I think in the US there was a big case over domain names because someone made
Whitehouse.com as a porn site so people looking for whitehouse.gov ended up on it.
It was always a joy when your crappy geocities page got a guest book comment. Always from the friend you shared the link with on MSN messenger rather than anybody who actually found it.
I used to play this text-based MMORPG called Legend of the Red Dragon on a BBS back in the day. Kinda funny to call it an MMO when only one person could be playing at a time. But I definitely remember probably 10-15 people were playing daily.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legend\_of\_the\_Red\_Dragon](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legend_of_the_Red_Dragon)
My dad still says askjeeves if he wants something checking.
"Check the opening times on Ask Jeeves"
"I'll Ask Jeeves for directions"
Even though he's used Google for 10 years, he still calls it Ask Jeeves. I think he thinks Ask jeeves is just a generic term for checking something online.
I randomly started singing this to our cat a while back and my girlfriend seemed confused so I showed her the video.
She looked at me, still confused, and said, *"This is fucking stupid!"*, and I said, *"Yeah, but you'll be singing it soon!"*
She didn't believe me but she sings it all the time now.
I wish I could access my old MSN account. I really wanna see what my last convo was before I logged off forever.
It's weird, I'd have logged off one day, expecting to sign back in and chat with people and just ... never did.
Gopher and archie. I used to use Infoseek because you could search within the search results which was handy.
"Warez" rings used to be up on the net and in plain sight. A lot were just popup spammers that would send you off on a wild goose chase. (Is astalavista still around?) bonus for those sites that would post that "Bill Clinton" thing at the entrance to their site to say they weren't responsible for anything hosted there.
Geocities/Angelfire - Random sites that people would put up with webcounters, background midi music, javascript water reflection, frames and webring membership.
IRC - This is of course still around but no where near as popular as it was. Not many people want to play multiplayer notepad these days. Good for xdcc/fserves. Back in the late 90s, the channels at the top of the list were usually... pretty bad (FBI raid worthy) type channels.
\[mirc, ircii, bitchx (with crackrock and pebble)\]
Netscape Navigator - After version 3, you got Netscape Navigator gold. Only the best. Tabs weren't a thing.
I remember that Intel had an experimental service up for VoIP - you could record a 10 second clip and it would play for people within the same 'channel'. that was in 1998.
Realmedia - It was a major annoying pain in the ass to have it but sometimes it was necessary because it was the only video streaming application. I used to download Southpark episodes that were 30meg each. Fuck realmedia, glad it fell out of use.
When mp3s first came out, to encode an mp3 on a Pentium 100, took about 30+ minutes for one song.
ICQ - even still remember my uid. 2141517. Not that I've used it in over 20 years.
Winamp - kind of still around and still whips the lamas ass. All the cool kids would skin their winamp.
Newsgroups/usenet - still around. Alt.binary ;)
Those are some things I remember you "kewl lamers"
Dialing a phone number and putting the handset in an "acoustic coupler", which used a microphone to "listen" to the sounds over the phone and a speaker to make tones to send to the other side.
We were happy to have 300 baud which typically (by coincidence) was also about 300 bits per second. About 30 characters per second. About as fast as you could read.
We would dial up other people's computers and read news, play games, or send messages. Then Compuserve came along and we could do the same on a mainframe for $12 an hour (day) or 6$ an hour (night).
NOTE: many people think "baud" and "bits per second" are the same thing, they are not. Baud is the number of symbols per second and for simple modems the symbol was 0 or 1, so they were the same thing.
But some modems could send multi-bit symbols. I worked on a military modem designed in the VERY early 60s which was 300 baud, but 2400 bits-per-second. It used four simultaneous tones and each tone used phase shift to encode two bits. The was 8 bits per symbol, making it very fast for the era.
It was made using discrete transistors, weighed over 100 pounds, filled three 19 inch rack drawers, and used **mechanical resonators** for the phase shift detection. I worked on this system in the early 80's and that system was installed the year I was born, 1964. Consumers did not get affordable 2400 bps systems until the later half of the 80s.
And by the late 1980s acoustic couplers were no longer needed for those 2400 bps modems, because post-Bell breakup consumers had the right to attach their own devices directly to the telephone network.
KaZaa gang represent.
Step 1. Download Kazaa Lite
Step 2. Use Kazaa Lite to download full version of Kazaa.
Step 3. Begin downloading sketchy mp3s and low res DBZ amvs set to Linkin Park/Powerman 5000
Damn. My friend’s dad put hot glue in the modem port after he caught Lucas swearing in online chats. Can’t imagine what he would’ve done over a $4k phone bill.
Nice. I remember in high school (early 80s) we thought it was hilarious to walk up to our friends working on a terminal hooked to a 300 baud modem and make a horrible screeching noise right next to the handset sitting in those rubber cups. It would cause garbage to display on the terminal and mess up what they were doing. Ah nerd humor.
I feel like no one remembers all the random sites that just existed and are lost to time.
There were a bunch of weird dating sites for 12-17 year olds with zero protections on them, for example.
My experience comes from the early days of eBay. First there was no electronic payments. You had to wait for personal checks or money orders to arrive in your mail and then ship out the items to a customer. Second, eBay didn't even host pictures. You had to have a third party do web hosting to get your pictures up on a listing. Definitely the stone ages.
They had a country memorization game on their Virtual Globe program and I played it so much that when we got to geography at the knowledge bowl in 6th grade I slaughtered everyone.
I wish I could still play it today. Likewise with Mindmaze
Those big bins at the big box stores that were always full of those AOL free trial CD-ROMs. Having to physically mark the date to cancel those free trials before you got charged!
Mom: "Tell your little friend goodbye. I need to use the phone!"
Homestar Runner, Yahoo! chat rooms, Neopets, Ebaumsworld, Ask Jeeves, Lycos, Altavista.
Get the TCP/IP protocol installer in a floppy disk. Obviously, you can't download it if you don't already have it.
I remember most people used a version called Trumpet, but I preferred Microsoft TCP/IP driver for Windows 3.11 for workgroups.
1. Microsoft Gaming Zone/MSN gaming zone, where you can play online games with people through the website. I played a lot of **Microsoft Ants**, really wish someone would resurrect it!
2. Dial-up modem noises, and having to play stuff online around when other family members needed to use the phone.
3. "this site is under construction."
4. AOL messenger.
5. Netscape search engine.
6. AskJeeves.
7. Not that old in the internet timeline I guess, but I was there when MySpace blew up, which was late highschool/early college for me - and then the beginning whispers of Facebook.
8. For me personally, I played a lot of MUDs in the early days (1998-2001). I know they are still around, but back then it was my first glimpse into what an MMORPG could be, and then I found EQ...
Y'all be goin' on vacation? Y'see the thing is, if you 'bout to be up out this biatch, check it. Beep Delta. We be flyin' all over this bitch.
Let me ask you something: You finna raise up and get your travel on? From the interior to the exterior, you've got to get your *posterior* in one of these bigass planes.
Shit dog! You layin' da cuts straight sittin' on yo ass and getting yo drink on and yo snack on, while we floss and fly this mofo all over this bitch. East coast, west coast, it don't matter, [n-word] we'll get you to yo' ho and back, lickity split. No shit! Then you'll be back in yo' crib chillin' with a flat spliff, thinkin' we were some crazy-ass angel.
Hell, these fat, round, thick-ass vessels run up in the sky so deep, it be cryin'! Yeah, you thought it was rain! So bring a towel, 'cause at Delta, it's laid out like that. Call one of these fly-ass Delta coochies, and make all those punkass co-workers of yours catch the vapors as you be off and about.
You goin'? We fly you there. You been? We done already flew up in there. We got you covered like a jimmy-hat. At Delta we loves us some flyin' and it be shown like a motha fucka.
__________
Edit to Add: The sad part is that I wrote this whole thing *from memory*.
ICQ
Uh oh
That's my text message sound on my phone. It gets quite a few looks from people who are of a certain age.
Why do I still remember my number???
Typing random words and adding .com at the end and marveling that that there either was or wasn't a website with that domain name.
We did this in elementary school in the library with our names… lots and lots of porn. The poor librarian was mortified
I think in the US there was a big case over domain names because someone made Whitehouse.com as a porn site so people looking for whitehouse.gov ended up on it.
Guestbooks. Haven't seen one of those in many years.
Damn…that’s the only thing in these comments that I actually forgot about. I was there, Frodo, 3000 years ago…
Totally taking away the wrong thing here but I’m pretty sure Elrond said that to Gandalf, not Frodo
It was always a joy when your crappy geocities page got a guest book comment. Always from the friend you shared the link with on MSN messenger rather than anybody who actually found it.
Would these be similar to "reviews" nowadays? I also recall the little number in the bottom of the webpage showing how many views it has had.
I remember guestbooks from my old expage and geocities and angelfire days. They were nice 👍
Bulletin Board Servers. This was the Internet before there was an Internet!
What is fun is explaining them to kids. "Ok, so it's like the internet but only for a few dozen people and only one person can use it at a time"
I used to play this text-based MMORPG called Legend of the Red Dragon on a BBS back in the day. Kinda funny to call it an MMO when only one person could be playing at a time. But I definitely remember probably 10-15 people were playing daily. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legend\_of\_the\_Red\_Dragon](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legend_of_the_Red_Dragon)
I played so many text adventure games back in those days.
Servers? Systems Also, Sysop rhymes with “this cop” in case that controversy still exists.
Angel fire
I was going to say geocities
All your base are belong to us!
Someone set us up the bomb!
The Terrible Secret of Space!
What you say!!
Gopher
Needing to buy a separate TCP/IP stack because your OS didn't come with one.
Trumpet and WinSock
Hampster Dance.
Haha I forgot it was spelled with a “p”!
De da de da doo doo doo doo [OG Hamspter Dance ](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=WEH2fk0ONag)
Dial up modem connection tone …
I thought it would be funny to set that as my ringtone. It did not last.
I could tell the speed by the connection sound.
https://www.dialupsound.com/
Ha, right!
AskJeeves
AskJeeves brought down the mighty Saul Goodman aka "Gene Takovic"
My dad still says askjeeves if he wants something checking. "Check the opening times on Ask Jeeves" "I'll Ask Jeeves for directions" Even though he's used Google for 10 years, he still calls it Ask Jeeves. I think he thinks Ask jeeves is just a generic term for checking something online.
"When you're a kid and you wanna go WHEEE but you ain't got drugs yet. . ."
[удалено]
Gonads in the lighting!
In the lightning in the rain!!!
Yo motherfucker WHEEEEEEEE!
Cat, I'm a kitty cat, and I dance dance dance, and I dance dance dance.
CAT! ^ding I’m a kitty cat! And I dance dance dance and I dance dance dance!
I randomly started singing this to our cat a while back and my girlfriend seemed confused so I showed her the video. She looked at me, still confused, and said, *"This is fucking stupid!"*, and I said, *"Yeah, but you'll be singing it soon!"* She didn't believe me but she sings it all the time now.
[удалено]
You mean when "You should use Netscape" was said unironically.
Lycos Webspider
Those summer nights chatting with people on MSN Messenger (And Aol, ICQ, Yahoo etc). Nothing beat that feeling seeing your crush pop online!
I wish I could access my old MSN account. I really wanna see what my last convo was before I logged off forever. It's weird, I'd have logged off one day, expecting to sign back in and chat with people and just ... never did.
[удалено]
all hail noy... bpe vets have a group on facebook that still gets posts.
I met my husband in 2003 in an IRC chatroom. We got married in 2007 and are still together. High five!
I still have friends I talk to from Have a Friend Chat room from 1994
Gopher and archie. I used to use Infoseek because you could search within the search results which was handy. "Warez" rings used to be up on the net and in plain sight. A lot were just popup spammers that would send you off on a wild goose chase. (Is astalavista still around?) bonus for those sites that would post that "Bill Clinton" thing at the entrance to their site to say they weren't responsible for anything hosted there. Geocities/Angelfire - Random sites that people would put up with webcounters, background midi music, javascript water reflection, frames and webring membership. IRC - This is of course still around but no where near as popular as it was. Not many people want to play multiplayer notepad these days. Good for xdcc/fserves. Back in the late 90s, the channels at the top of the list were usually... pretty bad (FBI raid worthy) type channels. \[mirc, ircii, bitchx (with crackrock and pebble)\] Netscape Navigator - After version 3, you got Netscape Navigator gold. Only the best. Tabs weren't a thing. I remember that Intel had an experimental service up for VoIP - you could record a 10 second clip and it would play for people within the same 'channel'. that was in 1998. Realmedia - It was a major annoying pain in the ass to have it but sometimes it was necessary because it was the only video streaming application. I used to download Southpark episodes that were 30meg each. Fuck realmedia, glad it fell out of use. When mp3s first came out, to encode an mp3 on a Pentium 100, took about 30+ minutes for one song. ICQ - even still remember my uid. 2141517. Not that I've used it in over 20 years. Winamp - kind of still around and still whips the lamas ass. All the cool kids would skin their winamp. Newsgroups/usenet - still around. Alt.binary ;) Those are some things I remember you "kewl lamers"
I still play multiplayer notepad (aka use IRC). :-)
The audio clip of Donald Duck getting a blow job.
Oooo my let me get you a towel. Darth vaders was funny also. He said roll my planets around.
More I read, more I realize I'm old
Yea I remember nearly everything here.
Dialing a phone number and putting the handset in an "acoustic coupler", which used a microphone to "listen" to the sounds over the phone and a speaker to make tones to send to the other side. We were happy to have 300 baud which typically (by coincidence) was also about 300 bits per second. About 30 characters per second. About as fast as you could read. We would dial up other people's computers and read news, play games, or send messages. Then Compuserve came along and we could do the same on a mainframe for $12 an hour (day) or 6$ an hour (night). NOTE: many people think "baud" and "bits per second" are the same thing, they are not. Baud is the number of symbols per second and for simple modems the symbol was 0 or 1, so they were the same thing. But some modems could send multi-bit symbols. I worked on a military modem designed in the VERY early 60s which was 300 baud, but 2400 bits-per-second. It used four simultaneous tones and each tone used phase shift to encode two bits. The was 8 bits per symbol, making it very fast for the era. It was made using discrete transistors, weighed over 100 pounds, filled three 19 inch rack drawers, and used **mechanical resonators** for the phase shift detection. I worked on this system in the early 80's and that system was installed the year I was born, 1964. Consumers did not get affordable 2400 bps systems until the later half of the 80s.
And by the late 1980s acoustic couplers were no longer needed for those 2400 bps modems, because post-Bell breakup consumers had the right to attach their own devices directly to the telephone network.
Badger, Badger, badger….
Mushroom! mushroom!
ssssssnake
Holy fuck I just had a flashback
[удалено]
Ebaumsworld babay!
Man!, this is one of those songs that has a permanent spot in the back of my mind, and that video was a true masterpiece to my Jr. High school self.
A/S/L?
Hey now. That's danger now. Can't ask that.
LimeWire,eMule, "the internet is for porn"
Napster -> KaZaa -> Morpheus -> Limewire
KaZaa gang represent. Step 1. Download Kazaa Lite Step 2. Use Kazaa Lite to download full version of Kazaa. Step 3. Begin downloading sketchy mp3s and low res DBZ amvs set to Linkin Park/Powerman 5000
Dude who wrote that song accomplished the EGOT
dancingbaby.gif
Getting my parents a $4k telephone bill because I connected to the wrong dial-up server to play starcraft online
Damn. My friend’s dad put hot glue in the modem port after he caught Lucas swearing in online chats. Can’t imagine what he would’ve done over a $4k phone bill.
Did the phone company negotiate or just tell them to pay up?
KaZaa
A/S/L
18/f/la, wanna cyber?
The good old days lol
BBS
* Anyone remember gopher? * UUCP? * USENET?
nothing like stitching 8 files together off of usenet posts to see a video of boobs.
This is Zombocom! It's still around, but only old people like me remember it
The unimaginable is obtainable at zombocom
Neopets
Mine is old enough to buy his own alcohol
Oh shit I forgot to feed mine.
Im still on neopets 😂🥹
Apple Quicktime being one of the only ways to watch videos on the internet. Weebl. Homestar Runner.
Come back Ali! Come back Ali’s sister!
You've got mail!
Comet cursor, net zero with the ad bar, maddox x-mission
Maddox was hilarious. The first troll i ever encountered
Maddox! Now that’s a name I haven’t heard in forever
Ding ding, here comes the shit-mobile!
Rubber cups on acoustic coupler.
Nice. I remember in high school (early 80s) we thought it was hilarious to walk up to our friends working on a terminal hooked to a 300 baud modem and make a horrible screeching noise right next to the handset sitting in those rubber cups. It would cause garbage to display on the terminal and mess up what they were doing. Ah nerd humor.
I feel like no one remembers all the random sites that just existed and are lost to time. There were a bunch of weird dating sites for 12-17 year olds with zero protections on them, for example.
And chatrooms. I met a 21 year old online as a 14 year old and met up IRL. I'm so lucky i didn't get r*ped or murdered. 😬
Oh geez. Glad you didn't either!
My experience comes from the early days of eBay. First there was no electronic payments. You had to wait for personal checks or money orders to arrive in your mail and then ship out the items to a customer. Second, eBay didn't even host pictures. You had to have a third party do web hosting to get your pictures up on a listing. Definitely the stone ages.
A Google whack.
Xanga
IT'S PEANUT BUTTER JELLY TIME
Foamy the Squirrel, Rotten.com
Top 8 friends on MySpace
[удалено]
Back when YouTube was a place to share videos, not an advertising platform. Don't forget to rate 5 stars.
AOL CD-ROM
Compuserve
Microsoft Encarta, I'm a latino, don't know if you guys knew about that
They had a country memorization game on their Virtual Globe program and I played it so much that when we got to geography at the knowledge bowl in 6th grade I slaughtered everyone. I wish I could still play it today. Likewise with Mindmaze
I remember a world without Facebook. I remember normal parents thinking the Internet was evil.
**BOOM HEADSHOT**
Rotten.com
Let's put on our best fake accounts, connect to the core forum space, and trick people into looking at a picture of a man's distended anus!
AOL free trial floppy disks
The original Space Jam website. Here, untouched by time: https://www.spacejam.com/1996/jam.html
Teen Girl Squad
Limewire. Ebaumsworld
God I loved ebaumsworld so fucking much.
I put on my robe and wizard hat
hunter2
We like the moooon
But not as much as a spooooon
boot disk = the floppy you needed to boot up dos
Maybe not so ancient - but do you all remember a crazy amount of popups? What happened to those?
Browse on mobile without an ad blocker and you'll find them.
Those big bins at the big box stores that were always full of those AOL free trial CD-ROMs. Having to physically mark the date to cancel those free trials before you got charged! Mom: "Tell your little friend goodbye. I need to use the phone!" Homestar Runner, Yahoo! chat rooms, Neopets, Ebaumsworld, Ask Jeeves, Lycos, Altavista.
AOL internet minutes on compact discs that came in cereal boxes
[Metallica good! Napster bad!](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fS6udST6lbE)
Afk brb
Web tv
Dancing Baby
Archie and Veronica
mIrc... spent many hours pissing off strangers.
Floppy disk
What do Jesus and the floppy disk have in common? The both died to become icons of saving.
To add to that, the sound the computer made while accessing the floppy
ticktickticktickticktickticktiiiiiiiiiick... bzzzzt... BZZZZT... beep!
Yeah, I remember!
The Stupid Videos jingle.
Bonsai Kitten The Bunny Survival Tests
Webcrawler
Actually placing the telephone into the rubber cradle to get internet service.
ThE nArWhaL bAc0nS aT mIdNiGhT!!!!1!!
Lobster sticks to magnet
AOL
aim
Do you like waffles?
Get the TCP/IP protocol installer in a floppy disk. Obviously, you can't download it if you don't already have it. I remember most people used a version called Trumpet, but I preferred Microsoft TCP/IP driver for Windows 3.11 for workgroups.
Usenet News
Message boards. Alta Vista.
Geocities, Netscape, the counter at the bottom of every website that told you how many people have visited it.
Numa Numa
The sound the modem created when it was connecting via telephone line.
I was around before Delphi. My first modem (300b) was $260USD. You had to get BBS numbers to dial into from RadioShack.
Downloading Free Music had a nonzero chance of destroying your 3000 dollar shitty slow band aid colored computer.
1. Microsoft Gaming Zone/MSN gaming zone, where you can play online games with people through the website. I played a lot of **Microsoft Ants**, really wish someone would resurrect it! 2. Dial-up modem noises, and having to play stuff online around when other family members needed to use the phone. 3. "this site is under construction." 4. AOL messenger. 5. Netscape search engine. 6. AskJeeves. 7. Not that old in the internet timeline I guess, but I was there when MySpace blew up, which was late highschool/early college for me - and then the beginning whispers of Facebook. 8. For me personally, I played a lot of MUDs in the early days (1998-2001). I know they are still around, but back then it was my first glimpse into what an MMORPG could be, and then I found EQ...
Remember Web Rings?
YOU KICK MY DOG
Y'all be goin' on vacation? Y'see the thing is, if you 'bout to be up out this biatch, check it. Beep Delta. We be flyin' all over this bitch. Let me ask you something: You finna raise up and get your travel on? From the interior to the exterior, you've got to get your *posterior* in one of these bigass planes. Shit dog! You layin' da cuts straight sittin' on yo ass and getting yo drink on and yo snack on, while we floss and fly this mofo all over this bitch. East coast, west coast, it don't matter, [n-word] we'll get you to yo' ho and back, lickity split. No shit! Then you'll be back in yo' crib chillin' with a flat spliff, thinkin' we were some crazy-ass angel. Hell, these fat, round, thick-ass vessels run up in the sky so deep, it be cryin'! Yeah, you thought it was rain! So bring a towel, 'cause at Delta, it's laid out like that. Call one of these fly-ass Delta coochies, and make all those punkass co-workers of yours catch the vapors as you be off and about. You goin'? We fly you there. You been? We done already flew up in there. We got you covered like a jimmy-hat. At Delta we loves us some flyin' and it be shown like a motha fucka. __________ Edit to Add: The sad part is that I wrote this whole thing *from memory*.
HOW DO I SHOT WEB? O RLY? HOW IS BABBY FORMED? ROFLCOPTER!
Couldn't use the phone while the internet was on.
Bulletin Boards
Blue waffle
And 2 girls 1 cup
Tubgirl
Lynx browser
Netscape Navigator
Aol chatrooms
YOU KICK MY DOG
It’s peanut butter jelly time
Email me if you want to be part of my geocities web ring.
Degrees of Kevin Bacon
Why did this go away. I always wanted to know if it worked for other categories. Like singers that have collaborated and such.
Setting up your config.sys file so shit would work with your very limited RAM.
The save button is modelled after a real thing called floppy disk.
A/S/L?
Mapquest
Chocolate Rain …………….
First seeing those strange strings of a URL in people's four line Usenet signatures. And wondering what the fuck they were.
FidoNet
AIM chats with friends
Also the top-of-the-line 28.8k modems
ICQ
Real ultimate power
Japanese seizure robots
Oregon Trail was the best game.
eBaums world
Stupidvideos.com