I don't care if he's wired or annoying, just as long as he wired and annoying somewhere else
I have genuinely found you creepy at times but never Magno. Just for balance.
your internet story
- Thread starter movingtables
- Start date
I have genuinely found you creepy at times but never Magno. Just for balance.
Soldato
- Joined
- 10 May 2004
- Posts
- 13,073
- Location
- Sunny Stafford
You were allowed 30 minutes A DAY?! In 1998, parents only gave me 30 minutes a week and I was 19
Thankfully I moved out to uni later in 1998 and had halls of residence connection which was an always-on connection using ethernet port. FF VII though, what a game that was!Oh yeah, and i-series events. Went to i8, i10 and i11 I think. God knows what they're up to now if they're still going. Best bit was at i10, we were the underdogs in the TFC final against a top clan with the game being screened in the bar. I capped the flag within 30 secs and the whole place went mental. Lost eventually but won £50 which was a big deal when I was like 14.
I remember the i-series. Didn't go to any myself but would be interested if it's still going. Any idea what I need to look up on Wikipedia as it's not the easiest search term?
- Joined
- 11 Feb 2004
- Posts
- 3,343
- Location
- TheWirral
Soldato
- Joined
- 27 Dec 2005
- Posts
- 17,316
- Location
- Bristol
http://insomniagamingfestival.com/
It's now up to 51 and looks like it's come on a bit lol. The ones I went to were at Newbury Racecourse and we slept under the benches...
This pretty much but my game was Kingpin. Had a modem with my Spectrum which probably kick started it all.
Soldato
- Joined
- 10 May 2004
- Posts
- 13,073
- Location
- Sunny Stafford
Ahhhhhhhh thanks! Forgot "i" stood for Insomnia. I think that's because I tend to associate the i-word with Insomniacz which is a club event.
Classic web site that is. You can see what Microsoft, AOL, Google etc looked like 15 years ago
Sure I had a page somewhere on Geocities listing easter eggs in Microsoft office. Doubt I could find it tho.
Soldato
- Joined
- 30 Sep 2005
- Posts
- 16,843
Started in 1993 with a 14.4 modem on BBS sites
Joined Compuserve
Moved to Pipex Dial - 28.8, 33.6, 56k Flex
Moved to AOL - 56k US Robotics
Moved to MSN
Moved to Freeserve
Beta tested Virgins up and coming 512k high speed broadband
Virgin 1mb, 2mb, 10mb, 50mb
Moved house and went back down to Sky ADSL 4mb
Upgraded to Sky Infinity 80mb
Joined Compuserve
Moved to Pipex Dial - 28.8, 33.6, 56k Flex
Moved to AOL - 56k US Robotics
Moved to MSN
Moved to Freeserve
Beta tested Virgins up and coming 512k high speed broadband
Virgin 1mb, 2mb, 10mb, 50mb
Moved house and went back down to Sky ADSL 4mb
Upgraded to Sky Infinity 80mb
- Joined
- 11 Feb 2004
- Posts
- 3,343
- Location
- TheWirral
could anyone here function without the internet now?
even stuff like online banking is so much easier online.
i remember canceling a direct debit or transfering money
from one account to the other was time consuming and sometimes
a pain, now it's just a click away.
if i want to make a doctors appointment i just log in and go straight to
their calander and pick a time and leave a few notes.
i'm sure we would survive but it would feel like going back in the dark ages lol.
even stuff like online banking is so much easier online.
i remember canceling a direct debit or transfering money
from one account to the other was time consuming and sometimes
a pain, now it's just a click away.
if i want to make a doctors appointment i just log in and go straight to
their calander and pick a time and leave a few notes.
i'm sure we would survive but it would feel like going back in the dark ages lol.
Was always a bit jealous of my friend on AOL who didn't have to redial every 2 hours. That was until I saw how terrible the software was.
Mine started around the mid 90's when my Dad took out a 28.8K connection with an ISP that I can't remember, back then I was really young and therefore I didn't pay much notice. Fast forward to around 1998 when he switched to BT and also had an extra dedicated phone line installed for the internet so that it would not get in the way of any incoming phone calls and that it would keep my Mum happy haha, I think it was by this time too that we had moved up the latter to 56K.
Then in 2000 we made the mistake of moving to AOHell as they're most renown for (AOL) and it was just simply unreliable. After my parents divorced back in 2001 we went without the internet for a while as my Mum cancelled the phone line altogether :/
By 2002 my Mum had reinstated the phone line and my Dad opened up a dial-up account with Freeserve for me, and again that was only 56K. Finally in late 2003 was when Broadband was enabled in my village but I didn't get upgraded to it until April 2004 and that was on the 512K speed.
Mid 2005 - upgraded to 2Meg
October 2006 - upgraded to ADSL Max up to 8MB (6Meg on average)
Mid 2010 - Migrated to Claranet as Mum's BF moved in & used them (same speeds)
Jan 2012 - Migrated to BT as they had enabled WBC in my village (10Meg on average)
We're still with BT at present and still get the same speeds, it's always been a big annoyance that Virgin Media have never enabled our area for cable and LLC didn't arrive in my village until early 2012 too but the only providers who are enabled for it are Sky & TalkTalk.
I still remember the day of when I finally got upgraded to Broadband back in 2004, as sad as it sounds it was like a dream come true haha. The jump from 56K to 512K overnight was insane. Oh the joys of when Broadband was being promoted & advertised on TV over a decade ago "You can use your internet, and talk on the phone at the same time!" haha!
Liam
Then in 2000 we made the mistake of moving to AOHell as they're most renown for (AOL) and it was just simply unreliable. After my parents divorced back in 2001 we went without the internet for a while as my Mum cancelled the phone line altogether :/
By 2002 my Mum had reinstated the phone line and my Dad opened up a dial-up account with Freeserve for me, and again that was only 56K. Finally in late 2003 was when Broadband was enabled in my village but I didn't get upgraded to it until April 2004 and that was on the 512K speed.
Mid 2005 - upgraded to 2Meg
October 2006 - upgraded to ADSL Max up to 8MB (6Meg on average)
Mid 2010 - Migrated to Claranet as Mum's BF moved in & used them (same speeds)
Jan 2012 - Migrated to BT as they had enabled WBC in my village (10Meg on average)
We're still with BT at present and still get the same speeds, it's always been a big annoyance that Virgin Media have never enabled our area for cable and LLC didn't arrive in my village until early 2012 too but the only providers who are enabled for it are Sky & TalkTalk.
I still remember the day of when I finally got upgraded to Broadband back in 2004, as sad as it sounds it was like a dream come true haha. The jump from 56K to 512K overnight was insane. Oh the joys of when Broadband was being promoted & advertised on TV over a decade ago "You can use your internet, and talk on the phone at the same time!" haha!
Liam
Associate
- Joined
- 7 Jan 2010
- Posts
- 886
28.8 followed by 56k. Dat noise.
Planetarion and later Spacecake - making galaxy wallpapers to warn people how damn serious we were
MSN Messenger with school friends and stalking randoms.
Unreal Tournament online, I was terrible but it was like having a huge lan party
BT outright refusing to let us have ADSL as it wouldn't be perfect on the crappy aluminium lines they had to my parent's house. Eventually buying a second line to try it on.
LAN internet in halls at uni (2004) - playing CoD1 or CS 1.6/Source, with DC++ for filesharing between hundreds of students.
Getting lost in WoW for far too long, though I did eventually quit.
These days, Virgin media with more bandwidth than I could have imagined 10 years ago.
Facebook for friends, OcUK for spare time and GTA5/Planetside 2 for gaming.
Planetarion and later Spacecake - making galaxy wallpapers to warn people how damn serious we were
MSN Messenger with school friends and stalking randoms.
Unreal Tournament online, I was terrible but it was like having a huge lan party
BT outright refusing to let us have ADSL as it wouldn't be perfect on the crappy aluminium lines they had to my parent's house. Eventually buying a second line to try it on.
LAN internet in halls at uni (2004) - playing CoD1 or CS 1.6/Source, with DC++ for filesharing between hundreds of students.
Getting lost in WoW for far too long, though I did eventually quit.
These days, Virgin media with more bandwidth than I could have imagined 10 years ago.
Facebook for friends, OcUK for spare time and GTA5/Planetside 2 for gaming.
What chatroom do you use now UKCB died?
My story, i started using the internet at about 20, after i had been living in Ibiza, started with the one you got from the curry shop (freeserve was it?) and netscape navigator
. I then found excite chat and was a member on there for a few years, met loads of people on there and arranged all sorts of meets, met my ex ex on there and my current best mate, still keep in touch with a couple of the people i met on there. The VP bought out the software from excite and it was scrapped. The basic framework is still available even today but nobody visits. here.In 2002 or 2003, i started tinkering in building PC's, my first was an AMD duron 800
. Then i discovered this place in 2004 and have been active ever since, not an avid poster by any means but still read a lot. I started gaming also in 2003ish, MoHAA was my first real delve into online gaming, i loved it. Then i discovered Half Life and still play HL2 now and again.I wouldn't say i was addicted to the internet but it's certainly useful, and i really only use it regularly for facebook and here these days.
In 1998 I bought the game 'Unreal', however it had an incompatibility issue with my Cyrix CPU that needed a patch to make it work. The only way I could get hold of a patch was via a magazine coverdisk (long wait) or via the internet.
As neither I nor any of my friends had the internet, I went to an internet cafe and downloaded the patch on to floppies using a shared ISDN connection (it was slow to say the least!). I went back to the cafe a couple of times and let me tell you, when you have NEVER had the internet before time just flies by because there are so many new and interesting places to explore.
Then in September 1998 I started at uni, annoyingly I got placed in a hall that didn't have a network/JANET connection in our rooms which I had been reading about in PC Zone. As a keen gamer I used to play Quakeworld online really late at night in the uni labs (basically when there would be very few other people around getting annoyed at me playing games!). In fact one of the main reasons I was playing Quakeworld was because the uni had a firewall blocking UDP traffic, but QW had this proxy called Qizmo which amongst other things had a firewall evasion feature that let you connect over TCP. I had this special custom stripped down package I used to use to install Quake, as the uni machines got wiped every time you logged off.
So anyway alongside playing Quake I started to frequent sites like bluesnews, sharky extreme, anandtech, yahoo (for playing chess mostly), heck even Friends Reunited back when it was free and the biggest social network (before the phrase was even coined) in the UK.
By the end of my first year I was hooked but of course returning back home over the summer meant persuading my dad to let me get the internet. I actually had a very good modem connection (typically 50,666bps+) and racked up some fairly hefty phone bills (this was in the days before unmetered internet).
Back for my second year at uni and I was sharing a house with 3 other guys, this was before broadband was widely available so we went for the next best thing: Home Highway (dual ISDN). This was actually pretty good because it meant I could have my own dedicated line. ISDN was low latency (~20ms) so actually pretty good for gaming and for downloads I used to take 100MB zip disks into the uni labs. Around this time Napster got going too. What I find really ironic is nowadays I almost exclusively buy CDs at a time when digital music is all the rage. Whereas 15 years ago I was the weirdo downloading mp3s when aside from geeks very few people knew what they were!
Looking back now, I am AMAZED I didn't get any sort of warning from the uni, considering the countless hours I spent gaming on their network and countless gigabytes (which was a lot in those days) of dubious material I downloaded. They did ban&block Napster after a while though!
So anyway it was around the turn of the century when unmetered dialup started to take off, and there were some completely free but massively oversubscribed ISPs like X-stream. A guy I knew through QW (str from this forum in fact) created this application to permanently spam dialup requests, with ISDN this was very rapid and meant you stood a decent chance of getting connected (many more dials per minute than Windows DUN).
Other highlights included the BT free weekends, where if you could get yourself on the 62.x IP range there was a good chance the 2hr cut off wouldn't take effect. So you'd see everyone on IRC dropping in and out between 23:30 and midnight on Sunday until they could get on a host62 It then became almost like a spectator event seeing people gradually drop off, if you were lucky you might last a couple of days.
OcUK I first came across in late 1999 around the time Quake 3 was released, some guy I knew was building a PC for that game and got the Athlon 500 guarenteed to 750mhz.
That was probably my first 18 months or so online, of course there are many more tales to tell but by then I was fairly savvy about most things.
As neither I nor any of my friends had the internet, I went to an internet cafe and downloaded the patch on to floppies using a shared ISDN connection (it was slow to say the least!). I went back to the cafe a couple of times and let me tell you, when you have NEVER had the internet before time just flies by because there are so many new and interesting places to explore.
Then in September 1998 I started at uni, annoyingly I got placed in a hall that didn't have a network/JANET connection in our rooms which I had been reading about in PC Zone. As a keen gamer I used to play Quakeworld online really late at night in the uni labs (basically when there would be very few other people around getting annoyed at me playing games!). In fact one of the main reasons I was playing Quakeworld was because the uni had a firewall blocking UDP traffic, but QW had this proxy called Qizmo which amongst other things had a firewall evasion feature that let you connect over TCP. I had this special custom stripped down package I used to use to install Quake, as the uni machines got wiped every time you logged off.
So anyway alongside playing Quake I started to frequent sites like bluesnews, sharky extreme, anandtech, yahoo (for playing chess mostly), heck even Friends Reunited back when it was free and the biggest social network (before the phrase was even coined) in the UK.
By the end of my first year I was hooked but of course returning back home over the summer meant persuading my dad to let me get the internet. I actually had a very good modem connection (typically 50,666bps+) and racked up some fairly hefty phone bills (this was in the days before unmetered internet).
Back for my second year at uni and I was sharing a house with 3 other guys, this was before broadband was widely available so we went for the next best thing: Home Highway (dual ISDN). This was actually pretty good because it meant I could have my own dedicated line. ISDN was low latency (~20ms) so actually pretty good for gaming and for downloads I used to take 100MB zip disks into the uni labs. Around this time Napster got going too. What I find really ironic is nowadays I almost exclusively buy CDs at a time when digital music is all the rage. Whereas 15 years ago I was the weirdo downloading mp3s when aside from geeks very few people knew what they were!
Looking back now, I am AMAZED I didn't get any sort of warning from the uni, considering the countless hours I spent gaming on their network and countless gigabytes (which was a lot in those days) of dubious material I downloaded. They did ban&block Napster after a while though!
So anyway it was around the turn of the century when unmetered dialup started to take off, and there were some completely free but massively oversubscribed ISPs like X-stream. A guy I knew through QW (str from this forum in fact) created this application to permanently spam dialup requests, with ISDN this was very rapid and meant you stood a decent chance of getting connected (many more dials per minute than Windows DUN).
Other highlights included the BT free weekends, where if you could get yourself on the 62.x IP range there was a good chance the 2hr cut off wouldn't take effect. So you'd see everyone on IRC dropping in and out between 23:30 and midnight on Sunday until they could get on a host62
It then became almost like a spectator event seeing people gradually drop off, if you were lucky you might last a couple of days.OcUK I first came across in late 1999 around the time Quake 3 was released, some guy I knew was building a PC for that game and got the Athlon 500 guarenteed to 750mhz.
That was probably my first 18 months or so online, of course there are many more tales to tell but by then I was fairly savvy about most things.
