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. 😄
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.
You see me now a veteran, of a thousand internet wars.
I’ve been living on the edge so long, where the tones of dialup roar.
And I’m young enough to look at, but far too old to meme
All the scars on the inside…If I was a veteran I wouldn’t want to have anything to do with the current landscape
BBS was the shiz in the olden days
…yeah, come back after you’ve pulse-dialed an acoustic coupler at 300 baud to network your terminal emulator with a shell account, kid…
Do not speak to me of the old magic, I was there when it was written.
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
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.
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.
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?
Is it okay to bully nazis?
That’s not bullying, that’s enforcing social mores.
Haha, I just said something similar before your reply had loaded on my screen. :) Whoops!
Is it still bullying then? Seems less like ‘bullying’ and more like ‘self defense’ and ‘standing up for what’s right’ to me.
Just like what a butthead would say.
Uhh, shut up Beavis.
We NEED a Lemmy community to screenshot the best comments ever
The dude who answers, reminds me of my dad.
Shit, my steam account is older than most of the highschoolers I work with
My Steam account is almost 18 years old and I still have to select DOB when viewing “adult” games…
Well, I guess Steam won’t have a problem with California law
Steam could stop asking in California, since it’s now the responsibility of the operating system to tell Steam your age.
That might be.
Can’t be very sure about how it turns out for the Steam Deck.
The law’s definition of OS might not be on the same page as ours.
My steam account is older than the fresh University grad we just hired.
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…
Or pidgin when it was called gaim.
I remember trillian. You might like this -
I remember my ICQ number, 4170129, but I don’t remember why I know it.
Surely I didn’t have to type it in every time I logged in, did I? That would be a really stupid UI.
And Facebook Messenger and Gmail Chat (or whatever it was called)! There was a glorious period of time where you could talk to pretty much anyone on any service from one chat app.
Still can :)
I also don’t remember my ICQ number, but I had one. And I remember my first time stepping into a 99 cent only store and their registers used that “uh oh” sound from it. I always felt like nobody else recognized where it was from.
Omg Trillian! I haven’t heard that name in forever. You just unlocked a flood of memories.
I absolutely remember Trillian. It’s what convinced me to finally make an AIM account to talk with my “mainstream” friends who didn’t have ICQ or IRC, since I wouldn’t actually need to run any new software.
It was just last year that re-found my little black book from the late 90’s and 2000’s with all my accounts from back then AIM/ICQ/Yahoo, shit there was even a /. account number sub 100,000 that I couldn’t log into any more
I remember ARPANET before it was privatized. Before TBL made Mosaic and the first web server, when all there was was USENET discussions, FTP, and Gopher. I set up mail and news over uucp dialup for clients in the 80s. I ran System III Venix on a PDP-11. I was a sysadmin on a team managing a dual CPU VAX 9000 with 192MB of RAM in 1990. Which was a lot back then. I’m old.
“I have usernames older than you” is actually a pretty sick burn
My Reddit account was 19 years old before I was permabanned by their stupid AI for liking Luigi pics and saying I wish Trump wouldn’t wake up in response to a pic of him napping 😔
Saw it on an episode of MASH.
Henry is dating a 22 year old nurse. Hawkeye tells Henry that Henry has bunions older than his girlfriend.
You wouldn’t be in my Top 8
I chuckled. I miss MySpace. Choosing a song for your profile was great. Facebook should add that feature to their profiles. So should Bluesky and Mastodon.
SpaceHey may not be the same, but it’s what my girlfriend uses!!
I remember the rise and fall of icq. I laughed from the real internet as you kids played, knowing it was a fad wouldn’t last, not worth taking seriously.
I played online before the internet, when it was scattered individuals, or when you needed access to separate telenet and arpanet, when you could keep in your head all the accessible nodes, when the building blocks you take for granted were all new and exciting ideas
Now get off my lawn
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
I had to telnet into chat rooms. We had no browsers. I was old before you were born.
Telnet. An elegant tool for a more civilized time.
I see you, graybeard. And I pay respect.
Doesn’t telnet have in-band signaling? I would hardly call that elegant.
Ooh, Australia, I have a question. Was PalTalk a big thing over there? Obviously way after what you described. I remember my father having an old classmate over from Australia and he introduced us to “The Internet”, and how instant messaging was possible a cross borders through PalTalk. Even though I never heard anyone using it in Europe, even years past that encounter.
No, not that I know of. We use to have local / oz only IRC channels, because overseas calls were expensive. So, you would dial into your ISP and then have access to city/state wide IRCs like AusNet. Later that became national. That was circa 94-99.
It was BBS before that.
I remember buying a small black and white TV from a second hand store to watch the 2000 Olympics and chatting to people over mIRC simultaneously.
The TV was sitting right next to a Apple Newton in the store. When I went back to get it, it had already been sold. Ended up buying a palm pilot 1000 instead.
Damn, I’ve been lied to 27 years ago! Thanks for sharing your experiences
I will invoke the old words
A/S/L
I actually was 15/f/ca. I love that it has become an internet inside joke. I spent way too much time in the Yahoo star wars chat rooms back then 😅
WhiskyTangoFoxtrot slaps CaptPretentious around a bit with a large troutIt’s like I’m back on quakenet!
DiscworldMUD?
18/F/Cali
Weren’t they all…
55/male/Stalingrad
We were and still are all f16s
Nyeeeuuuuwwww kkkkkjkk bbrrrrrrrr
head nod
16/F/Cali
