Ask Lemmy

I remember clicking on a YouTube video and waiting about an hour for it to load. When it finished loading the whole Family gathered in front of the screen and watched it.

Errghhh ooo oo uh uh oh uh uh.

Dial up

Lots of blinking geocities and angelfire sites. Waiting for NetZero dial up to noisily connect. Buffering music and video clips.

MSN IM was really popular. I remember it felt really funny to come home and talk to your friends you had just seen.

StumbleUpon was also really cool before it was sold to ebay. It's how I found cgsociety, but then the website owner shut the site down for some reason and everyone migrated to artstation.

There were also the video games on YTV's website, and all the other flash games that are hard to find now. Prime among them in my memory was the 3-d missile game. You would guide a missile through a series of spinning obstacles as the missile accelerated. Newgrounds, ebaums world, the original youtube that wasn't entirely focused on profit yet...

I don't remember using napster, but I did use Limewire until it shutdown. It was really cool to have access to so much music but IIRC it was mostly mp3's of a single song and sometimes it wouldn't even be the full song.

I also spent a lot of time playing tower defence maps on Starcraft \Battle.net, then it started to be over-run by spam bots and no one played anymore. It was really sad to see that happen, and eye-opening for me when no one at blizzard or whoever controlled battlenet did anything about it. Looking back, that was likely a large part of the reason for my eventual to switch to linux.

BBS on a commodore64 and a tiny bit of compuserve.

9600 baud connection. IBM PS2 running win 3.1. prodigy service, i think

VT100 terminals on Solaris (SunOS) reading usenet, chatting with ytalk, elm (email), Gopher (and searching Gopher with Archie), DartMUD. It was great. Pretty much once we got PC and Mac based clients that stitched together downloads out of usenet posts and could run multiple terminal sessions at once, we were set and the Internet peaked.

Around the mid-80s a friend of mine set up a public-access Unix system. You could dial in and get shell access, and from there newsgroups, email, etc. It technically wasn't a "live" internet connection, his system dialed in to Yale each night and downloaded newsgroups and stuff via UUCP, so there was at least a day's delay between writing messages and getting a response. I don't remember exactly when it was but I was around for the Morris worm so it was some time before that.

Gen z here. Coolmathgames.com was fire. I actually bought a shirt from them last year and it gets a lot of compliments surprisingly 🤷‍♀️

The games on the PBS kids website over dialup

Definitely 2flashgames.com and Newgrounds.com.

AOL keywords, AOL chatrooms, free AOL minutes on a disk, dial up modem sounds, slow af connection.

Day of defeat on steam with a download speed of 56k modem... Took like 4 hours for nearly 700mb? And oh my, was it worth it !

ICQ for instant messages !

I guess my very first exposure was my brother letting me use his university account over dialup. You really had to know your way around in those days or know someone who did. He showed me how I could go to umich (U. of Michigan) and a few other places that ran public ftp servers full of games!

Then I landed a job at a small company which had accounts on CompuServe. Around this time at home, I was playing MUDs a lot on a free local BBS, and at some point, the people running the BBS decided to have a go at becoming the first commercial ISP in town. (They're still around, in fact!)

So I approached work about opening an Internet account, arguing that it was way cheaper than CompuServe. They reluctantly agreed. I was over the Moon but my superiors were not super impressed at first. They complained that they couldn't find anything while CompuServe was much better organized. I eventually found Yahoo which, at the time, had a sort of CompuServe-ish vibe of providing this directory that categorized most of the more popular sites by topic and that placated them. You have to remember this was long before search engines and even the www itself was still in its infancy.

I was having a blast, discovering something new every week. Usenet was so cool when I learned about that! And I found out about some sort of MIDI file format with embedded instrument samples you could play to get electronic music in a super compact format long before broadband made mp3s the way to go. What were they called again? Soundtrack files? Something like that. I played them all the time while I was coding.

Good

9600 baud > 14.4 > 56k dial-up modems and AOL chat rooms.

Only had dial-up so insert youvegotmail but then got introduced to bbs and freaked out when I realized I was actually typing to a real person who would gasp! respond.

Not long after I entered the brave new world of irc and the rest was history. Internet=RabbitHole 4ever!

CBBC website

The first time I got onto the internet proper, I was over at a friend's house for his birthday as a teenager and his dad had an account and he dialed in and the very first thing he showed me was a picture of a lit red candle sticking out of a woman's butthole.

Prior to that, I had signed on to a local BBS with my home computer, but there was not any pornography available on that BBS.

It was glorious, though, being like 12 years old and figuring out how to make computers talk over telephone lines, though.

2nd hand.

Connecting to a text only BBS at 300 baud who got their content from the internet.

We took a class field trip to a students parents facility where they made supplements. They showed us a computer connected to university databases of research papers. Up until that point we called BBS servers directly and would rush to download everything before sometime accidentally picked up the phone. This was the early 90s

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_HiNote

The next year I got my first laptop and a 14.4baud us robotics pcmcia card.

A local BBS got internet service so I poked around with gopher and lynx. I remember it being slow, there was lots of waiting for things to load.

Quake online

Evolution vs creationist forums as a teen on Win 2000. And of course porn.

Limewire to get early Naruto releases from Japan, subbed by a random guy on the internet one day later. 500MB and took at least an hour.

AOL IM

I dialed into the local university's phone bank and could access fun stuff like... Kermit and Gopher. It was cool in the sense that I could read words in someone else's computer, but content was really sparse, so mostly I hit the outbound network in another city to but porn BBSs that weren't local calls for me.

Eventually I discovered IRC and trivia. And then they invented WWW and DSL and it started to explode.

And now it's all commercialized garbage. I wonder if the internet would've held so much fascination for me if I'd known it would become a tool to view constant advertisements like a brainwash machine in Clockwork Orange.

Grab a 4 free AOL disk from blockbuster, use 3 of them as frisbees. Take the last one home and spend 10 minutes waiting the interface to install. Plug in the phone line and hear a series of beeps and schreeches before being greeted by an early robotic voice saying "welcome!" And often "you've got mail".

Afterwards you follow a guide to sign up for a mail account and a text like document with links to AOL platform tooling like chat rooms and search tools. You started looking for urls everywhere wondering what hidden gems you'll find in the virtual world and what kind of content was on cereal websites or Nickelodeon. There was a massive learning curve for multimedia, but you had a lot of pen pals from chatrooms. So much porn spam. Nabisco had an awesome gaming site

@solarvalleys Definitely AOL chat rooms. But also figuring out how to use Netscape Navigator and search for things using a seach engine called Hotbot. And teaching myself how to build entire websites on notepad.

It was neat to see things evolve fast. Examples: AOL sent these loss leader free offers to grow their network, it gave you free time to try the service and was an installer package that came in the physical mail as little cartidges. A short time later as CDs (the precursor to DVDs), with even more time. It rapidly went from “90 minutes free, wow!” to “600 hours free, wow!” and they went from people coveting them to just piling up everywhere and getting upcycled around the house. 🤣 “Honey hand me one of those 3000 hours coasters for my drink”.

Or how fast web development went. I remember how excited we were for hotdog pro, where the html tags had *colors* and you could push *buttons* to add tags! A short time later “Hey Netobjects Fusion just stick this graphic here somewhere, i dunno you figure it out, use a dozen nested tables with a single clear pixel in each cell, kthx”

Man now that I think about it, the frequency that businesses and organizations had the word “hot” in their brand name back then was another thing lmao. Hotdog, Hotmail, Hotbot, and I know I’m forgetting some other ones. Because the internet was HOT my friends! 🔥

"Internet Cafe" mid 90s. Clicked down through yahoo's directory not really knowing what I was looking for. Found the canonical list of lightbulb jokes. Funny but overall I was quite underwhelmed. Got a print magazine that listed and reviewed websites.

Kinda limited, in the sense that I didn't have my own computer until about 2006 and just had a "family" PC before then, which my brother and dad used.

One of my earliest memories from the late 90's (I would have been about 8 years old) was making a website on MaxPages, which was one of those build-your-own-website services. Mine listed video game cheats and passcodes. I didn't have much time to add to my page as my computer skills were limited and I didn't get much time on the computer, so I got bad reviews just for not having much content. Some asshole on one of their public chatrooms hacked my account and defaced my site a few weeks later. I think his name was Ray.

For reasons I'd rather not go into, I had a more limited exposure to Flash games and didn't really get involved with Newgrounds until my late teens. Cartoon Network (at least the US/Canada site) used to have a great selection of Flash games though.

By my teens I was playing RuneScape actively (2005 - 2007), then World of Warcraft (2007 - 2012.)

Expage, and geocities quickly turned to MSN messenger and neopets. Some Yahoo! Games in there too.

CompuServe chat rooms and the Neverwinter Nights MUD on the service.

plato/novanet, irc, newsgroups, email.