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Child Item

How the Internet Used to Be

Augmerson

Geocities everywhere. Geocities and Angelfire. Websites on Justin Timberlake and the Spice Girls. Being excited when you got an email. Rotten.com being a novelty. Trying to look up pictures of your favourite celebrity nude. A/S/L? Counter-Strike. 33k and 56k modems but never actually connecting at that speed. mIRC.

What are your favourite memories of yesteryore from the Internet?

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pharmaton

I had some serious phone bills all the same

FearDark

gurramok wrote: »

I paid a fortune to EircoN for ISDN back then, oh so we were so ripped off by a monopoly. And then Ireland Offline was born!

I had a dial up one way and my downloads came through my a sattelite dish. Fantastic for Napster but awful for Counter Strike or any other online game for that matter. Then we got ISDN, changed my life! Often got home from school on a Friday, turned on the PC, logged into my favourite game and before ya knew it it was time for school again on the Monday, eating my body weight in crisps and red bull and holding in my piss to a point where I'm sure I have permanent damage!

The_Valeyard

"Get off the phone I want to use the Internet"

FearDark

Back in dial-up days we had a money jar for the internet, if you wanted to use it it would cost you 60p per hour... I can tell you, there were massive phone bills circa 95-00

1ZRed

The dial up screechy, annoying noise. I'm probably one of the only people on the planet that actually liked it! Miss it in a strange way

pharmaton

and it was all so amazing and new and mindblowing, wtf happened.

http://www.internetis****.org/

MaroonAndGreen

pharmaton wrote: »

and it was all so amazing and new and mindblowing, wtf happened.

http://www.internetis****.org/

It got better

Ruu

Doras search engine and Tinet.ie email.

gurramok

Hold on as this is down memory nostalgia way, who here remembers using 56k over Windows 3.1 on Netscape?! Huh?!

pharmaton

MaroonAndGreen wrote: »

It got better

faster and bigger, really not better.

shleedance

Playing chess on Yahoo, Rotten.com, ebaumsworld, screeching sound of the modem when dialing in, chatting up people on YIM, trolling on yahoo chat rooms, making ****ty websites on geocities and downloading ringtones for my phone.

There was no youtube, broadband or social media. A completely different time.

AllGunsBlazing

Metallica suing everyone.

whirlpool

pharmaton wrote: »

and it was all so amazing and new and mindblowing, wtf happened.

http://www.internetis****.org/

No.

pharmaton

whirlpool wrote: »

No.

ya sound like a junkie :P

Allyall

FearDark wrote: »

Before 1997 ish everything was a pay site! No porntube then my friend!

Streaming movies did exist. But god help you if you tried to watch one.

They were mostly still pictures.

Tiny thumbnails, seeing a female in what looked like a "lovely picture", and clicking on it. It took about 1-2 minutes to load the picture fully, and popups.. :mad:... 20 popups per picture. Internet Explorer seemed better than netscape to some, whilst waiting for the picture to load you were constantly closing popups that wouldn't close until they were fully loaded, and that took AAAAGGGEESSSS..

Porn was possible, but you worked, for one picture.

SEANoftheDEAD

I actually miss how the internet used to be. Now a days every Tom, Dick and Harry has access and the rise of social networking has actually bothered me.

Going back 10-15 years it was almost like a cult thing to have internet and as someone else pointed out I also miss the old dial up tone. At around that time I was mad into WWF, and finding a website via Altavista that had wallpapers or theme music gave ye a unique feeling as there was time involved searching for the content that was fairly rare.
We didn't have the luxury of Google images Pirate Bay back then

McCrack

Askjeeves.com

Man he knew everything. I was well impressed.

ahjaysis

I still use mIRC, Xchat, and Counter Strike (have a little portable edition on a usb)

mIRC and Xchat are still pretty huge.

eviltimeban

First ever "internet" experience - playing 688 over a phone line with a friend who would dial in over a modem.

Newsgroups - eg rec.music.beatles, alt.music.

Ireland Online.

Morpheus.

Real Player.

Lycos.

This is the first website btw: http://www.w3.org/History/19921103-hypertext/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html

The Black Oil

MSN messenger in your system tray, and looking at your transcripts afterwards.
MSN Groups
Setting up a hotmail account
Alta Vista, Ask Jeeves, Dogpile, Excite, Lycos
Configuring dial up through your Internet Options
Real Player
Metallica whining about Napster
Oceanfree chat
Phantom FM's chat room
Sky News technology slot/show
Ordering XP service pack 2 on disc rather than downloading it
Spybot Search and Destroy, Adware
BBC Cult message boards

Kidchameleon

Marks Bookmarks

[Deleted User]

I always loved the sound of the dial up

Anyone remember Paddynet?

ICQ was good craic too

bbam

VIP anyone?
Virtual Irish Pub.

Was a great laugh passing time working nights.

SpaceTime

Remember when you'd dial a local number to go online and in the early days the biggest problem was the lines would be busy.

You had to keep redialing!

And email used to be 98% actual messages and usually provided by you ISP who didn't even read your mail and pitch ads at you!

Jimoslimos

gurramok wrote: »

Hold on as this is down memory nostalgia way, who here remembers using 56k over Windows 3.1 on Netscape?! Huh?!

Nearly. I had Windows 3.11 for Workgroups. Disliked W95 intently when it came out!

Daveysil15

Having to prolong ejaculation because it took ages for a picture of a naked woman to load. Viruses that weren't clandestine and actually informed you of their presence in some cases.

MagicMarker

I remember going into an Internet cafe in town to print out hundreds of guitar tabs!

Slutmonkey57b

Seeing a website for the first time at a friend's house whose dad was a software developer, using mosaic and the then brand new netscape with the big blue N. I remember being more impressed with mosaic because of its globe. They had a dedicated phone line for it!

Going to college and using telnet for the first time. alf2, and knowing all that power was being handed over to idiots. Writing a website in a text editor. The sight of rooms full of computers waiting to have games loaded on them while arts students wrote essays. MUDs. Winamp and seeing the difference in size between an mp3 file and a normal sound file.

Being told by someone to go on cloud boards and ignoring them! Modem noises. Staying in a computer lab all weekend and leaving on a Monday morning at 6am. Swiping into the hamlab with that Black passcard.

snausages

EdenHazard wrote: »

Going on to search for pictures of Trish Stratus from Wrestling and freaking out my parents would walk in on me.

I printed out a load of those... and was caught

errlloyd

Used to play MOHAA online, I remember getting ISDN and it being savage, but quicker if I signed on with two phone lines! Dad ultimately got "midband" because he thought it would sort it out, but the pings were too high, so I was still using ISDN until I racked up an incredible bill one month. Game over for MOHAA.