The old internet

OU812

I recall there being a classical or jazz station (interestingly I can’t recall the genre of music) based somewhere in Eastern Europe which was spectacularly popular because they broadcast their presenters live on the webcam and they were all stunning looking.

Electric Sheep

Deleted User wrote: »

You forgot Usenet. Alt.barney.die.die.die and alt.tasteless!

Actually a really good trip down memory lane of how the internet used to be is a book by JC Herz. A woman who used to write for playboy if I recall correctly.

The book I think is just called Surfing the Internet. But I think when I read it it had a different name and was just changed in later publications. I am sure when I read it it had "information superhighway" in the title.

Anyway it is about her internet addiction which she eventually overcame. Back in the days of early IRC - usenet - and even bulletin boards.

Anyone who wants to know what the net was really like in the early days - I think that's the book to get.

Ah, Usenet. Some of it was totally out there, but in general I loved it. Rec.food.cooking, alt.true-crime, rec.arts.books.

The quality of posting was far above today, very few people had internet access in the early 90s. Those who did have access tended to be intelligent and
educated, unlike now where every eejit is online.

Sleepy

It used to feel like an adventure when you logged on in the early days. I can remember the first batch script I ever wrote being connect and disconnect commands to ensure my overnight Kazaa/Limewire queues didn't continue past 8am and outside of the IOL "No Limits" off-peak window. I think it may have been getting kicked off that plan for breach of "the spirit of the arrangement" that first brought me to boards.ie in fact...

Sleepy

Sleepy wrote: »

the IOL "No Limits" off-peak window. I think it may have been getting kicked off that plan for breach of "the spirit of the arrangement" that first brought me to boards.ie in fact...

A work colleague with the same "no limits" plan was also kicked off. I used Tinet at the time, I mean my dad .

smilerf

Faceparty chatrooms

Hotblack Desiato

Deleted User wrote: »

You forgot Usenet. Alt.barney.die.die.die and alt.tasteless!

alt.tasteless was brilliant. It's where the word "fap" comes from (and it popularised "choad", too.)

Undividual

Mena Mitty wrote: »

A/s/l

Wow, ok.... That's like uh, problematic?

Undividual

Playing Age of Empires 2/Ultima online on a dial up... Also chatting with what I assume were dirty old men pretending to be women on Yahoo and definitely not interfering with myself.

Surely the pinnacle of human civilization?... We dreamed the wrong dreams.

Lorelli!

I don't remember much of the 'old internet.' I only really started using it for college in the mid 00s.

When we were in first year around 1996/7, our English teacher was chatting to us and she said 'soon enough everyone's gonna have the internet in their home' and the whole class laughed at her

branie2

Star Trek vs Star Wars
Kirk vs Picard

Grayson

Capt'n Midnight wrote: »

Bulgarian viruses.

Nasty ones.

Back in the days before multisynch monitors they could over drive your monitor. POP ! :eek:

Or tell the stepper motor that moves the head to keep stepping, right off the edge of the drive :eek:

Well that's what the story was. Viruses that killed hardware.

And hardware wasn't cheap back then.

There were some amazing viruses. And they had great names. The chernobyl virus could overwrite your bios chip. The christmas violator gave you a message on xmas day telling you all your data was disappearing. It was a lie. And how can anyone forget cascade?

Grayson

refusetolose wrote: »

twas years before i realised it was "I seek you"

I just learned something.

maccored

i remember trying to upload documents to a BBS when a 9.6 kbit/s modem was the bees knees

limnam

Irish Guitarist wrote: »

She managed to ger her doctor to repeat the prescription and send it to the chemist in 1984.


I can't get mine to do it over email in 2019 :pac:

chavezychavez

"Modern" websites in the late 90s, early 00s with Macromedia flash front pages.
Waiting forever for the page to load only to get a crappy animation or sound on a black screen. 2 months later the site won't work with the new version of Netscape.

Also remember a nightly late night radio program on 2fm if I'm not mistaken that was based on playing early internet memes and calling out requests from people.....get this...not in Ireland. Shocking stuff at the time.

Having access to fast internet for the first time in 2006/2007 was a head-spinning experience for me. It felt like the lights had been turned on - you could suddenly look up *anything*. I used to have over 10 tabs open at a time, wikipedia pages and youtube videos loaded up, unable to decide what to read/watch first. For somebody like me who has an obsessive need to know and understand things it was utterly addictive. Ever since then I have always viewed people younger than me with great envy for having access to this resource from a younger age than I did.

Smartphones becoming ubiquitous between 2011 and 2013 though had some very bad effects on peoples behavior and the culture in general, and social media becoming popular since 2006 is something I wish never came into existence too.

Igotadose

Adventure, over 300baud dialup. Internet via Mozilla and 1200 baud!
Star Trek (c scan! c lrscan!)
Early multiplayer games like Empire
Rogue

Compu$erve logins and funky addresses (123.4567@compuserve.com)

When the dog barked, the 300 baud acoustic coupler cut out. even if she was outside, but under the window. Had the perfect bark for it. Learned to feed her a big dinner in the early evening so she'd be lethargic and not too noisy.

safetyboy

Goatse

IamtheWalrus

Collegechat.com

IamtheWalrus

I remember in first year of college a colleague was explaing email to me. We both had uni accounts and he said he’d said me an email, which he did, and that for me to receive it *all* I had to do was restart my computer. We did and he was right. I was very impressed that’s all it took.

sheesh

Ush1 wrote: »

I'll see your Geocities and raise you a Xoom.

I see your Geocities and your Xoom and give you angelfire and Tripod!

and getting guitar tabs nevada.edu using ftp!

angel eyes 2012

Pinch Flat wrote: »

Hey, I need to use the phone, get off the internet

For some reason, if someone was on the internet in our house we were able to hear the neighbours on their landline through our tv, usually when the Simpsons was on.

It was definitely cheaper after 6.00 and at the weekends. I remember using yahoo chatrooms sign up was easy and you could have multiple accounts if you forgot your login details as no email addresses were required. Google wasn't in existence. I recall using Lycos and altavista for search engines.

_ptashek_

Some fond memories...

Chatting on IRC on a 80x25, monochrome green terminal.

Web search before Altavista was a thing, and Yahoo's static index of web pages was all the rage. Early 1995ish I guess.

Downloading all kinds of crap off of BBSes.

Setting up my first 14.4k dial-up modem on Debian 0.9, with nothing but man pages and own brain cells to help.

The "joys" of Trumpet WinSock on Windows 3.11 and the beauty of graphical web pages under the very first public version of Netscape Navigator, and a bit earlier on Mosaic.

Massive phone bills
Fun times!

Grandeeod

We have reached Dick Swinging territory now.:D And I salute all of you! I was a virgin in '99 compared to a few years earlier.

ozmo

Deleted User wrote: »

A work colleague with the same "no limits" plan was also kicked off. I used Tinet at the time, I mean my dad .

Oh - I remember that - we had a page you could go to where it showed how much you used the internet and if you went over 150Mb a month or something you got a nasty letter and could get cut off.

Cee-Jay-Cee

I remember logging into MSN chatrooms and heading straight to the Religious groups and telling them that God didn't exist and then waiting for the onslaught or visiting the diet rooms and calling them all fat fcukers with no self control. Hours of unlimited fun with idiot strangers on the internet that always took the bait.

givyjoe

Cee-Jay-Cee wrote: »

I remember logging into MSN chatrooms and heading straight to the Religious groups and telling them that God didn't exist and then waiting for the onslaught or visiting the diet rooms and calling them all fat fcukers with no self control. Hours of unlimited fun with idiot strangers on the internet that always took the bait.

You haven't changed!

E mac

Cee-Jay-Cee wrote: »

I remember logging into MSN chatrooms and heading straight to the Religious groups and telling them that God didn't exist and then waiting for the onslaught or visiting the diet rooms and calling them all fat fcukers with no self control. Hours of unlimited fun with idiot strangers on the internet that always took the bait.

The Belfast 'room' on yahoo chat was a horrible place full of vitriol

branie2

I used to frequent the films chatroom on Yahoo chat.

Ush1

IamtheWalrus wrote: »

Collegechat.com

I remember collegehumor.com

Boom_Bap

I remember collegechat well, walking around the computer labs to try get a sneaky look at the girls usernames

Grayson

sheesh wrote: »

I see your Geocities and your Xoom and give you angelfire and Tripod!

and getting guitar tabs nevada.edu using ftp!

I'll see your angelfire and raise you playing a MUD over telnet.

Jesus I'm old.

jester77

Ah the good ol days when you would wait for a gif to download pixel by pixel, only for your mum to let a roar to get off the PC so she could phone the neighbour, right before the first nipple had appeared.

Fionn

Grayson wrote: »

I'll see your angelfire and raise you playing a MUD over telnet.

ah telnet! oh my....

Fionn

not to be too pedantic!
ha ha
but the world wide web was where it all changed sort of!

I had a Gateway PC back in 19 or something and Gateway support allowed a bulletin board that users could actually chat with each other regarding problems that they had with Gateway Computers etc. (anyone remember them?) and some guy hooked up the Irish board with their US board and that was how I got into the Internet mostly a text based system that was really fast too, until TBL made the GUI...
Oh well :-)

kowloon

Played Quake online with the people who started Boards. Remember the Low Ping Bastards having the advantage while the rest of us suffered the lag supreme.

jimbobaloobob

I remember gateway computers. The box looked like a freak an cow. It holds our Christmas decorations now and he computer is in the house covered in a. If plastic sheet like a crime scene preserve.

babi-hrse

Writing down the webpages with the full path extension because it was several less steps on a 50kpbs dial up connection of pages you wouldn't have to load up otherwise.
Waiting on raster by raster line of an image loading from top to bottom and being convinced it'd load quicker if you scroll off image.

Anteayer

RealAudio radio stations via a 56k modem ...

I can still vaguely remember having to write my own modem scripts:
ATDT021....

StupidLikeAFox

_Brian wrote: »

I remember spending lots of time chatting in the “Virtual Irish Pub” when working nights mid 90’s

I remember, aged about 12, chatting away with some Canadian woman in the VIP with my parents standing by looking/contributing. they were fascinated and telling me things like "ask her what her name is", "ask her if she has a job". Was even a conversation starter for them both for a while "Did i tell ya STLF was talking to a Canadian on the internet last week....". All very innocent stuff.

joeguevara

A/S/L ?

jester77

jester77 wrote: »

Ah the good ol days when you would wait for a gif to download pixel by pixel, only for your mum to let a roar to get off the PC so she could phone the neighbour, right before the first nipple had appeared.

Or the troll images of a woman that loads until it gets good and stops, leaving you hanging.

Larbre34

I remember literally the first time I used the internet. A buddy of mine worked in DIT in Aungier Street as a network manager. I was writing a thesis around that time so I took a break from the library and went to meet him for lunch at the college. He brought me into their office beside all the servers and junk and they had two PCs linked up to a T1 lease-line. He gave me a crash course in how to use Netscape Navigator and pretty soon we were twiddling our thumbs while this thing downloaded a couple of tinny WAV files and a funny jpeg or two. It was late 1996....

Anteayer

I remember my dad concluding that the internet would never take off and that it was “only for geeks, like HAM radio”.

DublinWriter

First used it in 1989 when at TCD.

Mainly email and Usenet via the DEC VAX systems. Was pretty cool getting at email from someone @nasa.gov

I remember subscribing with one of the first Irish ISPs in 93. They only had a 64kbs (yes - k!!) line outward and got over-subscribed pretty quick and went bust. Wasn't IOL, can't remember the name.

Ger Roe

Fionn wrote: »

not to be too pedantic!

I had a Gateway PC back in 19 or something and Gateway support allowed a bulletin board that users could actually chat with each other regarding problems that they had with Gateway Computers etc. (anyone remember them?) and some guy hooked up the Irish board with their US board and that was how I got into the Internet mostly a text based system that was really fast too, until TBL made the GUI...
Oh well :-)

I remember that... I worked for a telecomms company at the time and I installed a telephone conference system that allowed their telephone chat rooms to operate. They set up virtual 'rooms' for various broad classifications of faults (monitor, hard drive, cpu, etc) and there would be one Gateway monitor (operator) on each group. They would put you through to the 'room' that applied to your fault and you could have an actual group discussion with others that had the same, or similar issues. Gateway reckoned it sped up the fault resoultion process by having a number of people listening in or participating in the discussion and sharing their experiences.

That was in their factory in Clonshaugh .... long gone at this stage (closed in 2002)

ohnonotgmail

Fionn wrote: »

not to be too pedantic!
ha ha
but the world wide web was where it all changed sort of!

I had a Gateway PC back in 19 or something and Gateway support allowed a bulletin board that users could actually chat with each other regarding problems that they had with Gateway Computers etc. (anyone remember them?) and some guy hooked up the Irish board with their US board and that was how I got into the Internet mostly a text based system that was really fast too, until TBL made the GUI...
Oh well :-)

The very first pc i bought was a gateway. cost me £3000.

is_that_so

Your Face wrote: »

So what was it like?

Very very sloooooow! Lots of grey and no pictures.

Using the 'Narrow-Band' on an elf tornado 28.8 k modem

bonzodog2

My first PC was a 486 with a 200MB disk in Win3.11 (1994). We got a upgrade to Win95 and a 500MB disk and a 14.4k modem. Due to our crappy phone line out in the sticks we could only get 2400bps :eek: