I met a girl on an MSN chat room and we talked for awhile and enjoyed each others’ company. We found out we lived pretty close and were the same age but went to different high schools. We decided to meet up in a public place for a date so I fired up mapquest and printed off directions. She did as well. Well, I took a wrong turn and couldn’t get back on track so I disappointingly went home to get back on MSN to give her the news that I got lost. Turns out she did as well! lol. Next time I just gave her my address and we dated for a bit ha
It was the mid-90s, and just a shell account. Gopher, archie, pine and zmodem.
We didn’t get PPP access for a year or two; this was the days before google - yahoo, altavista, some other engines I can’t remember, and metasearch engines like dogpile that would query a bunch of different search engines and return the combined set of results.
This was the days of mailing lists and usenet for the most part - connect up, download messages for like an hour, then log off, read and reply, then log on and send.
I was there for the original hamsterdance, and it ruled.
America Online. Chat rooms. A/S/L? Beware sexual predators.
19/f/Cali always
I remember coming home from school, and immediately going on to MSN. The silly gifs were so entertaining back then, and it was very cool to have a gif for each letter - like the letter A in flames LOL. I also used to love Club Penguin and ToonTown. Going into those type of cyberworlds felt pretty magical to me back then :)
Omg I forgot about the letters. Also made me remember those characters you could customize with clothes and backgrounds and stuff. I guess the prequel to bitmojis but they were like, edgy and cool.
If anyone remembers what I’m talking about can you remind me the name?
Lots of blinking geocities and angelfire sites. Waiting for NetZero dial up to noisily connect. Buffering music and video clips.
Compuserve back in like ‘91.
CompuServe was a large part of the lack of parenting I received during the 90s. 3-5 hours a night, plus work/school and sleep means I didn’t see my mom much for more than a decade.
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 !
Day of Defeat was so good! That and team fortress are the only team FPS I ever played. I do love shooting me some Nazis.
Playing Star Trek in my high-school counselor’s office on a teletype machine that was connected to the local college’s main frame. The teletype used a roll of paper. Type in a move, and a new “screen” was printed on the paper. I must have used miles of paper playing that game.
Holy shit. I never knew teletype ever became a civilian technology. I only know of it from my military training. Though it was old technology by the time we trained on it.
I also played this in High School. We thought it was fantastic.
The games on the PBS kids website over dialup
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.
A/s/l?
I used to go to internet cafes to look for cheats for video games. Pretty much all I ever used the internet for back then. Don’t remember many other sites but I do remember a website where you slaughtered the teletubbies in various ways, like dismembering them or slicing them in half with meat saws.
After that, my first social uses of the internet were MySpace, a forum for metal and alternative music called MakeSomeNoise (named after a magazine that came out in my country) and the chat rooms on The Offspring’s website.
simple static personal websites with a single tiled image as background, dubious color palette, and a guestbook
Cartoon Network games! I remember one set of adventure games that I loved to play but I couldn’t understand English very well yet so I’d always make my dad play with me and translate. Resort something. I look them up on the Wayback machine once in a while.
Errghhh ooo oo uh uh oh uh uh.
Dial up
