When the interwebs were young

[Luco]

Does anyone remember punchbaby.com? How about the xiao xiao stick fight series? Or possibly even bigheadbadhair.com (a blog about an english teacher living in south korea)?

Confession time - I had a geocities web page. It sucked.

What did you do when the web was young?

[MadMojoMonkey]

BBS.... there was nothing else to do.

Oh, create, send & receive ASCII "pictures".

Make other people's computer beep in that single tone, single volume beep that always attracts unwanted attention.

Later: email. PINE... anyone remember PINE?

[DoubleJ]

porn

plus ca change

[BooG690]

I remember the Xiao Xiao stickmen series that I used to watch on Newgrounds.com. So good.

[rpm]

newgrounds! that's the site we weren't allowed on in primary school that we all wanted to be on. i was trying to think of the name of that when i read this thread before.

[KoRnholio]

Confession time - I had a geocities web page. It sucked.

Ouch. I had one on angelfire I think it was. Same shit, different pile!

[eugmac]

confession: as an angry teen i used to trick friends and strangers into executing deltree /y c: on their windows boxes. best executed as part of autoexec.bat, so that everything gets wiped clean.

[Luco]

confession: as an angry teen i used to trick friends and strangers into executing deltree /y c: on their windows boxes. best executed as part of autoexec.bat, so that everything gets wiped clean.

You motherfucker. Did anyone actually do it?

[eugmac]

i admit it was a very bad thing to do.

[Lukie]

talk on aim/play starcraft

[Galapogos]

BBS.... there was nothing else to do.

Oh, create, send & receive ASCII "pictures".

Do you remember ACiD artwork? I totally forgot about those picture sets until you mentioned ASCII pictures just now.

[eugmac]

i remember when all the people i would meet on summer courses and shit from the US would be on AIM and I would be on ICQ and I would download AIM just to talk to like, 3-4 people.

[eugmac]

42573250 BOOOOM ICQ number remembered.

[KoRnholio]

Ooooh ICQ. My number is 713731, and I even remember my password. Eat it, bitches!

[JL]

Talk to people in AOL chat rooms.

Play Red Alert

[KoRnholio]

Play Red Alert

Ahh Red Alert.. good times. Also Doom, Diablo 1, Total Annihilation (never liked SC1)

Other random bits:

- "noob" was spelled "newb"
- pirating music/games/porn through irc/ftp sites and hoping you didn't get a virus
- downloading midi music files because mp3 took too long on a 14.4 modem
- getting disconnected whenever someone would call your landline
- Doom sprite packs to make enemies look like bunnies/cartoons/etc

[NightGizmo]

Pine was my main email client for a few years.

Anybody remember "finger"?

[rong]

I discovered online porn around 1997. I didn't waste a second looking at anything else until 2001.

[jackvance]

Before internet, my parents bought me a commodore 64, I got a book from the library and tought myself BASIC. Made a ton of programs, including a game where you had to race (I had to draw the sprite that was the car using multiples of 2 calculations) and a bunch of ASCII scrolling down was the road, at the end you got to face a boss, who shot down (ASCII) stars. It also had a chess game, played it a lot with my brother, again I went to the library to get a book to teach me the rules, and taught my brother and sister, we all became pretty succesful at it. (I quit playing at age 16, and so did they)

I don't remember all I was doing around the time the internet came around, but at one point my best friend gave me a coupon for my birthday to buy a CD, I wasn't much into music so I bought starcraft with it. We could install it and play on different PCs with my code, so much fun was had. And lateron a lot was mIRC and downloading (horribly pixelated) movies.

[boost]

hampster dance was funny, but then we found jesus dance... I think that may have really been some of the first truly edgy humor I came across.

http://www.webhamster.com/

http://www.angelfire.com/id/hern/

[givememyleg]

$IM_OFF

anyone?

[boost]

OH SHIT!

I remember wwwwwwwway back, there were these ad apps (but back then nothing was called an app unless it was on a warez site), but you would run it while you computed, and it would always run on top of whatever you were doing. You would get paid pennies an hour to allow the app maker to stream ad's to you while you computed. You could move it around, but if you minimized it, you stopped getting paid.

It was also a bit of a MLM, in that if you referred people, you got a commission on their hours logged. You could obviously only run one at a time. But obviously there was a crack. So you would make your real account, then make a swath of fake accounts. You could never collect the money from the fake accounts (unless you used friends/relatives info and had them give you the checks), but you'd get the commission. I was 20 tabling these things (my computer could barely handle that many) and was making like 50c an hour. Sadly I only got a couple of checks before the whole thing collapsed.

[Galapogos]

I remember the Internet in the beginning only being ftp sites that we shared with each other. My friend and I got suspended from school because we logged onto Playboy's ftp site and downloaded nudes and saved them on the school network.

They had no way of proving it was us but they did the old trick of taking us into separate rooms and saying, "Well your buddy just told us all about your involvement so you might as well come clean" and we both instantly cracked.

[boost]

lol, prisoner's dilemma newbs.

[eugmac]

- downloading midi music files because mp3 took too long on a 14.4 modem
- getting disconnected whenever someone would call your landline

Man, you're supposed to dial pound-something-something to disable call-waiting to prevent incoming calls from interrupting your connection! In my case though it was mostly an angry father needing to use the phone that would end my download party. He wouldn't just pick up the phone - he'd start mashing buttons until the connection failed.

[a500lbgorilla]

The first thing I ever did on the internet was play this game

http://anguish.org/

It was and still is a text based Multi User Dimension (MUD). Grand-daddy to WOW and all those MMORPGS but with words instead of moving pictures.

And right after that I would look for celebrity nudes and virus the shit out my computer.

[BooG690]

I'll punt all your asses off AOL.

[boost]

I tried a MUD, way back when. I either spawned in a dead end area, or I was just too much of a visual person to be able to navigate through text. Nonetheless, the concept always fascinated me.

[givememyleg]

i made $250 off epinions.com when i was in 9th grade. i felt rich. then i got kicked off the site.

[d0zer]

Downloading 30mb realplayer rips of seinfeld episodes overnight on a 28.8k modem.

Playing quake 2 with a 300 ping

Using dogpile because google wasn't out yet.

Remember those "get paid to have ads on your screen" deals? Well I would run one of those overnight with an app I wrote to simulate user activity and laugh all the way to the bank as the tens of dollars rolled in.

[rpm]

did anyone ever askjeeves?

[boost]

Downloading 30mb realplayer rips of seinfeld episodes overnight on a 28.8k modem.

Playing quake 2 with a 300 ping

Using dogpile because google wasn't out yet.

Remember those "get paid to have ads on your screen" deals? Well I would run one of those overnight with an app I wrote to simulate user activity and laugh all the way to the bank as the tens of dollars rolled in.

See my post above..

tldr: you got a small cut of referrals' ad revenue and there was a crack that allowed you to multitable them.

[givememyleg]

did anyone ever askjeeves?

yes.

what about steakandcheese.com? anyone? fuckingstopitalready.mpeg. anyone?

[MadMojoMonkey]

did anyone ever askjeeves?

I know where all the baby pigeons are.

[Galapogos]

Playing games over Kali.

[JKDS]

Kazaa..LOL

[rpm]

napster, kazaa, limewire in chronological order for me

[rpm]

my first main use of the internet was MSN, truth be known

[Chelle]

napster, kazaa, limewire in chronological order for me

this.

also - i fucking hated dial-up.

when i was "grounded" from the internet, cause i would stay up til 3-4am, when having to go to school the next day, well, my dad was working 3rd shift at the time, and in order to get on the internet when he was sleeping for work, and no one else was home, i'd turn on the kitchen sink [kitchen is close to parents bedroom], then connect to the internet, and pretty sure i'd wash dishes, so the kitchen sink running would make sense. it'd work, a lot.

got the internet at 11, haven't looked back since then. oh internets, i love you.

[eugmac]

altavista, before google.

[eugmac]

i still remember when google was only known to like, one dude who was the alpha computer nerd.

[Luco]

altavista, before google.

I also used Lycos.

Also, before IE there was Netscape Navigator.

[eugmac]

i totalllly preferred navigator! and sites would either work on navigator or IE and would have a stupid badge at the bottom saying "Best Viewed on" or some shit.

Before broadband, there were only shit resolution jpgs for your porn. Often times the image failed to load, and you only see like 20% of it and you had to hit refresh and try again.

Handing in school work on a floppy disk, only for the damn thing to become fried in your backpack. I had a science teacher who insisted on making a free account at some crappy webmail provider, and submit work as attachments. Not everybody had an email account then.

I still sometimes look at micro-SD cards with gigabites of capacity, and behold it in sheer awe. I mean, a humble 4 GB microSD card holds the equivalent of like ~2800 3.5 inch diskettes.

[Jack Sawyer]

I used to have an iomega zip drive thinking i was the shit

[kiwiMark]

I used to have an iomega zip drive thinking i was the shit

This was my first experience with the net. Download as many games as I could from the university(my dad's work)'s intranet/internet and smack them on a zip drive.

Previously it was wait for my older brother to come home from a similar mission but with boxes of floppy disks, and I got to be the one who put them all individually into our home computer, copied the archive files off and decompressed everything. What a lucky little guy.

[jyms]

It's funny how I thought I got into the internet later than a lot of guys but most of this is just memories for me. I remember finaly figuring out there's a code on my Internet dialer to shut up that stipid 8600 baud modem when it dialed and thought I was some sort of guru

[jackvance]

Oh yeah forgot about napster and kazaa. Good times.

[MadMojoMonkey]

It's funny how I thought I got into the internet later than a lot of guys but most of this is just memories for me.

Yeah... All of this is stuff from when the internet had been around for about 5 - 10 years.

Napster was going in, '99 - '01, right? The internet had been around, at least in my neck of the woods, by '92 - '93. It was all text based and there was really not much that a non-nerd would care for. The learning curve and patience required was just too much for most.

Most of what is being discussed here is after GUI's became popular as browsers. Really, that was after the "proof of market" had been established. There were a bunch of years there where everyone kind of knew about the internet, but had no idea what it was for, and who might care. It required a high level of technical acuity and some moderately expensive hardware to use the internet. Most people didn't even own a computer at this time, so having a computer AND a modem was a lot. PLUS, there just wasn't much on the internet but a burgeoning community of high school and college age nerds who were into BBSing and MUD's... until.... EMAIL!!!!

Email and Netscape made everyone need the internet. Even then, you had to know exactly where to go to find what you wanted, because it was a couple more years before Yahoo came out as a decent search engine.

Yeah... back then the internet was cute and harmless...

[chemist]

Configuring the token ring network to share the single dial up connection,
and getting Linux to run on Micro Channel Architecture.

[BennyLaRue]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gsNaR6FRuO0

You won't regret it.

Each AOL CD in the mail meant 20-40 more free hours!

[BankItDrew]

I lost my virginity in 1999 to a girl that got herself horny by chatting on Yahoo! while I was studying for a science exam.

I learned how to play better than average chess on msn.zone.com.

I used to hack Hotmail accounts (approx. 50), one of which was one of the female stars of 90210 back in the day.

And finally...

I created a few interweb pages on Homestead, and assumed I was a computer God.

[Galapogos]

I used to hack Hotmail accounts (approx. 50), one of which was one of the female stars of 90210 back in the day.

Was this by exploiting security flaws, if so, what were they, or were you just guessing passwords?

I'm wondering because I knew a guy who knew a guy that claimed he could get into anyone's account. But I was never sure if it was a standard I know a guy who knows a guy story.

[eugmac]

there was this unbearably annoying kid in my class in high school, and stole his hotmail because his security question was "favourite hockey team" and EVERYBODY knew what that was because he wouldn't fucking ever shut up about how the redwings rule. so he totally deserved it.

[eugmac]

oh, then he threatened me that he has an uncle who works for Microsoft who was gonna take action against me lolol.

[givememyleg]

how did you get out of the lawsuit?!?!??!?!

[jyms]

Was this by exploiting security flaws, if so, what were they, or were you just guessing passwords?

I'm wondering because I knew a guy who knew a guy that claimed he could get into anyone's account. But I was never sure if it was a standard I know a guy who knows a guy story.

I don't think hotmail used to limit attempts. You could try all day or maybe run a script to do it. I don't think anyone was to inventive in passwords back then and just used some name something easy.

[eugmac]

[rong]

My first real memory of the internet is seeing a hot blonde chick doing something inappropriate with a baseball bat. Can't remember the first non pornographic thing I saw, whatever it was wasn't as memorable.

[eugmac]

was it goatse? there wasn't a baseball bat, and that wasn't a chick.

[rong]

It was either teensteam or teendreams or some similar sounding porn site from 1999.

[eugmac]

i started a porn collection when was in my early teens, saving jpgs and whatnot in a secret hidden folder. survived various migrations to new computers and such, but sometime last year, after over a decade of collecting, i somehow managed to accidentally clobber the entire directory, and no backups can be found. i was a bit sad for at least a minute or so.

[boost]

i started a porn collection when was in my early teens, saving jpgs and whatnot in a secret hidden folder. survived various migrations to new computers and such, but sometime last year, after over a decade of collecting, i somehow managed to accidentally clobber the entire directory, and no backups can be found. i was a bit sad for at least a minute or so.

It's funny how cataloging porn is such a strange concept nowadays.

Which brings me to another thought. Could you imagine if the internet went down world wide for a month? You might thing economies would collapse-- but I think the boom in the physical copy porn industry would single handedly buoy the markets.