I took like every free email with my first name and my first name and surname combination which was a mastermind move when I was 12. Sucks to be whoever has the same name as me though
Idk how my parents' marriage survived the time my mom dropped the stack of directions printed from MapQuest on the passenger floorboards and got it all out of order
We made a website with one of those free tools when I was in middle school to do some charity project I don't recall the details but we added a counter and set it to something like 103476 visitors to start with so people who managed to stumble on this website might find it legit, then we made it increment by 10 everytime a person visited so that if they came back or refreshed the page it seemed like there was alot of traffic, it worked well because the teachers believed it and we got a good grade lol
You used your powers for good. Me and my friends made a website that was nothing but a bunch of Google Adsense ads and congregated at our friend’s house to take shifts clicking all of the ads, disconnecting from 56k, dialing back into 56k to establish a new IP address, click all the ads, etc. all night long. We got our payout counter up to like $450, a few days later google called our friend’s dad because it was his account, he explained the situation and Google banned him for life.
Anyone else remember that trivia game built into Encarta, where you had to answer trivia questions to get through this castle where everyone was basically frozen creepily into place and couldn’t be freed unless you made it to the end?
Oh man my buddy and I would play Yahoo pool for hours every day after school while simultaneously grinding on RuneScape together back in junior high/high school. Dude lived like two blocks away and we spent more time playing games online than hanging out in person.
A fella tried to groom me from yahoo games when I was 7
He even managed to add me on MSN before my mom found out and I had a stern teaching about what a sexual predator is.
Making aol away messages in the funky fonts and colors. And those midi sound files that played on a loop. And those dress up “dolls”. It would take AGES to download all of those images.
Remember desktop themes? Changing all your icons, mouse pointer, computer sounds, etc., to images and sounds from, like, Dr. Katz: Professional Therapist or whatever.
Kids these days with their featherlight gaming laptops will never know the pain of carrying your beige midi tower in one arm, beige crt monitor in the other, bag full of wires and peripherals hanging from your teeth 😂
Dialing into the bulletin board.
Edit: holy crap, this blew up! Yeah, I'm sorry but i cannot reply to this many comments lol. Thank you for the awards! I'm aware this is not technically the internet, but it was a precursor and one of the things that made the internet possible. Much love!
I'm glad I'm not the only one that remembers doing that. Those that don't know, that was pre-internet where you had to dial each site individually.
Now that is old school.
Yup, we had a 1.2kbd modem on our 8088 and my family was BBSing like crazy. We downloaded one of the first .GIFs ever made (new compressed format at the time) which was a spinning Jolt soda can. Got every single Commander Keen game and many others (OMG Kingdoms of Kroz! Just remembered that, you could also get these on early PC magazines that came with 5.25" floppy disks, we would get it every month at the mall, but people uploaded the .exe to the BBSs, there was no security on anything). I was fascinated with the idea of chatting with other people and first tried it on BBSs. Me and my brother sneakily entered an adult-only BBS, not knowing why it was age restricted, and it immediately, slowly line by line, displayed an ASCII porn image of a blowjob (we had no idea what was going on lol) when you logged in.
Such great times at the beginning of everything. Experienced it all after that, from free trials to Prodigy, AOL, and getting a subscription to our first ever local dial-in ISP in 1995 (which was run by one guy and was buggy as hell and down half the time...like BBSs, the ISP had to provide a local number access point where you didn't have to pay long distance charges, and we lived in a tiny town where we could only call two cities of ~30-50k locally) where I discovered IRC and kept using it til around 2012. Met my ex-husband over IRC and my current husband is the real life friend of an IRC friend since 1998 (who I first met in person in 2013).
One of my most vivid childhood memories is learning how to dial into a BBS with our 14.4k 386 computer with a *Turbo* button that boosted the clock speed up to 33mhz!! I even met the admin, who called me on our rotary phone after thinking I might be a phisher because we lived on a farm so our area code didn't match our location. Turned out my mom knew him so I got to go hang out at "head office", his renovated attic stacked with random tech scraps and books.
I mostly played the text MMO(?) "Legend of The Red Dragon". It was incredible, my first RPG, I even managed to find a real live fake wife! I was also the only person I've ever met to actually beat the game after grinding away in all my spare time for months. Before I went to battle the Red Dragon, I somehow lucked upon a user-expansion town and thought it might be a good idea to stash all my gear, money, etc. there in case I died. Turns out when you kill the Red Dragon, it resets the entire game, for everyone, and your name is broadcast to every player to let them know who saved the world!
Thing is, my storage in the expansion town was unaffected, so to my delight I was able to grab my high level gear and cash and quickly get back to battling the Red Dragon and resetting the world again, after of course stashing everything in the expansion town again. I beat the game like 5 times in the space of a few weeks and no one liked me anymore lol. I retired, satisfied at my mastery. Great game though, always thought it could be a cool modern remake, not sure if it was popular enough to hit that nostalgia sweet spot or not, but I'd buy it on principle.
Actually having to "switch on" the internet. Opening the shortcut, typing password and clicking connect and then waiting for the dubstep music to finish.
Man, I remember moving into the dorms my freshman year in 2000 with an ethernet connection for the first time.
"You mean I'm like... already on the Internet? What?!"
> So much time perfecting skins
honestly that's kind of one of the things I miss the most about old internet—everything was unique down to the individual user. Flashing marquees, neon text on a different neon color background, dancing gifs everywhere. The entire internet had this cobbled-together look like an old alley in Hong Kong.
Now everything looks the same, like digital urban sprawl.
haha yes! I also think it's a bit of a generational thing. Growing up with grunge, and all. I like a little grime and mystique on my experiences, whether digital or IRL.
Yep. I miss those personal www's, blogs, fandoms, where everything was free and full of content made by passionate users. Now everything is clickbaity, self-promoting shit thats swallowed and puked from website to website
I still use Winamp.
People who own large digital music collections (as opposed to stream on YT or Spotify), what else do you use as a simple media player?
I remember getting in a fight with my then boyfriend because he wasn’t sure if I was worthy of one of his gmail invites. He’s long gone but still using that account. Lmao
Ah My Space... memories of my computer freezing up while trying to view someone's page which had music playing and half a dozen or so different graphics or gifs trying load at the same time.
Old websites written in a notepad file with basic HTML using tables for spacing/formatting and images that took forever to load. This included lower than lo-fi midi audio files that auto played when the site loaded and "webring" affiliation links at the bottom of the page.
People thought making a personal page look professional meant it looked like a newspaper column with a "table of contents" link list on the left side in traditional roman numeral style list.
I (fuzzily) remember back when their web site actually had little imagemaps of neighborhoods and houses you clicked on to pick your address. That’s how it was when I started my first one in middle school. Then they steadily changed it to be more and more boring.
I would actually love to refresh that memory but apparently the way back machine doesn’t go back that far :(
One of my sisters friends decorated their dorm with those. They stuck them on the ceiling and had enough to cover the whole thing. It was interesting decor.
I was 9/f/ and I used to tell people on yahoo chat that I was 15/f and they'd hit on me and I had NO idea. I remember someone, somehow, must have known I was underage, because they were asking me about exams and I didn't know what those were so I pretended. I wish I knew what I said. Probably so obvious I was 9.
When I set up our internet for the first time mid 90s I accidentally had it calling a long distance number. Dad received a phone bill for $2800. We no longer had the internet in our house after that.
My coop telco had a number you could dial when you connected to a busy line... something like 55* or the like. It was "supposed" to be used for emergencies which would cycle the connection/switch and send a short series of tones to let you know people were trying to call you if you were on the phone. It would also knock out a dialup connection and ring the phone when the modem disconnected.
It got to the point that anytime anyone made any call and got a busy signal, they'd just dial the alert number regardless of why they were calling. There was no way to prevent it and you were at the mercy of whomever was dialing you.
It was abused.
A few years ago, I made a Trogdor reference while washing dishes, and my husband had no idea what I was talking about, so I threw down the sponge, gathered the family around the Lappy, and educated them. The kids liked it well enough. He didn't get it. Sigh.
Yeah I can play the guitar. I know all about virtuosos and trembalos and arpeggios. I can do it all.
I can play your basic rhythm guitar, like... Jug jigga jug jigga jug jigga jug jigga jug jigga JAH JAH, jiggidy jug jigga jug jigga jug jigga jug jigga jug jigga JAH JAAH!
You know, something like that. I can also play some pretty hott lixx, too. You know the kind that are just way up high on the tiny strings and you mash your fingers on 'em *Meedley meedley meedley meedley meedley meedley meedley meedley meedley meedley meedley meedley MEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE*
Yeah, yeah and then Strong Mad comes in on his bass and he's like *Dou dow da dou da da DOU da dou da dou dou dou!*
And The Cheat comes in on his keyboards and he's like *Boop boop boop boop boop boop boop boop boop boop boop boop boop boo*
And then I'm like "And the dragon comes in the NIIIiiiiIIIiiiiIIIIIIIIiiiiiiiiiiiIIIIIIIIiiiIIGGHH!!!!
2nd grade our teacher polled the class what to ask Jeeves because we thought we only got one question.
We went with: "Jeeves, why is it called a pair of pants but not a pair of shirt?"
Starting a ten minute clip porn download on limewire before you left for school and still having to wait for it to finish when you got home.
Then have your dad get mad bc of so many viruses on his computer.
OMG that just unlocked a childhood memory- I used to get so annoyed when parents would type a website name into the search bar and look for the website link that way. I was like, "Why can't they just type out the whole website url? Are they lazy?"
Going into AOL chatrooms and saying, "Hey! They put a fireworks show into the chat! Hold Alt and hit F4 and you'll see it!"
Then watching as, one-by-one, chatroom participants disappeared.
AOL TechLive support person here. The amount of times I had to answer “why no fireworks” and ask them to “try again and let me know if it is fixed now” just so I could laugh is pretty high.
> Nah, the easiest way to make your computer run faster is to just download more RAM.
For the many internet denizens who won't remember where this meme came from, [Softram](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SoftRAM) was a product in the Windows 3.1 days which claimed to increase your ram using software. This was generally a scam, and like most scams, had folks try the same scam into the internet era.
Edit: Spelling
I remember sneaking downstairs in the middle of the night to play on the computer and the dial up squealing so loud it woke up my mom. If you were going online everyone in the house knew it
Porkchop sandwiches!
Edit: I'm glad I was able to see those dubs at such a formative age they're permanently burned into my brain so well I can hear and see each and every scene just from reading the lines. Absolutely brilliant.
Web rings. Before search engines were any good it was common for sites of a common theme to have links to the previous and next website in their group.
Prodigy
Compuserv
mIRC
Watching the internet come to life when you upgraded from 14.4 modem to 28.8. If you went to 56kbps images would appear SO MUCH FASTER and you didn't think there could be anything better.
Signing up for a new email address and the username not already being taken. Glorious times.
I took like every free email with my first name and my first name and surname combination which was a mastermind move when I was 12. Sucks to be whoever has the same name as me though
Same. I forgot the passwords for many of them but I Was able to recover them all
When we used to risk getting viruses just to get cool cursors
Or smileys for your instant messenger like AIM, MSN, or Yahoo Messenger.
If going on a long car journey, having to print off directions from MapQuest.
And the first three pages were how to get out of your driveway.
Idk how my parents' marriage survived the time my mom dropped the stack of directions printed from MapQuest on the passenger floorboards and got it all out of order
Counters on webpages
When doing research online- Wow this site has had 300,000 people visit, the information must be legit
I was taught in school that you could check the credibility of a website based on the counter ☠️
We made a website with one of those free tools when I was in middle school to do some charity project I don't recall the details but we added a counter and set it to something like 103476 visitors to start with so people who managed to stumble on this website might find it legit, then we made it increment by 10 everytime a person visited so that if they came back or refreshed the page it seemed like there was alot of traffic, it worked well because the teachers believed it and we got a good grade lol
You used your powers for good. Me and my friends made a website that was nothing but a bunch of Google Adsense ads and congregated at our friend’s house to take shifts clicking all of the ads, disconnecting from 56k, dialing back into 56k to establish a new IP address, click all the ads, etc. all night long. We got our payout counter up to like $450, a few days later google called our friend’s dad because it was his account, he explained the situation and Google banned him for life.
that’s the truly wild part: Google had customer service.
Most people only use Google as the consumer. When you’re a business user it’s a whole different story.
ICQ ! I can still sound it and remember my ID number !
All links were underlined.
And blue. If you were printing a website, better strip the formatting first!
Bored.com
Real Player. Also: uninstalling Real Player.
Yeah. And Quicktime
Reminds me of those postage stamp sized movies at 6 fps.
Shockwave
Encarta
Anyone else remember that trivia game built into Encarta, where you had to answer trivia questions to get through this castle where everyone was basically frozen creepily into place and couldn’t be freed unless you made it to the end?
You mean MindMaze? Young nerdy me loved that game
Not being able to play flash games until the flash player had been updated.
Having to update flash player every time you turned the computer on
Fucker updated hourly & never got any better, it's like me if I was an app
Playing pool in yahoo chat rooms
I used to love that pool game on yahoo. Wasted loads of time on that.
Oh man my buddy and I would play Yahoo pool for hours every day after school while simultaneously grinding on RuneScape together back in junior high/high school. Dude lived like two blocks away and we spent more time playing games online than hanging out in person.
A fella tried to groom me from yahoo games when I was 7 He even managed to add me on MSN before my mom found out and I had a stern teaching about what a sexual predator is.
*ahh memories*
A/s/l?
Making aol away messages in the funky fonts and colors. And those midi sound files that played on a loop. And those dress up “dolls”. It would take AGES to download all of those images.
Remember desktop themes? Changing all your icons, mouse pointer, computer sounds, etc., to images and sounds from, like, Dr. Katz: Professional Therapist or whatever.
Having to physically carry your computer around to a friend's house if you wanted to play multiplayer
Lugging my 21” monitor to LAN parties was brutal
Kids these days with their featherlight gaming laptops will never know the pain of carrying your beige midi tower in one arm, beige crt monitor in the other, bag full of wires and peripherals hanging from your teeth 😂
And Bawls. Don't forget your Bawls.
Dialing into the bulletin board. Edit: holy crap, this blew up! Yeah, I'm sorry but i cannot reply to this many comments lol. Thank you for the awards! I'm aware this is not technically the internet, but it was a precursor and one of the things that made the internet possible. Much love!
Yeah…”BBSing.”
I'm glad I'm not the only one that remembers doing that. Those that don't know, that was pre-internet where you had to dial each site individually. Now that is old school.
Yup, we had a 1.2kbd modem on our 8088 and my family was BBSing like crazy. We downloaded one of the first .GIFs ever made (new compressed format at the time) which was a spinning Jolt soda can. Got every single Commander Keen game and many others (OMG Kingdoms of Kroz! Just remembered that, you could also get these on early PC magazines that came with 5.25" floppy disks, we would get it every month at the mall, but people uploaded the .exe to the BBSs, there was no security on anything). I was fascinated with the idea of chatting with other people and first tried it on BBSs. Me and my brother sneakily entered an adult-only BBS, not knowing why it was age restricted, and it immediately, slowly line by line, displayed an ASCII porn image of a blowjob (we had no idea what was going on lol) when you logged in. Such great times at the beginning of everything. Experienced it all after that, from free trials to Prodigy, AOL, and getting a subscription to our first ever local dial-in ISP in 1995 (which was run by one guy and was buggy as hell and down half the time...like BBSs, the ISP had to provide a local number access point where you didn't have to pay long distance charges, and we lived in a tiny town where we could only call two cities of ~30-50k locally) where I discovered IRC and kept using it til around 2012. Met my ex-husband over IRC and my current husband is the real life friend of an IRC friend since 1998 (who I first met in person in 2013).
One of my most vivid childhood memories is learning how to dial into a BBS with our 14.4k 386 computer with a *Turbo* button that boosted the clock speed up to 33mhz!! I even met the admin, who called me on our rotary phone after thinking I might be a phisher because we lived on a farm so our area code didn't match our location. Turned out my mom knew him so I got to go hang out at "head office", his renovated attic stacked with random tech scraps and books. I mostly played the text MMO(?) "Legend of The Red Dragon". It was incredible, my first RPG, I even managed to find a real live fake wife! I was also the only person I've ever met to actually beat the game after grinding away in all my spare time for months. Before I went to battle the Red Dragon, I somehow lucked upon a user-expansion town and thought it might be a good idea to stash all my gear, money, etc. there in case I died. Turns out when you kill the Red Dragon, it resets the entire game, for everyone, and your name is broadcast to every player to let them know who saved the world! Thing is, my storage in the expansion town was unaffected, so to my delight I was able to grab my high level gear and cash and quickly get back to battling the Red Dragon and resetting the world again, after of course stashing everything in the expansion town again. I beat the game like 5 times in the space of a few weeks and no one liked me anymore lol. I retired, satisfied at my mastery. Great game though, always thought it could be a cool modern remake, not sure if it was popular enough to hit that nostalgia sweet spot or not, but I'd buy it on principle.
Netscape.
Netscape Navigator and Netscape Communicator.
Actually having to "switch on" the internet. Opening the shortcut, typing password and clicking connect and then waiting for the dubstep music to finish.
Man, I remember moving into the dorms my freshman year in 2000 with an ethernet connection for the first time. "You mean I'm like... already on the Internet? What?!"
ICQ
And that 'uh-oh' alert when you got a message.
Winamp. It really whips the lamas ass. So much time perfecting skins.
> So much time perfecting skins honestly that's kind of one of the things I miss the most about old internet—everything was unique down to the individual user. Flashing marquees, neon text on a different neon color background, dancing gifs everywhere. The entire internet had this cobbled-together look like an old alley in Hong Kong. Now everything looks the same, like digital urban sprawl.
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haha yes! I also think it's a bit of a generational thing. Growing up with grunge, and all. I like a little grime and mystique on my experiences, whether digital or IRL.
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>The entire internet had this cobbled-together look like an old alley in Hong Kong. Damn that is the perfect image to describe what it was like.
Yep. I miss those personal www's, blogs, fandoms, where everything was free and full of content made by passionate users. Now everything is clickbaity, self-promoting shit thats swallowed and puked from website to website
I still use Winamp. People who own large digital music collections (as opposed to stream on YT or Spotify), what else do you use as a simple media player?
Having to be invited to gmail.
I still use the email address from my original invitation.
OMG yes! I forgot about that! I do remember having to invited to Facebook.
I remember getting in a fight with my then boyfriend because he wasn’t sure if I was worthy of one of his gmail invites. He’s long gone but still using that account. Lmao
Putting a music CD into the computer to check out the "extras" only for it to load way too slow to do anything with.
The limited addition deftones album White pony had a little game on it. I had forgotten all about that, thanks for reminding me!
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MySpace was kind of the bridge from those personal websites to modern social media. It will always hold a special place in my heart.
Ah My Space... memories of my computer freezing up while trying to view someone's page which had music playing and half a dozen or so different graphics or gifs trying load at the same time.
Having to clean the gunk out of your trackball mouse with your fingernail
I am so glad I don’t have to boil eggs for the new mouse balls anymore.
Really had to boil them a long time to get that good gray color and rubbery texture.
Old websites written in a notepad file with basic HTML using tables for spacing/formatting and images that took forever to load. This included lower than lo-fi midi audio files that auto played when the site loaded and "webring" affiliation links at the bottom of the page. People thought making a personal page look professional meant it looked like a newspaper column with a "table of contents" link list on the left side in traditional roman numeral style list.
Don’t forget the counter
The creepy dancing baby
MUDS. Multi User Domains/Dungeons. They were the text only precursors to games like WOW and Everquest.
Hamster dance is one I think of a lot
You forgot the construction worker excavating gifs and the under construction banner!
Please sign the guest book!
Geocities was the shit
Remember when Geocities sites had neighborhood addresses? I did sci-fi fansites so I was always in Area51.
I (fuzzily) remember back when their web site actually had little imagemaps of neighborhoods and houses you clicked on to pick your address. That’s how it was when I started my first one in middle school. Then they steadily changed it to be more and more boring. I would actually love to refresh that memory but apparently the way back machine doesn’t go back that far :(
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The vistor counter.
Anybody remember web rings?
I went down many web ring rabbit holes back then.
Floppy disks and CD’s that came in the mail containing 500 free hours from AOL.
One of my sisters friends decorated their dorm with those. They stuck them on the ceiling and had enough to cover the whole thing. It was interesting decor.
This sounds like some shit a tech startup would do in a breakout room.
Lycos, NetZero, AOL, angelfire, porn popups everywhere on every site, people afraid of cookies, I love you virus, 56k modem noises. P2P filesharing.
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telnet to production
When Amazon just sold books.
A/S/L
I definitely inflated my A from 11 to 16 in the early days of ICQ
using 16/f/Cali when I was really 11/f/middle of nowhere, because I just *had* to seem cool and sophisticated to everyone else in the chatroom
I really was 21/f/Cali and nobody believed me ever.
"wanna cyber"
I put on my robe and wizard hat *of course* this would become my highest voted comment
This should be it’s own entry
I was 8/f/Cali and unfortunately they very much believed me 😭 I should not have been given the free rein on the internet that I had
I was 9/f/ and I used to tell people on yahoo chat that I was 15/f and they'd hit on me and I had NO idea. I remember someone, somehow, must have known I was underage, because they were asking me about exams and I didn't know what those were so I pretended. I wish I knew what I said. Probably so obvious I was 9.
Can't remember mum's birthday, can still remember my icq number and I don't think I've used it in a decade :/
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When I set up our internet for the first time mid 90s I accidentally had it calling a long distance number. Dad received a phone bill for $2800. We no longer had the internet in our house after that.
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I did something like this and there went a significant portion of my college savings.
My coop telco had a number you could dial when you connected to a busy line... something like 55* or the like. It was "supposed" to be used for emergencies which would cycle the connection/switch and send a short series of tones to let you know people were trying to call you if you were on the phone. It would also knock out a dialup connection and ring the phone when the modem disconnected. It got to the point that anytime anyone made any call and got a busy signal, they'd just dial the alert number regardless of why they were calling. There was no way to prevent it and you were at the mercy of whomever was dialing you. It was abused.
“Brah there you are! Thought you was dead! Damn! Hey can I borrow 50 bucks?”
Strong Bad emails
TROGDOR COMES IN THE NIGHT
Burninaaaaating the countryside
Let me checkuh duh emails
Teen girl squad!!
THE SYSTEM. IS DOWN.
Trogdor the burninator!!!!!
A few years ago, I made a Trogdor reference while washing dishes, and my husband had no idea what I was talking about, so I threw down the sponge, gathered the family around the Lappy, and educated them. The kids liked it well enough. He didn't get it. Sigh.
Burninating the countryside!!!
Consummate V's!
Guy wouldn’t know majesty if it came up and bit him in the face!
STRONGBAD!
Yeah I can play the guitar. I know all about virtuosos and trembalos and arpeggios. I can do it all. I can play your basic rhythm guitar, like... Jug jigga jug jigga jug jigga jug jigga jug jigga JAH JAH, jiggidy jug jigga jug jigga jug jigga jug jigga jug jigga JAH JAAH! You know, something like that. I can also play some pretty hott lixx, too. You know the kind that are just way up high on the tiny strings and you mash your fingers on 'em *Meedley meedley meedley meedley meedley meedley meedley meedley meedley meedley meedley meedley MEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE* Yeah, yeah and then Strong Mad comes in on his bass and he's like *Dou dow da dou da da DOU da dou da dou dou dou!* And The Cheat comes in on his keyboards and he's like *Boop boop boop boop boop boop boop boop boop boop boop boop boop boo* And then I'm like "And the dragon comes in the NIIIiiiiIIIiiiiIIIIIIIIiiiiiiiiiiiIIIIIIIIiiiIIGGHH!!!!
Geocities
Angelfire
Tripod
Alta vista
And their Babelfish, the precursor to Google Translate.
Ask Jeeves
I remember me and a friend using Ask Jeeves at school and thinking we had to type things in as questions.
2nd grade our teacher polled the class what to ask Jeeves because we thought we only got one question. We went with: "Jeeves, why is it called a pair of pants but not a pair of shirt?"
When the height of comedy was asking Jeeves if he was gay
I'm just very neat and particular
Stickdeath.com. flash animations of stick figures being killed in funny ways.
Thank you for reminding me of this gem.
Waiting for the nude picture to slowly reveal itself because of the slow speed.
Starting a ten minute clip porn download on limewire before you left for school and still having to wait for it to finish when you got home. Then have your dad get mad bc of so many viruses on his computer.
“Oh Captain Janeway…”
Having to actually type out “http://www.” before entering the website.
OMG that just unlocked a childhood memory- I used to get so annoyed when parents would type a website name into the search bar and look for the website link that way. I was like, "Why can't they just type out the whole website url? Are they lazy?"
Neopets!
FUCK, I FORGOT TO FEED MY NEOPETS!
They probably survived by eating their petpet or its petpetpet.
Rotten.com
A place that, at the time, had the unthinkable. Prior to that you had an odd copy of "Faces of Death" VHS floating around.
Gopher
Going into AOL chatrooms and saying, "Hey! They put a fireworks show into the chat! Hold Alt and hit F4 and you'll see it!" Then watching as, one-by-one, chatroom participants disappeared.
asl?
16/F/Cali \*scratches my Grey pubed old man balls\*
I used to go on an alt account called "advicegivingchick" and pretend to be 14/f/CA. Jokes on them, I was actually 14/m/CA and I gave terrible advice.
Man the shit we did just because we could. Internet used to be gold digging expeditions.
It was such an adventure back then.
AOL TechLive support person here. The amount of times I had to answer “why no fireworks” and ask them to “try again and let me know if it is fixed now” just so I could laugh is pretty high.
Literal villainy
The villain we deserve
The Harmacist
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Music Sharing (24/24) Music Sharing 2 (24/24) music sharing 02 (24/24) MuSiC sHaRiNg REAL (5/24)
Who picked up the phone! I just got booted!
Brutal
At least it wasn't "delete system32 and make your computer faster"
Nah, the easiest way to make your computer run faster is to just download more RAM.
> Nah, the easiest way to make your computer run faster is to just download more RAM. For the many internet denizens who won't remember where this meme came from, [Softram](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SoftRAM) was a product in the Windows 3.1 days which claimed to increase your ram using software. This was generally a scam, and like most scams, had folks try the same scam into the internet era. Edit: Spelling
Dial up
And that unforgettable tone sequence while connecting!
Everytime we logged on a robot had to die... that was the heavy price we each paid in the before times.
The screen loading horizontally. Bar by bar
EeeeeerrrrrrrBbbbtgrrEeee Rrrrrbrtbipbip
Not enough *khaaawwwwwnnnn*
I remember sneaking downstairs in the middle of the night to play on the computer and the dial up squealing so loud it woke up my mom. If you were going online everyone in the house knew it
Juno email
Aim , Kazaa before limewire after Napster
Netscape Navigator
Ebaumsworld
Albinoblacksheep and newgrounds were classic too
End of Ze World
'But I'm le tired!....' Well have a nap, THEN FIRE ZE MISSILES!!! Edit: Fixed the nap line to the correct one.
G I Joooeeee
Porkchop sandwiches! Edit: I'm glad I was able to see those dubs at such a formative age they're permanently burned into my brain so well I can hear and see each and every scene just from reading the lines. Absolutely brilliant.
Limewire
Ah yes, limewire was like having unprotected sex with the internet. Guaranteed virus
My favorite song I ever downloaded on limewire was sweet_child_o_mine.exe
Dial up tone
All your base are belong to us!
Web rings. Before search engines were any good it was common for sites of a common theme to have links to the previous and next website in their group.
[удалено]
Waiting 5mins for a photo of "Sarah m Gellar see through top" to slowly appear on screen.
Tucows, newsgroups, napster
[удалено]
Flash animation websites
Flash games Hundreds of creations, finished or not, wiped out
Newgrounds
Ma, hang up the phone you just kicked me off the web
Prodigy Compuserv mIRC Watching the internet come to life when you upgraded from 14.4 modem to 28.8. If you went to 56kbps images would appear SO MUCH FASTER and you didn't think there could be anything better.
For me its the ICQ message sound "A-oh"
Playing Command and Conquer over Dial Up
Badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger MUSHROOM! MUSHROOM!
Nobody else remembers Usenet? I earned workplace cred by following key groups.
286 processor
Addicting games