The Good ol' days

Hades said:
wireplay
barrysworld
upsetchaps (for all your quake tuning needs)
IRC
ICQ
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Very similar experience to @Hades (waiting for Q3 updates and picking a time to download on a modem :/).

Wireplay plus these forums, in their fist incarnation, was my first use of the medium. Nearly, everyone you came across was unnervingly chipper and it was all about helping and building up the community - even mid game (on q3 servers). Everything was spangly and new and that universal naivety was a great leveller and made almost all interactions a fun experience.

Oh, and the excitement of ISDN when it finally hit my area - stupidly expensive, at the time, and then the associated guilt of playing against modem players until it became more mainstream.
 
All of that but the biggest revolution was when cable broadband went live. I've had Virgin Media ever since the Nynex/C&W/NTL days and upgraded to 64Kbps cable which then got a free double speed boost every year until we reached around 200Mbps then B< started charging extra per year with no more free speed bumps.
 
- Spending too much time on Ultima Online, and on the Stratics boards for it.

- Trying to 'optimise' my 56k modem with new settings so as not to stutter in games.

- Being cut off at midnight due to NTL's restrictions on the internet connection we had, and the fleeting joy when it would last a few minutes past midnight and I thought they'd forgotten that day. (never did, damn it)

- Taking all evening to download small Unreal Tournament maps and mods.

- ICQ chats with friends.

- Geocities being a thing.

- AOL coasters coming through the letter box every week.

- later on, but, YouTube being about people sharing their passions and interests and not all about money / copy write claims etc.
 
Lysander said:
If you grew up in the '70s or '80s, it was a great time to be alive from the point of view of the ascendancy of digital technologies. You were able to experience home computing and the tech-crazy '80s, as well as the offline life before the 1990s came alone, as did the internet and mobile phones AND you were able to experience the internet in all its anarchy before tighter regulation came along in the 2010s. No-one born from the 1990s onwards will have been able to experience life offline or away from the clutches of the digital megacorporations.

For instance, just think of p2p clients like Kazaa, Limewire and eMule, and how the record industry was in panic for years because of Rapidshare and Mediafire downloads. They literally had no idea what to do for years about the downloading. It was a total free-for-all.
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We did have them, actually. I was born in 1989 and I'm familiar with everything you're talking about from the 80s at least.

Gray2233 said:
I once linked a mate of mine Lemon Party, he wasn't very good with computers so he didn't know how to get rid of it.

His mother happened to walk in on him while he was furiously trying to close the window. He was banned from using PC's unsupervised for months, she actually moved it into the living room and put a password on it so he couldn't use it while she was out. His father that evening sat him down and gave him a 'birds and the bees' talk coupled with how old men weren't suitable partners for a teenaged boy.

I thought it was hilarious, don't think he ever forgave me for it.
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The first proper PC I had my dad bought me from a closing sale at a LAN centre in our town called Wireworld. I spent every friday night at wireworld spending my paper round money. Good times! They were selling the PCs for £300, but he came home with one for £150 I think. The best thing was that all the 30-40 games were pre-loaded without discs, so I suddenly had about 40 games.

Anyway, it was set up in the dining room back then because I don't think they wanted me to have the PC in my bedroom. Sometimes my sister used it too. But obviously it was also my **** station, having discovered porn at some point. I remember my sister and her friend from over the road going on it to use the internet. I was always a bit on edge in case they found some site I'd be on. Lo and behold, I heard my mum shouting in shock - I'd been on bigsausagepizza and my sister and her friend had found it. My mum has always been a bit funny talking about stuff like that, my dad too I guess. Instead of saying "you're banned" or whatever she was just like, "you really shouldn't look at that sort of stuff. do you look at it often?" Of course I was mortified, but I was just like, no not often. It was probably one of my friends (same ones who'd apparently been looking up Diana Troy nude on my dad's PC).

That was bloody awkward. I never got banned from it though. I think MSN messenger damaged me more than watching porn did.
 
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dirtychinchilla said:
Kazaa, Limewire, eMule, napster, Rapidshare, Mediafire etc. They were all still going in the late 90s/early 00s. I remember the internet being a pretty unregulated place.
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Oh, my post must have been unclear then, I was talking about p2p clients in the late '90s/early 00s. Great times. It was unregulated as you mention. I think things started to go downhill roundabout the time MSN popularity died, around 2009/2010. It was that period when regulations started to kick in and the net was flooded with normies.
 
Irish_Tom said:
Wireplay for Air Attack and Half-Life mods like the early CounterStrike betas.

Those were the days *dons pipe and slippers*.
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The feels - my first experience of multiplayer, Team Fortress iirc, that or/and Half Life mods.
 
Bouton Aide said:
It still is unregulated as such - if it was fully regulated you wouldn’t have any bad sites or the likes of companies harvesting data still etc.
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A lot is still "unregulated", but unregulated by the wrong people now.

It turned in to personal data harvesting and advertising machine. But it was never meant to be that.

Years ago ads and any kind of personal data on the internet was considered bad and to be avoided. But now companies just expect you to hand it over for them to profit from :/
 
Nasher said:
A lot is still "unregulated", but unregulated by the wrong people now.

It turned in to personal data harvesting and advertising machine. But it was never meant to be that.

Years ago ads and any kind of personal data on the internet was considered bad and to be avoided. But now companies just expect you to hand it over for them to profit from :/
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yep.
 
Used to spend hours and hours making my own terrible websites for whatever MOH clan I was in at the time. These included all manner of funky text effects and scrolling banners.

Can’t remember the exact sites, but free webs and geocities rings a bell.

MSN Messenger - we used to see each other all day at school, then rush home to all talk for hours online :-D
 
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