I didnt join the internet until 2001

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bctbct

Diamond Member
Dec 22, 2005
4,868
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Originally posted by: Pepsi90919
Originally posted by: bctbct
So did all major retailers rush to get online shops? What was there to do the 1st year? Obviously no chat rooms/online forums?

"online malls", a 3D virtual shopping experience, was the big thing in the early-mid 90s, and pushed mostly by CompuServe.


You've posted more than anyone in this thread, can I have a star? :laugh:
 
Feb 19, 2001
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Remember when WAREZ used to be done on HTTP websites that had like "Vote" links you had to click on? Remember iDrive and XDrive? I'm sure some warez still operates similarly, but goodness.... those were the days.

ICQ! Yeahhhhh... Now no one uses it.

I remember when Hotmail had the spinning globe.

I remember when Geocities offered 6mb of space compared to Angelfire's 2mb. Yayyyyyy. I was in what.. 5th grade? 6th grade? I forgot.

I also remember when people used to "mailbomb" each other. Remember DDOS attacks when people made programs called NUKERS? You type in their IP address and you type port 139 or 135 and you hit the nuke button. Oh goodness that always cracked me up.

AllAdvantage?

NetZero? Bluelight? Altavista FreeAV? (har har @ the name)

what else?

AOL 4.0 gave 100 hours of free internet. I made sure I didn't go over that 100 hours the first month.
 

JRich

Platinum Member
Jun 7, 2005
2,714
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In the beginning there was darkness.
Al Gore said, "CONNECT!" and the computers did.
Al Gore saw the Internet, and it was good.

 

SludgeFactory

Platinum Member
Sep 14, 2001
2,969
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Originally posted by: bctbct
Oh, I got caught up :)


Any serious answers? Anyone here old enough?
I don't really go back that far. I first went on the internet in the mid 90's, from Sun workstations. Yahoo was probably the first site I ever went to. Used Mosaic and then Netscape 0.99 or whatever it was. The popularization of the World Wide Web is what got it commercialized, it really took off and was growing exponentially in '96, '97, '98.

All those old programs that you used -- trumpet, winsock, vm, gopher, eudora 1.0, ws_ftp. Dial up connection at 9600 baud. People complaining that your phone was busy. Logging into the school mainframe. Everyone saying the internet would go to hell when AOL let their moron subscribers loose with actual internet access. Blex's Page of Good MP3.

It sucked. What you have now is infinitely better than all that crap.
 

Skeeedunt

Platinum Member
Oct 7, 2005
2,777
3
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I think I played Team Fortress at a glorious 400x300 resolution for about 5 months straight. 2fort4 FTW.
 

Kaido

Elite Member & Kitchen Overlord
Feb 14, 2004
51,468
7,218
136
It was really, really slow. I remember my first Geocities accounts...ahh, the memor-yuck, nevermind. Yay 2007 :p
 
Oct 4, 2004
10,515
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Everything was slow as molasses.
Skype didn't exist.
'Tunak Tunak Tun' was unknown.
'All of Your Base Are Belong to Us" was old even then.
10 second long MPEG-1 porn clips were the shit.
I remember using something called WinMX for filesharing.
Hotmail offered 2MB of storage and Yahoo opened up a can of whoop-ass by offering SIX MB.
Anandtech Moderator identity was a close-guarded secret.
 

potoba

Senior member
Oct 17, 2006
738
0
76
Originally posted by: theprodigalrebel
Everything was slow as molasses.
Skype didn't exist.
'Tunak Tunak Tun' was unknown.
'All of Your Base Are Belong to Us" was old even then.
10 second long MPEG-1 porn clips were the shit.
I remember using something called WinMX for filesharing.
Hotmail offered 2MB of storage and Yahoo opened up a can of whoop-ass by offering SIX MB.
Anandtech Moderator identity was a close-guarded secret.

I think my first yahoo account had 1M quota. Was it just me?
 
Oct 4, 2004
10,515
6
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I remember when Hotmail and Yahoo were both at 2MB. Then Yahoo upped it to 6 and everyone went nuts.

I have little to no idea how much storage my first Yahoo account (1999) had.
 

esun

Platinum Member
Nov 12, 2001
2,214
0
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Back in the early days, there were a bunch of search engines that were comparably popular (e.g. Infoseek, Hotbot, Altavista) that it seems nobody uses nowadays. There was no Wikipedia, so finding information was always a matter of using one of these search engines. Angelfire and Geocities were everywhere; it seemed like everyone had one of their free websites. Animated GIFs were also everywhere. It was just a lot more immature in general.
 

AgaBoogaBoo

Lifer
Feb 16, 2003
26,108
5
81
The first time I got on was in 1993 or 1994 I believe. My 1st grade teacher had told us about using the internet to research, and so I asked my dad if we "had the internet" and he showed me... I started off with downloading tons of videos from lamborghini.com at some point, started creating my own sites, etc. and quickly moved on. I never really even used geocities/tripod though...
 

KLin

Lifer
Feb 29, 2000
30,422
739
126
Tradewars 2002 ruled, trumpet winsock sucked to configure, Majormud was cool too.
 

RelaxTheMind

Platinum Member
Oct 15, 2002
2,245
0
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My rough and most likely incorrect cycle?

3.11, newsgroups (binary a pic of yourself just to say you did?), 9600baud (pause between strokes), Doom (not internet but mods were fun downloading), webcrawler,

gap> Mirc/aol chatrooms (the internet high school)

win95/98 OS9 chat rooms, "free" software, yahoo.com, aj.com/ask.com

winME > skip

OSX/winxp (XP? never! i love 98... heh), google.com, mp3s, gaming (hello ever so popular broadband )

Linux = inbetween
 

Scouzer

Lifer
Jun 3, 2001
10,358
5
0
CONSTRUCTION SIGNS

WEBSITE UNDER CONSTRUCTION WITH ANIMATED GIFS

That was over half the internet back then...
 

Adn4n

Golden Member
Aug 6, 2004
1,043
0
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Originally posted by: theprodigalrebel
Everything was slow as molasses.
Skype didn't exist.
'Tunak Tunak Tun' was unknown.
'All of Your Base Are Belong to Us" was old even then.
10 second long MPEG-1 porn clips were the shit.
I remember using something called WinMX for filesharing.
Hotmail offered 2MB of storage and Yahoo opened up a can of whoop-ass by offering SIX MB.

Anandtech Moderator identity was a close-guarded secret.

My thoughts are in bold.

PASSWORD DID NOT HAVE LENGTH REQUIREMENTS.

I miss my yahoo mail with a short password.
 

dbk

Lifer
Apr 23, 2004
17,685
10
81
I joined in 95. AOL3.0 i believe on 14.4bps connection. I don't think I did anything on the internet except for aol chat. It was just so slow, took around 40~50 mins to download a damn song. I also did some IRC but that's pretty much it. I didn't think the internet was a big deal, little did I know.
 

OREOSpeedwagon

Diamond Member
May 30, 2001
8,485
1
81
Napster/WinMX/Morpheus were awesome for file sharing. I remember making all kinds of custom CDs for kids in junior high, I made a small fortune for a 13 year old.
 

Goosemaster

Lifer
Apr 10, 2001
48,775
3
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I remember when I first downloaded an mp3 over dialup.

Had to go though like 30 warez sites to find anything...what's cool was that I finally found one and the quality was great. I played it on my ALtec Lansing ASc48's (kick ass speaks btw) and the whole family was like :Q


The song you ask?


Hotel California...:cool: