Assuming y’all aren’t just fucking around, reading the comments here is actually really cool, tangentially interacting with people who have internet stories from well before I was born
I’m just from the dialup era, and I still feel old online a lot of the time, but then someone here is like “yeah, Berners-Lee invented HTTP just to make a website to mock me”
I’ve known adventures, seen places you people will never see, I’ve been on university work terminals and back… frontiers! I’ve stood on the back deck of Usenet bound for Mosaic with sweat in my eyes watching Netscape Navigator fight on the shoulder of the internet… I’ve felt wind in my hair, riding Lynx off of monochrome monitors and seen usegroups burn like a match and disappear. I’ve seen it, felt it…!
The true measure of your worth: do you prefer amber, green, or true B&W?
My terminal used to be set up such that local terminal usage was green & black and remote was amber.
Pretty sure the first C prompt I ever encountered was amber. Will always have a soft spot for it.
Like ASCII tears in a digital rain
Time to dial
I will invoke the old words
A/S/L
WhiskyTangoFoxtrot slaps CaptPretentious around a bit with a large trout18/F/Cali
Weren’t they all…
55/male/Stalingrad
“I have usernames older than you” is actually a pretty sick burn
These kids have never been slapped around a bit with a large trout and it shows.
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…
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.
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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.
I had to telnet into chat rooms. We had no browsers. I was old before you were born.
fuck. i can’t remember my icq # anymore. it was 6 digits and started with an 8.
867530
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…
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. 😄
Thank you.
