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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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srsly78

errlloyd wrote: »

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.

You get more bandwidth from using 2 isdn lines, but it doesn't make your ping any better. So downloads are faster, but games would not be. You wasted so much money on that second line

theSHU

eviltimeban wrote: »

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

wow I miss Morpheus. It allowed you access to a shared folder on a stangers computer. You were supposed to save just music/videos etc. but people saved EVERYTHING in there. Crazy!!

Owryan

off topic

theSHU wrote: »

wow I miss Morpheus. It allowed you access to a shared folder on a stangers computer. You were supposed to save just music/videos etc. but people saved EVERYTHING in there. Crazy!!

Heres your chance to catch up.....http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/member.php?u=6804 ...

on topic doras search engine, the plastic clip holding the cable into the socket breaking, someone tripping over the modem cable cause it snaked through three rooms from socket to pc

iguana

Babylon 5 webrings.

Daveysil15

I remember when I first started downloading music, it used to take about 20 minutes to download one song - that's if I could find the fecking thing. I used to get about 20 results for Brittany Spears first.

CrazyRabbit

Runescape!

partyatmygaff

Kazaa, that 56k sound and being excited when you could download at the full 5KB/sec, incredibly ugly websites. Seeing Windows XP and thinking it looked too futuristic to be real. MSN Zone Gaming with chess and midtown madness and not believing that the other players were real and not bots.

BrokenArrows

Maximus Alexander wrote: »

MSN messenger.

I still used MSN Messenger up until the other month when Microsoft merged Skype and MSN.

[Deleted User]

xxxJennyxxx wrote: »

I always wondered ... What exactly was geocites?

I always remember funny junk and lime wire

Free web hosting, so you could make your own website and upload it. Most of them were terrible - marquees, Times New Roman and coloured backgrounds galore. Or animated GIFs as backgrounds.

LimeWire... pfft. I remember the days of FTP servers with upload/download ratios. You had to upload stuff to be able to download.

Augmerson wrote: »

What happened to Netscape?

Spun off as The Mozilla Foundation. So Firefox has its roots in Netscape.

o1s1n wrote: »

I broke the esat 'terms of fair use' (probably Napster!) an got cut off.

Only other option was IOL a few months later with the above on the weekend.

Had my pc to auto dial at 6:00pm friday

Same here, only I accused them of false advertising (by having a "no limits" service with a limit) and they backed down.

Jimoslimos wrote: »

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

I started on 3.0 and went to 3.11 but I loved 95 myself.

Agricola

Waiting to connect, hoping you'd get 33.3kbps but sometimes not managing more than 14k!
Pages and pages of itemized phone bills all with the same eircom dialup access number.
Using software that pixelated or removed photos from every webpage, just so you had a hope of actually visiting more than 5 websites of an evening

My fondest earliest memory of using the web in my own home was around 2001. Friend of mine came to visit and see a stonking quick 33k connection. We download Doom shareware and a few wad files and played it for the night with a huge grin, just kept repeating - "Jesus, we're playing Doom here"

DublinArnie

I remember when YouTube was ad free, good times ... good times.

krudler

Napster
Needing the phone line to be free
Huge bills
Simple web pages about movies, when the imdb was in its infancy watching a movie trailer online was mindblowing.
Online gaming on Quake.
Hamster Dance was the cat meme of the time

krudler

DublinArnie wrote: »

I remember when YouTube was ad free, good times ... good times.

adblocker, still is

Dostoevsky

Jake1 wrote: »

I always loved the sound of the dial up

Anyone remember Paddynet?

ICQ was good craic too

Paddynet was absolutely class. I'm surprised somebody hasn't revived it. You used to be able to slap people with a fish! (ah memories). Oh the flirting on that internet machine thing was ferocious back in the day... until your parents got the bill from Eircom and all hell broke loose...

Agricola

Oh yeah the only online game that actually worked well in dialup days for me was one of the early Tiger Woods Golf games. Stand at tee, twack. 2 minutes later the guy in America Im playing against sees my shot and takes his own. Then 3 minutes later, I take my next shot. Rinse and repeat for 9 holes. Took ages. This must be why I suck at twitch gameplay!

Augmerson

Wasn't there two Irish chatrooms on mIRC? Fortress.ie and Boards.ie?

Allyall

THIS

And loads of time wasted with
THIS and THIS

tricky D

Jake1 wrote: »

Anyone remember Paddynet?

Dostoevsky wrote: »

Paddynet was absolutely class. I'm surprised somebody hasn't revived it. You used to be able to slap people with a fish! (ah memories). Oh the flirting on that internet machine thing was ferocious back in the day... until your parents got the bill from Eircom and all hell broke loose...

You're welcome!

We 2 chat rooms which I was admin of, The Salmons Leap and The Ravens Nest and a Bulletin Board a bit like boards and there was also a few real life meetups in Ireland and the US. Also had Virtual Blarney with a semi-intelligent barman who would answer questions.

tricky D wrote: »

I worked on this from the start in early 95.

I was the mod for the chat.

We also had Digital Island - a quirky view of ancient Irish legends.

The Green Pages - 2,500-3,000 links to Irish sites, suspended in 1997. A noticeboard not unlike boards.ie.

Had a sorta intelligent bar man also who would give answers to basic questions using weighted keywords and some randomisation - a good laugh.

We also ran three gigs on Paddy's Day 1997 in Temple Bar, New York and Paris and they were broadcast live over the Net. The lag wasn't bad and Donal Lunny in NY and the others managed to do a three-way jam over the Net despite a lag of about 0.2-0.4 seconds.

Lots of other tie-ups with Guinness.

Just looking at some of the files I have, times sure have moved on. Have lots of stuff on floppies in the attic but have no drive.

good times

frozenfrozen

Having to specify whether you were going on the computer or going on the internet.

BeardySi

bbam wrote: »

VIP anyone?
Virtual Irish Pub.

Was a great laugh passing time working nights.

Spent sooo much time on that site when I was supposed to be studying for my leaving cert....

Discworld MUD

Downloading whole floppies (oh the irony) full of porn at my parents house at the weekends cos I couldn't afford my own internet connection...

FouxDaFaFa

Being genuinely excited to set up a Hotmail account.
MSN messenger being the primary way you communicated with your friends.

My first memory of the internet was this, when Dad showed it to me. So, I would have been 7 or 8.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6WpMlwVwydo

CrinkElite

Trolling IRC chat with msg floods FTW!

DCC session file sharing.

IRC was the real internet back in the day.

sheesh

got online around 93 in college. was told by my brother that you could get guitar chords to almost every song you could think of on nevada.edu figured out how to use ftp using help files, got loads of songs, very exciting, the wonder of being to connect to other places really turned me unto computers Failed my course in college due to my internet addiction. good times.

The_Valeyard

Internet now in 800×600 screen resolutions.

Sleepy

I'm sure I can't be the only one that remembers the first thing I typed into Netscape Navigator was playboy.com...

Honey-ec

The Hun. God bless all those generous people.

And Yahoo chat. a/s/l?

kupus

How the internet was and still is........
www.lingscars.com

enjoy getting lost its a great site

[Deleted User]

Boltblue.com

Used to get the composer notes for the ringtones and free wallpapers for the Nokia 3310.

Stabshauptmann

Ask jeeves!

spank_inferno

Augmerson wrote: »

What happened to Netscape?

Wasn't Netscape sold off and one day returned as Firefox?