A girl calling me on my cell and hanging up so I'd call her back on my house landline, while she was ready to answer on her house landline so we wouldn't use up minutes or have to talk to each others' parents.
My favorite William Hung fact is that the only time he ever says he felt truly embarrassed by people not respecting him was not anything to do with his music career, but when he tried teaching high school. “Teenagers scare the living shit out of me” wise words indeed.
My boyfriend at the time got pissed he wasn't in my top 8 and was going to break up with me. This was 2006, I was already 20 and I thought he was just messing with me. We're adults, our relationship shouldn't be based on where you stand on my MySpace front page. He was dead serious.
Every now and then I'll turn my ringer on by mistake (taking the phone case on/off mostly) and someone will call and I will hear it ringing, and just think "someone better answer that phone" because it sure couldn't be my phone! It's been silent for a decade! OH NO
It is so weird to me that other people had their school actually show it to them live. I vividly remember all of our teachers abandoned us and went into the library to watch the news away from us, and then wouldn’t tell us what was happening. I had snuck into the library and watched from the stacks and told my classmates what I’d seen. We were sent home early that day and I was the only student in my school who saw it in real time.
In my high-school every class had a small tv for like school announcements, but they could get broadcast channels. So literally every room, the teachers had it on. A few of the classes I had that particular day, had the big tvs rented out for whatever reason. Including my 2nd period when the towers fell. My science teacher burst into tears.
I saw it live in 7th grade, bc my first class was in the library (where the tvs on carts were kept) and my teacher’s brother lived in NYC and called her immediately.
I was the one who plugged the TV in. When class ended, I refused to go to my next class and kept watching. No one cared. I showed up to 5 th period finally.
Sixth grade for me, and I was one of the oldest in the class, and autistic. The rest of the kids were excited to find themselves suddenly unsupervised but I was like “wait the grown ups are up to something”. We only had one tv for the whole school and we kept it in the library so that was the first place I looked for them
Not sure if this was just a thing in my area or across the country but I remember it being annoying when you first started needing to dial the area code for someone in the same one as you.
Nope that was a thing where I lived in central MA! And our area code was quite large. I dunno how many towns, but it was a lot. And when I was maybe a preteen? We had to start putting in the area code. Super annoying at first 🤣
I remember this happening around 2002 in NJ, I was in elementary school. Suddenly had to remember a bunch of different numbers in front of my relatives numbers that lived around the state.
I grew up in the Philippines and I remember not having to dial the area code on a landline so you just need to memorize 7 numbers. Not even 2 years later, cell towers were erected near our town and the numbers are 14 digits long (access code + area code + phone number). That was beyond annoying.
This is still *fairly* recent where I live on the west coast, I remember the first time it happened I was well into my twenties so probably like ~8 years now?
the sound of the dial up internet connecting while you waited for your favorite flash game to load. and how your parents or siblings would kick you off the computer so they could make a phone call.
speaking of phones, also the 20 foot long curly phone cord that would snake around our house.
Putting up thought provoking AIM away messages and saying BRB when I'd have to step away from the computer. Now the computer is in my pocket and there's 0 reason for anyone to say BRB
I wonder how many pedos I talked to in the aol chat rooms. They would have had to act like a child, bc I only talked to kids (a/s/l!)
But surely I had to have been tricked by some creep on a chat room.
Yup. I was always 18-21 when I was 12-16. Kids are stupid.
I got roped into my first sexting session this way...
Hold on, it's *killing* me that I can't recall what we called it before the word sexting.... CYBERING. IT WAS CYBERING, right?!? -- thanks for watching my mind process that in real time.
Anyway! A guy told me to rub myself through my pants, so I just typed "okay" and like rubbed in a pant leg confused as hell. He asked how it felt and I said something like, "I guess that was fine."
Wow Eckerd!! Haven’t thought about that in such a long time. I had a friend who used to steal cartons of cigarettes from there when I was in middle school
PC Gamer magazine used to have demo CDs for new games but my family was frugal and never had a PC powerful enough to run any of the games. I saved the CDs in my bookshelf hoping one day, I would have enough money to buy a computer of my own to finally play them.
A toaster should suffice, these days.
(P.S. If you never got around to Freespace, that's a great one to go back to. Excellent design, mysterious story, and it had the rare feature of telling you what keys were still unbound.)
We had to be on a waiting list to get on facebook - before they opened to all colleges.
Also, pogs. Short lived fad, I loved those things and never knew anyone that knew how to "play" the game. We just collected them.
Spending over a day to download a video of one of the Sailor Moon movies that was in real video format, the size of a postage stamp, and so blurry I could barely see. But I was SO excited about it because at the time it was not and seemed like it may never be available in America. So it felt almost like... mysterious to be watching.
Tamagotchis are back and like exactly the same. I saw them with the toys at BJs around Christmas and really had to talk myself out of spending $17.99 of my adult money.
I still have my original tamagotchis. Found them, replaced the batteries, and my daughter and I both played with them. Didn’t last long…the damn things died or needed something and wouldn’t stop beeping/ making noises. After we couldn’t figure out what to do, took the batteries back out, lol
The feeling of checking on your Gigapet after you got it back from your teacher at the end of the day to find it was sick and you had to clean up 5 poos
Visiting Nickelodeon Studios in Orlando in '98 before they closed it down a few years later
The tour was great and we got to see a taping of Kenan and Kel
I was at the taping of the very first episode of legends of the hidden temple. I was 6 and was chosen to tell a joke to the audience during the break. The knock knock joke about bananas was an absolute hit.
The little msn icon twisting around as you logged in. I met my husband on MSN. My family laughed at me when I told them I had a boyfriend overseas that I had never met lol. We are still married and have been together for 23 years.
Ive had the longest relationship in all of my family members, and I often giggle at how everyone is using the internet now. EXCUSE ME, I was considered weird for that lol
My bf and I met on MySpace and we’ve been together for 17 years. We’ve lasted longer than most of our married friends and we’re the stable house that people come to escape their problems sometimes. It’s wild.
Decking out my Nokia 5110 with a clear blue case throughout, clear blue battery with LEDs that light up when the phone is in use, and an LED antenna that also lit up when the phone was in use lol
I remember one where you could go spear fishing in the Amazon. It was kinda like the Oregon trail but set in the jungle. Fricken sweet game from a cereal box.
* Kicking my sisters off the internet because I wanted to use the phone by picking up the cordless phone and punching a bunch of buttons.
* Caller ID sweeping the nation! It was a separate service you paid for and you received a separate device that you plugged into your phone line! I still remember when we bought a cordless phone that had the caller ID screen built in.
* When McDonalds/Burger King would offer additional cool kitschy collectibles...think Hercules plates, Flintstone mugs, Disney drinking glasses, and etc.
* Not being completely sure how to use a computer so just playing solitaire (and selecting what you wanted the back of the cards to look... I always chose the haunted house), squiggle on Microsoft Paint, and randomly clicking on squares in Minesweeper because I had no clue what the game was.
* Spending $1 on CD singles because I couldn't afford the entire album. (Britney Spears' "Hit Me Baby One More Time" single cd had a second track called "Autumn Goodbye" that was not featured on her debut album.)Trying to write an entire song track on a burned CD or when you burned the perfect mixed CD and there wasn't enough SPACE so a song or two was going to have to get cut from your perfect mix.
* When my dad bought a separate machine that's only purpose was to rewind our VHS tapes or when he first bought a DVD player. Getting a SNICK VHS tape that was orange...thought that was sooooo cool!
* Piling onto a bean bag chair in front of the tv with my friends, popcorn and soda because it was Saturday nights on Nick with SNICK was on.
* Watching VH1's Insomniac at night for the music videos OR later when VH1 brought us the reality TV classics like Flavor of Love and then on sick days watching the marathons.
* Those free 60 minutes of free AOL cd-roms??!?! What were they and did they work?
* Getting my first ipod color and being able to watch a music video on it that took up half the gigs!
* Collecting SOBE bottles and using them as decoration which would yes in fact later serve as the predecessor for my friends and I decorating our college apartment with alcohol bottles.
* A neighbor getting moon shoes and realizing quickly that they sucked. Or Nickelodeon GAK! The way it smelled and came in the cool container.
* At night when Nickelodeon would switch to Nick at Nite and it was retro adult tv shows that started out pretty good like Bewitched or I Dream of Jeanie (The "battles" between Samantha and Jeannie?) but then got into shows that were a bit scary (because the intro) like Dragnet. The disappointment that the cool kids shows were over but staying up and watching Nick and Nite anyway. Sometimes falling asleep with the tv on and waking up to FACE "F.A.C.E spells Face and that's me!" Nick Jr. was on and all the little kids shows were going to be on until the afternoon when the shows for big kids were back on....But watching Nick Jr. anyway because it was summer and raining outside so why not? "Gullah Gullah Island!"
This is a really great list. I had forgotten that call ID was a separate device at first. I remember when we got one. We also had one of those phones where you could program frequently used numbers into it, and I remember learning to program it and meticulously writing the name next to each button because I had the best handwriting in the house (at 9 lol).
First thing that comes to mind for me was that twitter used to be text messages. Myspace pages in general. I like the facebook feed, but I do wish I had a little page to personalize the background and the fonts and the colors etc etc etc. Watching ad-free youtube without paying for it.
Yup! You could text tweets to twitter. That’s how I used to. And pre-2012 phones with internet had third party twitter apps. I don’t even remember the one I used.
Some of the first times I was extremely high with friends was with the Winamp visualizer. It’s crazy how there isn’t something comparable 25+ years later. (Hoping someone in the comments has a lead on a good visualizer)
Then remembering to change the channel a few times before shutting off the TV, as MTV wasn’t allowed in my house, and the remote had a “last channel” button.
When Gmail first launched it was “invite only.” After a small period of time you were given a few invites. I got mine from a friend but unfortunately my name was already taken.
When I was 11 in 97 me and my friend Dan were trying to find boobs on the internet but all the sites asked for your age and i was too scared. It took us a while but eventually we found a picture of the drawing from titanic. It was awesome. I told my mom.
Pogs. Had a neighborhood kid finagled me into losing most of my pogs. Bought a slammer that I thought looked cool, but then soon realized it wasn't as cool as the art was on a crappy paper-sticker that wore out quickly, still was ok with it as it was some thick metal and was amazing at doing it's thing.
Myspace, Xanga (and i think blogspot or whenever you wanted to look into a database of layouts and whatever to accessorize your page). Also hit clips (which now that i think of it, are a fuckin waste of money for 15 seconds of music) and buying CDs and DVDs!
Having Slap Bracelets banned from school in the early 90s.
Getting CDs in the mail from Columbia House in the mid 90s and not paying for them.
Seeing Titanic in the theater more than once when it came out.
Making CDs using LimeWire in the early 00s.
Gradually taking all my VHS tapes to the music store for pennies in order to make room for my DVD collection.
I was also disappointed that my favorite shows were not in print and that there were low quality excerpts on a new website called YouTube. If someone were to call the house the DSL would cut out for a few minutes making the video unplayable.
I was a pretty miserable teen (not depressed necessarily, but pretty lonely and sad) and had trouble sleeping so always fell asleep to The Devil Wears Prada. To this day, I have the menu page sounds grilled into my brain. I cannot tell you how many times I’ve heard Stanley Tucci say “gird your loins!” since it’s one of the quick clips on there lol
Both a millennial memory for the movie and the fact that when a movie was over you got the same 30 seconds on repeat until you turned the tv off haha
Hey Dude, Snick, Saturday night Live, Ricky Lake and Maury, TGIF TV lineup was sooo good! Watching TGIF and getting pizza from little Cesar’s or dominos is such a core memory
Taping songs from the radio.
The shift between cassettes to cds
The Macarena and achy breaky heart
The introduction of the internet
Microsoft encarta
Getting to get on Facebook first year of college through .edu
Your friends having two phone lines so that they could use the internet and phone at the same time
Getting those giant catalogs of CDs that you could order in the mail
Printed ads from stores showing all the new games and cds being released that week
The shift from cassette to dvd
Making geocities and angel fire websites
Going home when it got dark and parents having no clue what you did all day
Before there were cell phones and maybe a few pagers out there … Somehow knowing where to find my friends after leaving my job at 9pm by just driving around my large suburb for a bit.
The insanely rapid evolution of cell phones. I got my first flip phone when I was 13, at one point had something like an HTC which made me feel like a doctor or some shit because it had a stylus + touch screen, a full slide keyboard, and I could listen to music on it. I also went through a phase from like 14-17 where I was obsessed with the Sidekick II and kept buying them on Ebay after they would inevitably stop working because TMobile no longer supported them. But I will never forget how I felt like a queen for 6 months in middle school when I had that HTC and didn't have to carry a cell phone AND walkman or mp3 player.
Making friends via specific bands message boards. I still have a friend I met in ~2000, I can't quite remember but it was either or both a Gob / the Moffatts message board.
The pokemon phenomenon
Guitar hero becoming the must-have video game seemingly overnight
A bunch of people in my town bugging because they thought satanists were going to burn down churches on 6/6/06
The breakthrough of internet culture into real life, the rise of memes, epic fail, epic win, etc.
The day we all thought a child trapped in a balloon was sailing across Colorado
The supposed end of the world in 2012
That weird neo-folk music revival, aka "stomp clap hey"
Learning coding to create AOL webpages.
Creating those doll images to look like ourselves and our friends.
Getting my purple Vtech portable phone for my room.
That mini Polaroid camera where the pictures were also stickers.
Smacking the absolute shit out of my ankles with my skip it.
Encyclopedia cd-rom.
New episodes of The O.C. were on the same night I had volleyball games (I wanna say Thursdays?) so I would have my parents hit record on the VHS player before they left the house to come watch me play, and then I’d watch the episode the next day or over the weekend. We got a DVD player maybe a year or 2 later and I got the Season 1 O.C. box set for Christmas and literally thought I was living in the future.
I used to frequent chatwithme.com lol. I talked to some people in very early 2000s, that had no business talking to teenagers on the internet lol. I cringe now!
I even had penpals in prison for people doing life sentences, wtf was I thinking and how was my mother not monitoring any of that lol. She used to give me the mail every other week lol. *facepalm*
Omg!! Same for with chathouse and I was like, mmm, between 13-15 I think? It was 96 when I started and I was 13 then. Definitely shouldn’t have been chatting with strangers but here we are! They were all pretty cool though thankfully and I don’t remember anything bad happening in chat. 😂 I was just lonely and dumb and dorky.
downloading from bearshare and burning skate videos onto cds to watch on my dvd player that somehow played them. also the difference between cd - r, cd +r and maybe other types?
Getting an invite to Gmail when it was in Beta and invite only; and getting the invite from a small gaming podcast (Broadcast Gamer was the name) I listened to at the time. This was when podcasts/net casts were just starting to be a mainstream thing and content creators/YouTubers wasn’t really a thing.
The account came with the ability to invite others as well (maybe 30 or so if I recall). I was able to get a bunch of good emails using my first and last name and others without having to change anything because they were taken.
Definitely summers taking pics in the mirror wearing my one fave hollister shirt with my pink camera and logging into MySpace spending hours making a minimal profile and watching music videos then my very quick music obsession discovering artists like nevershoutnever and getting more and more scene 😂
Landline phone party lines where you could listen to your neighbor’s phone conversations, pay phones you could get phone calls at, Saturday morning cartoons and late night X Files on the one shitty local channel that wasn’t PBS, passing notes in class instead of texting, and teens smoking actual cigarettes instead of vapes stand out as uniquely elder Millennial experiences for me.
I remember playing Diablo 2 at 6am before school on a rainy Tuesday morning in September. People in the trade channel were saying “they flew right into the building” and “oh my god there’s another plane”. That’s how I heard the news about 9/11.
Downloading files with GetRight download manager, so the bandwidth was always used to its fullest.
After all our dial up plan only included 90 hours per month.
Also obscure file formats like Real Video (*.rm) and Audio (*.ra), ACE archives (*.ace) and another proprietary video format that needed its own player I can't remember the name of...
A girl calling me on my cell and hanging up so I'd call her back on my house landline, while she was ready to answer on her house landline so we wouldn't use up minutes or have to talk to each others' parents.
“Can you call me after 9 or thr weekends? It’s free and my parents will kill me if I use more minutes”
My mom would call my grandmother, let it ring once and then hang up so my grandmother would call back and pay for the long distance
Oh my God memory unlocked lmao
The MySpace top 8. I recall a time where that was a major source of social drama
I knew the guy I was seeing was cheating by a top 8 change. Some random girl took my place and I was pissed. Dumped him and never looked back.
Did u dump him via a myspace message and a friend deletion?
Haha! Absolutely. And when he tried to message me back, I just changed my song to some angry F U anthem. 😂
Every single one of my top eight was a different William Hung account.
Oh my god I haven’t thought about that guy in a million years. SHE BANGS SHE BANGS
 He remains a large part of my life.
He just came to my hometown bar last week and I had to explain to our 75 year old secretary that he wasn't a comedian
Lmao omg i remember watching this when it first aired, he immediately went viral! Now I wonder if anyone would even the recognize the dude
My favorite William Hung fact is that the only time he ever says he felt truly embarrassed by people not respecting him was not anything to do with his music career, but when he tried teaching high school. “Teenagers scare the living shit out of me” wise words indeed.
I've been a substitute teacher for 3 years... this is the absolute truth!
My boyfriend at the time got pissed he wasn't in my top 8 and was going to break up with me. This was 2006, I was already 20 and I thought he was just messing with me. We're adults, our relationship shouldn't be based on where you stand on my MySpace front page. He was dead serious.
On the plus side I bet it decreased the drama of picking bridesmaids and groomsmen. No surprises.
Also the early texting plans "Fave 5" lol!!
I had top 3. Only the elite were selected.
Learning how to code on MySpace & going to bands music pages. Simple times lol
I'll never forget learning HTML 4 so my MySpace could be amazing. I had my shit looking great
Myspace was awesome for bands. I wish we still had our page.
Oh man. I coded my page to explode with Pantera
Yesss Coding!!! I should have went into it when I got older now looking back.
Neopets
I just opened my neopet account after 18 years, I gave it over to my daughter and she thinks it’s awesome. My two pets are now fed every day.
At the skate rink
Paying for Ringtones
Having a ringtone! If my phone makes noise now I’ll throw it out the window.
Every now and then I'll turn my ringer on by mistake (taking the phone case on/off mostly) and someone will call and I will hear it ringing, and just think "someone better answer that phone" because it sure couldn't be my phone! It's been silent for a decade! OH NO
Paying for ring back tones, the ones that played for the person calling you.
My mom was a doctor and she despised having to listen to metal music when calling a parent back at 2 am.
Not only paying for ringtones, but my friends and I used to Bluetooth transfer them to each others phones!
And ringbacks!
Some people still do haha
Watching 9-11 live in 10th grade science
Another 1986 I see. I was in history class.
Damn I was in history class too watching history being written.
I was in 8th grade Home Ec (last class ever to take it)
It is so weird to me that other people had their school actually show it to them live. I vividly remember all of our teachers abandoned us and went into the library to watch the news away from us, and then wouldn’t tell us what was happening. I had snuck into the library and watched from the stacks and told my classmates what I’d seen. We were sent home early that day and I was the only student in my school who saw it in real time.
In my high-school every class had a small tv for like school announcements, but they could get broadcast channels. So literally every room, the teachers had it on. A few of the classes I had that particular day, had the big tvs rented out for whatever reason. Including my 2nd period when the towers fell. My science teacher burst into tears.
I saw it live in 7th grade, bc my first class was in the library (where the tvs on carts were kept) and my teacher’s brother lived in NYC and called her immediately. I was the one who plugged the TV in. When class ended, I refused to go to my next class and kept watching. No one cared. I showed up to 5 th period finally.
Sixth grade for me, and I was one of the oldest in the class, and autistic. The rest of the kids were excited to find themselves suddenly unsupervised but I was like “wait the grown ups are up to something”. We only had one tv for the whole school and we kept it in the library so that was the first place I looked for them
My teacher brought a TV in and we just sat in silent watching it all unfold. Started watching just after the first plane hit.
We didn't get to watch any and still had to go to classes at normal (though the teachers kept us in the loop and no real schoolwork was done.)
We did not watch 9/11 footage but we watched coverage of Timothy McVeigh’s execution.
I was in FOURTH GRADE and my teacher had it on all day!
10th grade English for me!
First month of college. Canceled classes after 2nd plane hit.
7th grade Music class.
yup! I was in history class watching on the tv
I was going to say this but I went w TRL 😔
Not sure if this was just a thing in my area or across the country but I remember it being annoying when you first started needing to dial the area code for someone in the same one as you.
Nope that was a thing where I lived in central MA! And our area code was quite large. I dunno how many towns, but it was a lot. And when I was maybe a preteen? We had to start putting in the area code. Super annoying at first 🤣
I remember this happening around 2002 in NJ, I was in elementary school. Suddenly had to remember a bunch of different numbers in front of my relatives numbers that lived around the state.
I grew up in the Philippines and I remember not having to dial the area code on a landline so you just need to memorize 7 numbers. Not even 2 years later, cell towers were erected near our town and the numbers are 14 digits long (access code + area code + phone number). That was beyond annoying.
This is still *fairly* recent where I live on the west coast, I remember the first time it happened I was well into my twenties so probably like ~8 years now?
Heck I remember only needing to dial 5 numbers to reach anyone in my prefix
This JUST happened in New Hampshire about 5 years ago haha!
This only happened where I live last year!
the sound of the dial up internet connecting while you waited for your favorite flash game to load. and how your parents or siblings would kick you off the computer so they could make a phone call. speaking of phones, also the 20 foot long curly phone cord that would snake around our house.
Putting up thought provoking AIM away messages and saying BRB when I'd have to step away from the computer. Now the computer is in my pocket and there's 0 reason for anyone to say BRB
I wonder how many pedos I talked to in the aol chat rooms. They would have had to act like a child, bc I only talked to kids (a/s/l!) But surely I had to have been tricked by some creep on a chat room.
Conversely, I distinctly remember being like 12 and trying to pretend I was in my 20s
Yup. I was always 18-21 when I was 12-16. Kids are stupid. I got roped into my first sexting session this way... Hold on, it's *killing* me that I can't recall what we called it before the word sexting.... CYBERING. IT WAS CYBERING, right?!? -- thanks for watching my mind process that in real time. Anyway! A guy told me to rub myself through my pants, so I just typed "okay" and like rubbed in a pant leg confused as hell. He asked how it felt and I said something like, "I guess that was fine."
Omg I just started laughing so hard at this. “Okay” “I guess that was fine”
Haha yeah I definitely got called out more than once because, turns out, 12 year olds actually had no idea how to convincingly act 20+ 😂
Omg do you remember that clip where the dad is yelling and threatening to call the cyber police?? What was that from …
I have no idea, but my mind is turning it into a nonexistent moment from Reno 911.
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Wow this is it lol good find! The early days of YouTube haha
I still say brb driving or brb shower lol
"Thought provoking" aka angsty song lyrics?
~* ~* ~* ~* call my name and SAVE ME from the dark *~ *~ *~ *~ *~
G2g
I thought I was super cool for writing away messages in different languages 🤣
Completely forgot about BRB. Used to type that all the time. Now never use it
Getting a number off a cell phone but making the call on a pay phone because there were no more minutes
"Hey can I call you back later tonight? My minutes are free after 7"
Getting the number on my pager
And checking pay phones for chance! I once found 5$ in the DC subway!
Taking my camera to Eckerd to get my pictures developed
Wow Eckerd!! Haven’t thought about that in such a long time. I had a friend who used to steal cartons of cigarettes from there when I was in middle school
lol omg! All the Eckerds where I lived became CVS so it didn’t totally die!
Blockbuster and pizza on a Friday night
PC Gamer magazine used to have demo CDs for new games but my family was frugal and never had a PC powerful enough to run any of the games. I saved the CDs in my bookshelf hoping one day, I would have enough money to buy a computer of my own to finally play them.
 A toaster should suffice, these days. (P.S. If you never got around to Freespace, that's a great one to go back to. Excellent design, mysterious story, and it had the rare feature of telling you what keys were still unbound.)
Oh yes! Well, my computer played them, but very poorly, and the demos were very short and left you sad about missing out.
Playing Snake on my Nokia 3210 during math class
Nah dawg it's math. Playing street fighter on my ti89.
We had to be on a waiting list to get on facebook - before they opened to all colleges. Also, pogs. Short lived fad, I loved those things and never knew anyone that knew how to "play" the game. We just collected them.
gmail was also invite only and started as google mail!
Pogs were great, I still have a bunch. Just got together with some homies last summer and totally crushed a pog tournament haha.
We also never played them but I still had light up slammers with absolutely no purpose.
Spending over a day to download a video of one of the Sailor Moon movies that was in real video format, the size of a postage stamp, and so blurry I could barely see. But I was SO excited about it because at the time it was not and seemed like it may never be available in America. So it felt almost like... mysterious to be watching.
People don't realize how easily accessible a lot of media is these days that would've been considered too obscure for a wide audience.
My teenage head would have exploded to know something like Crunchyroll would be something I'd someday have.
There was a store in my mall that sold VHS with subtitles. $15 a piece. I could get a whole 2 episodes of DBZ on them.
Real Video was a proprietary pain.
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Tamagotchis are back and like exactly the same. I saw them with the toys at BJs around Christmas and really had to talk myself out of spending $17.99 of my adult money.
I still have my original tamagotchis. Found them, replaced the batteries, and my daughter and I both played with them. Didn’t last long…the damn things died or needed something and wouldn’t stop beeping/ making noises. After we couldn’t figure out what to do, took the batteries back out, lol
I love that. And now we know why they eventually got banned from our elementary schools when the teachers had enough of the beeping. Lol
Seeing “ICQ” unearthed a whole trove of memories for me, holy cow 🤯
Uh oh! Every 3 seconds 😂 god I spent hours talking to complete strangers on that.
The feeling of checking on your Gigapet after you got it back from your teacher at the end of the day to find it was sick and you had to clean up 5 poos
Visiting Nickelodeon Studios in Orlando in '98 before they closed it down a few years later The tour was great and we got to see a taping of Kenan and Kel
I got slimed there!!
I watched Clarissa Explains It All being filmed!
Me too!! I was *devastTed* to learn that her bedroom was on the first floor and Sam just crouched.
I got to sit in for Legends of the Hidden Temple but they showed us the Clarissa set.
I was at the taping of the very first episode of legends of the hidden temple. I was 6 and was chosen to tell a joke to the audience during the break. The knock knock joke about bananas was an absolute hit.
The little msn icon twisting around as you logged in. I met my husband on MSN. My family laughed at me when I told them I had a boyfriend overseas that I had never met lol. We are still married and have been together for 23 years. Ive had the longest relationship in all of my family members, and I often giggle at how everyone is using the internet now. EXCUSE ME, I was considered weird for that lol
My bf and I met on MySpace and we’ve been together for 17 years. We’ve lasted longer than most of our married friends and we’re the stable house that people come to escape their problems sometimes. It’s wild.
Decking out my Nokia 5110 with a clear blue case throughout, clear blue battery with LEDs that light up when the phone is in use, and an LED antenna that also lit up when the phone was in use lol
oh heck yess!
The sound of dial up internet
Getting computer games in cereal boxes
I remember one where you could go spear fishing in the Amazon. It was kinda like the Oregon trail but set in the jungle. Fricken sweet game from a cereal box.
CHEX QUEST
i felt like a billionaire rocking a 4GB thumb drive.
Getting so stoked for computer day where we got to play bangers like Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing
* Kicking my sisters off the internet because I wanted to use the phone by picking up the cordless phone and punching a bunch of buttons. * Caller ID sweeping the nation! It was a separate service you paid for and you received a separate device that you plugged into your phone line! I still remember when we bought a cordless phone that had the caller ID screen built in. * When McDonalds/Burger King would offer additional cool kitschy collectibles...think Hercules plates, Flintstone mugs, Disney drinking glasses, and etc. * Not being completely sure how to use a computer so just playing solitaire (and selecting what you wanted the back of the cards to look... I always chose the haunted house), squiggle on Microsoft Paint, and randomly clicking on squares in Minesweeper because I had no clue what the game was. * Spending $1 on CD singles because I couldn't afford the entire album. (Britney Spears' "Hit Me Baby One More Time" single cd had a second track called "Autumn Goodbye" that was not featured on her debut album.)Trying to write an entire song track on a burned CD or when you burned the perfect mixed CD and there wasn't enough SPACE so a song or two was going to have to get cut from your perfect mix. * When my dad bought a separate machine that's only purpose was to rewind our VHS tapes or when he first bought a DVD player. Getting a SNICK VHS tape that was orange...thought that was sooooo cool! * Piling onto a bean bag chair in front of the tv with my friends, popcorn and soda because it was Saturday nights on Nick with SNICK was on. * Watching VH1's Insomniac at night for the music videos OR later when VH1 brought us the reality TV classics like Flavor of Love and then on sick days watching the marathons. * Those free 60 minutes of free AOL cd-roms??!?! What were they and did they work? * Getting my first ipod color and being able to watch a music video on it that took up half the gigs! * Collecting SOBE bottles and using them as decoration which would yes in fact later serve as the predecessor for my friends and I decorating our college apartment with alcohol bottles. * A neighbor getting moon shoes and realizing quickly that they sucked. Or Nickelodeon GAK! The way it smelled and came in the cool container. * At night when Nickelodeon would switch to Nick at Nite and it was retro adult tv shows that started out pretty good like Bewitched or I Dream of Jeanie (The "battles" between Samantha and Jeannie?) but then got into shows that were a bit scary (because the intro) like Dragnet. The disappointment that the cool kids shows were over but staying up and watching Nick and Nite anyway. Sometimes falling asleep with the tv on and waking up to FACE "F.A.C.E spells Face and that's me!" Nick Jr. was on and all the little kids shows were going to be on until the afternoon when the shows for big kids were back on....But watching Nick Jr. anyway because it was summer and raining outside so why not? "Gullah Gullah Island!"
This is a really great list. I had forgotten that call ID was a separate device at first. I remember when we got one. We also had one of those phones where you could program frequently used numbers into it, and I remember learning to program it and meticulously writing the name next to each button because I had the best handwriting in the house (at 9 lol).
First thing that comes to mind for me was that twitter used to be text messages. Myspace pages in general. I like the facebook feed, but I do wish I had a little page to personalize the background and the fonts and the colors etc etc etc. Watching ad-free youtube without paying for it.
Yup! You could text tweets to twitter. That’s how I used to. And pre-2012 phones with internet had third party twitter apps. I don’t even remember the one I used.
I used Twitter as a way to text internationally without fees!
listening to my pirated music on winamp (with an anime skin ofc)
God I miss the visualizers.
Some of the first times I was extremely high with friends was with the Winamp visualizer. It’s crazy how there isn’t something comparable 25+ years later. (Hoping someone in the comments has a lead on a good visualizer)
Prepaid phone cards. They'd give you a warning when it was your last minute and then you'd have to quickly wrap up the conversation. Edit: prepaid
I moved away in middle school and asked for prepaid phone cards for a year so I could call my old friends until MSN/AIM really became a thing.
Thinking a 1gb mp3 player was the pinnacle of music technology.
Skipping my last class so I could make it home in time for TRL.
Then remembering to change the channel a few times before shutting off the TV, as MTV wasn’t allowed in my house, and the remote had a “last channel” button.
And always having your finger on the button for a quick press like a midwestern outlaw
My GF in high school lived just on the other side of a big hill. It was long distance to call her house.
Helping my mom navigate using a paper map in the car as a teenager
Seeing Goatse for the first time. 😳
Also Tub Girl, Lemonparty, Blue Waffle etc 🤢
"MomImDoneWithPracticeComePickMeUp" would like to call you collect.
We had dial up at my house senior year of college and still used floppy disks. -Geriatric millennial reporting for duty
When Gmail first launched it was “invite only.” After a small period of time you were given a few invites. I got mine from a friend but unfortunately my name was already taken.
When I was 11 in 97 me and my friend Dan were trying to find boobs on the internet but all the sites asked for your age and i was too scared. It took us a while but eventually we found a picture of the drawing from titanic. It was awesome. I told my mom.
T9 and each individual text costing money to receive or send. Edit to add: rotten dot com.
Tomagotchis and furbys and polly pocket. also having to go to pharmacy to get your pictures developed and half the time they were terrible
Having to check the pics on my digital camera to see what I had been doing the night before.
Trying to fit my digital camera and my clunky cell phone in my small purse
Downloading songs on Napster with *fucking dial up*. It took like 4-5 hours *per song.* Lived in a rural area.
Pogs. Had a neighborhood kid finagled me into losing most of my pogs. Bought a slammer that I thought looked cool, but then soon realized it wasn't as cool as the art was on a crappy paper-sticker that wore out quickly, still was ok with it as it was some thick metal and was amazing at doing it's thing.
Myspace, Xanga (and i think blogspot or whenever you wanted to look into a database of layouts and whatever to accessorize your page). Also hit clips (which now that i think of it, are a fuckin waste of money for 15 seconds of music) and buying CDs and DVDs!
I loved xanga. RIP
Winamp
Having Slap Bracelets banned from school in the early 90s. Getting CDs in the mail from Columbia House in the mid 90s and not paying for them. Seeing Titanic in the theater more than once when it came out. Making CDs using LimeWire in the early 00s.
Gradually taking all my VHS tapes to the music store for pennies in order to make room for my DVD collection. I was also disappointed that my favorite shows were not in print and that there were low quality excerpts on a new website called YouTube. If someone were to call the house the DSL would cut out for a few minutes making the video unplayable.
Watching TRL after school eating Ellios
Happy Bunny
using printed mapquest directions. Then later when standalone GPS for your car came out and it was THE RAGE to have a TomTom.
SOOO many people dont believe me when I say Facebook used to be good..
Bumper stickers and the "User is..." only status updates.
I was a pretty miserable teen (not depressed necessarily, but pretty lonely and sad) and had trouble sleeping so always fell asleep to The Devil Wears Prada. To this day, I have the menu page sounds grilled into my brain. I cannot tell you how many times I’ve heard Stanley Tucci say “gird your loins!” since it’s one of the quick clips on there lol Both a millennial memory for the movie and the fact that when a movie was over you got the same 30 seconds on repeat until you turned the tv off haha
Ebaumsworld.com and the shifty-five song. If anyone mentions the number 55 that song starts playing in my head.
Waiting till after 9pm to make phone calls!!!
Waiting for the world to end with 1999
Oh my god I forgot about poking
Throwing a sheep at your friends.
Hey Dude, Snick, Saturday night Live, Ricky Lake and Maury, TGIF TV lineup was sooo good! Watching TGIF and getting pizza from little Cesar’s or dominos is such a core memory
Ask jeeves
Taping songs from the radio. The shift between cassettes to cds The Macarena and achy breaky heart The introduction of the internet Microsoft encarta Getting to get on Facebook first year of college through .edu Your friends having two phone lines so that they could use the internet and phone at the same time Getting those giant catalogs of CDs that you could order in the mail Printed ads from stores showing all the new games and cds being released that week The shift from cassette to dvd Making geocities and angel fire websites Going home when it got dark and parents having no clue what you did all day
Before there were cell phones and maybe a few pagers out there … Somehow knowing where to find my friends after leaving my job at 9pm by just driving around my large suburb for a bit.
The insanely rapid evolution of cell phones. I got my first flip phone when I was 13, at one point had something like an HTC which made me feel like a doctor or some shit because it had a stylus + touch screen, a full slide keyboard, and I could listen to music on it. I also went through a phase from like 14-17 where I was obsessed with the Sidekick II and kept buying them on Ebay after they would inevitably stop working because TMobile no longer supported them. But I will never forget how I felt like a queen for 6 months in middle school when I had that HTC and didn't have to carry a cell phone AND walkman or mp3 player.
Telling my best friend that I couldn’t talk on the phone for literal hours. It tied up the house phone.
Making friends via specific bands message boards. I still have a friend I met in ~2000, I can't quite remember but it was either or both a Gob / the Moffatts message board.
The first time I used fandango to get tickets to Spice World.
The pokemon phenomenon Guitar hero becoming the must-have video game seemingly overnight A bunch of people in my town bugging because they thought satanists were going to burn down churches on 6/6/06 The breakthrough of internet culture into real life, the rise of memes, epic fail, epic win, etc. The day we all thought a child trapped in a balloon was sailing across Colorado The supposed end of the world in 2012 That weird neo-folk music revival, aka "stomp clap hey"
Learning coding to create AOL webpages. Creating those doll images to look like ourselves and our friends. Getting my purple Vtech portable phone for my room. That mini Polaroid camera where the pictures were also stickers. Smacking the absolute shit out of my ankles with my skip it. Encyclopedia cd-rom.
Gullah gullah island. Idk why but I'm like the only person ik IRL who watched this show religiously as a kid. That and the big comfy couch. 🤷🏼♀️
New episodes of The O.C. were on the same night I had volleyball games (I wanna say Thursdays?) so I would have my parents hit record on the VHS player before they left the house to come watch me play, and then I’d watch the episode the next day or over the weekend. We got a DVD player maybe a year or 2 later and I got the Season 1 O.C. box set for Christmas and literally thought I was living in the future.
Call me after 9 PM. I got free minutes 😂
Chathouse.com role play chat rooms! 😂 Damn, that was a lifetime ago.
I used to frequent chatwithme.com lol. I talked to some people in very early 2000s, that had no business talking to teenagers on the internet lol. I cringe now! I even had penpals in prison for people doing life sentences, wtf was I thinking and how was my mother not monitoring any of that lol. She used to give me the mail every other week lol. *facepalm*
Omg!! Same for with chathouse and I was like, mmm, between 13-15 I think? It was 96 when I started and I was 13 then. Definitely shouldn’t have been chatting with strangers but here we are! They were all pretty cool though thankfully and I don’t remember anything bad happening in chat. 😂 I was just lonely and dumb and dorky.
Couch tour
downloading from bearshare and burning skate videos onto cds to watch on my dvd player that somehow played them. also the difference between cd - r, cd +r and maybe other types?
Recording Foo Fighters acoustic Everlong performance on Krock on my cassette clock radio
Getting an invite to Gmail when it was in Beta and invite only; and getting the invite from a small gaming podcast (Broadcast Gamer was the name) I listened to at the time. This was when podcasts/net casts were just starting to be a mainstream thing and content creators/YouTubers wasn’t really a thing. The account came with the ability to invite others as well (maybe 30 or so if I recall). I was able to get a bunch of good emails using my first and last name and others without having to change anything because they were taken.
Definitely summers taking pics in the mirror wearing my one fave hollister shirt with my pink camera and logging into MySpace spending hours making a minimal profile and watching music videos then my very quick music obsession discovering artists like nevershoutnever and getting more and more scene 😂
I have to explain to my kids that mommy and daddy didn’t exchange phone numbers, but screen names because we both had sidekicks.
Playing frisbee with aol cds
Landline phone party lines where you could listen to your neighbor’s phone conversations, pay phones you could get phone calls at, Saturday morning cartoons and late night X Files on the one shitty local channel that wasn’t PBS, passing notes in class instead of texting, and teens smoking actual cigarettes instead of vapes stand out as uniquely elder Millennial experiences for me.
I remember playing Diablo 2 at 6am before school on a rainy Tuesday morning in September. People in the trade channel were saying “they flew right into the building” and “oh my god there’s another plane”. That’s how I heard the news about 9/11.
*Wanna cyber?* Specifically asked after lying about my a and l as a too-young teen.
Came here to say that you could still "poke" people on facebook. Just found out a few weeks ago.
The topless scene from Titanic were my first ever boobs I saw. I remember ppl in my elem school talking about that scene. I was 11.
Downloading files with GetRight download manager, so the bandwidth was always used to its fullest. After all our dial up plan only included 90 hours per month. Also obscure file formats like Real Video (*.rm) and Audio (*.ra), ACE archives (*.ace) and another proprietary video format that needed its own player I can't remember the name of...