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Author Topic: it's been five years since I originally joined the forum  (Read 5080 times)

Allybee

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instead of reminiscing about everything/everyone that's gone, can we take a second to appreciate the fact that the internet has been usable for more than five years? what the fuck email still feels relatively new to me
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jhocking

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Re: it's been five years since I originally joined the forum
« Reply #1 on: 22 Sep 2009, 20:07 »

I made my first webpage over 12 years ago, and I was hardly riding the first wave of the internet. hell, the webpages had pictures by then! (although background colors still hadn't been invented yet.) 5 years ain't no thang, the internet is way older than that.

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Re: it's been five years since I originally joined the forum
« Reply #2 on: 22 Sep 2009, 20:13 »

What Papa Hocking said
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Re: it's been five years since I originally joined the forum
« Reply #3 on: 22 Sep 2009, 20:24 »

I think that's the point.  To some people, five years seems like a long time for the internet and computer literacy, but it has been around a bit longer.
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allison

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Re: it's been five years since I originally joined the forum
« Reply #4 on: 22 Sep 2009, 21:15 »

the first song i ever downloaded on napster was train's drops of jupiter
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Re: it's been five years since I originally joined the forum
« Reply #5 on: 22 Sep 2009, 21:23 »

animated gifs of flaming torches and tiled backgrounds is what it's all about
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With cake ownership set to C and cake consumption set to K, then C + K = 0.  So indeed as one consumes a cake, one simultaneously deprives oneself of cake ownership. 

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Re: it's been five years since I originally joined the forum
« Reply #6 on: 22 Sep 2009, 21:25 »

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With cake ownership set to C and cake consumption set to K, then C + K = 0.  So indeed as one consumes a cake, one simultaneously deprives oneself of cake ownership. 

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Re: it's been five years since I originally joined the forum
« Reply #7 on: 22 Sep 2009, 21:26 »

my first aol screenname was Romeo co98, as in class of 1998, as in the year i graduated 8th grade.
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Re: it's been five years since I originally joined the forum
« Reply #8 on: 22 Sep 2009, 21:36 »

I had an icq number with only 6 digits. We're not talking a high 6 digit number either.
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Re: it's been five years since I originally joined the forum
« Reply #9 on: 22 Sep 2009, 21:37 »

the first song i ever downloaded on napster was train's drops of jupiter

good_charlotteXgoldfingerXmestXblink182XlagwagonXmxpx__the_innocent_[Sept_11_2001_911].mp3
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Re: it's been five years since I originally joined the forum
« Reply #10 on: 22 Sep 2009, 21:38 »

First time I had Imternet access at home was through a 14.4kbs modem ripped from a supermarket checkout.

And it feels like yesterday, indeed.

It's not, though.
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Re: it's been five years since I originally joined the forum
« Reply #11 on: 22 Sep 2009, 21:42 »

You know what that makes you, ally?

That makes you gay.

The internet makes you gay.
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Re: it's been five years since I originally joined the forum
« Reply #12 on: 22 Sep 2009, 22:38 »

The first time I really remember going on the internet was in year 7, when I would go to the computers in the library and look at Harry Potter fansites and find out what House I would be in and what wand I would get.

Before that all I would use the home computer to look through Encarta and play the trivia game where you went through a castle-type thing?
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Re: it's been five years since I originally joined the forum
« Reply #13 on: 22 Sep 2009, 22:39 »

oh oh, and I would go to chatrooms which I probably found through yahoo and would talk to strangers. Also, using Yahoo messenger and setting the alert tone to be a Dragonball Z soundbite.


Wow, this is kind of embarrassing.
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allison

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Re: it's been five years since I originally joined the forum
« Reply #14 on: 22 Sep 2009, 22:49 »

the first song i ever downloaded on napster was train's drops of jupiter

good_charlotteXgoldfingerXmestXblink182XlagwagonXmxpx__the_innocent_[Sept_11_2001_911].mp3

shut up johnny c you don't know me

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Re: it's been five years since I originally joined the forum
« Reply #15 on: 22 Sep 2009, 22:52 »

aol when they had chatrooms and dial-up and before that we had something, i think it was called Prodigy, that was aol's competitor for a very short time. BTW i still have my same E-mail account from 1996 on aol =)
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Re: it's been five years since I originally joined the forum
« Reply #16 on: 22 Sep 2009, 22:53 »

Wow, this is kind of embarrassing.

at least you didn't create whole sets of magic-the gathering cards online! 6th and 7th grade, baby. oohhh yeaaa
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Re: it's been five years since I originally joined the forum
« Reply #17 on: 22 Sep 2009, 23:51 »

The first version of AOL I installed came on a single floppy disc. That's still my primary e-mail.
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Re: it's been five years since I originally joined the forum
« Reply #18 on: 23 Sep 2009, 01:18 »

We got the internet when I was halfway through 11th grade in 2001. My first email address was [email protected], it was a Hanson reference. I spent my time roleplaying on DragonBall Z forums as a saiyan named Eva Skyspirit (because I wasn't allowed in chatrooms, but I would fantasise about going on one and saying 'hi im a noob' and having lots of people want to be my friend) Oh! And making my neopet (a white Aisha) awesome.
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Re: it's been five years since I originally joined the forum
« Reply #19 on: 23 Sep 2009, 01:32 »

My first AIM name was "RomanticFlop14", based solely on the fact that I thought I would never be successful at love or things.
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Re: it's been five years since I originally joined the forum
« Reply #20 on: 23 Sep 2009, 01:57 »

I first used email at Norsk Data in the mid-1980s; it was a private system, and they had a line from the UK to Norway.  The mail itself was surprisingly much like modern systems, with the ability to attach files, even.

The Internet arrived when I bought a 14.4 modem (it could do 19.2, but using a proprietary standard that never caught on) and joined Demon Internet (essentially the UK's first ISP) in late 1992.  I wrote and contributed a dial-up script for OS/2 users to connect to Demon, which was used for several years and got me mentioned in a couple of articles about the Internet.  I also joined the older bulletin board system CiX, which I still use a little.

In 1993 I started looking at the web, using the earliest widely available browsers for Windows, Mosaic and Cello (the team that wrote Mosaic later went off to start Netscape), and then in 1994 came IBM's Web Explorer for OS/2.  Web Explorer was good enough that if IBM had done things right it would probably have enabled OS/2 to beat Windows in the marketplace - which would have made the world a very different place today!

In 1997 I started helping to run a web server for my employers, and by 2002 I had my own domain. In 2003 I set up my own server to host all my domain services at home over an ADSL line.
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Re: it's been five years since I originally joined the forum
« Reply #21 on: 23 Sep 2009, 03:59 »

The first time I really remember going on the internet was in year 7, when I would go to the computers in the library and look at Harry Potter fansites and find out what House I would be in and what wand I would get.

Before that all I would use the home computer to look through Encarta and play the trivia game where you went through a castle-type thing?

man i loved that game and the madlibs shit you got when you won

seriously that was some hardcore gaming chops right there

also, remember webrings? they were a thing
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Barmymoo

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Re: it's been five years since I originally joined the forum
« Reply #22 on: 23 Sep 2009, 04:18 »

I had my first website about fifteen years ago (you can still see it in its latest incarnation! But please don't, it is horrifically boring and I can't update it because I've lost the upload password), maybe sixteen years. My dad was a web developer, or rather at that point he was a technical author who dabbled in the web, so I've been online basically since birth.

It's weird because there is no memory in my head of a time before the Internet; I do remember joining Facebook but that's about the only "start of something" Internet memory I have. I've had the same email address since my website was made. I guess I'm old skool.
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Re: it's been five years since I originally joined the forum
« Reply #23 on: 23 Sep 2009, 04:47 »

I am pretty sure Paul wins Internet, but c'mon, he's kind of cheating.

I used BBSes with my Amiga uh, ages ago.  I was in highschool I think.  BBS games like Legend of the Red Dragon, TradeWars, The Pit and Hack N Slash were The Shit.

One of the BBSes got some kind of email gateway thing for people who wanted to send email but didn't want to sign up for internet.  It seemed kind of dumb to me back then because hey, if I wanted to talk to someone there was a chat channel right there in the BBS and a message system and all that jazz.  Basically BBSes were kind of like forums, only in ascii (and if you were lucky, ANSI art).

Around the time that Windows 95 came out (I think?) one of our friends started getting hacked OzEmail dial-up accounts for us to use.  Used to talk on irc a lot back then because it seemed like a logical progression from the BBS chat rooms.

Can't remember when I set up my first webpage.  I could set one up at uni, but I think I probably set one up on Geocities or someshit before then.  I've had my own domain since 2002 though, and I remember the relief I felt finally being able to do whatever I wanted with it.
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Re: it's been five years since I originally joined the forum
« Reply #24 on: 23 Sep 2009, 05:25 »

Internet usage for me was about 12 years ago, I remember doing a lot of MUDs through www.mudconnector.com , Ultima Online, playing warcraft 2 online with the brand spanking new battle.net edition, downloading cobs and norn breeds for creatures, and also the first incarnation of the neopets website. Later I remember creating a xanga in highschool, then later myspace and finally facebook. I remember a lot of earlier webcomics, like that 3D one about the egyptian king. I remember using Homestead to build my first website about 3 years ago and joining my first forum over at creatures.co.uk (which of course is totally defunct now)
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jhocking

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Re: it's been five years since I originally joined the forum
« Reply #25 on: 23 Sep 2009, 05:43 »

I would fantasise about going on one and posting my picture and having lots of people want to be my friend

fyp

It's weird because there is no memory in my head of a time before the Internet

eh, while I have plenty of memories of life before the Internet, the idea of life before the Internet still seems weird to me. Like, Google wasn't started until I was nearly through college, but I still think how weird it was back when the best way to find websites was to read about them in magazines.

Basically BBSes were kind of like forums, only in ascii (and if you were lucky, ANSI art).

Oh yeah, I forgot about that! The first time I ever drew anything on a computer was some ANSI art for a friend's BBS.
« Last Edit: 23 Sep 2009, 05:44 by jhocking »
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Re: it's been five years since I originally joined the forum
« Reply #26 on: 23 Sep 2009, 06:26 »

I would fantasise about going on one and posting my picture and having lots of people want to be my friend

fyp

jho you are the one he quotes that picture from that time period.
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Re: it's been five years since I originally joined the forum
« Reply #27 on: 23 Sep 2009, 06:35 »

her sixth post

I'm just saying.
« Last Edit: 23 Sep 2009, 06:40 by jhocking »
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Re: it's been five years since I originally joined the forum
« Reply #28 on: 23 Sep 2009, 06:42 »

Five years ago Blast Tyrant was released oh my god I feel so OLD
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Re: it's been five years since I originally joined the forum
« Reply #29 on: 23 Sep 2009, 07:37 »

I had an icq number with only 6 digits. We're not talking a high 6 digit number either.

Four digits.  Woot.

First internet connection was 5400BPS in very early 90s.  First BBS was 300BPS in the mid 80s.  Cable modem in '95.  I've spent far too much time digitally connected.  (Or analog-y?)
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Re: it's been five years since I originally joined the forum
« Reply #30 on: 23 Sep 2009, 08:27 »

i was really excited when my parents first got the internet in 2000 because it meant i could finally be on neopets, the super awesome new thing all of my friends were into at the time and would absolutely never shut up about. i remember that my pet was called a wocky and i loved him. later i went on the neopets forums and dissed some stupid guy and my account was locked so i lost my wocky and i never went on neopets again because i was too sad.
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Re: it's been five years since I originally joined the forum
« Reply #31 on: 23 Sep 2009, 08:52 »

I got on the internet in the early 90's.  It was a free demo for AOL.  I used it to look up cheat codes for video games (because I was sucking so bad at them) and IM with my friend from down the street.  It was the coolest thing ever.  Once the demo expired, my dad decided to use dialup through his work (we connected to his office, which connected to the internet).  It was beyond slow.  I don't remember any of the Windows things, because we had Macs back then (before the G series processors, and that computer still works, by the way).
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Re: it's been five years since I originally joined the forum
« Reply #32 on: 23 Sep 2009, 09:09 »

I'm a dinosaur like Paul, just not as cool.

We had Internet email on our VAX-11 system in 1983, but I had no one to write to.  I used to haunt various BBS's back then, discussing movies and music and stuff.  Usenet kinda grew out of that in the mid-80's, and I still use Usenet a lot to get new music.

My first modem was 1200 baud, hooked up to an original Apple Macintosh in 1992.  I used it play on MUDs and MUSHes.  My character's name was always Orbert.  My "Internet persona" has always been Orbert.  I remember getting my 2400 baud modem and totally grooving on how frickin' fast it was.

I was at the NCSA (National Center for Supercomputing Applications) in 1993 and watched Dr. Bob Panoff demo an amazing new application he was working on called a "web browser".  The app was called Mosaic, and many of the patents in Mosaic went into Netscape and are still used by IE and every web browser today.  He kicked me off of a Cray once because I was playing Rogue.  He hated computer games, the freak.

I wrote my first web pages in 1996.  Back then, there were no WYSIWYG tools; everything was written in raw HTML code.  I still have a few websites, every one of which is just done for fun, but at least there's FrontPage and DreamWeaver now.
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Re: it's been five years since I originally joined the forum
« Reply #33 on: 23 Sep 2009, 12:13 »

I had my first website about fifteen years ago

Aren't you only like seventeen or eighteen?

I first started using the internet back when I was twelve or thirteen, so maybe '96 or '97. Our PC was way out of date. No CD-ROM, running Windows 3.1 on like a 486 machine. I passed my time on it going to AOL's chat rooms and message boards, primarily comic book related ones, but a few band ones. I stuck with a single Marvel Comics chat room from the ages of thirteen until I moved out and got cable internet in my first apartment at around twenty. I still actually communicate with a couple people from that chat to this day. My crowning achievement on that forum was a fan fiction parody of comic subculture starring Mr. Potato Head and Kool-Aid Man where we would basically just make terrible puns and in-jokes about how John Byrne was an asshole (The Marvel chat room was essentially the biggest comic chat on the internet back then, so a few various creators would pop in from time to time, Byrne and Walt SImonson being about the biggest I ever conversed with, though I did once get the chance to be banned for a bit for asking Tom Breevort why Spider-Man sucked so bad at the time and who let John Byrne and Howard Mackie write comics).

Ah, memories. I can also remember back when it would take like a week to download an entire album. Oh, Dial-Up...
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Re: it's been five years since I originally joined the forum
« Reply #34 on: 23 Sep 2009, 12:25 »

Yeah I am 18, my dad made me a website and I dictated stories about princesses for him to put on, and drew a picture on Paint to upload (I think it was of me and my brother). I also coloured in a picture of Noddy but I think that was later.
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Re: it's been five years since I originally joined the forum
« Reply #35 on: 23 Sep 2009, 12:57 »

According to wikipedia, the World Wide Web went public two months before I was born. My dad's a computer guy, so it's been with me always. We got it at home quite late, back when 128kb was the big thing, and just a few people had ADSL, but I had a lot of fun times. Spent most of my time at a terrible norwegian chat site for kids (short story; 12-14 year olds cybering) and a Paperinik forum in decline. That's where I learned the joy of good spam. It's wonderful if done right.
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Re: it's been five years since I originally joined the forum
« Reply #36 on: 23 Sep 2009, 13:10 »

Guys I used to be on Prodigy, and I would go in chat rooms and in these chat rooms we would RP and I was MagiCaros because Caros was a name I made up for Gemstone 3 but then they took down Gemstone 3 on Prodigy and I was sad, but I was MagiCaros and I owned a bar and sometimes I would duel people and we would type up crazy things to sound impressive as we fought int he chat room.

I guess this was 95?

Goddamn.
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Re: it's been five years since I originally joined the forum
« Reply #37 on: 23 Sep 2009, 14:27 »

I used BBSes with my Amiga uh, ages ago.  I was in highschool I think.  BBS games like Legend of the Red Dragon, TradeWars, The Pit and Hack N Slash were The Shit.

Man, LoRD was a good game. Barren Realms Earth was fun, too. I also used to play a game called VGA Planets - you had to email your turn to the host, as would all the other players, then the host would email you back a file to load that would show all the other players moves, etc. A RISK-like game, in space.

I got Prodigy when I was 12 or so, in 1993, (I don't remember using Prodigy a whole lot, though), when I got my first modern computer, a Gateway 2000. It was a 486, had a 66Mhz processor, 4Mb of RAM, and something like 200Mb hard drive, along with a 9600 baud modem. I BBS'd a bit, but it wasn't until 1994 that I really started getting into it, 'cause we moved back to Chicago and there were many more options out there. The Lake County Radio Group BBS was the one I spent the most time on, mostly playing games and using the message boards, but also downloading stuff and trying to get into ANSI. When I turned 16, (1996), I asked for, and received, a 28.8bps modem for my birthday. It was awesome. Sometime around then the family decided to sign up for AOL. We had version 1.5. I still have the same screen name for AIM, which was a shortened version of the handle I used for all the BBSs I frequented, and my parents still (unbelievably) use AOL.

memories
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Re: it's been five years since I originally joined the forum
« Reply #38 on: 23 Sep 2009, 15:14 »

You kids and your internet. Get off my lawn.
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Re: it's been five years since I originally joined the forum
« Reply #39 on: 23 Sep 2009, 15:32 »

from 96 till 99 I had free internet from AOL because we kept getting free demos and when we would call to cancel after the demo expired they just offered another 2 months or so. Back then I didn't do much on the internet because there didnt seem to be much too do, I also had a neopet and remember some god awful games. 

Mostly what I remember was my parents being all fearful and timid of the internet and giving me a set of rules for the internet as though I could some how be taken through the screen by some crusty pervert.
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Slick

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Re: it's been five years since I originally joined the forum
« Reply #40 on: 23 Sep 2009, 16:17 »

I remember being excited by the prospect of AOL but it wasn't really what I had hoped. Firstly, we were not in/near a major city so it was long distance fees on the free trial, and the place just wasn't very cool. It was like, hey, let's take the idea of the internet and then make a new one entirely separate from the internet so that we shut off the pioneers and the interesting people. I guess I can see why they thought it might of flown, but it really just always sucked.


My first internet experiences were talking in chatrooms set up for magic: the gathering. I remember one guy mentioned he popped someone's cherry and I was like 'what does that mean?' and they had to explain it to me. Also I read lots of webcomics. Lots and lots. Now I just read a handful.
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celticgeek

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Re: it's been five years since I originally joined the forum
« Reply #41 on: 23 Sep 2009, 16:42 »

Well, I joined this forum about three years ago.

I first got on the internet on May 19, 1996 (I have records to show this), with a 14.4 dial-up modem.  It was a local ISP, FutureOne, which was subsequently purchased by a series of other ISPs, until Mindspring (EarthLink) finally bought them, and I just couldn't stand any of their crap any longer.  And about that time (2000), my cable company came along with internet for our house, and I remember being extremely impressed by the speed of the cable internet.  I also remember that I essentially had to reinstall Windows on an erased hard drive to get rid of all the EarthLink crap on the computer. 







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Bastardous Bassist

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Re: it's been five years since I originally joined the forum
« Reply #42 on: 23 Sep 2009, 16:56 »

Oh, man.  Cable internet reminds me of the funny time when we got cable internet.  I was all, "Man, I can start downloading so much music.  It'll be great!"  So I did, and it was fast.  So fast!  Then I went to play it, and nothing came out of my speakers.  Not a damned thing.  It had worked fine before.  After much searching, we found that our computer didn't have enough IRQs to run both the freshly installed ethernet card and the sound card at the same time.  So, I could download my music, then I'd have to go into the back of the computer and disconnect the ethernet card from the PCI slot to get everything to work.  At the time, I wasn't aware that the software could have probably handled that, but we're hardware people in my family.
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Mnementh

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Re: it's been five years since I originally joined the forum
« Reply #43 on: 23 Sep 2009, 18:18 »

I remember Mosaic! I used it briefly. We didn't get the internet at home until the late 90s, but I first used it over a 2400 baud modem in the early 90s (I want to say 92/93) in school.

I didn't do much with it at the time other than check out Usenet, but hey, internet history!
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squawk

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Re: it's been five years since I originally joined the forum
« Reply #44 on: 23 Sep 2009, 19:55 »

I've been using the internet since I was probably five or six? I remember playing CD-ROM games with my brothers when I was three, but later I went online solely to play shockwave games. Then in 2002 I started my own website about my birds and some comics. All incarnations of this are still running. Then I discovered this forum and consequently webcomics in early 2005. This was also the advent of "Social Networking" and shit, which is now my major timewaster.
Then Texts From Last Night launched early this year and that is like the only recent new habit of mine in terms of internet usage since 2005 and also my other major timewaster.
Oh I finally got some fuckin' DSL in May of this year. That was ridiculous.
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look out! Ninjas!

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Re: it's been five years since I originally joined the forum
« Reply #45 on: 23 Sep 2009, 21:01 »

Dad got dial-up put in in 1996, on a separate phone line so he could use the net and talk on the phone at the same time. At the time this was considered pretty cool, and calling my friends would often be an exercise in calling, hearing the familiar signal noise, and waiting an hour to call again.
We got a faster modem in 1999, but didn't get ADSL until 2004, which was amazing. I remember having to wait hours to get onto some flash games on miniclip, and spending more hours waiting for 'all the small things' to download off Napster because I couldn't wait for it to come on the radio again.

I also remember having to use the internet at school, with Netscape because we were using macs. Although the memory that sticks out most in my mind is that the printer network was horrible and if two computers tried to print at the same time they would both lock up and not respond to anything short of hitting the power button, and wouldn't print. Many a six year old's work would be lost amid many tears.
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Orbert

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Re: it's been five years since I originally joined the forum
« Reply #46 on: 24 Sep 2009, 09:41 »

Ha ha, oh yeah I remember having two phone lines, one for voice and one for the modem.  The Dark Ages of the Internet.
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Bastardous Bassist

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Re: it's been five years since I originally joined the forum
« Reply #47 on: 24 Sep 2009, 09:44 »

I remember wanting two phone lines, but my parents did not acquiesce.
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ackblom12

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Re: it's been five years since I originally joined the forum
« Reply #48 on: 24 Sep 2009, 10:08 »

I'm curious how upset phone companies were when cable came on the scene.
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Orbert

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Re: it's been five years since I originally joined the forum
« Reply #49 on: 24 Sep 2009, 10:12 »

They might've been bummed for a little while, but now that everyone and his dog has a cell phone, the same family that used to have one phone line, maybe two, now has five or six, so they're still making tons of money.
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