I'm 36, I put my first PC together at the age of 12 in the year 2000. Been through the entire evolution of the internet. I remember people sharing the Titanic movie through mIRC. Napster, Limewire then torrents. This site has an old school feel, I thought the internet was completely dead, at least if you try to use Google to search anything.

YouTube was super cool when it first came out, I had a YouTube account the first day it launched. In 2016 YouTube did a mass ban and deleted alllll of the cool content and creators. This let all the garbage fake & bullshit rise to the top that is popular now. I promise you look at the majority of popular youtubers you'll see they came up around 2017 because it was so easy to if you were just making consistent content that wasn't "controversial" at that time.

Just my little rant, this collection of websites and this forum linked from them I stumbled on feel very nostalgic, my props to the creator.

 

Last edited by a moderator: Feb 25, 2024

Total BS.

 

...if anyone was on any of the EFNET #warez(xx??) IRC channels back in the day (late 80's+) with some windows client (like mIRC or somesuch) you would have gotten KB'd in 2 minutes... No one was cool on IRC unless they were running some sort of scripted *NIX command line IRCII client. If nicks like dethnite and vassago don't ring any bells, and you don't know what a net-split, kLINE, or ping-flood is, you were probably just some rando wannabe script kiddie who thought they were "1337" and imagined themselves hanging with the big boys... but actually BlacksHawk's assessment is more than likely the correct one in this case...

 

Last edited: Feb 24, 2024

'Been through the entire evolution of the internet.'

Except you missed the first 10 years, which were the peak if you wanted it to actually feel special, non corporate and new.

 

Meh. People were exchanging Grateful Dead news on the net before 1990. Those hippies were trailblazers.

 

The corporate gatekeeping and control of content, and the masses embracing that model that then later allow those corporations to do as they pleased with their monopolistic positions, was an involution. As saccamo said, you missed the good stuff. This forum is what it is, nostalgic is your own bias. Read Stallman.

 

"In 2016 YouTube did a mass ban and deleted alllll of the cool content and creators"

what ?

 

adpocalypse was the name for it , but the tos shift started 2018-2022 then got even weirder 2023 to now.

dunno about mass bans or all that

 

i been using this website (not forum) since 2011.. so alot of great stuff i found on here

 

The internet was the next big thing after the BBS area. So if you were not around for the mailboxes and BBSs, and you only know the internet, I am not sure that you qualify for any special place regarding personal computer or internet history. If you didn't have a 9.6 or 14.4 kbps analog modem or a 8mhz or 16mhz IBM pc with a monochrome graphics card, don't even try to show off. And Yes, I am that old.

 

Ex-Sysop Micropolis BBS South-West-Germany ... US-Robotics was the cream and ... 2600Hz the Dip ;-) (sure the most don´t know what i´m talking about ;-))

Greets ... from Germany ...

 

This was my workstation in 1925:

 

usenet was the only useful internet product til Cern dumped HTML on the world. You could actually discuss the entire world of ideas with people across the planet (who spoke english) over a matter of days or weeks giving lots of time to think over the replys making for a rational conversation, rather than the streams of hate rage bot spewing on the internet (which is really just the World Wide Web) these days

of course even then Spam raised its ugly head, in the form of the infamous email chain letter "Make Money Fast" which every newbie in the world sent to everyone they knew.

 

Am I missing something? I don't see the steam pipe connections to power that thing, was it using whale oil???

 

Sshh, you'll bore and/or scare away the little kids! And make the rest of us feel old... though I wasn't heavy duty into warez (apart from standard license keys from BBS's) back then, was into IRC early '90s onwards. Local linux users group mainly, and my school's channels. Though I'm pretty sure efnet didn't exist in the 80's yet, that was all leet BBSs to my knowledge then.

 

Kate, I think you were still in boarding school in 2011. you must have had a shared connection in your dorm.

 

I'm getting weepy remembering the 1st mp3 I downloaded back in the 90's, and then the search how the f*ck do I play this thing...

 

No shit, they were doing lossless audio trading (once they moved from DATs as distribution) in the '90s and BitTorrent was out of that scene as well.

 

according to Wikipedia, Al Gore built the internet in his basement in 1992, so I don't know how it could be, unless AL was a deadhead and let the rest of the cult be the Beta Testers for him and Tipper.

 

I remember my first mp3 (and player), a mate had managed to hear about this thing and sourced WinAMP and a couple of tunes. The first one I pilfered from him was the player, and "Marbles" by Plastikman. This was maybe a year before I heard of Napster because fast home internet was still modems, and two years before I had a decent link at home (dual channel ISDN).

No wonder that tune holds a special place in my heart.