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What we used to do online in the olden days

Started by 23 Daves, August 19, 2011, 08:34:48 PM

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vrailaine

Before getting internet at home, I initially just looked up gaming websites to find out about older final fantasy games and all the weird import games listed on the back on videogame magazines.

From 2002-2004, I spent computer class in secondary downloading gameboy roms, which were just about the only think you could manage to download in there over the hour.

Upon getting dial-up, when it was was super slow on our first pc, I'd leave the computer alone while downloading SNES games and the occasional song as browsing the internet guaranteed the downloads would fail.
With the newer PC, I started using myspace and forums and things while obsessively browsing allmusic and other sites for recommendations of older music which i would download 2-3 mp3s of in each of the few evenings I'd be online each week. Had a bit of a burst in confidence in real life as a result of being able to have okay conversations online, which was neat. Most the people I talk to on facebook and IM things now are people I met around then.

Then I got broadband, sat in front of films and television shows until the day I died.

Famous Mortimer

Aside from a very brief go at MUDs back in about 1987 or so (a Commodore 64 with a modem almost as big as it was) it was going to Uni in 1994 and discovering Uni message boards and websites devoted to Pixies and so on. I've been flaming people since some of you lot were in short trousers etc.

But having it at home...would have been 1999, and I used to go on wrestlezone pretty much exclusively and pore through the badly-written tabloid-headline articles. Then I started on their forum, then on to a bunch of other places, a few of which I still visit today.

gmoney

I remember a bloke coming into to our school to talk to us about computer technology and the internet when I was in primary school (probably about 1995) and me not having a fucking clue what he was talking about. 'Phone lines connected all over the world? Information superhighway? Gigabyte? I'm scared, will I still be able to play Championship Manager and my cracked copy of Sam and Max?' We had a computer that ran Windows 3.1 right up until 2001, but by then I'd been on the internet at school and at friends houses and it all seemed very exciting. When we did eventually get dial up I quickly settled into it, joining a few forums (hip hop and wrestling based) and downloading music (Audiogalaxy!). Pretty much what I do now.

biggytitbo

I remember back in the old days on the internet you could groom real kids, now they're all just policeman pretending to be kids. Sad times.

Famous Mortimer

Quote from: gmoney on August 20, 2011, 07:43:43 AM
downloading music (Audiogalaxy!)
I loved Audiogalaxy. That little box with the list of all the songs you had queued...the truly bizarre little comments section some artists had (I remember wanting to download a wrestler's theme music once, and one of the comment threads at "WWF" was about whether anyone had seen a wrestler's penis pop out of their trunks, and if so how hairy it was).

Jim Jarmusch

Quote from:  27th September 2001Internet radio station Groovetech is to celebrate its first year of broadcasting next month with some special shows and live performances. The festivities will commence on October 15 and will continue through the week. Lone Swordsman Andrew Weatherall, the first DJ to ever appear on Groovetech, will be kicking things off with a Haywire Sessions show. Following that will be a special live performance from Keith Tenniswood's Radioactive Man. Shows through the week will come from Colin Dale, Perverted Science and The Nextmen, The Orb, Portishead's Andy Smith, Hospital Records and Intec's DJ C1. 

Groovetech has showcased some top guests over the past twelve months, with archived sets from the likes of DJ Craze, Suburban Knight, Freddy Fresh, Atjazz, Umek, Mixmaster Morris, Kevin Saunderson, Mike Dearborn, Joey Beltram, Doc Martin and Matthew Herbert.

Nothing has ever replaced it. It was an Internet radio station and online record shop with studios in London, NY, San Francisco and possibly Toronto. It only ran for two, two an half years before going under. 

Having to make do with recording BBC Radio 1 Essential Mixes on cassette to this couldn't have been more radical change. They had 56kbps live Real Player streams with a webcam set up of the DJ's. Whoever was in charge sourced the absolute best talent to represent every "underground" genre. Half the names I'd never heard or seen printed in MixMag.

I discovered more music there than anywhere else and it developed my taste to the point that going out in Liverpool suddenly appeared shit.

Following people on SoundCloud is not the same.

kngen

Quote from: shiftwork2 on August 19, 2011, 11:56:06 PM
Finding foreign radio stations (ok US ones) through windows media player, and marvelling at hearing a San Francisco radio station playing in our basement office when we couldn't even get FM in there.  Sounds trite now but this was jaw-dropping at the time.

yes, this was definitely a 'oh shit - this is the future' moment for me, too. also, in about 97/98 finding a site that linked you to live webcams, and watching a feed (which refreshed every second or so) from a corner on Hollywood Boulevard. I sat for god knows how long  in the middle of the night, just watching people walking (jerkily) down the street on a sunny day thousands of miles away, and I was literally fucking shivering, just thinking how cool this was.

Consignia

I remember circa '94, I got special permission to download the latest version of One Must Fall 2097, which was a beefy 2.5MB, and required over two hours connected to the net on our 28.8kbs modem. Pah, these days you'd think nothing of a download so small.

hpmons

#38
Edit, maybe thats too weird to actually type.

Viero_Berlotti

Quote from: Jim Jarmusch on August 20, 2011, 08:33:48 AM
Nothing has ever replaced it. It was an Internet radio station and online record shop with studios in London, NY, San Francisco and possibly Toronto. It only ran for two, two an half years before going under.

Having to make do with recording BBC Radio 1 Essential Mixes on cassette to this couldn't have been more radical change. They had 56kbps live Real Player streams with a webcam set up of the DJ's. Whoever was in charge sourced the absolute best talent to represent every "underground" genre. Half the names I'd never heard or seen printed in MixMag.

I discovered more music there than anywhere else and it developed my taste to the point that going out in Liverpool suddenly appeared shit.

Following people on SoundCloud is not the same.

It's not live but Samurai FM has an excellent selection of up to date underground dance music radio podcasts. Also WYNU'S 'Beats In Space' which has been going since 1999 and can be caught live every Tuesday 10:30pm to 1:00am EST.

http://www.beatsinspace.net/

http://samurai.fm/

Cerys

Mmmmm.  University.  Email, AberMud, Bullet and alt.fan.dragons.  Then a long gap between 1995 and 2000, when I landed on the World Wide Web.

23 Daves

Unlikely to be of interest to many here, but in my case a special mention should go to Poesie.com (which ran from about 1998- 2002), a very basic internet site set up as a large community of people offering advice and guidance on short stories and poetry in development.  A brilliant bunch of users and a fantastic site, and communicating ideas with American, Australian, Canadian and Kiwi writers felt like a whole load of barriers coming down at the time.

Several key contributors have since gone on to produce commercially available work, including one who was recently mentioned as a new writer to watch in The Times - I have to wonder if the site was a big factor in helping them along.  If you were living in some provincial town somewhere and couldn't get access to decent feedback, it was just an amazing place to seek it out, and the users pulled no punches. 

Kapuscinski

I used to use MSN messenger a lot when I was at school. This was pre-Facebook. I remember being introduced to Facebook in 2006 at university, and then Twitter in 2008. I log into MSN once a year now.


buttgammon

I still use MSN but unfortunately, very few other people seem to. I've got one friend who uses it a fair amount but she's the exception. Facebook annoyed me so much I had to stop using it, so I'm seriously wishing people would go back to proper messaging. There was a time that I actually had Facebook's own IM facility set up so I could use it through MSN - that was the only way I could actually bring myself to use it.

Ronnie the Raincoat

I spent 90% of my Internet time on the Megazine Yahoo! Group. I felt like a queen when I was made a moderator. How I miss Teletext.   I spent the other 10% of my time working (with HTML on Notepad, which misled my parents into thinking I was some sort of computer genius) on the Geocities Megazine website and the League of Gentlemen website I ran (with an, "Are you local?" cursor trail, which probably caused a fair few monitor smash rage attacks).

We got the internet - well, AOL - in 1997 but I only started taking an interest a year later, having been allowed to stay up on Sunday nights to watch South Park and became obsessed with downloading wavs and mpegs of Cartman singing about Kyle's Mom's BigFatBitchness. This was immediately followed by a newsgroup (alt.music.manics; uk.sport.football.clubs.liverpool), Napster and smut (worldsex.com) lust which blighted my parents' phone bill.

NaCl

My mother streamed an N*Sync song via AOL, and all the neighborhood urchins gathered in front of my brand-spanking-new Compaq computer to listen.

MuteBanana

When I was in Sixth Form in 1999 a few of us used Yahoo Messenger to chat while at home. It was great because for the first time I was talking to friends of friends. People I had never had much interaction with at school. Girls especially. I remember the instigator of this Yahoo Messenger gang tried to get everyone to follow his advice and create an email that was just their name and then 123456. He said 'Why would you need to create an email address any differently?'. But I did, I made up a little internet moniker for myself, like a rebel.

Then came Yahoo chat rooms and talking to cute girls from Texas. Has anyone tried getting back into Yahoo chat? It's a fucking nightmare. Why the pirate theme? It's total bollocks and the profiling thing is lame as well. I used to have a sweet profile, now it's gone.

Then it was Stile Project and MSN and a bit of ICQ and AIM, but I never used them much. I started posting on forums based in America and made some friends online. I even discussed going out there to visit one of them, but I chickened out.

The one thing I remember and miss about the internet back in the early 00s is the chat. Logging on and seeing lots of people around and having three or four conversations on the go. Now I log on and nobody is about. They're all out and about having social lives. But it's okay, because they can access Facebook on their mobile phones.

Yeah right, like that's the same. :(

salr

I used to go on the barrysworld servers everyday to play qwtf n stuff.

I suppose this comes under first world problems but my dad got so fed up of the amount of time me and my older sister were tying up the phone line and the bills we caused that he got us our seperate line in about '98 or so.

This must have been before mobile phones took off because I would have to cut short my place in the odd clan match so that my sister could talk to her boyfriend.

chand

When I started using the internet, most of what I did involved looking up song lyrics I'd never quite figured out, and getting most likely entirely wrong answers. Also, Mr T vs Everything.

It did seem more exciting in those days, finding rare live versions and b-sides and covers by bands you liked on Audiogalaxy, which took an hour to download, so you savoured every note once you had it. Also, creating horrendous-looking Geocities pages (my Geocities page was a replacement for a Homestead-built site after Homestead went paid-for), and checking out other people's pages with backgrounds that took forever to load and made the pages unreadable when they did.

My main memory of the olden days of the internet though is of downloading the four 15-second free preview clips from porn sites and having to queue them in a looping playlist to get something resembling a porn film.

thenoise

My friends and I used Quickdot to chat in 2000 ish, still my favourite.  Shame it started charging so we fucked off to ICQ, which was (is) shit.

In the late nineties I used to mostly look up film reviews (imdb.com was pretty exciting development), look at shitty personal websites, nothing much really.  I remember getting napster and taking all evening to download a song.  I remember by dad remarking that he heard of new kind of internet where you can download a film faster than you can watch it, but not really thinking that technology would ever make it to our house.  Nerdy magazines/TV shows had been predicting the demise of the keyboard/mouse combo for 10+ years even then, and here I am still with a keyboard/mouse.

Nasty thrills amoung my friends included 'Gallery of the Grotesque', annoying things included that hamster dance thing.  I remember someone at school got told off for downloading a text file of terrorism/activism instruction, like 'Anarchists Cookbook' I suppose.

 I once got to number 6 in the all time rich list on Popex, the fictional pop exchange.

Tokyo Sexwhale

I started off on AOL in 1998 - via a disk on the cover of a magazine.

Immediately, I was thrust into the murky world of AOL Chat - and immediately starting chatting up anyone with a female name.  There was that terrible wait for a picture, only to find the flirty chatty girl you thought you were chatting to, was in fact a bored housewife, or a chubby teen that looked like a boy.  Sorry that last one was very specific.

It was about a year before I realised you could access the internet outside of AOL's own browser screen.  That was a big revelation.

Also the usual horror story of £100 phone bills, when I wasn't earning a lot back then.

I accept the terms of the

Freeserve chat + illicit drinking as a 15 year old circa 1999-2000. I wonder if any of you were there? Probably not, as most of you can spell at all.

http://web.archive.org/web/20021025051752/http://www.popex.com/stuff/stats/richListNice.html heres when I was at number 19, I used to go under the user name Snif.

SOTS

#55
I only started using the internet circa 2002-ish, at the age of 12. May not seem as though it's that far back, but this was still on dial-up and the internet was still far less shiny and all-encompassing as it is 9 years later. Like now, I used to go on shonky messageboards (the BBC's official Eastenders one, especially) and as well as some rubbish chat places that I don't explicitly remember. I can't remember when I got into Habbo Hotel but I spent a lot of time on there and on Yahoo messenger and MSN. I got WinMX and Kazaa and literally any other file sharing software that ended in me getting some sort of virus.

Kind of just a combination of youthful pursuits and shitter versions of what we have now.

I accept the terms of the

Quote from: SOTS on August 22, 2011, 07:21:55 PM
I only started using the internet circa 2002-ish, at the age of 12
Fuck, could you give a warning before saying stuff like that?

Mr_Simnock

My earliest memory of the internet was around 1986-7, can't remember exactly when. A sixth former ( I was either in first or second year ) was using a BBC Micro and browsing ( if you can call it that ) holiday information on Prestel. I only remember it because I was a bit confused at the time when he started asking anyone if they wanted to go on a flight the next day. Prestel was basic to say the least and each page resembled something akin to CEEFAX but you could at least order stuff and download software on it. Baud rates and terminal identifiers, them wert days.

I accept the terms of the

I would love to have used Prestel (not really the Internet, but still cool). I can't imagine how excited I would have been about that as a kid. I used to experience BBS systems secondhand on the Amiga through floppy disk compilations, but having a modem and being able to do it myself always seemed out of reach.

The Internet was exciting in 1999, with people's websites looking unique and having fun content. Now it's really dull with everybody has homogenous Facebook profiles and using it like a basic utility. The excitement is gone, despite it offering us all of the free movies, TV shows, books and music we could ever want.

23 Daves

To be honest, for me the peak of the Internet was the point before YouTube and other video sharing sites were censored by the corporations - so I'm guessing that would actually be about 2007/2008.  The time when you could suddenly watch absolutely anything, including stuff you never thought you'd see again in your life. 

Talking to people?  Fuck that!  I've suddenly found a video by The Pastels.  I'll be with you later. 

It's still not that bad now, mind you, just minus the sense of sheer discovery.