miss when we gathered to get into the internet instead of having to quit it alone.
That time when you had to wait for the image to load line by line only to realize, her boobs where covered, and the utter disappointed of the image either being cropped or she was wearing pants.
When you entered, in the hallway there was a dedicated table that had a landline phone and paper phonebook on it. Possibly a pack of cigarettes and a lighter too.
Answering machine with the cute little cassette
everybody coming over to watch the new smosh video
I remember we discovered the shorter the phone cable the faster our connection would be. So my friend bought a 2 inch cable and we had the computer right up against the wall for that extra 2kbps
now this is podracing!
My family lived in a remote place, we had just barely gotten phone lines, they were terrible and we rarely got higher than 11kbs no matter what I tried.
Somehow I still was able to play online games like Team Fortress, I just had to radically change how I played compared to other players.
That was me with Quake II. All my rich friends had cable modems when they were still a luxury item and the rest of us poors out in the woods had to make do with 12kbps. It was a slaughter every night after school.
Don’t forget getting yelled at for “camping” because that’s the only way you can possibly play.
I had no shame about it. If hanging out in the rocket launcher spawn area doesn’t cause my latency to go apeshit then I’m hanging out there and shooting anything that moves.
Fuck you and your 45 mbps, Eddie and Ian!
it’s not that old, it was still normal in 2010
You must mean it will still be normal in 2010, which is the far future when we’ll have colonised Mars and use our flying cars to go home to our floating home in the clouds.
This but gaming instead.
As in, whatching our friend play aoe2 or something.
To be fair it’s exactly the same as watching a streamer, minus the parasocial relationship.
I used to watch my buddy play WoW.
That was 2 fold. We did what this post talks about, but i also knew what diablo 2 did to me, and knew i couldnt own WoW or I’d flunk out of high school
I was the one whose computer had the internet. The cruelest thing I ever did was get my friend, who had no computer at all, addicted to Ultima Online and EverQuest.
UOL
Ew the OG bot farming game
MUDs existed long before UO.
I would raise and contort my hand in sync with the dial-up tones when my friend was around to convince them I was a shaman
“One does not simply access the worldy wider web, my child. You have to sing to it.”
When was the last time you heard the storm? '96 for me. Had either a T1 or DSL connection after that.
back in '12 for me, we switch to fibre and suddenly we had a landline and internet at the same time – it was genuinely crazy
Wow! That’s crazy late to have still been using dialup. Did they ever get better than 56k baud?
no idea, I just remember a dramatic increase in my online time around that period. Also my dad going around drilling holes everywhere so that we could run a cable to everyone’s room back in the days when you assembled a PC from parts you found at a car boot sale
I remember occasionally seeing a 64k connection speed on the dialup at my parents’ old place before they finally got broadband. No idea if it was accurate, as I understand 56k to be a physical limitation on phone lines, but it’s what windows would claim at least.
you’re the man now dog
Ah, the good ol’ days, when my friend’s computer would get jacked up from Bonzai Buddy because she thought it was too cute.
I thought it was weird and didn’t care for it, so I never put it on my family’s computer. After it was discovered to be spyware, I felt vindicated.
We would ride our bikes to the library because their connection was faster and we could sit next to each other.
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I remember letting my brother’s friend use my computer and he reprogrammed my DOS boot sequence to play a (very simple) bleepy version of the teenage mutant ninja turtles theme song & then type out “TURTLE POWER” on the DOS prompt.
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Using your daily moves in Tradewars 2002…
Ahh… Hanging with friends gathered around a PC and trolling pedos on AIM. So weird that age, sex, and location were the primary opening lines of communication for a while. Even stranger that creepy dudes in their 40s were so honest about it while trying to pick up kids on the Internet.
My friends and I used to do that. We find some scumbag trawling the teen chat rooms on AOL and get them to IM us. The we’d say we wanted to send them a picture us and we’d send them gore, scat porn, and other gross shit. Some of the best nights of my teenage years.
Anyway ASL? 31 M AUS
18/F/Cali
This was the standard answer. Or was it 19?
Wait are you me?
I could be, there’s a non zero chance we’re a schizophrenic interacting with ourselves online and not know
12/F/Langley, VA
50/M/MAGA/Priest, 7/11 in 5, codeword: JoeBidden6969
I never understood that, I never participated in that weird ASL greeting, even as a naive kid who didn’t even have social experience I felt that was creepy and dangerous to share that kind of thing, and I resented how it basically turned every conversation into “Is it remotely possible we could fuck.”
I’m so glad the internet outgrew that silly trend and became so much more refined, intelligent and respectful.
I remember (as a girl) wanting to talk to another girl my age in a chatroom. The rest of the room started asking if I was a lesbian.
Like we couldn’t just talk to people online without bringing sex into it. I just wanted to make some friends.
I feel like if parents took the internet more seriously from the start and were more actively engaged in what their rotten teenagers were getting up to online we might have had at least a slowdown of the awful decay of society as our worst intrusive thoughts now not only have space to be seen without consequence, we have entire communities supporting each other’s rotten intrusive thoughts.
Honestly, if my parents had any idea how many creeps were on AOL, I probably would’ve been banned from it. We’re like the “grew up with no seatbelts and survived” version of internet users.
Was that a pedo thing? I always assumed it was just teenagers.
Parents certainly thought it was a pedo thing, and while there certainly were some nefarious adults it was mostly just teenagers.
My first hands-on experience with the Internet was at a friend’s house in the early 90s in 4th or 5th grade. I’d seen it before on various classroom computers but I never got a chance to use it because the teachers all seemed to agree on putting the unstable desk-throwing kids in front of them for the school day to keep them distracted.
