• billwashere@lemmy.worldEnglish
        7·
        9 days ago

        Well not sure about the other poster but the BBSes I used were ones you had to dial into and you were the only one there. Well unless it was a fancy one that had multiple phone lines. I even ran one for a short bit my junior year of high school on my commodore 128 and a 1200 baud modem. Good times. Then I got to college and learned about usenet and IRC. This was like ‘89.

  • VoteNixon2016@lemmy.blahaj.zone
    24·
    9 days ago

    Assuming y’all aren’t just fucking around, reading the comments here is actually really cool, tangentially interacting with people who have internet stories from well before I was born

    I’m just from the dialup era, and I still feel old online a lot of the time, but then someone here is like “yeah, Berners-Lee invented HTTP just to make a website to mock me”

    • Hikermick@lemmy.world
      4·
      9 days ago

      I got my first “home computer” in the days of the BBS’s when there was such a thing as a “long distance call”. Internet access was crazy expensive and not for the average geek. Back then it was a bit “underground”. There were professionals and there were passionate hobbyists. Most people didn’t have or need a computer in their lives. Things changed in the late 90’s boom. A cultural shift when suddenly everyone joined in. The geeks were no longer king

        • ChickenLadyLovesLife@lemmy.worldEnglish
          4·
          9 days ago

          I remember getting a Hotshot/286 card which allowed me to upgrade my 8088 to a 286. I don’t even remember what programs I used back then but I’m sure they ran a lot faster after that.

          IIRC correctly, the card was normally around $400 but I managed to get one for $150 and I was so proud of my dealmaking.

          • MinnesotaGoddam@lemmy.world
            5·
            9 days ago

            i just remember we had 2 games: King’s Quest 4: Rosella’s Peril and Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego, but we could only have one installed at a time.

            • ChickenLadyLovesLife@lemmy.worldEnglish
              4·
              9 days ago

              A friend of mine had a Commodore 20 with no tape drive. Not only could we only have one game at a time installed, but also we had to manually type in the code for the game each time.

  • MeowerMisfit817@lemmy.world
    252·
    9 days ago

    Okay, I get this may be off-topic, but “It is okay to bully–”, no, it’s not okay to bully anyone. What is passing by these people’s minds?

  • thewebroach@lemmy.world
    23·
    9 days ago

    23715769

    Social media used to be about socializing and communicating. These days its all drivel that has bren productized into a vehicle where streaming addictive brain rot keeps the advertisements flowing and lowers self esteem.

    Gen Z may have adopted the internet but it was born of us- AIM, yahoo messenger, ICQ, IRC servers, news groups… all on a dial-up modem. The good old days where there wasnt enough bandwidth for all the ads of today, and the most intrusive ads were a 468x60 pixel banner at the top or bottom of the netscape page

    • purplemonkeymad@programming.dev
      9·
      9 days ago

      I feel like those platform ideas came initially from people who wanted to build something cool. Something people would use. The ads were a side effect of being part of the tech company.

      Now I feel they are built because it’s a way to show ads or harvest data.

      • suicidaleggroll@lemmy.world
        7·
        9 days ago

        Exactly, the priorities have flipped. It used to be that ads were a necessary evil to fund the development and hosting costs for the service you actually care about and want to provide. Now it seems like the service is the necessary evil that’s only there to provide an excuse for the real goal - selling ad space.

  • gigastasio@sh.itjust.works
    23·
    9 days ago

    Friends, hear my story…

    In the days of old, the days where 300 baud modems were bought by us, the Early Adopters, there were meetings in dark places where code was exchanged on cassette, to be loaded from our tape drives, to create a new BBS, and you - yes you, dear reader - could be your very own SysOp. A king! Let them fall before you as you interrupted their email to live chat. Behold a world where encryption dare not tread, and you, My SysOp, could read the thoughts of all your subjects! Enter a universe where mom picking up the phone downstairs, only to be greeted with digital screeching, turned your conversations into garbled, alien characters before your eyes!

    This is where it began. This is where I began. And thus shall I endure, today, tomorrow, and all tomorrows. The lore is mine and mine alone to carry.

    Post on, dear friends. I did all this for you.

  • A_Random_Idiot@lemmy.worldEnglish
    221·
    9 days ago

    I am one of the few people, it seems, that can not for the life of me remember my ICQ number… but I was there, using it.

    Anyone remember Trillian? Having your Yahoo, AIM, ICQ, Messenger, etc all in one program…

  • SuspciousCarrot78@lemmy.world
    17·
    9 days ago

    ICQ? Listen here, young man.

    I grew up in outback Australia, in the before times. My first time online was a 1200-baud modem on a BBC Electron.

    We did school over HF radio with School of the Air, had no phone lines, and barely reliable electricity.

    Do not speak to me of the deep magics. I was there when they were written.

    double biceps flex

    farts

    breaks a hip

  • Abbysimons@lemmy.world
    16·
    9 days ago

    Honestly, the people who were around in the early internet days helped build the online world we all use now. A little respect for the veterans of dial-up isn’t a bad thing. 😄

    • Decoy321@lemmy.worldM
      12·
      9 days ago

      Back in our day, the Internet yelled at you when connecting to it. I think that conditioning helped us brace for what’s to come, and we should bring that feature back.

      • LifeInMultipleChoice@lemmy.world
        4·
        8 days ago

        Look, instant messages were instant, but getting the computer to boot up, connecting to the Internet and logging in were not.

        I’m on the younger end but I remember so Many people having routines like prep the coffee machine the night before, when the alarm went off you would get up youd hit the power button on the computer, turn on the coffee machine, then hop in the shower. When you got out of the shower you would log in, and go grab a cup of coffee, then come back and connect to the Internet. Drink your coffee and you could check the 2 items and emails you needed before running out the door

  • glorkon@lemmy.world
    10·
    9 days ago

    My ICQ was 1428816.

    And when young people ask me if I ever play multi-player games… my dude, I played the first one. Midimaze on Atari ST.

    • chunes@lemmy.world
      4·
      9 days ago

      The worst mistake we made was making it easy enough for normies to use.

      You want higher-quality people, you need to make it harder to use.

    • NottaLottaOcelot@lemmy.caEnglish
      3·
      9 days ago

      One day you’ll be able to tell your kids that you lived the golden age of streaming. You didn’t have ads. You could binge watch a whole season in a day without the service tricking episodes out once per week to try to increase user anticipation. You didn’t have increasing numbers of streaming services dividing the pie into tiny pieces such that you had to pay 5x what you used to pay for cable to watch the things you want. You didn’t subscribe to those services only to find that you needed to get a fancier membership type to watch the show you were actually interested in.

      You may have missed the birth of social media. But you lived the age of excitement about ditching cable, only to watch some massively rich companies create a monster bigger and uglier than cable ever was.