The old internet

CrankyHaus

What I miss most about the old internet was that African guy registering BertieAhern.com, placing porn on it and trying to sell the site to De Bert for $5M.

https://www.google.ie/amp/s/www.wired.com/2000/06/cybersquatter-gets-irish-up/amp

Such innocent times.

Fuascailteoir

L'hotel chat

Capt'n Midnight

from 2005

http://www.milliondollarhomepage.com/

Jim Root

A/S/L?

Feisar

mobileforest wrote: »

old chatrooms. Remember around 1998 sitting in uni lab on yahoo chat while roommate (female) was on at same time. People ask A/S/L. My "m" would be followed maybe with one or two "hi". Her "f" would be followed by a dozen or two "want to cyber??"

Anyone else here remember bulletin board systems before the World Wide Web? You'd get a few numbers of BBS's around and spend half the night trying to dial into one. Some would be playing some decent turn based games (basically a really slow game of D&D, although I remember their were mail-in ones on the back of Conan comics at the time so probably not that slow). One BBS in my hometown had a guy upload the Anarchist Cookbook (which many of us teens used to make a variety of smoke bombs with). I never read the document myself but a friend at the time did print out a few pages. The owner of the site had a call from the cops which is how I got to hear what the document was about. Good times. Mind you, I'm Canadian. I'm guessing if someone in early-90s Ireland uploaded a book that showed you how to make pipe bombs, they'd be picked up by the Garda.

The Gardaí must have cut their cyber crime funding by the late nineties, I never got a knock on the door for downloading the cookbook.
I always wanted to make that petrol bomb that didn’t need a flaming rag, plus ya gotta add styrofoam to the petrol.

I remember in the evening it’d be emails from the lads with porn. Now as anyone that ever had a 56k modem knows this was harmless enough. One of the lads set up an email account, garda@oceanfree.net or something like that and was mailing another of the lads questioning this “porn ring” and what was his involvement.