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Nineties internet nostalgia, anyone?


Lonely Lemon

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Lonely Lemon

Okay so I'm gonna be a total memberberry here...

 

During the 90's the internet was a unique and far more entertaining place. Dialing into it made you feel happy, like a big snort of digital cocaine. It felt more like a destination, somewhere to go that was exciting and worth exploring, rather than something constantly at the tips of your fingers.

 

The internet now is so self absorbed and corporate and scammy. Too many social media platforms, too many selfies, too many advertisements, and too many trolls. Nothing about it feels personal. Every profile looks pretty much the same, with the same duck faces and fake tans, from facebook to tinder and beyond. Millions of Kardashian clones, as far as the eye can see. How many makeup tutorials does YouTube need? It's... boring.

 

Don't get me wrong, there is some cool stuff from the new internet, but the old internet felt like a third grader's art project. It was messy, colourful, unorganised, and it was awesome! Are any of you from those early pioneering days of the world wide web? What were your favourite sites to visit? Where did you spend most of your time chatting? Were you the webmaster of your very own geocities page? Let's reminisce!

 

 

 

 

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12 minutes ago, Lonely Lemon said:

Where did you spend most of your time chatting?

I feel old. ICQ.

 

I  remember mentioning this to some of my nieces and nephews, and was looked at like I was a dinosaur. Then I told them about tape cassettes. I'm glad I didn't tell them how we'd record music off of the radio, by butting up two radios together, with one recording. In that, one person unaware and making noise, could've ruined the one of a lifetime radio mix you could never get back.

 

Pogo sticks was one of my most vivid memories.

 

I think we were the last generation where parents pretty much gave their kids unprecedented levels of freedom. We literally were kicked out of the house, until supper was ready.

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Lonely Lemon

@Perspektiv

 

Awww ICQ 😍

 

Before ICQ I used to chat at a site called WBS (WebChat Broadcasting System) and just the other day I found this https://www.classic-wbs.net/ someone is/was trying to reboot the old chat site! I was always in the X-Philers room. In fact, I'm pretty sure 85% of the internet circa 1995 was X-Files fan pages. 😂

 

Recording mix tapes off the radio were hours well spent! I agree about our generation. I seem to recall a lot more time spent playing outdoors in comparison to kids today.

 

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My father worked with computers; he made sure to block sites with adult content or certain words (e.g. relating to sex) and would periodically check which websites my sibling and I went on, so I wasn't able to browse all of the internet, freely (for example, wanting to search about sexuality and gender because I was confused and didn't understand why I seemed to be the only person who was attracting comments from others about appearing to be gay or trans). Schools also kept tabs on which sites students would visit on the library computers, connected to their login ID, so I didn't feel comfortable with the idea of browsing about topics like that, there, either.

 

I waited till I was older, when my father removed the filters and parental control settings (and stopped looking up all the sites I went on), before deciding to search about sexuality and gender on the internet.

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I had parental controls which blocked all search engines. My father was more concerned about me playing games on the internet and installing software.

 

I didn't start exploring my sexuality until I was at college, questioning if I liked guys, I already knew that I had a fetish and learned I was asexual when I was 23 at university after  I started trying to have sex with friends and discovered I preferred hugging.

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i spent most of my time on IRC. i dialed in to a few BBSes, but never anything more than to play some shitty text games. met a lot of friends through mail lists and chats in those days. lots of nerds with common interests getting together the only way they could at the time.

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I only got Internet access at home in 2006, and I rarely accessed it before that date, so I can't really contribute any memories.

I can recommend a book, though. "Cybergypsies" by Indra Sinha is a " a non-fiction memoir of the pre-internet generation" with lots of descriptions of MUDs, chatting, early hacking, and activism. 

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I spent a lot of the 90's playing Quake and Everquest over 11baud modems. Fun times.

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No nostalgia for me. I don't miss the slow load times, the poorly designed websites, the sheer gaudiness and all of the "teething" problems that tend to come with something new.

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RoseGoesToYale

Yeah, I think for the most part it sucked, but there is one thing I miss about pre-2005 internet... as long as you stuck to known websites, advertisements stayed in their place. In neat little boxes on the side or banners at the top, not obscuring any of the content you came to view. Back before Java had the capacity to support continuous autoplay video ads, mouse-move-wait-don't-go ads, and teasing content paywalls.

 

Of course, if you went to strange sites, pop-up city.

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I was only alive for the last few months of the 1990s, so I can't contribute anything here.

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Alejandrogynous

We didn't get internet at my house until '98, I think. I remember always trying to sneak onto the computer late at night when my mom was asleep, burying the tower in blankets to muffle the sound. Recently a customer in my store had the dial-up tone as their ringtone and I had my very own Vietnam flashback. 

 

As for nostalgia, I miss the anonymity there used to be with screennames and everything being easily compartmentalized. Nowadays Google owns everything so I'm paranoid to ever post anything personal because I know there's always a trail back to me somehow.

 

Back in the day, I mostly used AIM, Xanga (because Myspace was too popular, ugh), and MUD RPGs games. Good times good times.

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I remember hearing the dialup when my parents used the internet. Being that I was only 8 on December 31 1999 I didn’t use the internet much myself during the 90’s though. I do remember playing games like Ski Free and Chip’s Challenge, and I also like how Windows 95 and 98 looked.

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2 hours ago, Alejandrogynous said:

Back in the day, I mostly used AIM, Xanga (because Myspace was too popular, ugh), and MUD RPGs games. Good times good times.

OThat's the first time I've heard of Xanga so out of curiosity I checked and the site still exists.

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I was a little late to the party. The first time I used the internet was in 1999 and we got only got internet at home in 2000.

ICQ makes me a little nostalgic, but I hardly ever used it. However, I remember how excited I was about chat rooms back then. 😅 But that was in the early 2000s and since then I never really used chat rooms anymore.

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Alejandrogynous
53 minutes ago, Piotrek said:

OThat's the first time I've heard of Xanga so out of curiosity I checked and the site still exists.

Oh no, that's a frightening thought. 

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3 minutes ago, Alejandrogynous said:

Oh no, that's a frightening thought. 

Why?

 

3 hours ago, RoseGoesToYale said:

Yeah, I think for the most part it sucked, but there is one thing I miss about pre-2005 internet...

I've seen 2005 or 2006 mentioned in this context before. What happened at that point?

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Going to YouTube and downloading videos to watch - or, rather, watching the status bar get far enough ahead so you could start watching the video.

Netscape

AOL CDs by the bucket load - "You have mail" aka snail mail spam

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RoseGoesToYale
39 minutes ago, Piotrek said:

I've seen 2005 or 2006 mentioned in this context before. What happened at that point?

I'm not really sure, I just picked it because it was the middle of the decade. My guess is around that time processor power started picking up and memory got cheaper, giving web developers the excuse to make more resource-taxing website designs. (not great for people still on dial-up)

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Ah the 90's dialup internet speeds... open a webpage. Wait half an hour...

 

I had a Geocities page at one point. I wish I could remember half the stuff I used to know about html coding.

 

And the amazingness when Yahoo group launched at the beginning of the 21st century rendering newsgroups slightly less... something. 

 

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GeoCities ❤️ When Yahoo destroyed that, my intense hatred for them began, and I hold it against them to this day. AltaVista was better anyway.

 

ICQ was pretty great. Usenet. IRC. Miss those. Kinda miss the modem connection sounds, too. Direct dialup connections for Doom and Descent. We used the school's LAN to play 6 player (I think) Descent we snuck onto the computers on floppies and installed in the Windows directory so they wouldn't be found (I was the TA in charge of PC security anyway), and that was heaven.

 

Getting disconnected from a game because someone picked up the phone.

 

I was just looking through some old stuff and ran across some old CDs I burned (I remember when CD-Rs came out, that was amazing, the first one I had used a parallel port and was a blazing 2x burn speed)... tons of CDs with downloaded program installs (because re-downloading wasn't an option) and, of course, downloaded videos at like 120 pixels. I had a whole collection of videos I painstakingly downloaded and kept so I would always have it. Music videos you could almost tell which band was playing.

 

When I got access to the college LAN in the dorms, it was kid in a candy store and everyone on the floors was trading warez and serials constantly.

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I think we need some kind of poll on 90's search engines.

 

I was a WebCrawler and Dogpile user with some Altavista.

I even used Lycos because.... who knows frankly.

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Alejandrogynous
1 hour ago, Piotrek said:

Why?

Because if it still exists, that means my old blog might still exist and now I have to hunt it down and destroy it, haha.

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scarletlatitude

Oregon Trail. I found it online a while ago and tried playing it. It's a lot easier than I thought. :P 

 

1 hour ago, Amcan said:

I had a Geocities page at one point. I wish I could remember half the stuff I used to know about html coding.

 

Same. I had a geocities for a while. 

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Lonely Lemon
3 hours ago, Piotrek said:

Why?

 

I've seen 2005 or 2006 mentioned in this context before. What happened at that point?

 

It was around that time that the old internet started to change into something that resembles today's internet. YouTube, MySpace and Facebook all popped up in the mid 00's.

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I not only used GeoCities heavily, but I was very involved with a GC chat channel that had a pretty big social impact. Then they switched to Java and it fell to crap.

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