Internet Nostalgia

There were definitely nicer more mature people back in the dial up days that's for sure. Now all you see is toxic specimens in the majority of places.
 
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My early teenage years were spent looking at this (I hope this is version 6?)

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Sending MP3s to my friends over dial-up. Watching each other on webcam, before such a thing would make you think of something else (unless I was just missing a trick back then!) at 2 seconds a frame, or 10 seconds a frame if we were transferring a file. Putting song lyrics in your status. blocking someone and them finding out because you're talking to someone they know...

Also, I used to use a game cheatcode website a very long time ago (2000 maybe) it was a black screen with the logo tiled on the background. Cheatcodescentral or something?
 
I miss the 90's :(

Spent most nights on dalnet and efnet IRC servers in warez rooms, waiting for XDCC bots to serve me at 4k/s on 56k

Anyone remember the old warez sites that were on the kickme.to domains?

Most fun part was for the majority of the late 90's not paying for internet access, the likes of BT, redhotant, bigbluesky etc all used a basic login to dialup- which could be easily obtained via a little bit of hacking.

Now the internet is just meme's and trash.
 
I have to, how can there be any questions about the pronunciation of troll it is just roll with a t on the front.

With the elongated o sound? That's how I would pronounce it. However a good proportion of journalists seem to be using the shortens o sound as in trolley.

Dancing baby, been a while since I last saw that. Loving the nostalgia around cheat sites and platforms like gamespy too. I was a shameless fan of cheat code central back in the day, and I still used gamefaqs up until a few years back. Something about reading walkthroughs as one massive wall of text that just appeals to me, and I somehow appreciate the effort of some dude writing a 500 page walkthrough comprised solely of text more than someone creating a wiki or mixed media article.
 
Internet was a lot worse back in the day but there are a few reasons for feeling nostalgic:

-Feelings of elitism downloading MP3s, VCDs etc in the days when 'normal people' would consider you some sort of alien for getting music or video online (ironically I now tend to buy CDs and watch Sky...)
-Online time being valued, as in literally valued because you were paying by the minute so for example everyone would log on to play an arranged game at 8pm and you'd be playing within minutes, not waiting around ages for players to turn up and get ready. If people were online they'd generally be active, not idle
-Relative anonymity / escapism from everyday life, fewer blurred boundaries. For me I think the bubble burst when an acquaintance found me on Faceparty.
-Feelings of discovery and innovation; someone would find a great site that hosted video, or a new forum would be created about a specific topic you were interested in, connecting you to hundreds of others with the same interests. Communities were more insular but occasionally you would discover sister communities, such as groups in other countries playing the same game.
 
-Online time being valued, as in literally valued because you were paying by the minute so for example everyone would log on to play an arranged game at 8pm and you'd be playing within minutes, not waiting around ages for players to turn up and get ready. If people were online they'd generally be active, not idle

I remember my dad bringing home our seconds of, the first that was internet ready. I can remember his self satisfaction as he set up the internet for us (including 150 minutes free browsing) and then i vividly remember the blood draining from his face when the first phonebill came in. He opted to pay extra for unlimited browsing after that, and back in the day the monthly on unlimited access was not cheap.
 
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The good old days :D

One thing which has struck me reading this thread is just how fast the internet has evolved, its so true how internet dating literally was just a single blurry photo of someone and then chatting on IRC/yahoo or a chatroom, I met so many people that way. Sure, 9/10 of them were probably dudes messing with me but the mystery of not knowing so much was intriguing. Hell I even fooled one guy that i was an Olsen twin for months! You just couldn't do that now with facebook etc.

What was once a new "niche" technology which used to be reserved for modem geeks in their mums basement, has now become the popular trend where every duck faced social climber is busy updating their social media pages for a new like.

Forums seem to be the last refuge of the basement geeks, somewhere to hide from the masses on social media.
 
When your mother and sister would kick off because you were on the net when they wanted to use the phone but got an earful of screechy noises instead.
 
The password i use for most things to this very day (with some variations) comes directly from a password that was assigned to me when i did my first ever angelfire website back in the mid ninties. Times new roman was king :D
 
That's life, give people access to something which gets popular then people out there will spoil it for everyone else.

For example, back in 2001 I was on chatrooms (17 years old, had 56k dial from the mid 90's) and meet a girl from Lincoln. It was 6 months before we actually met. This was way before dating sites, what I saw on her photo is what I got. Nice, slim blonde girl, had good fun together :) With internet dating so popular now, you will struggle to find that now. Instead you get a bunch of fatties trying to look slim with photos from different angles or single chavvy mothers with multiple kids by multiple dads thinking they will find "tall,dark and handsome" on POF, Tinder, etc.

totally agree and kind of my point about not liking social media, it has given people the ability to give out a false impression of who they are causing 100 likes, 2000 followers ect creating huge egos and expectations that are totally unrealistic but this is probably best left for the relationships thread lol

Funny the things you can come across on Youtube.


Back in the day,bantz was appreciated, it was understood and taken as such. Today it' results in an RTM and/or toys being thrown out of the pram

God damnit, mrk! :D
 
You used to need some computer know-how to be able to use the web in mid-90's so it used to be a bit of a geek/techie thing which required knowledge, which idiots didn't have and weren't willing to learn.

However, access has now been made idiot friendly, so it's filled with idiots ruining what is possibly mankind's greatest invention (all human knowledge available everywhere to everyone) in what feels like the biggest "race to bottom" ever.

So I blame ease of access rather than social media for the downfall of web v1.0 and it's all our own fault that eventually a massively restricted web v2.0 will appear and our kids will wonder just how their parents could let it happen so easily!
 
You used to need some computer know-how to be able to use the web in mid-90's so it used to be a bit of a geek/techie thing which required knowledge, which idiots didn't have and weren't willing to learn.

However, access has now been made idiot friendly, so it's filled with idiots ruining what is possibly mankind's greatest invention (all human knowledge available everywhere to everyone) in what feels like the biggest "race to bottom" ever.

So I blame ease of access rather than social media for the downfall of web v1.0 and it's all our own fault that eventually a massively restricted web v2.0 will appear and our kids will wonder just how their parents could let it happen so easily!

I agree. I think the ease of access has made the sorts of people I would generally avoid in real life, almost unavoidable to a degree. On social media, gaming, pretty much everywhere there is an influx of idiotic and moronic behaviour that has become increasingly accepted. The moderators in these platforms/communities do their best to control it, but there are so many now that it is largely impossible to control. Thus allowances are made for some of the behaviour and this becomes acceptable and the norm. OcUK does a pretty good job at keeping everything in check here, and one of the few places I visit that still does. But these days I am less engaged with people online than ever before. The only people I probably speak to the most are family and close friends. I feel a lot of the time I have to avoid quite a lot of interaction online because some of it is so toxic, and therefore now find myself escaping the Internet rather than using the Internet as an escapism to real life, which I did when I was younger.
 
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blast-from-the-past-lycos-sold-today-for-36-million.jpg


The good old days :D

One thing which has struck me reading this thread is just how fast the internet has evolved, its so true how internet dating literally was just a single blurry photo of someone and then chatting on IRC/yahoo or a chatroom, I met so many people that way. Sure, 9/10 of them were probably dudes messing with me but the mystery of not knowing so much was intriguing. Hell I even fooled one guy that i was an Olsen twin for months! You just couldn't do that now with facebook etc.

What was once a new "niche" technology which used to be reserved for modem geeks in their mums basement, has now become the popular trend where every duck faced social climber is busy updating their social media pages for a new like.

Forums seem to be the last refuge of the basement geeks, somewhere to hide from the masses on social media.

How ugly everything was back then.
 
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