The early days of the internet

12 element

Yeti

Tea_Bag

12 element wrote: »

Yeti

i lost days of my life to that ski game.

i remember the porn sites, geocities and the like, chatrooms with " real women" :shudder:, and occassionally coming across that god aweful image of a naked lady that had a "loading image" banner over her boobs that you could fall for over and over again (hint: the image was fully loaded, it was early trolling days)

creating miniwebsites and competing with online friends you met in said chatrooms to see who could get the most site views.

then my dad got a 14.4k modem and the internet got sooo much faster.

amacachi

I was fairly late to the net but I think it was when phpBB was just taking off and every asshat around could set up a bulletin board no problem. The amount of homepages I had under different accounts on different hosting sites, Anglfire, Geocities, Freewebz and ton more I can't remember right now.

Twas nice to be able to go online and everyone typed properly and mainly had decent manners. That was a while after the net supposedly went to **** so I'd've loved to have been around before that.

OPENROAD

Got the Net at the end of 1999, remember one chat room site, where you had a multiple of different chat rooms and you could use your microphone to chat, usually ended up like a very very drunk AH without the mods :eek:, or did I dream that seems such a long time ago now, such chat rooms existed, didn't they?

stoneill

so basically it was sh1te then and it's sh1te now.

Pdfile

General General wrote: »

this whole thread belongs on someone's sched.

belongs to me really because as soon as i got onto a crappy atari in like 90/91 from their on in i was hooked !

as time slowly went on i used them more and more and their was no separation of us two...

come to think of it, kids ( my chums ) used to slag me for learning html when i was not much more then knee high, now their asked me for help with their business n' such and wondering why im quoting them stupidly high prices in a recession. :cool:


but really highlight for me was playing half life quake diablo civilizations etc on 56k and complaining about the 10 minute downloads for some stuff for games ( i. 2 pieces of custom jpegs on a map somewhere ) this or windows 98 ( bsod ftw... :mad: )

Ruu_Old

Hotdog colour scheme on Windows 3.1. :cool:

OPENROAD

That dial up tone on indigo was music to the ears, happy days

CorkMan

I remember getting an iMAC OS9 back in 2001. It had 20GB memory. The memory is still very fresh in my mind of walking through my front room door and my Dad and Sister unpacking the packaging of it. Aswell as that my trips to it when 14 years of age I would go onto gamefaqs.com and the WWF website too. I can remember an add-on for Unreal Tournament was released, it was 50MB. I dare not download as it would have taken over 6 hours to get it. (had speeds of 3KB/sec.)

The thing is the dial-up would sometimes switch on and off without me knowing it, so a couple of times we got a bill of 300 euros! How the **** did Eircom get away with that? Crooks the lot of 'em. They should have sent people out to properly install the phone lines when the internet was getting bigger. Though in 2004 BB arrived and it was a lot easier to download video files from websites, like an Eminem video from a fan website. Downloading video/music media definitley became easier.

But then 2006/2007 youtube and social media came, which turned the scene around more. A LOT more. Instead of downloading videos from specific websites youtube is all there is. I don't like to thing what stuff will be like in 10 years time, everything will be so alien it would be like we're on Mars. *shudders*

Rabies

papagormo wrote: »

counterstrike

That's is still fairly new in online gaming.

Go back a few years more

Ponster

Offy wrote: »

3.1? Wasnt it 3.11 that was a network platform? Could you connect with 3.1?

Yep, but only if you had Windows for Workgroups 3.1

3.11 had native 32bit TCP/IP while plain 'ol 3.1 needed an upgrade to add the TCP/IP stack (I think...)

suicide_circus

A/s/l
Wanna cyber?

_sparkie_

a friend of mine had the internet long before i did and i remember his mam giving out to use for using dial-up before 6 cause it went down in prince after then! and cause she couldnt use the phone, how the times have changed!

does anybody else remember a thing called m/dos? it is just sticking out it my mind. we were trying to download games to the computer but this thing called m/dos would never let us, i will never forget you m/dos.

jackiebaron

Mr. Loverman wrote: »

Around 1992 I used to go into TCD to play online games ("MUDS") in the computer lab under the train line. I would go there with my older brother, knock on the window, pretend we forgot our swipe card, and go online and play a very primitive text based game called "Endless Nameless". Sometimes a lecturer would come in and ask for my student card, but I would pretend I forgot it. I would say I am a "BESS" student. (Business Economic and Social Studies). I was 14 years old and wearing a tracksuit. They would believe me.

It was incredibly exciting playing this game as I could chat to people in America and England and interact with them.

Fast forward three years later and I have begun a computer science diploma in DIT Kevin Street. On the back of a computer magazine I saw an IBM advert saying they "powered the hyperweb". Curious I went into the computer lab with a college friend, found an application called Netscape and opened the IBM website. It was a thrilling experience. Although the PC was a 386 and slow as hell, I didn't care. Seeing that website load was amazing.

I then discovered webcrawler.com and pornsites. There were only about 150 of them at the time. "Amateurporn.com" was the biggest one at the time. Free porn pictures! Myself and my friend would stay in the computer lab after college spending one or two hours downloading a single image of a naked woman. Ridiculous? Yes, but we were 17 and didn't see anything wrong with it. It was worth it.

We then discovered telnet and shell accounts and how we could join BBS systems around the world. Our favorite was a BBS in Ann Arbor in Michigan. It tooks hours to create your account, but we could go online and talk to Americans. This may sound like nothing now, but you have to remember at the time this type of thing was unheard of, and probably 99% of Irish people had never heard of the Internet.

I remember looking at all the unregistered domain names (hardly any domain names were registered) thinking they were cool domains. It never occurred to me to register one of them.

Back then the Internet was not a commercial place. It was full of people happy to be communicating with other people. But there was money to be made. I remember I used to laugh at all the stupid ideas (e.g. onlyballs.com - we only sell balls! $5 million funding) getting loads of funding. At the time I was a web developer/programmer who had no sense of the real world, so I never once thought I should use my web skills to make some money.

...

Fast forward 16 years later and the Internet is like a strip mall full of tacky ****e. I still love it, but it doesn't thrill me like it used to. I wish it could.

Know what I mean?

I remember the railway arches. It was full of little Macintosh systems. I got you beaten by a few years. I was on the internet in 1988 on the VAX system in Trinity. Me and a friend would spend hours on the UseNet News site, mostly rec.music.misc emailing and posting to guys in America and Malaysia song lyrics to heavy metal music like Queensryche and Guns n Roses. It was surreal. Also they gave us FTP sites to servers in California where we could download sci-fi stories and pornography. Failed five of my 10 exams that year and had to repeat them because I spent so much time just dilly-dallying on the VAX mainframe. Make me sick when some fool comes up to me in like 1995 and says "Hey, have you ever heard of the internet? You gotta get online man!" Fück off, newbie!

Offy

suicide_circus wrote: »

A/s/l
Wanna cyber?

lol

greenasgrass

I remember playing Prince of Persia on my 286 on christmas morning in maybe 1990 and feeling sick when he fell on the spikes because it sounded and looked so real!!!

I do remember Microsoft Netmeet which was before MSN Messenger. We connected to a guy in Texas and we're all chatting with him. The whole family around the computer. Absolutely ridiculous when I think back on it but we just couldn't get our heads around it in 1993-ish!!

hardCopy

greenasgrass wrote: »

I remember playing Prince of Persia on my 286 on christmas morning in maybe 1990 and feeling sick when he fell on the spikes because it sounded and looked so real!!!

I do remember Microsoft Netmeet which was before MSN Messenger. We connected to a guy in Texas and we're all chatting with him. The whole family around the computer. Absolutely ridiculous when I think back on it but we just couldn't get our heads around it in 1993-ish!!

Prince of Persia, Captain Comic and SimCity, those games were the business (before I got online though).

Anybody remember Colony City? It was like a really primitive version of second life, I must have been on it around 1998/99. At the time the VR graphics looked amazing. I can't belive the site is still up.

I remember getting PC Format back in 1996 and skipping to the recommended websites page, there were so few sites online that I needed recommendations to find aything useful.

phill106

_sparkie_ wrote: »

a friend of mine had the internet long before i did and i remember his mam giving out to use for using dial-up before 6 cause it went down in prince after then! and cause she couldnt use the phone, how the times have changed!

does anybody else remember a thing called m/dos? it is just sticking out it my mind. we were trying to download games to the computer but this thing called m/dos would never let us, i will never forget you m/dos.

msdos you mean? Or are you trolling

boblong

Mr. Loverman wrote: »

Around 1992 I used to go into TCD to play online games ("MUDS") in the computer lab under the train line.

I'm not exactly sure which computer lab you're referring to, but I think I might be in there right now, or at least one of the ones nearby.

Ev84

greenasgrass wrote: »

I remember playing Prince of Persia on my 286 on christmas morning in maybe 1990 and feeling sick when he fell on the spikes because it sounded and looked so real!!!

Yeah, I remember that too... running around in a 2D dungeon looking for green and red potion bottles/jars with my last bit of health, S**ting it jumping through the metal jaw things. "Zak" was another game I vaguely remember. It was a puzzle game where you had to either type what you wanted to do, or pick a task from a list? Funny game.

Firefox11

http://www.webhamster.com/

D

Ruu wrote: »

Hotdog colour scheme on Windows 3.1. :cool:

Balmed Out

i remember we used to play a game where yould type in a web address which was composed of a real word.com and see how many you could get without repeating a word we'd used before. Wouldnt get far now but could fill up entire lab sessions without getting one back in the day. And everything out the window was grass...

transylman

After hours was a lot less active back then.

In the year 2000

CrazyRabbit

It's funny, but I can still hear the dial-up handshaking sound in my head clearly. I guess after listening to it over 3000 times, it's stuck with me forever.

I'd love to remember the first website that I visited, but I can't. It was probably porn though, as I was a rather curious kid after finding my dads porn mags.

Max Power1

transylman wrote: »

After hours was a lot less active back then.

In the year 2000

link functionality fail

RichieC

My first PC was a 486dx2 but I didn't really go online till I got a cable modem in 2000 aside from some dabbling in courses I was doing. that was mostly just downloading simpsons and south park wavs

tricky D

Lex_Diamonds wrote: »

A lot of what you wrote hit home to me. My first browser was Netscape 1.0 which came bundled with Indigo Ireland's (Ireland's second ISP?) welcome pack. I think this was around '94.

Twas mid/late '95. There was only really Internet Eireann, IOL(?) and Compuserve in '94.

Dont be at yourself

I remember when the internet was just Ate My Balls websites.

EL_Loco

playing FPS games on dial up, delighted with a ping of 150. No one able to use the phone at the same time.