90's internet vs modern internet

Tunney said:
I wonder how many people bought a copy of mIRC? 4? :p

(XiRCON > mIRC anyway)
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I bought a license for mIRC a couple years ago (even though shortly after I switched to Mac). Reasoning was, I'd been using mIRC pretty much every day since the 90s and that alone was probably worth the license fee. So I've still got my license if I ever need to stick mIRC on a Windows box again.
 
Actually, sod the net, whatever happened to Reebok Pumps and Puma Disc trainers?! They were amazing!

Edit*
WinAMP 5 here still too, it has the best media library system still and with ASIO out = Up to modern standards.
 
Back in the 90's, I liked how most other people I bumped into online were pretty much techy types or computer/gaming enthusiasts. We had gaming clan meets uptown and had beers and good laughs! I wouldn't say that opening the net to all has made it better - it would have been nice if we could have kept the chavs and attention whores off the net in all honesty. :/

BTW - MechWarrior 4 on the zone via 56k modem - so many happy memories! I had a girlfriend up in Newcastle at the time as well so my phone bills were friggin' huge back then! :eek:
 
v0n said:
But then again, I am getting older. I spent most of my life building this digital world with others and thought I understood it in depth, but I probably just reached the point where I start turning into my own father. From now on I will probably become more and more perplexed by why things work in such a weird and lame way these days and puzzled by why people do what they do on trivial websites. In few years I will lose my way around remote control for the next generation full eitch dee blue raymond doovd thing and be forced to study pictorial manuals in far eastern languages for hours in order to program my satellite TV channels. ;)
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You sound like Jeff Bridges in Tron Legacy :D
 
kwerk said:
LOL I remember doing that on Sundays.

Another scam was war dialing through 0800 (you'd find BT numbers that way) for meridian PBXs, then you just press 9 and it gives you a line out, then you dialed an ISP number and it was free internet. There was a newsgroup called alt.ph.uk that was quite fun back then.

You could also get free mobile calls with those chipped BT mobiles, and free Telewest cable with a cable cube before everything was digital. There was a huge black market for all this stuff back then.

Then when Telewest started doing cable internet you could setup your own TFTP server with a modified config file and set your own speed caps. It would max out at about 6 mbit down, 1mbit up... while everyone else had 0.5mbit down. Then about a year later lol they sent out threatening letters telling people to stop it.

There was some extremely more shady stuff as well that I wont go in to.
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I just blue boxed across to the states from an 0800 number, had Telix/Terminate loaded up and ATX3D to go online.

Also did the whole philips cellnet mobile phone, soldering iron and PIC chip dance too :D
 
kwerk said:
funny that there was a guy called rikki from glasgow who used to sell dodgy cds in the late 90s.
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Wasnt me actually. But then again Glasgow and The Barras was the capital of Europe for pirated warez back in the day.
 
kwerk said:
Another scam was war dialing through 0800 (you'd find BT numbers that way) for meridian PBXs, then you just press 9 and it gives you a line out, then you dialed an ISP number and it was free internet. There was a newsgroup called alt.ph.uk that was quite fun back then.
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Ahh, brings back memories reading that. I didn't really understand what was happening much at the time, as it was my uncle who introduced me to it all, but I remember him trying to explain it all to me. I seem to recall British Airways had one we used, but that may just be my memory being crap lol.

I just wish I was a few years older, or had a computer literate family(bar my uncle), so I could have understood it more when I was much younger!
 
Rikki said:
I just blue boxed across to the states from an 0800 number, had Telix/Terminate loaded up and ATX3D to go online.

Also did the whole philips cellnet mobile phone, soldering iron and PIC chip dance too :D
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a friend of mine made a bit of money selling these at uni... in addition to free phone calls home etc.. one guy found a company that would send you a BB gun in return for placing a premium rate phone call... the search was then on for any other companies selling good via the customer making a premium rate phone call.


Anyone else remember the jollyroger cookbook? I remember when the first kid in my school had the internet at home and downloaded then distributed to other kids on floppydisk - soon enough lots of people were popping to garden stores buying potassium nitrate and trying to make home made bombs in the local forest. Also a lot of magnesium would always go missing in Chemistry lessons because someone wanted a fuse for his thermite :D
 
Made some "napalm" myself from that bad boy. - 4 star petrol and polystyrene.

Didn't quite get the matchstick head pipe bomb to work though :(
 
I remember when the Jolly Roger Cookbook hit the headlines (1990 ish) and I already had a copy. Became very popular at school over night :D

It was matchstick heads in a tennis ball from what I remember btw :P
 
dowie said:
a friend of mine made a bit of money selling these at uni... in addition to free phone calls home etc.. one guy found a company that would send you a BB gun in return for placing a premium rate phone call... the search was then on for any other companies selling good via the customer making a premium rate phone call.
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Reworking PBXs was a fun pass time. Ford had a cracking number like 0800 111 222 or something and had just run its Ford Options TV advert - what they didnt do was set a password on their PBX system so calling in and pressing * got you to the operator menu where you could change the message that the 1,000's of TV viewers would hear when they called in for information.

Cue lulz :D
 
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