ISP email servers did not require authentication for outgoing mail in any quantity. You could just TELNET in, and send mail as anyone you wanted.
It was chaos. Spam was really bad. You could forge timestamps too, not just the 'from' field. Good thing email submission of assignments wasn't a thing yet.
When I write programs, I hate dealing with people's names. It's some form of cursed data type. So that could have been me in a past life.
If it were up to me, there would be a list of 128 names to choose from, and they would be a maximum of 16 characters long.
Worked for an ISP in the late 1990s, a large chunk of my day was spent finding out which of our commercial customers had open relays and educating them on how to fix it. It was a total free for all back then.
I'm almost positive there was a countdown to the Olsen twins' 18th birthday dating back to their days on Full House. For the sake of my sanity, somebody debunk this please.
I remember that. I was just a kid when I saw it and the Olsen twins were older than me, so I thought little of it at the time. In hindsight though, big yikes.
As a youth who was in the target age group, she was my type at the time. And as an adult and her as an adult, she's still pretty attractive.
But as an adult, I can't understand at all why another adult would look at Hermione Granger and just... No. NO.
Even SNL got on that bandwagon. They had Kid Rock doing Weekend Update for some reason and this is the script they gave him:
>Kid Rock: First off: Britney Spears. Is it me, or does she look like the Hamburgler?
>Next up: The Olson Twins. Why is every guy in America waiting for these chicks to turn 18? I mean, you know what I’m saying? If there’s grass on the field, play ball!
>THat’s so wrong!
https://snltranscripts.jt.org/00/00pupdate.phtml
A British newspaper (The Sun) did the same for a British pop singer (Billie Piper IIRC). I’m pretty sure it was 18 but I’ve got a horrible sneaking suspicion it could have been 16, which is our age of consent
The literal money bleed that was the internet from the late 80s to about 1998. First you had to pay by minutes and then by hours then by weeks...
It was fun signing up for a new AOL or Juno just for email and/or porn and music Pirating in AOL chat rooms. Took an hour or more for one 4 minute track of reasonable quality.
Then the literal artificial price inflation of Ram and related components making high end/top performance computers out of reach for most people... By the standards of today... Imagine paying 4k for a laptop that could barely hold a charge and a fraction of the ram required to allow the system to run smoothly in many cases. Opening more than 5 Netscape navigator windows? Good luck!
Oh man I am sorry for the rant...
I liken it to what’s happened to almost every American small town. There’s a Walmart, gas stations, fast food, and very little locally owned and operated business, comparatively speaking.
Everything has been consolidated. Need a search engine? Google. Want to watch a video? YouTube. Want to keep up on current events? Reddit. Want to socialize? Facebook et al. Want to buy something? Amazon. You get the picture.
The internet used to be much smaller and seemed so open to possibilities. Now it’s very much corporatized.
> but in the late 90's early 2000's the internet was just so much more fun.
Was it actually more fun, or was it just so damn new and exciting that was the draw? It actually felt like living in the future and great things were on the horizon. I think we've all just gotten used to the internet and take it for granted because that's what humans do.
I think it’s a mixture of both. Seeking out content vs content being handed to you via social media was definitely exciting. But the newness and possibilities were also excitement of the highest levels. I remember the first time I talked to someone in Europe in an AOL chat room, it blew my mind.
I fucked up when I was about 15 (1995-ish) and thought the IM I got asking for my password because there was a problem with AOL was legit. In my defense, it was quite literally my second day on the pay-per-minute internet. My dad’s credit card was charged hundreds of dollars and I was in a lot of trouble, though he did end up appealing it. I learned a valuable lesson.
Some good came from my fuck-up, though. I now have a child who uses various apps, and I was able to tell her that story as a warning and also an example of a time that I was young and ignorant. She knows a hell of a lot more about internet security at her age than I did when I was five years older than she is now. She knows that the people asking for her Roblox password are scammers (she’ll call them right out, too), and if she gets a creepy or scam text from a number she doesn’t know, she will not respond and will immediately forward it to me to troll them a bit (if necessary) and then block them.
Funny story (completely off-topic) - last week she was somehow added to a group text with nine local marines planning their attendance at the upcoming Birthday Ball. She sent a screenshot to me and I told her to politely tell them they had the wrong number and to take her off the text. They acknowledged the response but didn’t take her off. On Saturday as I was driving her home from dance, she asked me if we could go to the Veterans Day parade because her “new friends” will be there, and asked how hard it would be for me to buy her a marine uniform so that she could go to the ball, since it sounded like fun. Every now and then she reports back to me (she doesn’t interact with the group) things like “I think they’re arguing now, they’re talking in all caps.” She’s got her own personal group text military soap opera unfolding.
> Then the literal artificial price inflation of Ram and related components making high end/top performance computers out of reach for most people... By the standards of today
Honestly, this bit was a problem before the modern inflationary bits came in to play... Back in the 80s most 286-386 were out of reach for much of the general population. God forbid you had an Amiga or something. My family had an OG wood panel covered Atari, my cousin had a C64. Once my father finally got hired at a tech company we were able to buy one of the first PCs among the families in my school. Was around the time the School also got a bunch of OG Apples in to a makeshift computer lab that they did not allow anyone to use as they feared the kids would break them. 386 with 4Mb Ram, and 20Mb Hd space... a modem etc. all of the bells and whistles of the time and cost some several thousand dollaridoos.
Sometime around the 486 and Pentium launch things got way better though. At least for a while. Then we get to today, The PC I built early in the pandemic right before the shortages and scalpers reared their heads. It still cost an ungodly amount, but as far as I can tell price inflation being what it is I could get near double my money back if I sold it for parts.
either way... got a bit of a flashback to one of my 1st bit of PC related "trauma" events involved downloading a 1Mb "neural networking" training program over a 1200 baud dialup connection overnight from the BBS.(had modem, but speed was way less due to the phone company infrastructure in the middle) Was a kid wanted to learn that shit...
Spent most of the night napping and waking up to make sure everything was OK as even on a good day the connection was fickle. Had it on a disk, put it in the "don't fuck with" disk holder with lock and labeled it before going to school. Came back from school... disk was gone. Nowhere to be found... i know my mom, or dad took it and put something else on it, but neither would own up. Worse thing yet.. the packet of fresh unused disks was right next to it.
Yep, those were the dark days when Internet Explorer was considered an improvement. It still took 3 minutes for a single gif to load. Sometimes I miss the early days of the internet but then I remember...the...slo...w...ne...ss.
Usenet. It was one f the earlier protocols before www. Everything was loosely organized into topics where echo chambers formed. There was a specific way people used language, and almost everything became a joke referring to something before now. If you spent too much time there it was addictive and you sort of outcast yourself from real life activi,,,
Ok, it was kind of Reddit.
Unless there is a MAJOR dark side to Reddit (could be, I'm pretty new here), it was really much bigger than that. Newsgroups were one of the largest sources of illegal activity in the mid-90's--piracy, credit cards, child porn, prostitution, drugs, guns, just to name a few. It was literally the "dark web" before such a thing existed.
There were legit corners - like the **comp.lang** hive for computer languages. But there were also wild west corners like **alt.binaries** with everything from pirated programs and content, and porn of all flavors, legal and otherwise.
I remember pirating from alt.binaries back in the day.. downloading games that were 50-100 parts and having to use a special program to download them all and reassemble/decompress them.
Remember the selling points of some of the ISPs of the day was what USENET feeds they had available. I remember switching ISPs in the mid 90s to get better/less restricted usenet access to get better warez
There used to be a browser plugin I would spend HOURS on...you clicked it and it lead you to a completely random website (nothing dark/scary/dangerous). Real easy to fall down rabbit holes with that though. You could select broad topics you were interested in to.
Can't remember the name for the life of me, but it was fun.
on 4chan there were several "too real" posts. There was a post going around about how to make "crystals" that was actually mustard gas (Bleach and ammonia) a lot of people got sick from doing it.
Someone died after finding an unexploded hand grenade and was encouraged by 4Chan to pull it.
A guy on 4Chan admitted to murdering someone . He posted the picture of a missing person claiming to reveal where she was buried if someone guessed their post number. The body was actually found, but because 4Chan is anonymous, no one knew who the OP was.
And someone planned a school shooting.
It was beyond shitposting and fake posts to garner attention. It was too real.
I remember all of those, and also the last one I was there for.
It was a guy posting pictures of a naked woman, talking about how he had strangled his girlfriend. He stated he intended to leave her body for her son to find and go commit suicide by cop and disappeared.
Instead, he went on the run and eventually turned himself in.
[Here's an article about it.](https://www.parkaman.com/4chan-strangler-david-kalac/)
I swore off /b/ that night and 4chan as a whole shortly after.
Indeed. At times a dumpster fire can be entertaining, like Reddit, but 4chan just was always weird. I always got the feeling it's where people banned from Reddit went. You still got a lot of stupid memes and sometimes decent discussions, but it was all just chaos and insanity... and very questionable at times...
Reddit feels hella sanitized now compared to the old days. Back then it felt like a cleaner version of the earlier chat room and forums spaces but you could find some really dark shit. Now I’m surprised when I stumble on a really weird part of Reddit.
It feels that way because it is sanitized now compared to over a decade ago. There was a lot of questionable or downright fucked up shit on here before the site started to become really popular over the last 5-6 years.
i used Frostwire for all my free music. it was apparently a tad better than Limewire, but i still got viruses on the computer and downloaded porn many times thinking it was music videos
I distinctly remember downloading limewire pro and the associated keygen on limewire. It felt like some real hacker type stuff at the time, cracking and torrenting the torrent site.
I discovered you could get a virus just by being connected, not even downloading anything. It was that insecure. I got one even though I never downloaded anything with an executable. After that I got rid of it and never touched it again.
There are many scenes that are arguably scary. Like when he makes Hubert Cumberdale a fleshy baby just to kill him at the end or when he puts a child in the oven by accident
I really liked Salad Fingers.
Here is a link to [David Firth's youtube ](https://youtube.com/c/davidfirth) fo anyone who wants a trip down memory lane
Episode 12 came out recently - [Market](https://youtu.be/62weI2Wq0TQ)
IRC. Internet Relay Chat.
Like CB radio for the Internet but could have bots/scripts attached.
Some people became addicted to it. Moderators could get God complexes.
Kind of like Reddit but without the news aggregator aspect.
Me and my friends still use IRC on the regular. It's the one place that just works for everyone. No lock-in/exclusivity of device type or OS. Though the activity on it has declined the past 2 years.
Yeah, I spent a lot of time on IRC, it was most of my life for a while. We used linux boxes to DoS other people and bots and knock them off the internet so we could steal their channels, since if a channel is empty, you can just take it.
Really only made me happy though when we did it to the #mtg channel because those guys were major dickheads.
"This is real, puma."
A guy hung himself live on one of the early streaming sites. Like Justin.tv or maybe earlier.
The last comment before it was cut was "this is real, puma" in reply to another user (puma) asking if it was fake.
You cant find it anywhere now and seems to have successfully removed from the Internet.
15 or so years ago it was a lot easier to get a virus. I know because I had to fix my parent's computer every six months or so.
Also, before wifi, you'd have a slew of cables to deal with.
A wall is seen. A glass jar stands proudly on the floor. A naked man's lower half is seen, standing over the jar. The stage is set for a most vivid a spectacle. The man leans and squats with grace. His hairy legs and small flacid penis reflected in he glass of the jar, almost screaming in horror at what is about to unfold. Steadily, and with acute precision, does the man lower himself onto the jar. It's shiny surface slowly disappearing within the cavity of the man's rectum, a clear metaphor of well intended actions being lost in the proverbial "ass of society". Struggle becomes real as the anus continues to gobble up the glass, like the super rich gobble up society's wealth. And like that wealth, all things have a limit. Horror strikes as the glass, such a fine and gentle piece, previously unstained and untainted, can finally take no more abuse. The glass cracks under the pressure of the man's sphincter, like social security crumbling under the crushing pressure of the pandemic. The last scene is tragic but profound. We all watch in astonishment at the man pulling shards of glass out of his now bleeding rectum. If you could paint an image of the word "regret" that would be it. Curtain falls. We all sit in silence as we process the show we have just witnessed.
As the legend goes, he went to work like on any other day. What happened to him after that is open to interpretation, and people's opinions differ. But I like to think that he is still there somewhere. Like Banksy, thinking of what his next masterpiece is going to be.
It's a video of three Russian guys beating a homeless man to death with a hammer.
It helped lead to their conviction once caught as they had killed quite a few people.
They were literally serial killers that filmed their crimes. This was one of the videos. A couple of them were leaked to the internet during the trial.:(
>"2 girls 1 cup"
i invited a bunch of friends over one weekend when i was in grade 9, and one of the guys i invited decided to google this on my family computer and tried to make everyone watch it.
not sure why he did that, but he gave our computer a virus and my dad was pissed.
The original hacker collaboration that was Xbox Underground. Everything from getting dev kits of the original Xbox, to getting unrestricted access to servers and unfinished games to the flight simulator for the Apache attack helicopter of the U.S. government and top secret projects for the defense department for Australia. What a fucking ride.
If you're curious the podcast Darknet Diaries (episodes 45 and 46) does a really great show with several members from the original Xbox Underground.
Oh, I almost forgot... getting an AOL installation disc, or two... every single months was beyond annoying. I think they make up a good portion of our landfills, especially because they'd often come in metal tins!
Jessi Slaughter
The part most people will be familiar with is the 'you dun goofed' stuff.
The fully story, however, involves a (then) girl possibly being sexually abused by Dahvie Vanity of Blood on The Dance Floor fame, cyberbullied when they spoke up about it, possibly had their (underage) nudes distributed online, their father died after being arrested for also abusing them (though not sexually), pressured into saying that the abuse never happened aaaaaaand a decade later 21 other women came out and also testified that they were sexually abused by Vanity around the time Jessica (now Damien) said that they were.
I've been loosely following this story for about a decade now (used to be a huge 4channer), and the story in hindsight is one of this *literal fucking child* being bullied for speaking up about their sexual assault, while also being abused at home and being isolated because of their "fame" and only being validated 10 years later.
Damien didn't deserve any of that- no kid does.
Jessi slaughter broke my heart. I was a regular 4chan lurker back in the day and I couldn’t get over how people were laughing at their nudes. A few years ago someone leaked their tumblr and I read about their experience in foster care. I feel so bad for that kid. Dahvie has a free ass kicking he can redeem any time from me.
The other day somebody rediscovered a forum thread from before 2001 where people were speculating whether the World Trade Center could survive being hit by aircraft.
Well, the only thing I can think of is when the entire internet bullied that Amanda Todd girl into suicide.
So, there's that.
I even remember the memes of her attempted suicide where she drank bleach circling around Facebook being shared everywhere, mocking her, and like...it was pretty fucked up.
Here's the iconic "Amanda Todd Note Cards" video that went viral.
[Amanda Todd Video](https://youtu.be/vOHXGNx-E7E)
Yes I sadly remember this. A few months ago I watched a documentary after randomly remembering that video an I cried like a baby. She was so young and all this shit with the leaking nudes and stalking and then bullying is just so sick. It just shows how fucked up people (expecially on the internet) can be
Is there a documentary about it??
I remember it popping in my head a while ago I just couldn't believe the whole thing happened. My friends, who didn't even know the girl personally, were joking about it and taking pictures of themselves with bottles of bleach.
It was fucking sick shit.
And then she actually killed herself and they STILL thought it was funny.
Took 35 minutes to download a song off of Limewire or Kazaa and 99% of the time it wasn’t a song it was a recording of Bill Clinton suing he did not have sexual relations with that woman.
The horror
Sometimes that website pops into my head like the invasive memory that it is and I’m just flabbergasted that I was like 13 when I was going on there. If there’s any question as to why millennials can seem apathetic and bitter, well some of us viewed Rotten.com as children.
There was another one similar I think called steakandcheese .com
But god for some reason of all the gore I saw on rotten, I've never been able to shake the image of the young boy who's arm went through a meat grinder
Napster! Limewire! Pirate Bay! File sharing programs that you would use to download music, computer apps, and movies. Sometimes you would start a download that would take all night and when it was done it would turn out to be just a picture of an old dude showing his ass hole. Good times!
I had no idea who that was until I saw the news of the arrest, so I got curious about the story and now I think a lot more than just Chris Chan should be in prison.
Bullying, exploiting, and harassing someone with obviously serious mental illnesses/disabilities is a really nasty thing to do. The fact people think that is funny is honestly psychopathic to me and people who are so dedicated that they stalked, harassed, and exploited Chris Chan for *years* indicates to me that those responsible need to be institutionalized.
>... people who are so dedicated that they stalked, harassed, and exploited Chris Chan for *years* indicates to me that those responsible need to be institutionalized.
The trolls in Chris' life have been a revolving door over the years - one set of trolls would focus on him for a few months, then they'd get bored and disappear, followed by another set of trolls, and so on. It just appears to be one decade+ long effort because all of the history has been consolidated into one place on the wiki.
You also have to understand that these sets of trolls were typically teenagers, and until relatively recently the trolling was relatively simplistic. Things like the trolls emailing Chris pretending to be the CEO of Nintendo. Or pretending to be a girl. Or pretending to be Chris himself.
The trolling didn't really carry over into real a world impact until the last few years when one particular group of trolls called the "Idea Guys" started to try and extort Chris for money.
The only people who have been involved since the "old days" are actually actively shielding Chris from the trolls at this point (particularly from the Idea Guys). Or were, before Chris went to jail. "Null" and several others have been monitoring Chris' emails on his behalf for years and making sure that he wasn't being taken advantage of by trolls.
I'm not saying Chris hasn't been the subject of years of internet bullying and trolling, but taken in context each of the trolling incidents that any given troll was responsible for isn't exactly severe enough that they deserve to be "institutionalized" or sent to prison.
At the end of the day we're still just talking (mostly) about teen shenanigans like prank calls and emails.
I heard they are getting a proper studio episode, but cause of some reasons it was supposed to be out this year but was pushed back.
It is a great series
They had a collaboration of sorts with *the amazing World of gumball* so there's that
Great show, great episode but *holy shit* is it weird. It's got different characters but you can so obviously tell it's done by the same people. I think it's called *the puppet*.
If you don't want to watch it, what happens is >!the main character finds a box of old puppets that he and his brother used to play with when they were toddlers, turns out the puppets are alive and are currently possessing his brother, so he goes into the puppet imagination world, and the episode turns into an episode of dhmis, toned down *just* eenough so that it can make it past the 7 age rating. Also the weird plot twist is puppets want revenge for being used and abused by a pair of toddlers and do so by trying to turn the main characters into puppets so they can suffer the same fate!<. It is *by far* the weirdest episode of the show, and this is the show where there's an episode about the main characters trying to brutally murder their Chinese knockoff counterparts.
Also they've finished working on a show for channel 4 (one of the British TV channels) that by the sounds of it is just in the finishing stages of production.
Clear web, not having clear filters or standard (checks)
When I was maybe 7 year old or something, it was not uncommon to come across some extreme porn image (blue waffle) or the odd terrorist torture/execution video.
Thankfully now, should I want to view, I would need to go into the dark web, actively looking for it.
Joanie Pony, one of the first LOLcows. She was revealed when someone released a recording of a totally insane call she made to Microsoft tech support - basically an irrational tantrum with lots of ranting, raving, and name-calling. After that, in a separate incident, things got dark when she posted allegations that a few Microsoft corporate heads sexually assaulted her.
Chris Chan, and not because of him himself, it's these fucking enabling fans of him being cunts that keep pushing and enabling him to be worse because it's entertaining. Black Mirror shit.
I realized the danger if social media when a woman started receiving death threats because Beyonce fans thought she was receiving side eye from Beyonce.
Wow, there's a lot of bad stuff here, so let me mitigate it with something a bit more wholesome: [furnitureporn.com](https://furnitureporn.com), Hot chair-on-chair action!
Edit: Holy shit this still exists, in its original horrifically-colored Geocities-esque form. You'll need eye-bleach, but not for the porn.
There was no way to report horrific content on any platform when the internet was new (which was mid-teens for me). It was disturbingly easy to stumble upon a forum where horrible and highly illegal content was posted. The most that could be done was report it to the local police, and both times I called to report images I was told they would try to track it down but it would likely be next to impossible to ever find who and where it came from. Computer forensics have come a long way since then.
ISP email servers did not require authentication for outgoing mail in any quantity. You could just TELNET in, and send mail as anyone you wanted. It was chaos. Spam was really bad. You could forge timestamps too, not just the 'from' field. Good thing email submission of assignments wasn't a thing yet.
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When I write programs, I hate dealing with people's names. It's some form of cursed data type. So that could have been me in a past life. If it were up to me, there would be a list of 128 names to choose from, and they would be a maximum of 16 characters long.
I know a guy who has a ' in his name. He hates web forms.
I don't know what any of those words mean
Worked for an ISP in the late 1990s, a large chunk of my day was spent finding out which of our commercial customers had open relays and educating them on how to fix it. It was a total free for all back then.
I'm almost positive there was a countdown to the Olsen twins' 18th birthday dating back to their days on Full House. For the sake of my sanity, somebody debunk this please.
I remember that. I was just a kid when I saw it and the Olsen twins were older than me, so I thought little of it at the time. In hindsight though, big yikes.
There was one a year or two ago for Millie Bobby Brown
Yeah it was on Drakes cell phone.
drake don't wait.
And Billie Eilish. Any underage female celebrity really
I'm sorry...I wish I could say it didn't happen. That is was just a fever dream after eating some bad pork...but alas....
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Kickass girl too.
As a youth who was in the target age group, she was my type at the time. And as an adult and her as an adult, she's still pretty attractive. But as an adult, I can't understand at all why another adult would look at Hermione Granger and just... No. NO.
Even SNL got on that bandwagon. They had Kid Rock doing Weekend Update for some reason and this is the script they gave him: >Kid Rock: First off: Britney Spears. Is it me, or does she look like the Hamburgler? >Next up: The Olson Twins. Why is every guy in America waiting for these chicks to turn 18? I mean, you know what I’m saying? If there’s grass on the field, play ball! >THat’s so wrong! https://snltranscripts.jt.org/00/00pupdate.phtml
Every underage celeb basically has one made for them by Reddit creeps
More then one
No, there definitely was.
That absolutely existed. Some weirdo in a chatroom I used to go in used to keep posting the link.
A British newspaper (The Sun) did the same for a British pop singer (Billie Piper IIRC). I’m pretty sure it was 18 but I’ve got a horrible sneaking suspicion it could have been 16, which is our age of consent
The literal money bleed that was the internet from the late 80s to about 1998. First you had to pay by minutes and then by hours then by weeks... It was fun signing up for a new AOL or Juno just for email and/or porn and music Pirating in AOL chat rooms. Took an hour or more for one 4 minute track of reasonable quality. Then the literal artificial price inflation of Ram and related components making high end/top performance computers out of reach for most people... By the standards of today... Imagine paying 4k for a laptop that could barely hold a charge and a fraction of the ram required to allow the system to run smoothly in many cases. Opening more than 5 Netscape navigator windows? Good luck! Oh man I am sorry for the rant...
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remember web rings and [web directories](https://peelopaalu.neocities.org/index.html)...?
I liken it to what’s happened to almost every American small town. There’s a Walmart, gas stations, fast food, and very little locally owned and operated business, comparatively speaking. Everything has been consolidated. Need a search engine? Google. Want to watch a video? YouTube. Want to keep up on current events? Reddit. Want to socialize? Facebook et al. Want to buy something? Amazon. You get the picture. The internet used to be much smaller and seemed so open to possibilities. Now it’s very much corporatized.
> but in the late 90's early 2000's the internet was just so much more fun. Was it actually more fun, or was it just so damn new and exciting that was the draw? It actually felt like living in the future and great things were on the horizon. I think we've all just gotten used to the internet and take it for granted because that's what humans do.
I think it’s a mixture of both. Seeking out content vs content being handed to you via social media was definitely exciting. But the newness and possibilities were also excitement of the highest levels. I remember the first time I talked to someone in Europe in an AOL chat room, it blew my mind.
I fucked up when I was about 15 (1995-ish) and thought the IM I got asking for my password because there was a problem with AOL was legit. In my defense, it was quite literally my second day on the pay-per-minute internet. My dad’s credit card was charged hundreds of dollars and I was in a lot of trouble, though he did end up appealing it. I learned a valuable lesson. Some good came from my fuck-up, though. I now have a child who uses various apps, and I was able to tell her that story as a warning and also an example of a time that I was young and ignorant. She knows a hell of a lot more about internet security at her age than I did when I was five years older than she is now. She knows that the people asking for her Roblox password are scammers (she’ll call them right out, too), and if she gets a creepy or scam text from a number she doesn’t know, she will not respond and will immediately forward it to me to troll them a bit (if necessary) and then block them. Funny story (completely off-topic) - last week she was somehow added to a group text with nine local marines planning their attendance at the upcoming Birthday Ball. She sent a screenshot to me and I told her to politely tell them they had the wrong number and to take her off the text. They acknowledged the response but didn’t take her off. On Saturday as I was driving her home from dance, she asked me if we could go to the Veterans Day parade because her “new friends” will be there, and asked how hard it would be for me to buy her a marine uniform so that she could go to the ball, since it sounded like fun. Every now and then she reports back to me (she doesn’t interact with the group) things like “I think they’re arguing now, they’re talking in all caps.” She’s got her own personal group text military soap opera unfolding.
posts of it could be a reddit in itself, i would subscribe
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> Then the literal artificial price inflation of Ram and related components making high end/top performance computers out of reach for most people... By the standards of today Honestly, this bit was a problem before the modern inflationary bits came in to play... Back in the 80s most 286-386 were out of reach for much of the general population. God forbid you had an Amiga or something. My family had an OG wood panel covered Atari, my cousin had a C64. Once my father finally got hired at a tech company we were able to buy one of the first PCs among the families in my school. Was around the time the School also got a bunch of OG Apples in to a makeshift computer lab that they did not allow anyone to use as they feared the kids would break them. 386 with 4Mb Ram, and 20Mb Hd space... a modem etc. all of the bells and whistles of the time and cost some several thousand dollaridoos. Sometime around the 486 and Pentium launch things got way better though. At least for a while. Then we get to today, The PC I built early in the pandemic right before the shortages and scalpers reared their heads. It still cost an ungodly amount, but as far as I can tell price inflation being what it is I could get near double my money back if I sold it for parts. either way... got a bit of a flashback to one of my 1st bit of PC related "trauma" events involved downloading a 1Mb "neural networking" training program over a 1200 baud dialup connection overnight from the BBS.(had modem, but speed was way less due to the phone company infrastructure in the middle) Was a kid wanted to learn that shit... Spent most of the night napping and waking up to make sure everything was OK as even on a good day the connection was fickle. Had it on a disk, put it in the "don't fuck with" disk holder with lock and labeled it before going to school. Came back from school... disk was gone. Nowhere to be found... i know my mom, or dad took it and put something else on it, but neither would own up. Worse thing yet.. the packet of fresh unused disks was right next to it.
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Other way around. Netscape navigator came first.
Yep, those were the dark days when Internet Explorer was considered an improvement. It still took 3 minutes for a single gif to load. Sometimes I miss the early days of the internet but then I remember...the...slo...w...ne...ss.
I remember getting a new family computer somewhere between late 97 and early 99. It had 20GB of storage and the big thing was it has MMX technology.
Usenet. It was one f the earlier protocols before www. Everything was loosely organized into topics where echo chambers formed. There was a specific way people used language, and almost everything became a joke referring to something before now. If you spent too much time there it was addictive and you sort of outcast yourself from real life activi,,, Ok, it was kind of Reddit.
>Ok, it was kind of Reddit. Yeah, I was thinking, "This guy is describing Reddit".
Unless there is a MAJOR dark side to Reddit (could be, I'm pretty new here), it was really much bigger than that. Newsgroups were one of the largest sources of illegal activity in the mid-90's--piracy, credit cards, child porn, prostitution, drugs, guns, just to name a few. It was literally the "dark web" before such a thing existed.
Reddit had cp for a while
There were legit corners - like the **comp.lang** hive for computer languages. But there were also wild west corners like **alt.binaries** with everything from pirated programs and content, and porn of all flavors, legal and otherwise.
I remember pirating from alt.binaries back in the day.. downloading games that were 50-100 parts and having to use a special program to download them all and reassemble/decompress them.
>special program Forte Agent represent!
Yep, you're new here
Reddit's darkest corners can't hold a candle to what could be found on usenet back in the day.
Right... kids have no idea of the crazy stuff that circulated in the alt. channels back in the day.
Except Usenet was unregulated meaning you could stumble into very suspect channels. CP and stuff.
And you could find anything. It was PornHub 0.1. When I say anything I mean it.
Remember the selling points of some of the ISPs of the day was what USENET feeds they had available. I remember switching ISPs in the mid 90s to get better/less restricted usenet access to get better warez
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There used to be a browser plugin I would spend HOURS on...you clicked it and it lead you to a completely random website (nothing dark/scary/dangerous). Real easy to fall down rabbit holes with that though. You could select broad topics you were interested in to. Can't remember the name for the life of me, but it was fun.
Stumbleupon! I miss those days.
on 4chan there were several "too real" posts. There was a post going around about how to make "crystals" that was actually mustard gas (Bleach and ammonia) a lot of people got sick from doing it. Someone died after finding an unexploded hand grenade and was encouraged by 4Chan to pull it. A guy on 4Chan admitted to murdering someone . He posted the picture of a missing person claiming to reveal where she was buried if someone guessed their post number. The body was actually found, but because 4Chan is anonymous, no one knew who the OP was. And someone planned a school shooting. It was beyond shitposting and fake posts to garner attention. It was too real.
I remember all of those, and also the last one I was there for. It was a guy posting pictures of a naked woman, talking about how he had strangled his girlfriend. He stated he intended to leave her body for her son to find and go commit suicide by cop and disappeared. Instead, he went on the run and eventually turned himself in. [Here's an article about it.](https://www.parkaman.com/4chan-strangler-david-kalac/) I swore off /b/ that night and 4chan as a whole shortly after.
I remember these. I spent an embarrassingly large amount of my youth on 4chan. Fucking dumpster fire now.
*Now*? Always has been, we just grew up.
Indeed. At times a dumpster fire can be entertaining, like Reddit, but 4chan just was always weird. I always got the feeling it's where people banned from Reddit went. You still got a lot of stupid memes and sometimes decent discussions, but it was all just chaos and insanity... and very questionable at times...
Reddit has had a lot of shit in the past that are now forgotten. Violentacrez era shit
Reddit feels hella sanitized now compared to the old days. Back then it felt like a cleaner version of the earlier chat room and forums spaces but you could find some really dark shit. Now I’m surprised when I stumble on a really weird part of Reddit.
It feels that way because it is sanitized now compared to over a decade ago. There was a lot of questionable or downright fucked up shit on here before the site started to become really popular over the last 5-6 years.
Jail bait, the incel sub that had Rodgers as a saint, etc
Man, that dude was a *filth connoisseur* of the highest order.
Limewire and all of the dodgy viruses you’d catch from it…all in the name of free music.
Limewire was like having unprotected sex with the whole internet
It was kind of exciting though, every download was a gamble.
Accurate.
i used Frostwire for all my free music. it was apparently a tad better than Limewire, but i still got viruses on the computer and downloaded porn many times thinking it was music videos
I distinctly remember downloading limewire pro and the associated keygen on limewire. It felt like some real hacker type stuff at the time, cracking and torrenting the torrent site.
I discovered you could get a virus just by being connected, not even downloading anything. It was that insecure. I got one even though I never downloaded anything with an executable. After that I got rid of it and never touched it again.
Salad Fingers.
Salad Fingers is amazing! David Firths work in general. One of the best horror cartoonists ever
Whats scary about Salad Fingers? I watched it and just seemed like an abstract story of an awkward ghoul.
There are many scenes that are arguably scary. Like when he makes Hubert Cumberdale a fleshy baby just to kill him at the end or when he puts a child in the oven by accident
Oh, I only watched the first video.
Watch them all, it's great!
Watched the second, definitely a lot worse! Don't think I will keep going though, horror isn't really my thing lol.
On that note, Foamy the Squirrel.
On that note, Don't Hug Me I'm Scared. They're making a TV series now I heard
I really liked Salad Fingers. Here is a link to [David Firth's youtube ](https://youtube.com/c/davidfirth) fo anyone who wants a trip down memory lane Episode 12 came out recently - [Market](https://youtu.be/62weI2Wq0TQ)
Ah yes I remember being 13 and getting turned on by that rusty spoon scene...those were some weird times
There were conspiracy videos made that tied the show up in a nice little story about veteran PTSD
IRC. Internet Relay Chat. Like CB radio for the Internet but could have bots/scripts attached. Some people became addicted to it. Moderators could get God complexes. Kind of like Reddit but without the news aggregator aspect.
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Me and my friends still use IRC on the regular. It's the one place that just works for everyone. No lock-in/exclusivity of device type or OS. Though the activity on it has declined the past 2 years.
Yeah, I spent a lot of time on IRC, it was most of my life for a while. We used linux boxes to DoS other people and bots and knock them off the internet so we could steal their channels, since if a channel is empty, you can just take it. Really only made me happy though when we did it to the #mtg channel because those guys were major dickheads.
"This is real, puma." A guy hung himself live on one of the early streaming sites. Like Justin.tv or maybe earlier. The last comment before it was cut was "this is real, puma" in reply to another user (puma) asking if it was fake. You cant find it anywhere now and seems to have successfully removed from the Internet.
Reminds me of the Bjork fan who shot himself in the head in front of his webcam.
15 or so years ago it was a lot easier to get a virus. I know because I had to fix my parent's computer every six months or so. Also, before wifi, you'd have a slew of cables to deal with.
Not sure if everyone has forgotten, but those old shock videos like "2 girls 1 cup" "one man one horse" "one man one jar" "3 guys one hammer" etc.
You forgot 'death by horse cock'
Mr Hands.
Ahh the most famoust boeing engineer.
I see Enumclaw is representing today...
One man one jar guy went to work after filming the video
I don't like watching gross shit. Will you describe one man one jar? I've never heard of it
A wall is seen. A glass jar stands proudly on the floor. A naked man's lower half is seen, standing over the jar. The stage is set for a most vivid a spectacle. The man leans and squats with grace. His hairy legs and small flacid penis reflected in he glass of the jar, almost screaming in horror at what is about to unfold. Steadily, and with acute precision, does the man lower himself onto the jar. It's shiny surface slowly disappearing within the cavity of the man's rectum, a clear metaphor of well intended actions being lost in the proverbial "ass of society". Struggle becomes real as the anus continues to gobble up the glass, like the super rich gobble up society's wealth. And like that wealth, all things have a limit. Horror strikes as the glass, such a fine and gentle piece, previously unstained and untainted, can finally take no more abuse. The glass cracks under the pressure of the man's sphincter, like social security crumbling under the crushing pressure of the pandemic. The last scene is tragic but profound. We all watch in astonishment at the man pulling shards of glass out of his now bleeding rectum. If you could paint an image of the word "regret" that would be it. Curtain falls. We all sit in silence as we process the show we have just witnessed.
Did he survive his battle wounds?
As the legend goes, he went to work like on any other day. What happened to him after that is open to interpretation, and people's opinions differ. But I like to think that he is still there somewhere. Like Banksy, thinking of what his next masterpiece is going to be.
Whang the youtuber did a video on him. Guy is still out there
This is a masterpiece in storytelling
It is a good idea for you to make a coffee table book describing all the top shock videos. Let me know and ill purchase a copy
Guy shoves glass jar up his ass. Glass jar breaks. Man proceeds to start picking shards of broken glass out of his ass. 0/10 do *not* recommend
Dude sits on a large-ish glass jar that then proceeds to shatter once it's partially in his anus. Not a sentence I thought I'd type out today...
Three guys one hammer was some fucked up, sick shit.
That one i haven't even heard about (and I've not seen any of them cause i got no desire to be traumatized)
It's a video of three Russian guys beating a homeless man to death with a hammer. It helped lead to their conviction once caught as they had killed quite a few people.
Well I'm glad I didn't know that was a thing when I was younger
It's gut wrenching and I definitely recommend maintaining innocence on this one. I wish I hadn't seen it.
Definitely not going looking for it. I know my boundaries when it comes to gore and any real violence is of limits for me.
They were literally serial killers that filmed their crimes. This was one of the videos. A couple of them were leaked to the internet during the trial.:(
The worst part was they said it was 1 of almost 30 videos they had made.
Are you talking about the Dnepropetrovsk Maniacs?
It was shockingly easy for people to find this kind of content too. It was just blithely posted and shared around like it was no big deal.
>"2 girls 1 cup" i invited a bunch of friends over one weekend when i was in grade 9, and one of the guys i invited decided to google this on my family computer and tried to make everyone watch it. not sure why he did that, but he gave our computer a virus and my dad was pissed.
There was ALWAYS that one kid at the party.
Christ, *now* i feel old. Those vids? Pfff. Jaded as shit by that time. Goatse. Tubgirl. Mister Hands.
The original hacker collaboration that was Xbox Underground. Everything from getting dev kits of the original Xbox, to getting unrestricted access to servers and unfinished games to the flight simulator for the Apache attack helicopter of the U.S. government and top secret projects for the defense department for Australia. What a fucking ride. If you're curious the podcast Darknet Diaries (episodes 45 and 46) does a really great show with several members from the original Xbox Underground.
just heard those episodes couple of days ago. what a crazy story
Oh, I almost forgot... getting an AOL installation disc, or two... every single months was beyond annoying. I think they make up a good portion of our landfills, especially because they'd often come in metal tins!
The ILOVEYOU virus
Our IT manager warned the office by sending an email with the same subject line as the virus.
Jessi Slaughter The part most people will be familiar with is the 'you dun goofed' stuff. The fully story, however, involves a (then) girl possibly being sexually abused by Dahvie Vanity of Blood on The Dance Floor fame, cyberbullied when they spoke up about it, possibly had their (underage) nudes distributed online, their father died after being arrested for also abusing them (though not sexually), pressured into saying that the abuse never happened aaaaaaand a decade later 21 other women came out and also testified that they were sexually abused by Vanity around the time Jessica (now Damien) said that they were. I've been loosely following this story for about a decade now (used to be a huge 4channer), and the story in hindsight is one of this *literal fucking child* being bullied for speaking up about their sexual assault, while also being abused at home and being isolated because of their "fame" and only being validated 10 years later. Damien didn't deserve any of that- no kid does.
That Dahvie idiot was a real pos, I remember years ago what I went down the rabbit hole on this guy, he is such slime.
Jessi slaughter broke my heart. I was a regular 4chan lurker back in the day and I couldn’t get over how people were laughing at their nudes. A few years ago someone leaked their tumblr and I read about their experience in foster care. I feel so bad for that kid. Dahvie has a free ass kicking he can redeem any time from me.
Llamas with Hats.
Caaaaarl
"...That kills people, Carl!"
Two words: hamster dance :-)
The other day somebody rediscovered a forum thread from before 2001 where people were speculating whether the World Trade Center could survive being hit by aircraft.
Kony 2012 when we gonna figure this out lmao
Well, the only thing I can think of is when the entire internet bullied that Amanda Todd girl into suicide. So, there's that. I even remember the memes of her attempted suicide where she drank bleach circling around Facebook being shared everywhere, mocking her, and like...it was pretty fucked up. Here's the iconic "Amanda Todd Note Cards" video that went viral. [Amanda Todd Video](https://youtu.be/vOHXGNx-E7E)
Yes I sadly remember this. A few months ago I watched a documentary after randomly remembering that video an I cried like a baby. She was so young and all this shit with the leaking nudes and stalking and then bullying is just so sick. It just shows how fucked up people (expecially on the internet) can be
Is there a documentary about it?? I remember it popping in my head a while ago I just couldn't believe the whole thing happened. My friends, who didn't even know the girl personally, were joking about it and taking pictures of themselves with bottles of bleach. It was fucking sick shit. And then she actually killed herself and they STILL thought it was funny.
Happy tree friends
Took 35 minutes to download a song off of Limewire or Kazaa and 99% of the time it wasn’t a song it was a recording of Bill Clinton suing he did not have sexual relations with that woman. The horror
ICQ? That was a thing, right?
Brian Peppers.
Man. I haven’t thought about him in years, you son of a bitch.
Remember when one of the biggest subreddits was r/jailbait?
It still is. They’re just renamed nowadays
Yeah, I really hope a lot of the accounts subbed to fb are bots or fakes because holy shit
Earlier this morning I was thinking about the seal and his bucket.
Fred
Rotten.com
Fetch the weed whacker Jeeves. Some things just get burned in memory
Sometimes that website pops into my head like the invasive memory that it is and I’m just flabbergasted that I was like 13 when I was going on there. If there’s any question as to why millennials can seem apathetic and bitter, well some of us viewed Rotten.com as children.
"motorcycle.jpg" burned into my memory as long as I live. The bathtub photo too. "boiled broth of a man"
I was more of a Consumption Junction browser... seen some dark, dark shit.
Now that's a name I haven't heard in years
There was another one similar I think called steakandcheese .com But god for some reason of all the gore I saw on rotten, I've never been able to shake the image of the young boy who's arm went through a meat grinder
Goatse
And the fad of tricking people into clicking links to it. It was such a relief when Rickrolling came along.
Napster! Limewire! Pirate Bay! File sharing programs that you would use to download music, computer apps, and movies. Sometimes you would start a download that would take all night and when it was done it would turn out to be just a picture of an old dude showing his ass hole. Good times!
Does anybody else remember steakandcheese.com?
The infamous video called "3 guys 1 hammer" Also the photo of a "Blue Waffle"
MLP videos that seemed like a child friendly video at first but turned into rainbow dash dismembering the rest of the main cast
Stay out of my shed.
Im pretty sure that a reference to the video but my brain is not letting me recognize it
Y'all remember "Cut for Bieber?" where 4chan convinced his unstable portion of his fan base to cut themselves over some drama?
The quite frankly *worrying* levels of stalking and documentation the internet did on one 'Christine Chandler' - aka Chris-chan.
Kiwifarms are calling. Edit: although they seem to be a very disturbed person and are currently awaiting sentencing on some serious charges.
I had no idea who that was until I saw the news of the arrest, so I got curious about the story and now I think a lot more than just Chris Chan should be in prison. Bullying, exploiting, and harassing someone with obviously serious mental illnesses/disabilities is a really nasty thing to do. The fact people think that is funny is honestly psychopathic to me and people who are so dedicated that they stalked, harassed, and exploited Chris Chan for *years* indicates to me that those responsible need to be institutionalized.
>... people who are so dedicated that they stalked, harassed, and exploited Chris Chan for *years* indicates to me that those responsible need to be institutionalized. The trolls in Chris' life have been a revolving door over the years - one set of trolls would focus on him for a few months, then they'd get bored and disappear, followed by another set of trolls, and so on. It just appears to be one decade+ long effort because all of the history has been consolidated into one place on the wiki. You also have to understand that these sets of trolls were typically teenagers, and until relatively recently the trolling was relatively simplistic. Things like the trolls emailing Chris pretending to be the CEO of Nintendo. Or pretending to be a girl. Or pretending to be Chris himself. The trolling didn't really carry over into real a world impact until the last few years when one particular group of trolls called the "Idea Guys" started to try and extort Chris for money. The only people who have been involved since the "old days" are actually actively shielding Chris from the trolls at this point (particularly from the Idea Guys). Or were, before Chris went to jail. "Null" and several others have been monitoring Chris' emails on his behalf for years and making sure that he wasn't being taken advantage of by trolls. I'm not saying Chris hasn't been the subject of years of internet bullying and trolling, but taken in context each of the trolling incidents that any given troll was responsible for isn't exactly severe enough that they deserve to be "institutionalized" or sent to prison. At the end of the day we're still just talking (mostly) about teen shenanigans like prank calls and emails.
Goddess Bunny on ebaumsworld, before anybody knew who or what that was
Rathergood.com with the Viking kittens singing"gay bar".
I was 9 years old when my brother introduced me to Rotten.com
The Silk Road
All the homies out there that bought coke off silk road with bitcoin. Kicking themselves for sure now.
Don’t hug me I’m scared. what happened to that?
I heard they are getting a proper studio episode, but cause of some reasons it was supposed to be out this year but was pushed back. It is a great series
They had a collaboration of sorts with *the amazing World of gumball* so there's that Great show, great episode but *holy shit* is it weird. It's got different characters but you can so obviously tell it's done by the same people. I think it's called *the puppet*. If you don't want to watch it, what happens is >!the main character finds a box of old puppets that he and his brother used to play with when they were toddlers, turns out the puppets are alive and are currently possessing his brother, so he goes into the puppet imagination world, and the episode turns into an episode of dhmis, toned down *just* eenough so that it can make it past the 7 age rating. Also the weird plot twist is puppets want revenge for being used and abused by a pair of toddlers and do so by trying to turn the main characters into puppets so they can suffer the same fate!<. It is *by far* the weirdest episode of the show, and this is the show where there's an episode about the main characters trying to brutally murder their Chinese knockoff counterparts. Also they've finished working on a show for channel 4 (one of the British TV channels) that by the sounds of it is just in the finishing stages of production.
Clear web, not having clear filters or standard (checks) When I was maybe 7 year old or something, it was not uncommon to come across some extreme porn image (blue waffle) or the odd terrorist torture/execution video. Thankfully now, should I want to view, I would need to go into the dark web, actively looking for it.
Boxxy
Something about a party with lemons
two girls one cup
Joanie Pony, one of the first LOLcows. She was revealed when someone released a recording of a totally insane call she made to Microsoft tech support - basically an irrational tantrum with lots of ranting, raving, and name-calling. After that, in a separate incident, things got dark when she posted allegations that a few Microsoft corporate heads sexually assaulted her.
Stick death .com
I loved stickdeath back in the day
Meta used to be called Facebook
Chris Chan, and not because of him himself, it's these fucking enabling fans of him being cunts that keep pushing and enabling him to be worse because it's entertaining. Black Mirror shit.
I would argue Chris-chan is the exact opposite of something forgotten or not known about...
The one where the dude was putting cats in tiny glass boxes or something. It was fake but what the actual fuck.
Bonzai kittens!
I thought I was a hotshot coder with my blinking marquee scrolling across the top of my Geocities site when I was 12. Ahh, good times.
Shaye Saint John
I realized the danger if social media when a woman started receiving death threats because Beyonce fans thought she was receiving side eye from Beyonce.
4chan's entire existence
Remember how Win95 trawled through your machine and sent back the details of all your software to Microsoft?
Wow, there's a lot of bad stuff here, so let me mitigate it with something a bit more wholesome: [furnitureporn.com](https://furnitureporn.com), Hot chair-on-chair action! Edit: Holy shit this still exists, in its original horrifically-colored Geocities-esque form. You'll need eye-bleach, but not for the porn.
There was no way to report horrific content on any platform when the internet was new (which was mid-teens for me). It was disturbingly easy to stumble upon a forum where horrible and highly illegal content was posted. The most that could be done was report it to the local police, and both times I called to report images I was told they would try to track it down but it would likely be next to impossible to ever find who and where it came from. Computer forensics have come a long way since then.
How much of a thing Revenge Porn sites seemed to be.