Hooking up

Ah the days of dircon, nildram, IRC and newsgroups with schoolmates all downloading ten disks worth each to get the latest version of a certain app ;)

I miss gaming on the zone via dial up. The internet community was so much better when it was all nerds instead of duck faces and hipster bloggers.
 
Back in the days of the 56k modem we used to play close combat 3 online. Had to wait till 6pm or weekends to go to 1p a minute...

And voice coms was on your mobile to your mate at the same time :D
 
Kill_Phil said:
Ahh good old memories of blueyonder; I can actually still remember the login details to this day.

Playing runescape only to get a kill/shiny r2h then for someone to pick up the phone cutting you off.
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NTL, Barrysworld, Gamespy...

Narj said:
Ah the days of dircon, nildram, IRC and newsgroups with schoolmates all downloading ten disks worth each to get the latest version of a certain app ;)

I miss gaming on the zone via dial up. The internet community was so much better when it was all nerds instead of duck faces and hipster bloggers.
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LOL! Don't forget the video loggers today.

Funny how different the internet was. Rarely any home made videos, nobody had smartphones, no selfies... No millions of phones and tablets in the air.

 
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Used Barrysworld as my isp for a time (still use that password to this day). Then came along "leaked" BT Internet 0800 weekend accounts that got shared on IRC, everybody would anxiously wait come Monday midnight to see if they got disconnected, mamority did but sometimes some lucky sod would still be connected by Wednesday, obviously meant you couldn't reboot or switch off your pc so that was another set of kudos points. : )
 
Them were the days, bt evenings and weekdends were a godsend and then Bt Unlimited but was actually unlimited as they had a fair usage policy which I broke. Yep I got disconnected by Bt.
 
I'm still in touch with friends in the USA I made on IRC when I was 17 back in the nineties! :eek: Our group was very tight knit. Great group of guys. :)

Still see some old gaming mates from the zone for a beer occasionally. Meeting people just seemed less creepy back then.

There were also some proper fun girls on ICQ and Yahoo chat. ;)

Maybe we need to start an OcUK old gits club!
 
Remember in late 90's going from a 56k modem to BT's Stringray modem cant remember the speeds but it cut down downloading porn films to less than an hour.

 
The internet has lost its sense of significance with its widespread ubiquity, kids today who have grown up with it won't give it a second thought they can communicate with people across the far reaches of the world. They'll have not had the option of discovery like we did, and the experience of growing up without your life being all consumed by the net/digital devices. It genuinely was a more interesting/exciting thing back in the late nineties, sadly I think it has encroached far too much on everyday life now, which is remarkable given the short space of time, a couple decades.
 
I think I used all the freecall ISPs back in the day, BigBlueSky, Callnet0800, Madasafish are the ones I can remember!

Getting a baud rate of 43333bps was ace because it meant I got almost 4KB/s on my downloads and on the rare occasion I got a connection with STAC enabled, my ping times were about 110ms on a dialup modem! Keeping up with the ISDNers on TFC in some instances.
 
For about a year I had AOL dial-up solely through those trial discs they kept jamming through my letterbox. I was kinda sad when it stopped. Signed up for BT then.

Back in those days naked pictures of Captain Janeway was the white whale of the internet, it's a shame how... mundane it all is now.
 
leemk said:
Remember in late 90's going from a 56k modem to BT's Stringray modem cant remember the speeds
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I was amongst the first on ADSL - 512Kbit down and 256Kbit up with one of those ADSL modems - about 60KByte/s actual download rates - coming from 56Kbit (actually about 52Kbit - about 5-6KByte/s) I was like THIS IS THE FUTURE - now its like the world is ending if my connection is that slow.
 
My first modem was a 9600 quickly followed by a 14.4k.

After playing Ultima Online for hours on end with a per minute charged phone bill I'd never complain about the price of modern internet offerings ;)
 
What sort of conversations will we be having about the internet in 20 years from now:
"Aaah I remember having to wait for 2hours to download that 1080p film from iTunes. Yeah they had 1080p back then. Gees good old days huh?"
 
Remember it taking about an hour to get a track from Napster. Was cheaper to buy the album than pay per minute to download it.

The £50 a month i pay now isn't as bad when i think what i used to pay.
 
We used to use aol, well, that's my real first experience with home internet. Think it was version 5 or 6.

Also remember madasafish too.

Download accelerator plus, saved me countless files interrupted back in the day :p
 
Great times (worst of times) I recall playing day of defeat with a 250ms ping thinking that was more than playable! And leaving the pc on while I was at school to download something only to find out it corrupted or failed to download halfway...probably a few hundred mb which was serious back then haha.

Spent so much time on mIRC...great memories!
 
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