I didnt join the internet until 2001

[Goosemaster]

Remember downloading quicktime trailers?

I used to take zip disks from home to the office to use their T1 to download trailers

 

[NikolaeVarius]

I remember AOL, and every time I logged on, I got a "You got mail!" that got annoying after 5 times.

 

[Raiden256]

archie
gopher
uudecode/uuencode
finger
ncftp
lynx
elm
mosaic

 

[Evadman]

There were these thigns called 'modems'. They were acoustically coupled at up to 300 baud! You took your phone off the hook and put it on this modem thing and your computer would call a phone number for you and letters would flow though the phone. Sometimes they got stuck. But a lot of times, you got the letters to form into a screen. Sometimes in color, but you had to have one of those nifty 4 color monitors.

You could communicate with a ton of people at a time, if the sysop was good, maybe even up to 16 :gasp;. there were games that were made from letters. And p0rn made from letters because you could never get enough porn.

That way was good for a long time. At one point you stopped needing to put the phone on top of the modem and speeds quadrupeled to 1200 baud. 1.2kbps. It was godlike!

then, gopher came along. You could see exactly one site, the Smithsonian museum and you could see a few real pictures of rocks and some dinosauts when the site was up, and it usually was not. But wow, real pictures. Joygasm!

Then came WWW. And it was good. Someone figured out people would pay for p0rn and then everyone needed a bigger pipe; a common lament among the geeky. some called them tubes. A series of tubes. The tubes got bigger till you could drive a car through them. Then a bus, then an airplane. Somewhere in there, along '98 or so, some guy made a computer site. The site had a forum. the conversations were about butter mostly.

 

[Inspector Jihad]

Originally posted by: Evadman
There were these thigns called 'modems'. They were acoustically coupled at up to 300 baud! You took your phone off the hook and put it on this modem thing and your computer would call a phone number for you and letters would flow though the phone. Sometimes they got stuck. But a lot of times, you got the letters to form into a screen. Sometimes in color, but you had to have one of those nifty 4 color monitors.

You could communicate with a ton of people at a time, if the sysop was good, maybe even up to 16 :gasp;. there were games that were made from letters. And p0rn made from letters because you could never get enough porn.

That way was good for a long time. At one point you stopped needing to put the phone on top of the modem and speeds quadrupeled to 1200 baud. 1.2kbps. It was godlike!

then, gopher came along. You could see exactly one site, the Smithsonian museum and you could see a few real pictures of rocks and some dinosauts when the site was up, and it usually was not. But wow, real pictures. Joygasm!

Then came WWW. And it was good. Someone figured out people would pay for p0rn and then everyone needed a bigger pipe; a common lament among the geeky. some called them tubes. A series of tubes. The tubes got bigger till you could drive a car through them. Then a bus, then an airplane. Somewhere in there, along '98 or so, some guy made a computer site. The site had a forum. the conversations were about butter mostly.

 

[Scouzer]

ASCII

 

[Fritzo]

Remember when all web pages started with "Welcome to my web page"? They all seemed to have MIDI's on them too.

Type in your favorite website at http://www.archive.org/web/web.php and see what it looked like years ago

 

[homercles337]

I made my first hotmail account in '95 or so YEARS before the microsoft acquisition. This is why i have a "real" named account rather than foo123bar456@hotmail...

 

[91TTZ]

Originally posted by: her209
Napster...

Napster didn't come till much later.

 

[Cogman]

I think this symbolizes about what the internet looked like for me around 1995.

 

[Fritzo]

Wow...look at Anandtech in 1998: http://web.archive.org/web/199.../http://anandtech.com/

 

[SoundTheSurrender]

glory days of downloading warez on a 56k modem.

 

[91TTZ]

Originally posted by: Fritzo
Wow...look at Anandtech in 1998: http://web.archive.org/web/199.../http://anandtech.com/

And look at my post on there about 2/3rds of the way down. I'm replying to Doug about the "1,000,000 Duplicate CD-Roms". It's in the BBS section.

 

[GhettoFob]

Originally posted by: SoundTheSurrender
glory days of downloading warez on a 14.4k modem.

 

[compuwiz1]

Originally posted by: SoundTheSurrender
glory days of downloading warez on a 56k modem.

I had "shotgun". (2 x 56k modems running simultaneously)

 

[jagec]

Originally posted by: theprodigalrebel
Hotmail offered 2MB of storage and Yahoo opened up a can of whoop-ass by offering SIX MB.

I remember that. And hotmail kept that 2mb limit for a LONG time.

The first MP3 I ever downloaded was Will Smith's "Miami". Yes, I know. Took so excruciatingly long...

And then there was Starcraft on dialup.

 

[Duddy]

dope wars

bbs

and MS Office clipart EVERYWHERE!

 

[kranky]

Originally posted by: Scouzer
ASCII

I think this is the first right answer so far. There was an internet before there were websites, Usenet and IM.

You could send email (in ASCII) as long as you knew the "bang path" - the list of computers your email had to be routed through to get to its destination. It used the UUCP protocol (user to user communications protocol).

So if I wanted to send an email to user at Princeton with a login name of jdoe, I might need to use the bang path ...!sun!digi!ut-austin!princeton!jdoe.

Fortunately, as soon as email started to get popular, they came up with UUCP mapping that was like the precursor to DNS. If your site was registered with uunet, you could start your bang path with uunet!<site registered at uunet>!username.

 

[AudiPorsche]

Originally posted by: SoundTheSurrender
glory days of downloading warez on a 56k modem.

gaaah, i remember grabbing motorcross madness ISO over my 28.8k... and our house only had one phoneline... wow were my parents pissed that month.

 

[Homerboy]

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?

Read "When Wizards Stay Up Late"
great book about the "invention" of the Interwebs by the boys at BBN (AS1!!!)

 

[Pepsi90919]

Originally posted by: bctbct

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:

alright i'll give the thread 1 star

 

[Pepsi90919]

Originally posted by: DLeRium
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.

i was all about the alladvantage and gotoworld and all those fly-by-night companies and scamming my friends into signing up.

 

[Pepsi90919]

Originally posted by: OREOSpeedwagon
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.

lol me too

 

[Homerboy]

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

First of powwow LONG predated ICQ. And blew it out of the water. powwow was painfully cutting edge for its day, it even provided realtime voice (VOIP) before anyone anywhere.

Secondly, I still use ICQ. Old habits hard to break.

 

[Pepsi90919]

Originally posted by: Evadman
There were these thigns called 'modems'. They were acoustically coupled at up to 300 baud! You took your phone off the hook and put it on this modem thing and your computer would call a phone number for you and letters would flow though the phone. Sometimes they got stuck. But a lot of times, you got the letters to form into a screen. Sometimes in color, but you had to have one of those nifty 4 color monitors.

You could communicate with a ton of people at a time, if the sysop was good, maybe even up to 16 :gasp;. there were games that were made from letters. And p0rn made from letters because you could never get enough porn.

That way was good for a long time. At one point you stopped needing to put the phone on top of the modem and speeds quadrupeled to 1200 baud. 1.2kbps. It was godlike!

then, gopher came along. You could see exactly one site, the Smithsonian museum and you could see a few real pictures of rocks and some dinosauts when the site was up, and it usually was not. But wow, real pictures. Joygasm!

Then came WWW. And it was good. Someone figured out people would pay for p0rn and then everyone needed a bigger pipe; a common lament among the geeky. some called them tubes. A series of tubes. The tubes got bigger till you could drive a car through them. Then a bus, then an airplane. Somewhere in there, along '98 or so, some guy made a computer site. The site had a forum. the conversations were about butter mostly.

and then you learned that baud and speed don't go hand in hand.