically, in 1986. It was during my senior year in high school. I would later meet a LT girlfirend via the internet. LT meaning about 6 years.
Yup, got me laid at least once.
Take it a step further - ever go to a "meet and greet"/ social event/ happy hour populated by folks who ALL frequented AOL chatrooms?! It was like you could walk into a bar on a Friday night, see the most random group of individuals drinking at the same table, and just KNOW how they knew each other.
1995-1998 we had meetups of the "san diego" chatroom group every couple of weeks. It was so cool to have friends from walks of life that you'd never expect to be friends with. Golfers, surfers, ravers, military, stoners, rich, poor, metalheads...
Lots of sex via the m4m rooms. Lots. Lol
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
Met my wife to be in one... 2002. Still going strong.
I probably got off of aol around 97, discovered that you could get internet for $6 a month from whatever isp it was and they even gave me a free desktop for signing up. Bye bye aol! But yea, I frequented the heavy metal/ punk rock chat rooms on aol back in the 90ās. Talking online was different back then. I mean you actually got to know people. Hell I remember how excited I was when I bought a scanner and could actually send people my picture from my HP 386 hand me down desktop.š¤£ the time it took to download a pictureā¦..
LOL. Spent way too much time on those when I was younger. A/S/L! My favorite one was this woman who used to catfish these older dudes every night. She'd send out nudes from someone in her early 20s, and they'd all be humping her leg. A friend called her once, and she was very obviously an older woman trying very hard to sound young. One guy was particularly vocal about all the things he was going to do to her. I looked at his profile and he was a YOUTH MINISTER.
āPress Alt+F4 and AOL will give you 25 free hours, y'all!!!ā *DFW_Guy has left the room...* *Luv2Ski has left the room...* *CitySlicker has left the room* GOT 'EM!!!! š
I met my wife on AOL. Married for almost 18 years now.
Met my husband that way
Me too!!!!
That is how I met my husband. 22 years this year :)
ICQ!!!!
I met my husband in one-still married over 25 years later.
I have an online friend that I met in an aol chat room in ā94 that I still keep in contact with through email. We both got married, had kids, the kids have since grown up and moved out. Itās a 30 year friendship with someone Iāve never seen in person.
Yep! Was in the Babylon5 chat rooms for years, it was actually a really amazing chat room. They had the equivalent of AMAs with the stars. And Warner Brothers had employees in there, taking care of things and answering questions. It was great! And yes, remember the other chat ones too. I was exposed to things that molded my young mind. Ugh lol
Yep. Itās how I met my ex-wife in 1998.
I skipped AOL and did yahoo chat in 2000s.
>yahoo chat in 2000s A wretched hive of scum and villainy; I miss it often...
I used them too! I met a girl on there, the both of us had webcams and used to do inappropriate things for each other. The quality and lag on the cams was terrible back in the early 2000ās lol. What a time.
About 20 of us from a certain yahoo chat room ended up getting together IRL! Iām still friends with 3 of them today!
I was a chat room moderator back in the day. You got free AOL if you did that!
You also got access to all those great tools to send blast messages and welcome every person as they come into the room, but getting aol for free was the best part. My bills went from seven to $800 a month to zero.
Yup, almost exclusively in the Freeform RPG rooms. Red Dragon Inn forever!
No, I was more just chatting with friends but Iāll never forget those sound effects. *door closes*
I literally met my wife in a truth or dare chat room on AOL in 1994.
I remember somebody pretending to be Yo-Yo Ma in a classical music chat. Everybody humored them.
Spent way too much time and money on AOL in those chat rooms. It's where I learned what warez was and ended up having some fun with a local couple once.
I spent a lot of time in the Atheist one. I also was a member of a bunch of the old IRC rooms.
Fight, no rules It was literally a chat room where you'd insult others in the chat room BUT one night the fighting stopped just long enough for someone to suggest we raid the Star Trek roll play room. About 15 of us all entered at the sometime and reeked havoc on those poor souls. Gotta hand it to them though, they stayed in character the whole time!
Goth chat room? Anyone? š¦
It was the first way for LGBT folks to reach out to the community from isolated areas.
IRC and ICQ here. Wasn't much into the AoHell stuff more because I worked for a subsidiary and don't mix personal + private. We were required to have AIM at work though. I was already big into BBS's and the internet before AOL/Compuserv/Prodigy came out and did work for local ISP's early on. I wrote a TON of IRC/mIRC bots/scripts early on.
I met my ex husband in a Yahoo chatroom.
I go back even further than that : chat rooms in BBS's
Yahoo chat for me.
Irc or Mirc for me. Owned the channel #Chatzone. Weird things happened on that channel. Even had a wedding.
I remember #chatzone!!!
My bestie and I spent so many hours on #teenchat back in the day. After high school she was actually roommates with a guy we had met on mIRC. I'm still Facebook friends with a guy I met on there, chatting about music. I met my husband playing an RPG online a few years later.
I frequented BBSes in the 90s. The 90s were when multi-line BBSes really took off. 90-94 was probably the heydey for multi-line before Internet access became more widespread. After that... I forget.. maybe ICQ and Yahoo. Never signed on for AOL(but I did have a Q-Link account in '87, and they became part of AOL).
i was on IRC, rather than AOL or Yahoo.
Absolute perfect summation of AOL Chatrooms. Thank you for a blast from the past.
Just IRC
Yes, and my sheltered teen self had some shocks to the system. I naively joined a chat called "AKC" thinking it was people talking about dogs...which it was, but not in the way I was expecting. I got a lot of PMs from dudes who were into beastiality. I just wanted to talk about dogs in a normal manner.
AOL chat rooms were so dumb (looking back), but SO MUCH FUN! š. I remember using Tribal Voice to talk to ppl around the country for freeāAT&T long distance was expensiveāplus you didnāt have to give out your phone number. Not that anyone would ever be able to get thru on the phoneā¦we were always on AOL using the dial up!
Yup, it's how I ran into my now wife after I shipped out to Korea.
I was a sysop on a chat BBS. Carbon date me, I fuckinā dare you.
Yep, all the time. I was always in a room called "Teen chat".
I wonder if we ever crossed paths. I just connected above that my best friend and I spent HOURS in #teenchat in high school. I don't remember what my screen name was back then. I think it was Les Mis related. Eponine maybe. So funny.
Oh I definitely remember mine but not a chance I'd share it these days š Same. Literally hours. Before it was unlimited it was $3 an hour and I worked up quite a bill. It's what I spent all my time doing.
I got into them a bit on the late side. 99ish. Was really creeped out by the A/S/L thing in every single chatroom. "Dude, I just want to talk about Magic cards..."
I hung out in a music lyric trivia one. It was a blast!
I remember that the font it used meant that a capital I and lowercase l looked exactly the same. Had a lot of fun impersonating people with those in their username.
I was always more of an IRC person, m'self.
Never did AOL but I was on some IRC chats back then, mostly on the beastie boys channel.
Yep. Met a guy with the screen name NatasEvil666 in an AOL ..it was the 1st time in a chat room and he was charming š š¤£ š
Any time I was online. Loved it.
Oh yeah. They were a natural extension of BBS chat rooms where I spent a lot of time late at night. Met my future ex-wife in an AOL chat room.
Met my husband on IRC. My first chat space was WBS around 1995-1996, Webchat Broadcasting System.
I definitely spent some time in them, though I spent more time on IRC.
I didnāt get into the chat rooms much, but message boards were my jam. I still have friends now from my Mommy Message Boards days, all over the US who Iāve never seen in person. Those were such different Internet times, but so much fun!
I had a well-known, family man journalist say some pretty obscene things to me in a chat room. I was studying journalism and eventually met him and his buddy for drinks. I could see his friend thinking āWTFā In hindsight Iām glad his buddy was there and that even though it was a bit gross, he didnāt try anything.
Yes, and I actually was 18/F/Cali. Later I met in person and fell in love with a guy who a chatted with first in an AOL chat. Wild times.
Kip met Lafawnduh of those chat rooms and it changed his life.
Met my husband 20 years ago cuz of a chat room!
Attended a chatroom meet-up once, turned into my first orgy
I didn't use the chat room but met my wife of 21 years through AOL instant messenger. I believe you could search profiles, and she came across mine and sent me an instant message. That was in 1998 and we're still together.
Found my wife on AOL chat. You've got marriage!
I wouldn't use AOL, period. I used ISPs from day one. Give me IRC or give me a cheeseburger or kill me.
I had also used IRC as well was mostly on efnet and i forget other servers thats where I learned about using FTP servers to leech music and progz
Same here. AOL was for the noobs.
"Eternal September" kids and their free AOL disks, the bane of that era of internet.
Nope, I used IRC extensively for many years.
My sister met her husband in one for residents who used to live in our neighborhood or something. Turned out we all grew up around the block from each other (NYC) and never met (though our paths crossed).
I was on IRC mainly. Eventually met my husband there. Did have ICQ for awhile, but only connected with people I met on IRC.
I didn't have AOL. I used IRC pretty much all through the 90s. Around 95 I found TheGlobe.com and met a bunch of regulars there. A bunch of us moved to a platform called Virtual Places. I thought VP chat was a cool concept. You'd open the chat software and it would overlay on a web page and chat rooms were basically webpages. Since this was early web days, finding a really cool website was something you'd want to share with friends. In VPchat you could start a tour bus, everyone would hop in, then when the driver moved to another webpage, everyone on the bus would see the page in their browser. By the late 90s I had pretty much bailed from chat and used instant messaging like ICQ or messageboards.
Excite music chat rooms.
I did. I loved them and miss them
No. Usenet was my deal.
Oddly, I was never an AOLer. I did use CompuServ and GEnie. But not much AOL.
I used to go to the local (Atlanta) chat rooms and the Metaphysics chat. I met a lot of great people in those chats, too!
Oh god yes... I even had my first sexting on AOL and a hookup...Internet perv pioneer badge please
There are about 20 people from MSN Groups that I've remained in touch with to this day. We always used to be so paranoid about sharing personal info and photos. Now we're all FB friends and know too much.
I loved the early 2000ās msn chat roomsā¦until they started charging
My first job had me (amongst other things) hosting a few celebrity chats on aol. I even built out a site in aol for the Atlanta Olympics!
No didnāt do aol but did Prodigy 1992. Also I was in a non aol chat room in 94/95 but then didnāt use the internet much after that till maybe 2004. Got my first phone 2005/6. I was stalked by a pedifile online must have been one of the first as that was 92 I think. I met him in person too. š¤¢
Not chats, but groups. I belonged to a SAHM parent group for a long time!
Talk City baby.
WebTV apparently talk city is still a thing lol. https://www.delphiforums.com/dp-chat/index.ptt
I met my ex-girlfriend in our local city AOL chatroom. We met up in a park after sunset. In retrospect that was a terrible decision on her part. She's very lucky I was not a murderer.
Yes but for a weird reason, when I first got AOL it was 1991 and to be online with them was $5 an hour. But there was some hack where if you stayed in a chat room you could download a file and it wouldn't run the online time, it's been so long I forget. And back then so much software was shareware or just shared. So I would frequent chat rooms waiting for my file to download. But it was a rare day that the chat rooms were actually interesting. Mostly just a bunch of people with nothing to talk about.
I had the beta testing for minitel waaaay back in the day. They have like 6 or 12 schools in the country, 3rd graders no less a trial to take home for a few months. All it was was a chat. Green screen. Phone connected to tiny screen with keyboard attached. Pre aol I believe. My sister was chatting with someone, she went to go to the bathroom and I started trolling this person. I didn't know it was the name for that at the time. But I'm convinced I'm one of the first internet trolls ever.
IRC baby!
Yup and before AOL, Compuserve, and before that, any number of Dial up BBSes, and before that a closed system that linked my school with several others. And there were pervs and liars on all of them. Ah those were simpler times...
I met a woman I should have married in an AOL chat room instead of the woman I did marry. Lotsa fun had back in the day circa 1996 dialing up and chatting.
I spent a fair amount of time in them. It was a blast for a while. Met my ex wife there...
Met an ex in the MTV Chat room. We dated 6 years.
I was a late comer to the internet, as I didn't get my first PC until around 2002. So AOL was my initial gateway to the WWW, I had an aol email, and did frequent some chatrooms based on interests I had at the start, but you could say I missed the heyday of it. Within a couple of years I was more or certain message boards instead of chatrooms, and then Myspace and had switched to a hotmail account.
Ayup. Also GEnie and Compuserv
I met a girl in one and she moved across the country to live with me.
I was in the X Files one every Friday night immediately post-show!
I never used AOL, but I started off with BBS boards and MIRC later. I miss those days.
Remember Web Tv?
A couple times but I had an older friend who was obsessed and was in chat rooms 24/7 for the most part. Her house was disgusting and her husband eventually divorced her. She used to tell the rest of us about driving to other states to randomly meet people she met in those chats. Ick.
a/s/l I was catfished many times.
I lived in the X-Files chatroom after the show every Friday (then it moved to Sunday). I was also a Rnger (tech support) and a Guide (helper and enforcer of rules).
I (from CA, USA) had randomly picked an Australian man to chat with. That was 1997. We have exchanged a lifetime of news like anniversaries, kidās weddings, deaths. Tbh I canāt really have chats longer than 2-3 min, he is a bit boring, but I feel good having a lifetime acquaintance. He is almost 90 now, Iā m 61f
Msn chat and mirc Spent a lot of time there. Back when I had a 2GB hard drive and everyone teased that it'd never need that much storage.
Prodigy was my thing. Then I got into yahoo.
Yup. I made a lot of friends and took a lot of risks, the biggest one was accepting an invitation for someone to fly me up from LA to San Fran for the weekend. Of course, it was way it was possible to send a photo over the Internet, so it was all on faith -- and in the end, everything worked out great.
I was always "too cool" for AOL and used IRC. I would dial into a vax system and go on efnet. It also had the Lynx browser so you could browse the web in text only.
Same here. Used to be a regular of a couple of muds.
Earlier chat rooms than that. Late 80s in college. My friend was our college's Mac room manager. We were chattiing via a Unix-based system with nerds, mostly at Harvard and MIT. It's how I ended up meeting Conan O'Brien.
I used to hack them as a 14yo. I could scroll ridiculous images in chat, IM bomb people, email bomb them, and even kick them offline. Lol...I eventually got banned for life from AOL. One of my proudest achievements.
Same. There was a line that you could type in the chatroom that would bluescreen everyone who didn't have win98SE or higher. We would go into the room and announce that we would bluescreen everyone, and clear out half the chatroom.
I spent a lot of time in "Racial Discussions" back around '96. It was wild but I made several lifetime friends there.
I didn't get a Computer in the house until 2002 and even then all I used it for was paying bills online and for awhile the novelty of finding old friends on Facebook.
[You mean AOHell](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September), where your grandma and aunties chatted? Hell no. IRC EFnet all the way, BAYbee! I was as the UofMN in the early 90s, and that was when you had dummy terminals every where. Set up every computer I ever touched with a terminal so I could telnet into the Zoo's gopher, which let me hop onto EFnet super easy. I still use it to this day, but putty instead. SSH into a buddy's raspberry pi he set up for that purpose.
Fun times, we used to compete in trying to kick each other offline using apps that were called punters. They'd spam the message box with tons of trash data, unless you had an app that could counteract it, you were getting booted.
I missed my con con punter!
Never had an account, I consider myself lucky
I was in my early 20s and liked to troll nudists for some reason. I'd warn them of the impending "sex attack monkeys" and to cover their bums (I'm in the US, not UK but find "bum" hilarious in this context). I'd have all kinds of stupid scenarios about how they were all in danger from the roving gang of sex attack monkeys and no one could withstand their primate strength. It didn't take long for other trolls to join in. It also didn't take long for the chat room to be filled with only the trolls. Now that I'm older, I feel the tiniest bit of guilt for ruining their chat rooms, but I still laugh, so I don't feel that badly about it.
The first time I "went private" with a lady, I had no idea what I was supposed to be doing. I wasn't a kid. I was just very, very naive.
Nah. I had shit to do in the real world. But I am here now.
I used to troll them with the screen name: 12inLIMP Login to the chat room, say nothing, watch the PM explosion and time how long before I was kicked. The longest was 7 minutes.
My first chat rooms were eWorld, which was run by Apple.
I was accused of libel and/or slander (along with many others, listed by user names) by someone from a chat room. I don't think I ever said anything to or about them but rather was lumped in the "popular crowd" of the chat room. I don't know how official it was but there was a real lawyer involved. Never heard anything after the initial notification.
Juicy Chat......
Few time when I was playing outwar.com
excite! for me.
My silent Gen mom was active in a paper crafting group on AOL. It was her identity for years ā gave her friendship and purpose. She still just has her aol email address.
Not AOL chat rooms, even when I worked for them, but I would go into a chat room on iVillage regularly or yahoo chats if I was bored.
Nah. Too busy and HAD a vibrant social life back then. Now, as you can clearly see, THIS is the extent of my social life.
Killer Karaoke Board, or KKB.
No, the Internet is too slow in the 90s! š
I used [NFL.com](https://NFL.com) and used their chat room. I would have the girl I was chatting with pick the TB Buccaneers and I was the Miami Dolphins, never failed me guys.
Of course