20 years - a stroll down memory lane

Few things I remember from early-ish days:
  • Not being able to re-register for a week after the second nuke because it wouldn't accept my email address, basically a whole bunch of free providers like Barrysworld were blocked
  • Randomly going to Halfords as a group the morning after a night out in Swansea, and putting tacky vinyls on WillGill's S2000 for a joke. I wondered what the hell I was doing there at that point (other than the fact I was relying on Fox giving me a lift to Bristol!) as it wasn't how I'd normally spend a Sunday(?) morning but I guess with a heavy Motors presence it kind of made sense. I remember the event being a tad different than I expected, but I was pretty shy in those days so didn't put myself about enough. There was some other meet not long after at Matblack's house(?) that felt a bit more natural now that I'd met some people before.
  • 0.9r = 1
  • Forums running dodgy customised old version of forum software for ages, meaning no alerting, low posts per page and various other annoyances
  • Spie suspending the forums periodically as a mark of respect for past events
  • Some sort of big controversy/fallout between senior mods, a couple like 2blue4u got permabanned iirc but then invited back many years later (I wanna say like 10 years later but it probably wasn't that long in reality)
  • Assorted really tiresome 'posting crazes' (not sure on proper term, cliquey memes or whatever)... "TTIUWP", "This.", "Boxing Stance", "Jesus.jpg" etc. I know OcUK doesn't have a monopoly on these, but still really annoying.
  • The elaborate web woven by Harley and/or Sequoia. I never knew if he was for real but if he was a troll he was an excellent, enjoyable troll that was articulate, knowledgeable, frequently helpful and diligent. Just made interesting reading so I never really cared if it was a bit of fantasy.
Angus' bracketing system made a lot of sense to me tbh.
 
I didn't bother to sign back up again after the Big Nuke for a while, so I've only "officially" been around since June 2003 but I was on here before then, I think maybe I scrape through the 20 year mark but if not it is close enough :)

Of the things not mentioned in this thread, the IRC channel was the best.
 
Was Harley/Sequoia a proven fake then? I remember him posting and as has been said, remember him being helpful. He’d always engage and answer questions etc. He was one of those posters where things seemed a bit too good to be true though (there have been a few. Every forum has them). Didn’t he claim to have a fleet of Ferraris and even private jets (or shares of them) and the like?
 
Some more random memories:

The weapon avatars (not been mentioned yet I don’t think)
Beaky :p What a character. The banter about him being “12”
SETI. Was running it with a Pentium 3 450MHz early on and being dismayed when it’d take 9 hours to process a WU
GTA (the poster)
Flame wars (not heard that term in a long time)/arguments about all kinds of stuff

Will post more as I remember. Started browsing in 2001, I think. Before the “Big Nuke”, you literally couldn’t register as the forum database wouldn’t allow any more new members, hence the need to “nuke” it and start again. This is why so many of us registered in October 2002- particularly the 18th and 19th.

Was told about the shop by a mate at school who had built a rig in a green Juno case (remember them)? I thought it was the business. Discovered the forums from there. We were in Year 11 at the time. We used to talk about TMPGEnc and heatsinks :p

I always found the forum entertaining and informative, particularly in that early-mid 2000s period, when I was most active. It’s helped me plenty of times and even inspired me, whether in computing, photography, sports and even things like travel. It was a sizeable part of what were still my formative years.

It was a much more quirky, individual place back then, seemingly dripping with originality and characters. You were never quite sure what you were going to get from one thread/week to the next. Perhaps this was true of the internet more generally in the earlier years? Places hadn’t had time to become mainstream, take on a wider membership of people and establish regularity. Gaming and hardware is now mainstream. It’s still a bit geeky, but things have moved on from the days of thumbing through the back pages of Computer Shopper and mixing it up at computer fairs with stands selling dodgy Shania Twain albums in cheap plastic sleeves next to giant towers of blank CD-Rs.

Overclocking itself was a dark art, way before the days of auto modes and user friendly Windows based interfaces to help. These were the days of using pencils and “ghetto mods”. Very little fancy equipment then compared with the vast array of hardware in today’s world. Have fond memories of having my patio door open in winter to get temperatures as low as possible for that next overclock. Just one more increment on the FSB please so I can grab a CPUID screenshot, that would be marvellous! :D

Good times.
 
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