Prior to fb, there was dedicated forums for the music scene I was in to in my area. Everything was in them. Finding what was on was easy as all the promotors used them.
Then fb came along, the forums slowly faded and finding events became unreliable in fb's chaotic algorithm bullshit. Now some things are not on it, some are insta only etc.
Discord is (unfortunately) filling the gap now. Why have a bbs when you can have a shitty chat platform with shitty search and conversations that are impossible to track?
Then fb came along, the forums slowly faded and finding events became unreliable in fb’s chaotic algorithm bullshit. Now some things are not on it, some are insta only etc.
It gets worse on the mobile app because there's much less control and so much slop, versus accessing FB on a browser with a Violentmonkey script applying custom filters getting rid of unwanted suggested pages.
Back when I was booking shows it was great because you could blast a small event and know it was reaching a lot of people. Bands would share it, every band member would reshare it. But then I noticed the growing discrepancy between the amount of people who claimed they’d attend online and who showed up. Like so much on FB, the illusion of being a part of something became more important than actually being a part of something. But yeah, for a brief moment there was a bit of “social” in social media. Then came the yelling.
rofl tell me you do not understand how FB got started without telling me...
That shit's been a privacy nightmare from the beginning.
Zuck has been selling personal info from basically day 1. He's been abusing people since day 1.
The day people realize convenience does not equal good is the day humanity grows up from a petulant child to a moronic teenager... Too bad it's looking more and more like we'll never make it past, "petulant child".
A much younger korazail saw how my friends were leaving highschool, going to different colleges and foresaw they would continue to spread out after that.
He had an idea of building a website to help keep track of friends so we could keep in touch despite physical distance and enable networking; a blend of Facebook and LinkedIn.
I was a CS major and built a forum and database architecture that my local friend group used for a little bit to chat, but we were all still mostly local and it didn't seem super useful, and while always on Internet was a thing, I didn't have it and my server needed to be online to use my application.
A few years later, Facebook.
I wonder sometimes how the world would be if I'd promoted my idea, figured out how to host it outside my bedroom, etc. I might have also just been a Myspace or live journal, but maybe I'd have gotten there first...
I don't think I'd be a megalomanic asshole, but I can't prove it.
Events was what kept me on the site for far too long after they went bad. Being able to organise events with friends so easily was incredible. I can track the decrease in my social activity along with fb making their system worse and it makes me sad
Ive been around the internet since early dial up days, and while I haven't used every social platform that appeared, Facebook was the one where I saw everyone was really just posting their projected self, the world is amazing fake lives. I dont think it necessarily started immediately like that, but it quickly became that. Its the first place I saw it anyway.
My Reddit account was 19 years old before I was permabanned by their stupid AI for liking Luigi pics and saying I wish Trump wouldn’t wake up in response to a pic of him napping 😔
I've known adventures, seen places you people will never see, I've been on university work terminals and back... frontiers! I've stood on the back deck of Usenet bound for Mosaic with sweat in my eyes watching Netscape Navigator fight on the shoulder of the internet... I've felt wind in my hair, riding Lynx off of monochrome monitors and seen usegroups burn like a match and disappear. I've seen it, felt it...!
It was a color terminal starting with my upgrade from Mac OS 9 to Mac OS 10 (and Fedora around the same time). If I recall correctly my Claris works terminal was black on white in the 90s when I was in Usenet (alt.rec.scouting, baby (and others))
But I kept it that way because of my history growing up with Apple IIs (and an old interface to airline booking software in the early 2000s as well.
Assuming y'all aren't just fucking around, reading the comments here is actually really cool, tangentially interacting with people who have internet stories from well before I was born
I'm just from the dialup era, and I still feel old online a lot of the time, but then someone here is like "yeah, Berners-Lee invented HTTP just to make a website to mock me"
We are of similar eras. I just missed the days of building phreak boxes and it was always a bit of wonder to me.
While it’s harder these days for a litany of reasons I think it’s still in our collective interest to be bearers of stories, old and new, to the neophytes of the current generation.
I guess what I’m saying is, I am in your camp but to my kid’s generation we are still warlocks
Get into Lora (meshtastic/core). When I settle into bed I check to see if my solar powered nodes made any friends or if the heltec I keep in the car pinged anything cool.
I did a meetup a few weeks ago and its a cool smattering of younger folks and HAM folks who go wayyyyy back.
People talk about it being useful in an emergency, and sure, but mostly it's just cool.
I got my first "home computer" in the days of the BBS's when there was such a thing as a "long distance call". Internet access was crazy expensive and not for the average geek. Back then it was a bit "underground". There were professionals and there were passionate hobbyists. Most people didn't have or need a computer in their lives. Things changed in the late 90's boom. A cultural shift when suddenly everyone joined in. The geeks were no longer king
I remember getting a Hotshot/286 card which allowed me to upgrade my 8088 to a 286. I don't even remember what programs I used back then but I'm sure they ran a lot faster after that.
IIRC correctly, the card was normally around $400 but I managed to get one for $150 and I was so proud of my dealmaking.
i just remember we had 2 games: King's Quest 4: Rosella's Peril and Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego, but we could only have one installed at a time.
A friend of mine had a Commodore 20 with no tape drive. Not only could we only have one game at a time installed, but also we had to manually type in the code for the game each time.
Well not sure about the other poster but the BBSes I used were ones you had to dial into and you were the only one there. Well unless it was a fancy one that had multiple phone lines. I even ran one for a short bit my junior year of high school on my commodore 128 and a 1200 baud modem. Good times. Then I got to college and learned about usenet and IRC. This was like ‘89.
I also don't remember my ICQ number, but I had one. And I remember my first time stepping into a 99 cent only store and their registers used that "uh oh" sound from it. I always felt like nobody else recognized where it was from.
I absolutely remember Trillian. It's what convinced me to finally make an AIM account to talk with my "mainstream" friends who didn't have ICQ or IRC, since I wouldn't actually need to run any new software.
And Facebook Messenger and Gmail Chat (or whatever it was called)! There was a glorious period of time where you could talk to pretty much anyone on any service from one chat app.
It was just last year that re-found my little black book from the late 90's and 2000's with all my accounts from back then AIM/ICQ/Yahoo, shit there was even a /. account number sub 100,000 that I couldn't log into any more
Ooh, Australia, I have a question. Was PalTalk a big thing over there? Obviously way after what you described. I remember my father having an old classmate over from Australia and he introduced us to "The Internet", and how instant messaging was possible a cross borders through PalTalk. Even though I never heard anyone using it in Europe, even years past that encounter.
Social media used to be about socializing and communicating. These days its all drivel that has bren productized into a vehicle where streaming addictive brain rot keeps the advertisements flowing and lowers self esteem.
Gen Z may have adopted the internet but it was born of us- AIM, yahoo messenger, ICQ, IRC servers, news groups... all on a dial-up modem. The good old days where there wasnt enough bandwidth for all the ads of today, and the most intrusive ads were a 468x60 pixel banner at the top or bottom of the netscape page
Honestly, the people who were around in the early internet days helped build the online world we all use now. A little respect for the veterans of dial-up isn’t a bad thing. 😄
I watched the Adam Friedland interview with Clavicular yesterday, and Gen Z is so fucked. I realize not all of them are like that, but that someone like Clavicular has gained any traction is a sign the youth is not alright.
The only place I hear anything about that guy is on lefty podcasts and streams, I tend to avoid most social media so I'm not exactly tapped in to that shit but it kind of feels like the reactive coverage is his biggest boost. I tune in to chapo and hasan and friedland and denims and seder and holy shit I'm so sick of hearing about this irrelevant fucked up kid on all of their shows.
She's a lefty twitch streamer who's usually on in the mornings, mostly does reacts to current event stuff with some light context discussion, is one of the people Ethan Klein has tried to bully with lawsuits.
Th3Discourse with Majority Report contributor Brandon Sutton is another cozy lefty morning twitch stream, and he usually raids right into the latter when he's done.
As an early GenZ myself, the only consolation I have is that I still had a pretty un-GenZ childhood and the lack of that rot will likely give me a competitive advantages going forward.
I don’t think many of them actually take Clavicular seriously. Gen Z culture seems to be all about “inside jokes” that everyone knows and self-aware lolcows. It’s annoying, and I’m glad they all had their teens stolen by Covid. They deserve it.
Yeah, seems there is a belief that past a certain age, you should have zero fun, be nothing but a wage slave, and die somewhere quietly, where no one will see what fate awaits you.
Well, I happen to think minors especially should not have access to social media, or at least somehow have minor only social media.
Prevents them interacting with predators, getting brainrotted, and most importantly: leaves us with more mature people to interact with.
I initially like the idea of a minor-siloed internet, but damn if the predators aren't going to congregate there too (eg roblox) so I'm not out sure what the answer is
We're suffering from pedomania right now, seeing pedos under every bed but it's actually a rare thing. If you have an astronomical number of children online it's going to "feel" like they're in danger of falling prey to predators. Especially with the modern expanded definition of pedo where every freshman dating a senior is the victim of a grooming predator.
But if we want zero tolerance, the best thing to do is to promote parental controls. And if we want to get draconian about it, then charge parents with negligence if their kids become victims because the parents weren't using parental controls.
Same here, but I believe that those savvy enough should be getting into the conversation, instead of sneering at the ignorant lawmakers.
It's a tough problem that should be handled by interdisciplinary panels, and then coded into law in a non partisan way, instead of knee jerk legislation with the only intent of getting votes.
What we have right now are fascist surveillance states leveraging both outrage against predatory tech companies and the protective instinct we feel for our children to lock down our communications network by pinning all users to a real world identity. Wheeee!
See that's the thing, I was with it, uh, 20 years ago? I feel like all I can add is interpretation at the interdisciplinary panels so the lawyers can understand what the techs are saying.
Best way to do it I think would be to have a State (federal/state/local I don't care) issued digital ID. You can put the ID app in your phone and on your computer. If you're over 18, it can send an "I'm over 18" token that doesn't identify you, just says you're over 18. The token handshakes with whatever state ID database it needs to to verify you are an adult on your device once and then it's a verified token. Now your device can check it has a verified token whenever it needs and you never need to send out identifying info.
As far as keeping the rest of your PII private, idk I'm not a security dude but I'm sure there are ways. But I remember a kind Dane (I think? Maybe a Finn. Memory like a rusty sieve these days) telling me about their digital IDs and how they were connected to their bank account and government services and shit and in an ideal world where you can trust your government that would be pretty neat. By the time they get something like that built here in statesia who knows? We might almost have one!
I remember my grandmother telling me a story about the fact that the most romantic vacation of her life was a cross-country train trip sharing a tiny cabin with my grandfather. They were in their seventies - she was a breast cancer survivor and he had some heart health issues beginning. And yet still, they cackled with laughter trying to get changed together and share an itty bitty bed.
When we are young we seem to instinctively feel that old people enjoying each other is cringeworthy, and that them being romantic is gross. But really, wouldn’t we all want that for ourselves as we age? The voice in our heads never ages, so why would our hopes for joy and connection go awat?
Adobe flash games and adobe flash videos. Beige computers. Monochrome monitors. Trackball mice. DOS. The original Doom. Newgrounds. Joe Cartoon, Killfrog, and Stickdeath. Napster and Limewire. Geocities. Forums for days. Browser games like Utopia.
Those little mouse balls were so satisfying to hold and play around with. Pretty weighty for how small they were, with an interesting texture on it; and so perfectly round!
I never stole one, though. I always put them back, 'cause I'm not a jerkface.
My ICQ number was 737916. A hacker stole it 20 years ago because I thought, "why would anyone want this?" and used the password "buddha" for some reason.
I loved that platform. Those were innocent days by comparison.
I tried to get into it on the relaunched site a few years ago, but it didn't work. I might have used my university email account as the recovery email, and that account is long gone.
But...why? I doubt anyone else that I know is using it...
I can remember mine too, 4170129. I just can't remember why I remember it. The numbers I tend to remember are the ones that I actually had to use often. For example, I remember some phone numbers because to call someone I actually had to punch in (or dial) their phone number. But, did we have to type in our IDs from memory when logging in or something? That seems like it would be a terrible UI, and surely by the mid 90s nobody was still doing that.
I still don't think that would be enough for me to remember it. It would mean I'd have to give it out to people. But, I didn't do that so often that I'd have memorized the number and remembered it for 30 years.
6 digit ICQ number is actually worth bragging about, it means you were one of the early adopters. Everyone who joined later had a lousy 7 digit number, like OP.
I remember trying to play online quake in the 90's, I live in new Zealand... We had dial up, my latency was around the 5s mark. I have up pretty quick.
If I wanted to play multiplayer games, it was taking my desktop computer to a friends house, connecting them together with 10Mb BNC networking, and don't forget the 50ohm terminators.
A friend spent a week trying to download the original pirated version on XP, the couple of hundred meg file would get stopped for various reasons.
I have my full name as a gmail account, I got it as soon as it possible. [email protected]
Forums. Gaming guides made by actual gamers. Clans that are recognizable and actually respected, playing against the same. Email being the main method of 'notifications'. MSN Gaming Zone. PS2 network gaming, and not having to pay a fucking fee to play with your friends and those halfway around the world. Hosting dedicated servers. Lists of available servers and games to join, instead of this bullshit 'matchmaking'. Modding games, and to an extent programs. Websites not having 50 fucking layers of Javascript garbage just to load what is effectively a static page. Before analytics were everywhere, before ads took more real estate than the content. When Google was just a search engine.
E: Gamespy. Also, I also had someone in vrc recognize my name, and also recalled my clan, from back when we were just a Halo/Custom Edition group. I was so fucking excited, to be recognized, almost 20 years later. My clan is still going, though the numbers are single-digit now. Life happens.
A lot of stuff, but basically, before the internet was shit, and simultaneously, corporations taking over humanity.
For me, probably IRC and old school forums. Nowadays, everything is monetized, corporate, and all about engagement; either farming it as user or monetizing it as an owner.
Lemmy does kind of bring back some of that old school forum vibe with modern niceties though.
The modern internet can be more interesting than the old one ever was once you start to explore it, rather than hanging out on like three websites total.
One day you’ll be able to tell your kids that you lived the golden age of streaming. You didn’t have ads. You could binge watch a whole season in a day without the service tricking episodes out once per week to try to increase user anticipation. You didn’t have increasing numbers of streaming services dividing the pie into tiny pieces such that you had to pay 5x what you used to pay for cable to watch the things you want. You didn’t subscribe to those services only to find that you needed to get a fancier membership type to watch the show you were actually interested in.
You may have missed the birth of social media. But you lived the age of excitement about ditching cable, only to watch some massively rich companies create a monster bigger and uglier than cable ever was.
My steam account dates from the release of the Orange Box. That was a few years after launch, because back at the beginning Steam was only for Valve games and those weren't really my jam. But, the Orange Box was a great deal. So, I bought it (retail version) and then I had to register a Steam account.
Oh man, I had to use the orange ones sometimes at my first programming job. They were VAX/VMS dumb terminals. It sucked getting stuck with one of those, because the job was making a visualization GUI for some data, and these ones literally couldn't run the GUI; they were text-only. Eventually they started reserving one of the GUI-capable machines for me.
Haha, that's giving me way too much credit. I was a high school student and was still figuring out what the GUI bits did, like the ArcBall widget, so I practically couldn't do anything useful on the GUI itself on days when I didn't have a GUI machine. I could do some of the behind-the-scenes linear algebra stuff, though. Like, there was an array that held a 3d vector at every point in space that represented the flow field, and they wanted to be able to visualize cross-sections, so for that I needed to make a 2d grid of 2d vectors on a single plane. That sort of thing basically had to be done blind anyway.
I remember ARPANET before it was privatized. Before TBL made Mosaic and the first web server, when all there was was USENET discussions, FTP, and Gopher. I set up mail and news over uucp dialup for clients in the 80s. I ran System III Venix on a PDP-11. I was a sysadmin on a team managing a dual CPU VAX 9000 with 192MB of RAM in 1990. Which was a lot back then. I'm old.
Fun fact. ICQ was the the go to messaging platform for the porn industry and was actively being used in the industry right up to the point it was bought by a russian company.
I chuckled. I miss MySpace. Choosing a song for your profile was great. Facebook should add that feature to their profiles. So should Bluesky and Mastodon.
I remember the rise and fall of icq. I laughed from the real internet as you kids played, knowing it was a fad wouldn’t last, not worth taking seriously.
I played online before the internet, when it was scattered individuals, or when you needed access to separate telenet and arpanet, when you could keep in your head all the accessible nodes, when the building blocks you take for granted were all new and exciting ideas
I was on whatever the hell the network was between Stanford and the elementary schools in Palo Alto in the mid 1970's and cut my online teeth on an IBM Teletype 33!
I looked up "They're taking the hobbits to isengard" the other day for no particular reason. I felt old when I saw it was 19 years old. Then I remembered it was on ytmnd before that.
I remember my CompuServe id. I remember the sequence to kick the operator off a call and jump into AT&T's switching network for the free calls. A 300 baud modem was the shit in 85. Most these fetuses have no idea how anything works and what I used to do to get a connection would make their mind explode.
icq 29533018 hit me up, but of course that was already an additional fancy layer on top of text only chat. I had it bridged in my bitlbee setup via libpidgin together with my gtalk and irc and other xmpp stuff, and had it run in irssi in a screen on my server (next to the other screen that ran mutt for my email).
and check this: to this day I consider it the best chat setup I've ever had.
66618055
I kept putting off getting on. I was online on the CompuServe days before Prodigy or AOL. I had three different places to access the internet back in 1992. My catchphrase is "I am from the internet. I'm here to help." I deeply miss Usenet.
Up here in Canada we have "Legion" clubs where veterans go to socialize (drink) and we also have "The Army and Navy" clubs where veterans go to socialize (drink). It may be the same down south but am unsure. I would never exclude the air force by design. 😊
Edit: but I originally got the Internet in my house in Aug of 1986. I was almost 6 years old. I've been on the Internet since before it was the World Wide Web. Back in the days of BBSs, and MUDs. By the time I got that UIN, I was already 15, and heading to university.
I'm reasonably certain that I may be among a few hundred people that never went backwards on our connection speed, and had 24 h access to ISDN by 1996, and never have lost Internet access since 1986.
I have the number “x277853” burned into my memory… but I can’t 100% remember what it was for. I want to say it was my ICQ, but no one else seems to have an x at the beginning of theirs? Where was this x number from?
I think they're referring to some early java applet clients that were popular back in the day. he might have telnet'd into the servers that the clients (which were hosted on geocities) would connect to.
only reason why I think that is because I did similar and even found a way to circumvent room bans using telnet 🤣.
In one server variant you could change your name to a mod after they left the room and have admin privileges in that room.
a particularly shitty mod at the time received my ire and I was able to ban them from their own rooms because the software only validated on the clients to not ban yourself 😈
I never had a conversation on geocities, but I do remember you could do some SSI stuff, so maybe it was possible. I think lost my last geocities site password and didn't care to go through the effort of resetting it in '96 or so.
You can telnet into the HTTP port basically everywhere that doesn't auto-redirect to the HTTPS port (and start/resume a TLS session), and there could be stuff in the HTML source (or headers) that a browser might hide from you, at least by default -- but I can't think of how you would use that in geocities to "see private messages". (In theory you could manually start/resume a TLS session, but a proper telnet client might break on some of the bytes received, and you'd definitely have to figure out how to send some non-ASCII bytes.)
I'm 30 (Zennial microgeneration) and the only item from the list I could directly relate to is the perceptible audible difference between baudrates, not just because I did experience dial-up Internet, but also because I tinkered with radio modulation (hands-on experience with ham radio).
As for numeric identifiers, I can recall of a few ones, but I didn't use ICQ: things such as (if I recall correctly) ECE9D8 hex color being the specific shade of gray for window background in Windows XP, the ID of a specific Orkut community I used to participate at the time, among other numeric memories I have (many of which are buried in some kind of "locked state", i.e. I'd need specific triggers in order to recall them, just like I'm occasionally reminded of cartoons I watched during my childhood).
In fact, my numeric and symbolic memory is particularly good. I can still clearly remember a few mnemonics from school, such as Portuguese "reficofage" (kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, species) from biology classes, "sohcahtoa" (sine = opposite / hypotenuse, cosine = adjacent / hypotenuse, tangent = opposite/ adjacent) and "seno sem sono / cosseno com sono" (sine awake/vertical, cosine sleeping/horizontal) from math, AT and GC pairs also from biology, among a vast repertoire of mnemonics... without mnemonics, I remember x = (-b ± √(b² - 4ac)/2a for second degree polynomials, I remember pi = 3.1415926, I remember phi = 1.618033, I remember mol = 6.02 * 10^33, among many other constants and things... I developed my own mnemonics as well, I remember the whole Morse code and ASCII codepoints for letters and numbers, I remember some commands from Visual Basic 6, I remember some windows libraries such as user32.dll and kernel32.dll... FileSystemObject ActiveX... wow, I mean, I remember a lot of very old things... And it's been a bit more than a decade since the school times and my Windows XP childhood.
In the eyes of the society, however, it may be quite a pointless ability in times where one can just "Google it". Well, guess I'm still going to remember things despite Google's existence.
upvotes and gamification of human interaction ruined the internet and are directly responsible for the extremity of discourse today.
The internet was so much better before that shit.
Which is also the era before social media, because as far as I'm aware, social media introduced those addiction driven gamification mechanism for what should be, by now, clearly obvious reasons to even the most thick skulled individuals.
No, you're looking at it through rose colored glasses. Pure chronological sorting purely awarded the most active commenters regardless of quality, and led people to submit lots of low quality comments. Plus there was the "bump" phenomenon where a useless comment was made simply to manipulate the sorting.
Forums before slashdot just weren't that great without heavy moderation. By outsourcing some portion of moderation to the users, it made for higher quality discussion in the forums that allowed threading and voting.
and every forum had rules against bumping, typically only once in 24 hours, and only like once or twice. It was never a problem, much less as egregious as you try to paint it to be.
and I'd still take that any day, over the toxic miasma of gamification, advertising, and multibillionaire control we have now.
Honestly, I dont know how anyone can say that the days before gamification, before adpocalypse, before billionaire hijacking of the internet for their own personal ends, is worse than what we have today. It borders on either lunacy, or propaganda.
and every forum had rules against bumping, typically only once in 24 hours, and only like once or twice.
You're talking about pure bumping where someone has a zero-content comment like "bump" and nothing else. I'm talking about the entire spectrum of low to high quality content, from "bump" to the general phenomenon of reviving old threads to soft bumps like adding additional useless information to an unanswered request.
Other examples include stupid arguments that needed moderation to be shut down (a phpBB or vBulletin post that spanned 50+ pages in a forum where 3-4 was the norm, all because 2 users wouldn't shut the fuck up), always occupying the top of the chronological sort.
The point is that any active forum with more than 1000 comments per day needed to be heavily moderated. User votes allowed forums to scale beyond that limited size. Chronological sort was terrible and didn't scale beyond a group of 100-200 users (not coincidentally similar to Dunbar's number), which is why any decent forum today doesn't do it by default, including any totally free and open source forums, like the fediverse forum platforms of Lemmy and Piefed and Mbin. And even choosing to put these platforms on pure chronological sort reduces the quality of the overall experience.
Honestly, I dont know how anyone can say that the days before gamification, before adpocalypse, before billionaire hijacking of the internet for their own personal ends, is worse than what we have today. It borders on either lunacy, or propaganda.
I'm talking about the use of user voting, which undoubtedly improved the quality of forums (along with comment threading so that each comment could branch off into its own collapsible side discussion) when slashdot and a bunch of copycats started doing similar things (see HN, Reddit). You can't look at Reddit in 2026 and complain that the sorting algorithms they implemented in 2005 or 2007 made things worse. No, things got worse around 2015-2020 when the front page algorithm stopped prioritizing quality over engagement bait.
The first five digits of mine was a local zip code. Not quite my zip code but less than twenty miles away. I think they may have handed them out from the nearest tymnet node. There was a university there as well.
Bro got brutally post mogged. Unfortunate for him that he crossed paths with an Elder. He needs to grind 4chan for the next few weeks if he hopes to ever recover. Instagram reels won't help him out of this one.
Also, I just recently found a list online of old-school BBS names and numbers, and that was a fun 15 minutes going, "yup, called that one. and that one. ooh, that was the one with great u/d ratios."
Ah Telix...
None of that is a flex. ICQ is the same shit from the endless September. Personally I used to read Usenet on a mainframe, and thought it was cool we could see weather maps with gopher. I don't think any of this makes me cool at all. Just that I was nerdy and liked the escape technology used to be when the signal to noise was good.
(I also remember how to make them look like you're uploading a lot quickly using a 14.4k modem.....by uploading files full of null bytes and using the compression to your advantage.)
I do. In fact as part of the reddit exodus, and the shut down of hardocp, I found myself going over there more often as part of my "scan of the internet".
Nice. Too bad Slashdot doesn't show the date an account was created. I would like to what year I made mine, Around 30,000 so I know it's pretty early, but would that be '98, '99,or '00?Don't know.
My Fark profile was created 2002.
What about my Fark account number being a low 6 digit number (It would have been lower, but I just lurked for a year first)?? Or how far I got in various MUDDs on my local BBS?? I need someone to recognize my internet clout!! My gmail account is my name with no numbers.
I played YAHOO! Games, god damnit, and used Dogpile to search Ask Jeeves, Lycos, and Excite, HotBot, and AltaVista!!!1!!!!
I'm a bit older younger (don't post right before falling asleep, kids!), but this reminds me of back when people used to shame people with 8 digit SteamIDs, because they were obviously noobs, compared to 7 digit people, and of course the 6 digit people.
Bwah, my 7 digit one starts with a 0, yours starts with 8, [insert various slurs]!
And now the entire format has been through I think like 3 total revisions or something?
Couldn't disagree more.
Prior to fb, there was dedicated forums for the music scene I was in to in my area. Everything was in them. Finding what was on was easy as all the promotors used them.
Then fb came along, the forums slowly faded and finding events became unreliable in fb's chaotic algorithm bullshit. Now some things are not on it, some are insta only etc.
Fuck META.
I like how they specified before the algorithm and you cite the algorithm for why you disliked it
Let me clarify.
Before the algorithm when both fb and forums coexisted was still annoying.
Some events would be on forums.
Some on fb
Some both.
Occasionally I would miss out on early bird tickets or tickets all together.
There was never a point where Facebook made anything better on that front.
Don't even get me started on the fuckery that fb marketplace is vs what we had.
Used to be. There was a time when forums and facebook both existed and worked well in their respective niches.
Discord is (unfortunately) filling the gap now. Why have a bbs when you can have a shitty chat platform with shitty search and conversations that are impossible to track?
I've never used discord outside of multiplayer online gaming. And not for years now..
It has IRL event promotion on it now?
They have events that can be scheduled with RSVPs. I was in a local meetup that used those to stream the IRL meetings with the virtual crowd.
It's nice that your area had that. Mine didn't until Facebook, or at least nothing a somewhat tech savvy 15 year old new about.
It gets worse on the mobile app because there's much less control and so much slop, versus accessing FB on a browser with a Violentmonkey script applying custom filters getting rid of unwanted suggested pages.
Back when I was booking shows it was great because you could blast a small event and know it was reaching a lot of people. Bands would share it, every band member would reshare it. But then I noticed the growing discrepancy between the amount of people who claimed they’d attend online and who showed up. Like so much on FB, the illusion of being a part of something became more important than actually being a part of something. But yeah, for a brief moment there was a bit of “social” in social media. Then came the yelling.
rofl tell me you do not understand how FB got started without telling me...
That shit's been a privacy nightmare from the beginning.
Zuck has been selling personal info from basically day 1. He's been abusing people since day 1.
The day people realize convenience does not equal good is the day humanity grows up from a petulant child to a moronic teenager... Too bad it's looking more and more like we'll never make it past, "petulant child".
It was 2002-ish.
A much younger korazail saw how my friends were leaving highschool, going to different colleges and foresaw they would continue to spread out after that.
He had an idea of building a website to help keep track of friends so we could keep in touch despite physical distance and enable networking; a blend of Facebook and LinkedIn.
I was a CS major and built a forum and database architecture that my local friend group used for a little bit to chat, but we were all still mostly local and it didn't seem super useful, and while always on Internet was a thing, I didn't have it and my server needed to be online to use my application.
A few years later, Facebook.
I wonder sometimes how the world would be if I'd promoted my idea, figured out how to host it outside my bedroom, etc. I might have also just been a Myspace or live journal, but maybe I'd have gotten there first...
I don't think I'd be a megalomanic asshole, but I can't prove it.
Why now he has a doomsday bunker in Hawaii, and I'm damn sure he also has a squad of PMCs on retainer.
Before Zuck hired Joel Kaplan to specifically cater to right wing interests.
It was kinda nice yeah.
Events was what kept me on the site for far too long after they went bad. Being able to organise events with friends so easily was incredible. I can track the decrease in my social activity along with fb making their system worse and it makes me sad
Ive been around the internet since early dial up days, and while I haven't used every social platform that appeared, Facebook was the one where I saw everyone was really just posting their projected self, the world is amazing fake lives. I dont think it necessarily started immediately like that, but it quickly became that. Its the first place I saw it anyway.
Oh, you think the darkness is your ally. But you merely adopted the dark.
Do not cite the deep magic to me witch, I was there when it was written.
I'm not trapped in here with you. You're trapped in here with me!
Bazinga!
These pretzels are making me thirsty!
I came here to make this exact quote. Good job bro!
"I have usernames older than you" is actually a pretty sick burn
My Reddit account was 19 years old before I was permabanned by their stupid AI for liking Luigi pics and saying I wish Trump wouldn’t wake up in response to a pic of him napping 😔
Saw it on an episode of MASH.
Henry is dating a 22 year old nurse. Hawkeye tells Henry that Henry has bunions older than his girlfriend.
Not really.
I will invoke the old words
A/S/L
WhiskyTangoFoxtrot slaps CaptPretentious around a bit with a large troutIt's like I'm back on quakenet!
DiscworldMUD?
18/F/Cali
Weren’t they all…
55/male/Stalingrad
We were and still are all f16s
Nyeeeuuuuwwww kkkkkjkk bbrrrrrrrr
I actually was 15/f/ca. I love that it has become an internet inside joke. I spent way too much time in the Yahoo star wars chat rooms back then 😅
These kids have never been slapped around a bit with a large trout and it shows.
W98BSoD slaps usualsuspect191 around a bit with a large trout
I've known adventures, seen places you people will never see, I've been on university work terminals and back... frontiers! I've stood on the back deck of Usenet bound for Mosaic with sweat in my eyes watching Netscape Navigator fight on the shoulder of the internet... I've felt wind in my hair, riding Lynx off of monochrome monitors and seen usegroups burn like a match and disappear. I've seen it, felt it...!
Like ASCII tears in a digital rain
Time to dial
The true measure of your worth: do you prefer amber, green, or true B&W?
Pretty sure the first C prompt I ever encountered was amber. Will always have a soft spot for it.
We have a winner!
My terminal used to be set up such that local terminal usage was green & black and remote was amber.
So, that was a PC, or a color terminal? Either way, you're probably a young old fart.
It was a color terminal starting with my upgrade from Mac OS 9 to Mac OS 10 (and Fedora around the same time). If I recall correctly my Claris works terminal was black on white in the 90s when I was in Usenet (alt.rec.scouting, baby (and others))
But I kept it that way because of my history growing up with Apple IIs (and an old interface to airline booking software in the early 2000s as well.
Born in 80.
When my main (only) programming language was TurboBASIC, I was amber all the way. On the other hand, that sweet sweet Apple IIe was green.
bye
Shit, my steam account is older than most of the highschoolers I work with
My Steam account is almost 18 years old and I still have to select DOB when viewing "adult" games....
Well, I guess Steam won't have a problem with California law
Steam could stop asking in California, since it's now the responsibility of the operating system to tell Steam your age.
That might be.
Can't be very sure about how it turns out for the Steam Deck.
The law's definition of OS might not be on the same page as ours.
My steam account is older than the fresh University grad we just hired.
Assuming y'all aren't just fucking around, reading the comments here is actually really cool, tangentially interacting with people who have internet stories from well before I was born
I'm just from the dialup era, and I still feel old online a lot of the time, but then someone here is like "yeah, Berners-Lee invented HTTP just to make a website to mock me"
We are of similar eras. I just missed the days of building phreak boxes and it was always a bit of wonder to me.
While it’s harder these days for a litany of reasons I think it’s still in our collective interest to be bearers of stories, old and new, to the neophytes of the current generation.
I guess what I’m saying is, I am in your camp but to my kid’s generation we are still warlocks
So much of the wonder of computers and networks and just.... all of it has been abstracted away
So many people just have phones or tablets as the majority of their computer experience
Get into Lora (meshtastic/core). When I settle into bed I check to see if my solar powered nodes made any friends or if the heltec I keep in the car pinged anything cool.
I did a meetup a few weeks ago and its a cool smattering of younger folks and HAM folks who go wayyyyy back.
People talk about it being useful in an emergency, and sure, but mostly it's just cool.
I got my first "home computer" in the days of the BBS's when there was such a thing as a "long distance call". Internet access was crazy expensive and not for the average geek. Back then it was a bit "underground". There were professionals and there were passionate hobbyists. Most people didn't have or need a computer in their lives. Things changed in the late 90's boom. A cultural shift when suddenly everyone joined in. The geeks were no longer king
When we upgraded from the Atari whatsit box to a 286 it was amazing
I remember getting a Hotshot/286 card which allowed me to upgrade my 8088 to a 286. I don't even remember what programs I used back then but I'm sure they ran a lot faster after that.
IIRC correctly, the card was normally around $400 but I managed to get one for $150 and I was so proud of my dealmaking.
i just remember we had 2 games: King's Quest 4: Rosella's Peril and Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego, but we could only have one installed at a time.
A friend of mine had a Commodore 20 with no tape drive. Not only could we only have one game at a time installed, but also we had to manually type in the code for the game each time.
pfft. ive cut better lines than yours before.
I was on BBS forums in the '80s.
wasn't usenet fun?
Well not sure about the other poster but the BBSes I used were ones you had to dial into and you were the only one there. Well unless it was a fancy one that had multiple phone lines. I even ran one for a short bit my junior year of high school on my commodore 128 and a 1200 baud modem. Good times. Then I got to college and learned about usenet and IRC. This was like ‘89.
Still is. Y'arrggghhhh!
woah. i thought alt.tv.simpsons died
Okay, I get this may be off-topic, but "It is okay to bully--", no, it's not okay to bully anyone. What is passing by these people's minds?
Is it okay to bully nazis?
That's not bullying, that's enforcing social mores.
Haha, I just said something similar before your reply had loaded on my screen. :) Whoops!
Is it still bullying then? Seems less like 'bullying' and more like 'self defense' and 'standing up for what's right' to me.
Just like what a butthead would say.
Uhh, shut up Beavis.
We NEED a Lemmy community to screenshot the best comments ever
I am one of the few people, it seems, that can not for the life of me remember my ICQ number... but I was there, using it.
Anyone remember Trillian? Having your Yahoo, AIM, ICQ, Messenger, etc all in one program..
Or pidgin when it was called gaim.
I also don't remember my ICQ number, but I had one. And I remember my first time stepping into a 99 cent only store and their registers used that "uh oh" sound from it. I always felt like nobody else recognized where it was from.
I absolutely remember Trillian. It's what convinced me to finally make an AIM account to talk with my "mainstream" friends who didn't have ICQ or IRC, since I wouldn't actually need to run any new software.
Omg Trillian! I haven't heard that name in forever. You just unlocked a flood of memories.
And Facebook Messenger and Gmail Chat (or whatever it was called)! There was a glorious period of time where you could talk to pretty much anyone on any service from one chat app.
I remember my ICQ number, 4170129, but I don't remember why I know it.
Surely I didn't have to type it in every time I logged in, did I? That would be a really stupid UI.
It was just last year that re-found my little black book from the late 90's and 2000's with all my accounts from back then AIM/ICQ/Yahoo, shit there was even a /. account number sub 100,000 that I couldn't log into any more
I had to telnet into chat rooms. We had no browsers. I was old before you were born.
Doesn’t telnet have in-band signaling? I would hardly call that elegant.
Ooh, Australia, I have a question. Was PalTalk a big thing over there? Obviously way after what you described. I remember my father having an old classmate over from Australia and he introduced us to "The Internet", and how instant messaging was possible a cross borders through PalTalk. Even though I never heard anyone using it in Europe, even years past that encounter.
Damn, I've been lied to 27 years ago! Thanks for sharing your experiences
Can't wait till I can use that did someday.
I have an active email address that is over 30 years old 🤷🏻♂️
By the older gods... I made my current hotmail account in 1996... Yes it hurts when I stand up
Best I have is an active account on an anime torrent site I created in 2005. I'm more impressed that the site is still active tbh...
23715769
Social media used to be about socializing and communicating. These days its all drivel that has bren productized into a vehicle where streaming addictive brain rot keeps the advertisements flowing and lowers self esteem.
Gen Z may have adopted the internet but it was born of us- AIM, yahoo messenger, ICQ, IRC servers, news groups... all on a dial-up modem. The good old days where there wasnt enough bandwidth for all the ads of today, and the most intrusive ads were a 468x60 pixel banner at the top or bottom of the netscape page
Do not speak to me of the old magic, I was there when it was written.
If you bought your dial-up internet from your local newspaper, there’s a pretty good chance I was doing tech support for it.
Thank you for your service :)
I had freenet. It was like a party line in the 1930s version of internet. Basically you could have a little time online every day.
Honestly, the people who were around in the early internet days helped build the online world we all use now. A little respect for the veterans of dial-up isn’t a bad thing. 😄
I watched the Adam Friedland interview with Clavicular yesterday, and Gen Z is so fucked. I realize not all of them are like that, but that someone like Clavicular has gained any traction is a sign the youth is not alright.
I hadn’t heard of this person so I asked my 15 year old son if he knew about him or if his friends were in his orbit.
“He’s a loser. No.”
I appreciate you for giving me this intense moment of connection with my boy
Haha. You’ve got a good son.
The only place I hear anything about that guy is on lefty podcasts and streams, I tend to avoid most social media so I'm not exactly tapped in to that shit but it kind of feels like the reactive coverage is his biggest boost. I tune in to chapo and hasan and friedland and denims and seder and holy shit I'm so sick of hearing about this irrelevant fucked up kid on all of their shows.
That’s my rotation as well. You are probably right.
What is denims? Everything else I listen to.
She's a lefty twitch streamer who's usually on in the mornings, mostly does reacts to current event stuff with some light context discussion, is one of the people Ethan Klein has tried to bully with lawsuits.
Th3Discourse with Majority Report contributor Brandon Sutton is another cozy lefty morning twitch stream, and he usually raids right into the latter when he's done.
As an early GenZ myself, the only consolation I have is that I still had a pretty un-GenZ childhood and the lack of that rot will likely give me a competitive advantages going forward.
Adam was bugmaxxing hard in that interview
I don’t think many of them actually take Clavicular seriously. Gen Z culture seems to be all about “inside jokes” that everyone knows and self-aware lolcows. It’s annoying, and I’m glad they all had their teens stolen by Covid. They deserve it.
You know, I bet Covid really is to blame for this nonsense. Some developmental delay type thing.
Can i slap you around with a large trout? Or am i too young for that?
If this is a reference to Monty Python being the older generations’ version of this, I agree.
I am a late (2006) gen z, i just learned about the trout thing thanks to bitchat.
Do you actually game in an RV too?
No, that's a recurring question though.
Yeah, seems there is a belief that past a certain age, you should have zero fun, be nothing but a wage slave, and die somewhere quietly, where no one will see what fate awaits you.
Well, I happen to think minors especially should not have access to social media, or at least somehow have minor only social media.
Prevents them interacting with predators, getting brainrotted, and most importantly: leaves us with more mature people to interact with.
I initially like the idea of a minor-siloed internet, but damn if the predators aren't going to congregate there too (eg roblox) so I'm not out sure what the answer is
We're suffering from pedomania right now, seeing pedos under every bed but it's actually a rare thing. If you have an astronomical number of children online it's going to "feel" like they're in danger of falling prey to predators. Especially with the modern expanded definition of pedo where every freshman dating a senior is the victim of a grooming predator.
But if we want zero tolerance, the best thing to do is to promote parental controls. And if we want to get draconian about it, then charge parents with negligence if their kids become victims because the parents weren't using parental controls.
Same here, but I believe that those savvy enough should be getting into the conversation, instead of sneering at the ignorant lawmakers.
It's a tough problem that should be handled by interdisciplinary panels, and then coded into law in a non partisan way, instead of knee jerk legislation with the only intent of getting votes.
What we have right now is "War on drugs" shit.
What we have right now are fascist surveillance states leveraging both outrage against predatory tech companies and the protective instinct we feel for our children to lock down our communications network by pinning all users to a real world identity. Wheeee!
See that's the thing, I was with it, uh, 20 years ago? I feel like all I can add is interpretation at the interdisciplinary panels so the lawyers can understand what the techs are saying.
Best way to do it I think would be to have a State (federal/state/local I don't care) issued digital ID. You can put the ID app in your phone and on your computer. If you're over 18, it can send an "I'm over 18" token that doesn't identify you, just says you're over 18. The token handshakes with whatever state ID database it needs to to verify you are an adult on your device once and then it's a verified token. Now your device can check it has a verified token whenever it needs and you never need to send out identifying info.
As far as keeping the rest of your PII private, idk I'm not a security dude but I'm sure there are ways. But I remember a kind Dane (I think? Maybe a Finn. Memory like a rusty sieve these days) telling me about their digital IDs and how they were connected to their bank account and government services and shit and in an ideal world where you can trust your government that would be pretty neat. By the time they get something like that built here in statesia who knows? We might almost have one!
The only thing kids are gonna use a sandboxed babynet for is getting onto the real one somehow
And good for them! Learning how to break out of the sandbox is a valuable learning experience
I remember my grandmother telling me a story about the fact that the most romantic vacation of her life was a cross-country train trip sharing a tiny cabin with my grandfather. They were in their seventies - she was a breast cancer survivor and he had some heart health issues beginning. And yet still, they cackled with laughter trying to get changed together and share an itty bitty bed.
When we are young we seem to instinctively feel that old people enjoying each other is cringeworthy, and that them being romantic is gross. But really, wouldn’t we all want that for ourselves as we age? The voice in our heads never ages, so why would our hopes for joy and connection go awat?
Very interesting story, I am glad for them.
It's what children think
Adobe flash games and adobe flash videos. Beige computers. Monochrome monitors. Trackball mice. DOS. The original Doom. Newgrounds. Joe Cartoon, Killfrog, and Stickdeath. Napster and Limewire. Geocities. Forums for days. Browser games like Utopia.
Oh shit! I had completely forgotten about Utopia until this post. The hours I wasted. Haha! MUDs before that...
joecartoon.com was home to a lot of educational content, like superfly and frog in a blender.
I got interviewed by Entertainment Weekly for one of my Geocities pages.
I think you are referring to ball mice. Trackball are still in use and development, and are the preferred weapon for knowledgeable gurus, like me.
I used to admin a small campus, where we had 3 computer rooms. Kids (college) stole the balls.
I ended up buying a couple hundred of (then) expensive "laser" mice, because it ws cheaper than throwing away half the neutered mice each semester.
We just had a big ball bucket
What a coincidence, 'big ball bucket' was my nickname in highschool!
Those little mouse balls were so satisfying to hold and play around with. Pretty weighty for how small they were, with an interesting texture on it; and so perfectly round!
I never stole one, though. I always put them back, 'cause I'm not a jerkface.
Old man yells at the Cloud.
I regret nothing.
Have some damn respect old man helped build cloud while you get excited because your IPad is blue
I'll stop yelling at the cloud when it stops tripling my electric bill!
I got a Gmail account back when you had to get an invite.
Drops mic
I sold gmail invitations on ebay.
Moi aussi. My Livejournal user number was 3 digits.
My ICQ number was 737916. A hacker stole it 20 years ago because I thought, "why would anyone want this?" and used the password "buddha" for some reason.
I loved that platform. Those were innocent days by comparison.
Wish I could have gotten that number back.
I tried to get into it on the relaunched site a few years ago, but it didn't work. I might have used my university email account as the recovery email, and that account is long gone.
But...why? I doubt anyone else that I know is using it...
Good god, it’s escaping containment!
Apparently strings of numbers mess with Lemmy. I don't see my icq number at all in the app I use, Boost. For you it formatted badly. Very strange.
Are they not escaping text input adequately? Because that shouldn't happen...
I think they are turning it into a HTML ordered list, and the Lemmy CSS isn't set up for that.
A bit of browser inspection, and I can basically guarantee it's because the
li::markerCSS is sized for no more than 3 digits.So we should report a bug to the lemmy developers?
If the bug doesn't already exist / is included under an existing bug scope, yes.
I don't think I will, but I probably should.
no issues on voyager
Cut off on Voyager iOS:
Android as well
It breaks alexandrite.app a bit. It's outside the frame of the post.
There's no reason to use it anymore. I was using the OTR encryption protocol with it, which was the best there was to offer.
That being said, I did say "could have gotten," not "could have."
1576488 checking in; still burned into my memory from 30ish (fuck) years ago.
I can remember mine too, 4170129. I just can't remember why I remember it. The numbers I tend to remember are the ones that I actually had to use often. For example, I remember some phone numbers because to call someone I actually had to punch in (or dial) their phone number. But, did we have to type in our IDs from memory when logging in or something? That seems like it would be a terrible UI, and surely by the mid 90s nobody was still doing that.
If you wanted to find someone when I signed up for ICQ you had to know their UIN.
I still don't think that would be enough for me to remember it. It would mean I'd have to give it out to people. But, I didn't do that so often that I'd have memorized the number and remembered it for 30 years.
6 digit ICQ number is actually worth bragging about, it means you were one of the early adopters. Everyone who joined later had a lousy 7 digit number, like OP.
My brother had a 6 digit starting with 9, he barely made the cut.
I remember trying to play online quake in the 90's, I live in new Zealand... We had dial up, my latency was around the 5s mark. I have up pretty quick.
If I wanted to play multiplayer games, it was taking my desktop computer to a friends house, connecting them together with 10Mb BNC networking, and don't forget the 50ohm terminators.
A friend spent a week trying to download the original pirated version on XP, the couple of hundred meg file would get stopped for various reasons.
I have my full name as a gmail account, I got it as soon as it possible. [email protected]
I'm so sad that I missed out on this era of the internet. I only got online in 2020, just horrible timing. all you older folk were so lucky
If it makes you feel any better, while I got to experience it, I'm also so sad that it's gone and not coming back :(
Why's that? What part from that era would you like to see again today if you could?
Forums. Gaming guides made by actual gamers. Clans that are recognizable and actually respected, playing against the same. Email being the main method of 'notifications'. MSN Gaming Zone. PS2 network gaming, and not having to pay a fucking fee to play with your friends and those halfway around the world. Hosting dedicated servers. Lists of available servers and games to join, instead of this bullshit 'matchmaking'. Modding games, and to an extent programs. Websites not having 50 fucking layers of Javascript garbage just to load what is effectively a static page. Before analytics were everywhere, before ads took more real estate than the content. When Google was just a search engine.
E: Gamespy. Also, I also had someone in vrc recognize my name, and also recalled my clan, from back when we were just a Halo/Custom Edition group. I was so fucking excited, to be recognized, almost 20 years later. My clan is still going, though the numbers are single-digit now. Life happens.
A lot of stuff, but basically, before the internet was shit, and simultaneously, corporations taking over humanity.
Gamefaqs back when it was a bunch of txt files
Sad no one will experience it again.
For me, probably IRC and old school forums. Nowadays, everything is monetized, corporate, and all about engagement; either farming it as user or monetizing it as an owner.
Lemmy does kind of bring back some of that old school forum vibe with modern niceties though.
The modern internet can be more interesting than the old one ever was once you start to explore it, rather than hanging out on like three websites total.
agree, hanging out on little websites and blogs is a lot of fun. one of my favorites is tilde.town, lots of cool little microblogs there
The worst mistake we made was making it easy enough for normies to use.
You want higher-quality people, you need to make it harder to use.
One day you’ll be able to tell your kids that you lived the golden age of streaming. You didn’t have ads. You could binge watch a whole season in a day without the service tricking episodes out once per week to try to increase user anticipation. You didn’t have increasing numbers of streaming services dividing the pie into tiny pieces such that you had to pay 5x what you used to pay for cable to watch the things you want. You didn’t subscribe to those services only to find that you needed to get a fancier membership type to watch the show you were actually interested in.
You may have missed the birth of social media. But you lived the age of excitement about ditching cable, only to watch some massively rich companies create a monster bigger and uglier than cable ever was.
I had an icq number in the 184000 range. :) Bragging rights!
Every time this topic comes up, I feel very nostalgic. Of course the tech was not as good, but the internet was free of big tech.
I was using netscape as my first web browser.
I have a 5 digit steam ID, made on the 3rd day steam existed. Back when we all hated the concept of it.
My steam account dates from the release of the Orange Box. That was a few years after launch, because back at the beginning Steam was only for Valve games and those weren't really my jam. But, the Orange Box was a great deal. So, I bought it (retail version) and then I had to register a Steam account.
My ICQ was 1428816.
And when young people ask me if I ever play multi-player games.. my dude, I played the first one. Midimaze on Atari ST.
My YouTube account is older than Pewdiepie's account... and that's my second YouTube account.
@BonesOfTheMoon
Dont be rude to your mama - laugh at the memes she shares.
You feel me.
Single colour monitors, kids! Single colour monitors!
Team orange or team green?
Oh man, I had to use the orange ones sometimes at my first programming job. They were VAX/VMS dumb terminals. It sucked getting stuck with one of those, because the job was making a visualization GUI for some data, and these ones literally couldn't run the GUI; they were text-only. Eventually they started reserving one of the GUI-capable machines for me.
That's similar to early CGI when they had to hand code all the positioning and wouldn't know if it worked until the film was developed.
Haha, that's giving me way too much credit. I was a high school student and was still figuring out what the GUI bits did, like the ArcBall widget, so I practically couldn't do anything useful on the GUI itself on days when I didn't have a GUI machine. I could do some of the behind-the-scenes linear algebra stuff, though. Like, there was an array that held a 3d vector at every point in space that represented the flow field, and they wanted to be able to visualize cross-sections, so for that I needed to make a 2d grid of 2d vectors on a single plane. That sort of thing basically had to be done blind anyway.
Green al the way
Orange at school, green at home.
also they were like 20something when myspace started anyway
BBS was the shiz in the olden days
And still falling for the bait
Tom and I go way back. He's never so much as given you that over the shoulder smile.
I remember ARPANET before it was privatized. Before TBL made Mosaic and the first web server, when all there was was USENET discussions, FTP, and Gopher. I set up mail and news over uucp dialup for clients in the 80s. I ran System III Venix on a PDP-11. I was a sysadmin on a team managing a dual CPU VAX 9000 with 192MB of RAM in 1990. Which was a lot back then. I'm old.
fuck. i can't remember my icq # anymore. it was 6 digits and started with an 8.
867530
Angel is a centerfold!
That I could remember
Mine was somewhere in the 2 millions. I probably still have it saved somewhere.
I vaguely remember somebody sending me a bitcoin many many years ago, but I haven't been able to find it.
18982172 here.
Fun fact. ICQ was the the go to messaging platform for the porn industry and was actively being used in the industry right up to the point it was bought by a russian company.
We built this city...!
I chuckled. I miss MySpace. Choosing a song for your profile was great. Facebook should add that feature to their profiles. So should Bluesky and Mastodon.
The dude who answers, reminds me of my dad.
I remember the rise and fall of icq. I laughed from the real internet as you kids played, knowing it was a fad wouldn’t last, not worth taking seriously.
I played online before the internet, when it was scattered individuals, or when you needed access to separate telenet and arpanet, when you could keep in your head all the accessible nodes, when the building blocks you take for granted were all new and exciting ideas
Now get off my lawn
That's nothing. I was on ebaumsworld
I used telnet talkers! No web browsers existed.
Shit.. you're all pups..
I was on whatever the hell the network was between Stanford and the elementary schools in Palo Alto in the mid 1970's and cut my online teeth on an IBM Teletype 33!
(Now we're talking "old school.")
Guilty as charged.. What'cha gonna do about it!
ISCABBS?
I See Crabs Are Back Being Salty?
Lol. Iowa Student Computer Association Bulletin Board System. Still online, apparently.
I See, Computer Association BBS’s Be Serious.
I looked up "They're taking the hobbits to isengard" the other day for no particular reason. I felt old when I saw it was 19 years old. Then I remembered it was on ytmnd before that.
Badger Badger Badger Badger
MUSHROOM MUSHROOM
Everyone loves magical Trevor!
I remember my CompuServe id. I remember the sequence to kick the operator off a call and jump into AT&T's switching network for the free calls. A 300 baud modem was the shit in 85. Most these fetuses have no idea how anything works and what I used to do to get a connection would make their mind explode.
I turned off those modem noises.
I still have a Hayes Smartmodem 1200 with the beautiful aluminum case.
Facebook, Myspace, etc. all came after I finished grad school.
I had a crappy phone line back then, so I needed those sounds to diagnose connection issues.
I can still tell the difference between an AOL handshake and a Prodigy one.
Stop....PLEASE!!! ....i can only get SO erect!
icq 29533018 hit me up, but of course that was already an additional fancy layer on top of text only chat. I had it bridged in my bitlbee setup via libpidgin together with my gtalk and irc and other xmpp stuff, and had it run in irssi in a screen on my server (next to the other screen that ran mutt for my email).
and check this: to this day I consider it the best chat setup I've ever had.
I cut my teeth on bulletin boards. We actually ran a 2-node bbs with 2 dedicated phone lines out of our house.
66618055 I kept putting off getting on. I was online on the CompuServe days before Prodigy or AOL. I had three different places to access the internet back in 1992. My catchphrase is "I am from the internet. I'm here to help." I deeply miss Usenet.
I couldn't join facebook cuz I no longer had my .edu address. also, it was on a vax machine...
but i still remember it.
Anyone who tries to cut anyone else out of the herd is a dick, nothing more. I am the Army and Navy.
Army Navy Air Force baby.
Up here in Canada we have "Legion" clubs where veterans go to socialize (drink) and we also have "The Army and Navy" clubs where veterans go to socialize (drink). It may be the same down south but am unsure. I would never exclude the air force by design. 😊
Best fish fry on earth is held at the Legion. You could smoke indoors in a Legion until about 2010 I think? As long as people were done eating.
Maybe some kind of in-joke of air-force not getting to drink ) socialise ( because they have to be ready to scramble.
More a stupid response to that guy who said "I am Legion".
16577270 was mine not even close to op number.
9337000 checking in
968015 was my boss
1576488 checking in
ICQ 514984 checking in.
8833052,
Edit: but I originally got the Internet in my house in Aug of 1986. I was almost 6 years old. I've been on the Internet since before it was the World Wide Web. Back in the days of BBSs, and MUDs. By the time I got that UIN, I was already 15, and heading to university.
I'm reasonably certain that I may be among a few hundred people that never went backwards on our connection speed, and had 24 h access to ISDN by 1996, and never have lost Internet access since 1986.
2845383
4469182
I suddenly want to play Ultima Online!
1576488
2251298
I am elite. Give me warez doodz!
I have the number “x277853” burned into my memory… but I can’t 100% remember what it was for. I want to say it was my ICQ, but no one else seems to have an x at the beginning of theirs? Where was this x number from?
conversations? on geocities? telnet on geocities? wtf is this?
I think they're referring to some early java applet clients that were popular back in the day. he might have telnet'd into the servers that the clients (which were hosted on geocities) would connect to.
only reason why I think that is because I did similar and even found a way to circumvent room bans using telnet 🤣.
In one server variant you could change your name to a mod after they left the room and have admin privileges in that room.
a particularly shitty mod at the time received my ire and I was able to ban them from their own rooms because the software only validated on the clients to not ban yourself 😈
man, I've always been an asshole.
I never had a conversation on geocities, but I do remember you could do some SSI stuff, so maybe it was possible. I think lost my last geocities site password and didn't care to go through the effort of resetting it in '96 or so.
You can telnet into the HTTP port basically everywhere that doesn't auto-redirect to the HTTPS port (and start/resume a TLS session), and there could be stuff in the HTML source (or headers) that a browser might hide from you, at least by default -- but I can't think of how you would use that in geocities to "see private messages". (In theory you could manually start/resume a TLS session, but a proper telnet client might break on some of the bytes received, and you'd definitely have to figure out how to send some non-ASCII bytes.)
Man, I still remember my old dial-up BBS handle.
Not even 6 digits. Child.
@[email protected] @[email protected]
I'm 30 (Zennial microgeneration) and the only item from the list I could directly relate to is the perceptible audible difference between baudrates, not just because I did experience dial-up Internet, but also because I tinkered with radio modulation (hands-on experience with ham radio).
As for numeric identifiers, I can recall of a few ones, but I didn't use ICQ: things such as (if I recall correctly) ECE9D8 hex color being the specific shade of gray for window background in Windows XP, the ID of a specific Orkut community I used to participate at the time, among other numeric memories I have (many of which are buried in some kind of "locked state", i.e. I'd need specific triggers in order to recall them, just like I'm occasionally reminded of cartoons I watched during my childhood).
In fact, my numeric and symbolic memory is particularly good. I can still clearly remember a few mnemonics from school, such as Portuguese "reficofage" (kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, species) from biology classes, "sohcahtoa" (sine = opposite / hypotenuse, cosine = adjacent / hypotenuse, tangent = opposite/ adjacent) and "seno sem sono / cosseno com sono" (sine awake/vertical, cosine sleeping/horizontal) from math, AT and GC pairs also from biology, among a vast repertoire of mnemonics... without mnemonics, I remember x = (-b ± √(b² - 4ac)/2a for second degree polynomials, I remember pi = 3.1415926, I remember phi = 1.618033, I remember mol = 6.02 * 10^33, among many other constants and things... I developed my own mnemonics as well, I remember the whole Morse code and ASCII codepoints for letters and numbers, I remember some commands from Visual Basic 6, I remember some windows libraries such as user32.dll and kernel32.dll... FileSystemObject ActiveX... wow, I mean, I remember a lot of very old things... And it's been a bit more than a decade since the school times and my Windows XP childhood.
In the eyes of the society, however, it may be quite a pointless ability in times where one can just "Google it". Well, guess I'm still going to remember things despite Google's existence.
Anybody here remember Plastic, circa 2000? It was a forum kind of like Reddit, although I don't remember if it had upvotes or not.
upvotes and gamification of human interaction ruined the internet and are directly responsible for the extremity of discourse today.
The internet was so much better before that shit.
Which is also the era before social media, because as far as I'm aware, social media introduced those addiction driven gamification mechanism for what should be, by now, clearly obvious reasons to even the most thick skulled individuals.
No, you're looking at it through rose colored glasses. Pure chronological sorting purely awarded the most active commenters regardless of quality, and led people to submit lots of low quality comments. Plus there was the "bump" phenomenon where a useless comment was made simply to manipulate the sorting.
Forums before slashdot just weren't that great without heavy moderation. By outsourcing some portion of moderation to the users, it made for higher quality discussion in the forums that allowed threading and voting.
and every forum had rules against bumping, typically only once in 24 hours, and only like once or twice. It was never a problem, much less as egregious as you try to paint it to be.
and I'd still take that any day, over the toxic miasma of gamification, advertising, and multibillionaire control we have now.
Honestly, I dont know how anyone can say that the days before gamification, before adpocalypse, before billionaire hijacking of the internet for their own personal ends, is worse than what we have today. It borders on either lunacy, or propaganda.
You're talking about pure bumping where someone has a zero-content comment like "bump" and nothing else. I'm talking about the entire spectrum of low to high quality content, from "bump" to the general phenomenon of reviving old threads to soft bumps like adding additional useless information to an unanswered request.
Other examples include stupid arguments that needed moderation to be shut down (a phpBB or vBulletin post that spanned 50+ pages in a forum where 3-4 was the norm, all because 2 users wouldn't shut the fuck up), always occupying the top of the chronological sort.
The point is that any active forum with more than 1000 comments per day needed to be heavily moderated. User votes allowed forums to scale beyond that limited size. Chronological sort was terrible and didn't scale beyond a group of 100-200 users (not coincidentally similar to Dunbar's number), which is why any decent forum today doesn't do it by default, including any totally free and open source forums, like the fediverse forum platforms of Lemmy and Piefed and Mbin. And even choosing to put these platforms on pure chronological sort reduces the quality of the overall experience.
I'm talking about the use of user voting, which undoubtedly improved the quality of forums (along with comment threading so that each comment could branch off into its own collapsible side discussion) when slashdot and a bunch of copycats started doing similar things (see HN, Reddit). You can't look at Reddit in 2026 and complain that the sorting algorithms they implemented in 2005 or 2007 made things worse. No, things got worse around 2015-2020 when the front page algorithm stopped prioritizing quality over engagement bait.
ICQ 2042903
@BonesOfTheMoon I was 76474.3012 on Compuserve
Sidney, TX or close by. Its why I never would show mine.
Wow. Seriously.
The first five digits of mine was a local zip code. Not quite my zip code but less than twenty miles away. I think they may have handed them out from the nearest tymnet node. There was a university there as well.
I remember using a program called “Neotrace” to find the general geographic area a user was in based on their IP.
That freaked people out in the 90’s.
@MehBlah At the time I lived thousands of miles from there
But now you are back close by? The ID was based on your address. That part was confirmed by someone I know who worked there in the early 90's.
@MehBlah No, I've never lived in TX, so ???
Okay. I guess.
Aol mp3 channel 1
Behold... a 7th!
Bro got brutally post mogged. Unfortunate for him that he crossed paths with an Elder. He needs to grind 4chan for the next few weeks if he hopes to ever recover. Instagram reels won't help him out of this one.
UltraGiGaGigantic slaps BonesOfTheMoon around a bit with a large trout
57598641, checking in.
Also, I just recently found a list online of old-school BBS names and numbers, and that was a fun 15 minutes going, "yup, called that one. and that one. ooh, that was the one with great u/d ratios."
Ah Telix...
Frigg off, phreak!
I was on Usenet before AOL even knew it existed.
None of that is a flex. ICQ is the same shit from the endless September. Personally I used to read Usenet on a mainframe, and thought it was cool we could see weather maps with gopher. I don't think any of this makes me cool at all. Just that I was nerdy and liked the escape technology used to be when the signal to noise was good.
I remember ratio FTP sites
(I also remember how to make them look like you're uploading a lot quickly using a 14.4k modem.....by uploading files full of null bytes and using the compression to your advantage.)
You'd think he would have set up a usenet server running over UUCP. Or perhaps writing sendmail.cf files by hand?
mine is 4906xxx. Yep. been a while.
ICQ number? Newfangled stuff. BITNET TALK rulez. I wonder if anybody here has ever heard of BITNET...
Bragging about how long you have been on social media is like bragging that you are the coolest kid in a special needs classroom.
And for people who might be impressed, a 7 digit ICQ number proves they aren't really old school.
What about my 5 digit Slashdot uid number? Does anyone remember Slashdot?
I do. In fact as part of the reddit exodus, and the shut down of hardocp, I found myself going over there more often as part of my "scan of the internet".
six digits here , loooooowwww six digits.
Oh yeah, mines 6 digits, but the first 3 are 101. I started using it more when Reddit enshittified too much.
I do.
https://slashdot.org/~ender (edit, since it's not super obvious - #79)
Nice. Too bad Slashdot doesn't show the date an account was created. I would like to what year I made mine, Around 30,000 so I know it's pretty early, but would that be '98, '99,or '00?Don't know. My Fark profile was created 2002.
I would bet 98-99? I have no real insight into the numbers, just a guess. Fark frontpage days were pretty 👍
What about my Fark account number being a low 6 digit number (It would have been lower, but I just lurked for a year first)?? Or how far I got in various MUDDs on my local BBS?? I need someone to recognize my internet clout!! My gmail account is my name with no numbers.
I played YAHOO! Games, god damnit, and used Dogpile to search Ask Jeeves, Lycos, and Excite, HotBot, and AltaVista!!!1!!!!
My ISP (run by a jerky company) kept its BBS running until the mid-90s just for us still playing the MUDDs.
I'm a bit
olderyounger (don't post right before falling asleep, kids!), but this reminds me of back when people used to shame people with 8 digit SteamIDs, because they were obviously noobs, compared to 7 digit people, and of course the 6 digit people.Bwah, my 7 digit one starts with a 0, yours starts with 8, [insert various slurs]!
And now the entire format has been through I think like 3 total revisions or something?
All depends on what that first digit is.
Wow, still taking shots at disabled kids in this day and age.
The kids are in fact not alright.
Oh hey, did you watch "Waiting..." recently, and decide to mold your identity thru that piece of cinema?