Internet nostalgia

Remember when?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rxM8C71GB8w

caught an old episode of Buffy the other day. Here is a joek I hope to use soon:
"I met him online."
"On line for what?"

Unable to connect to SQL server. TURN BACK YOU POXY FULE

xp Requires you be in New York, though, doesn't it?

what if I use a new york accent?

It's like FIDONet, but with more bandwidth and faster response times.

And if you get this browser thing called Mosaic, you can do all kinds of neat shit. But it's a resource hog and you'll want to be running a Solaris workstation or a UNIX box.

If you don't want people to know what sites you've been surfing to, simply delete the .HST file.

Sticking to Gopher myself.

http://screenshots.en.softonic.com/en/scrn/39000/39464/2t_netscape_logo_150.jpg

"Can you get off the internet? I need to make a phone call."

http://chaco.laberintobbs.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/06/LegendOfTheRedDragon.gif

omg is that a MUD?

sad dad in video writing himself emails from his daughter jill at college

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gsNaR6FRuO0

Ah, that brings me back.

anyone who says they didnt hum along to that shit is a fucking liar

or a balanced individual, one of the two

SHAREWARE

ICQ

browsers w/o tabs

http://i56.tinypic.com/20f2as9.jpg

browsers w/o tabs

omg

don't bring me back to that world

having to get off the internet to use the phone

omg

*shivers*

"Can you get off the internet? I need to make a phone call."

― markers, Friday, October 1, 2010 9:35 PM (29 minutes ago)

;-)

unreg ilxors

http://stopthecap.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/prodigy-online.jpg

http://www.ethomaz.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/07/palace.gif

Referred by: Just Surfed On In!

http://www.qweas.com/downloads/games/puzzle-word-games/scr-snood.jpg
http://i.iinfo.cz/s/87/4285-icy-tower.gif

also

fake cybersex in AOL chatrooms

dudes i love snood

SNOOD CHARACTERS POLL

popup ads

(the ones that actually open a child window)

<font></font> tags

the Yahoo directory

I have had a problem when trying to reminisce about Prodigy. Lots of people don't remember it or didn't know it in the first place. So trying to say something like, "I loved trolling the Prodigy message boards when I was 12" gets this look in response, a look that says 'you think you were a genius kid or something?'

snood was not 'internet' jordan, also i have it on my computer RIGHT NOW

lol abbott. my most prominent memory involving prodigy is stumbling upon a wheel of time forum and having no idea wtf wheel of time was at the age of 9

http://www.bbsdocumentary.com/

300 baud acoustic modem -- you dial the phone -- I mean, with a DIAL -- and then press the handset into the cradle. Now that was Internet.

dudes, i'm playing snood right now

for my 8th algebra class ('95) i had a bearded, yet relatively young (35-ish) grateful dead fan "hippie" algebra teacher named mr. whitaker. mr. whitaker was really fond of "abtract" mathematical concepts such as fractals. he had lots of fractals posters in the classroom. one day, as a way to encourage us to fool around with The 'Net and thereby enrich the part of our brains that abstract mathematical concepts live in, mr. whitaker told us he'd kick us down us a few extra credit points if we could manage to successfully transmit to him, via the inter net, one (1) electronic mail aka E-MAIL. a few months prior, i'd convinced my dad to buy us an account with a local dial-up ISP, and i was already relatively savvy with it, so it was really no hassle at all. as it turned out, i was the only one in the class sophisticated/advantaged enough to have access to such technology at this time, and mr. whitaker was kind enough to point that out to everyone as he wrote my little extra credits down in the gradebook.

first time watching a video on the internet: some sort of 1 minute video about a space shuttle from NASA which took several hours to download and only played for a few seconds before crashing computer

oh man, that's fantastic

Another 1994 clip. Note how proud Crow is of the setup he describes:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2GoMoeV3Y4A

"And you think that'll make you happy, huh."

"YES."

you're a liar Z S and I don't believe you, unless 'space shuttle from NASA' is code for 'nude scene from fast times at ridgemont high'

it's the truth! bonus pr0n anecdote, though, is not knowing how to delete search history (or knowing that you could delete it, or knowing that it existed)and getting called out by dad - "...and tell me, what exactly is "hotsexvideos.com"?

"...uh, baseball cards"

^that's my totally revisionist version of what I would say, when in reality it was more like "nnnghhhh...i'm...nghgggghhhh...sorry...nnnnghhphhh"

"well you see dad, it's actually, um, 'hots ex videos' -- the guy's nickname is hots... no i have no idea how he got it -- and he posts testimonial videos from his ex-girlfriends explaining what went wrong in the relationship... so it's really an educational thing, when you think about it. it's a public service, is what it is"

ILX: the Momus years

IRC! I used to be on that shit non stop. I went and got a permanent diaup connection and everything.

my housemate Chris explaining how these two asshole lawyers posted messages advertising their firm to like, every single board on usenet

http://qodem.sourceforge.net/tradewars1.gif

//roll

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JMLH_QyPTYM

bonus pr0n anecdote,

Taking about a month to amass eight floppies full of pr0n.

how long did it take you to amass eight stiffies?

I'd graduated to a 20MB hard drive by then.

early 90s: going to a library meeting about the internet -- full room, with the lecturer showing off gopher (veronica, jughead, etc) and ascii art

1996?: using netscape 1.0 with the status bar managing the files to save, which just disappear if they don't finish downloading

not actually owning a computer and having to use the public library to access Hotmail account

nb not actually nostalgic about this

Printing out a picture of Elvis Costello & The Attractions, then adding text to it with MS Word and getting the image transferred to a t-shirt. Probably 1995 or so, and I had that shirt for 10 years.

I downloaded and printed a bunch of Kinks tablatures too, enough to make a three-ring binder get pretty thick. I'm sure my dad loved getting back into his office (which doubled as the guest room) the following Monday and finding out his printer had run out of ink.

xp i did that with the picture of sly on the CD insert for the family stone's greatest hits! it was awesome! i miss that shirt...

once I met someone off the internet, and I took the train across the country to see this dude, and I spent the next hour trying to ring him from the station payphone to say I had arrived and could I get a lift, but I couldn't get through, because he was online

because, you see, in those days, online meant no phone calls
and we didn't have cellphones
uhh
yeah, never mind.

For that just out of 1998 feel try http://wonder-tonic.com/geocitiesizer/

I'm pretty sure I had a geocities page with like five links or something

web rings

^^^^^^^^^

'Under Construction' GIF, sometimes animated.

"_00 hours free!!!" AOL CDs regularly appearing in mailbox

leaving the computer online overnight to download the latest game demo from HappyPuppy.com

turning off images to surf faster

hitting "stop" before clicking a link, because netscape used to crash if u tried to click away from the current page while it was still loading

people's personal "homepages"

banners, along with instructions to "contact the Webmaster" to place your banner ad in that space

― dude [yr gettin' a] (del)

Nostalgia is useless

banaka = smarterchild

I'm not sure if banaka = smarterchild.

nostalgia is the 'naive reading' of history/cultural memory, preparatory to any meaningful act of criticism

Welcome back, bernard snowy! How may I help you now?

criticism is not what is needed; what is needed is dispassionate analysis and action, action, action.

I'll have to think about that one for a while.

@_@

(o)_(o)

=||((O))_((O))||=

got mah hater-blockers on (||)_(||)

there is no hate to block, only the blinding light of truth (to use a hackneyed metaphor)

lolin at harbl

banaka how do you pronounce hackneyed, do you say 'hack en eyed' like 'hack en sack'

because I imagine that's how you say it

did anyone spend hours looking at these? i did. http://www.somethingawful.com/d/cliff-yablonski/

oh god yes, and jeff k

My favorite site circa 1997
http://www.alcyone.com/oo/

-exchanging .wavs of sound clips from star wars in an IRC channel called #sw_wavs

-writing sweet IRC scripts that let me play my sweet star wars .wavs and final fantasy .mid's using keyboard shortcuts

looking up wavs of fart sounds with my brother

savagery

setting all of the windows alert/startup/error/etc. sounds to the most obnoxious sound clips I could find

"i wanted to know what she was up to, so i fingered her"
"... YOU WHAT?!?!?"

sorry banaka but my petit-bourgeois class position renders me structurally incapable of apprehending this 'truth' of which u speak ¯\(°_O)/¯

this attempt at subterfuge does not serve you well.

http://www2.b3ta.com/catgame/

- people getting really upset b/c they thought bansai kitty was a real thing

my friends and I getting kicked out of the computer lab for playing MUDs using Telnet in, like, 8th grade

building websites using <table></table> tags

email accounts @yahoo, before Gmail existed

Waiting for YouTube vids to fully buffer before hitting play.

having to use RealPlayer because there was no YouTube

a song taking ten minutes to download per MB

Fighting over the one ethernet cable in the house.

I hate most of these things, actually, and I'm not nostalgic about them at all. Fuck dial-up.

I don't really wish most of this stuff was back either, but web 1.0 was a thing of beauty

AOL WAREZ like
/server SEND LIST
/server SEND 129

AOL Chat Progs
like rainbow text and AOHell
all the original bots

AOL IM Punters

InkLink - the internet shockwave game that is a ripoff of pictionary

I don't really wish most of this stuff was back either, but web 1.0 was a thing of beauty

yeah i miss the wild west amateurish atmosphere that used to be. looking at some weirdo's facebook page is pretty uninteresting compared to looking at said weirdo's webpage circa '99

i'm sorry i meant to say some "ECCENTRIC"

Do You Ever Miss The "Old" Internet

It did feel endearingly DIY once but, while it's fun to poke your head into a sod house or miner's shack, I don't really want to live there.

― M. White (Miguelito), Thursday, July 14, 2005 10:19 PM (5 years ago) Bookmark

lol

lol at yahoo starting out as "jerry's guide to the world wide web"

tho tbf i guess "jerry's guide" no more unlikely than "craigslist"

does anyone else remember this place?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebChat_Broadcasting_System

mirsky's worst of the web

mirsky's or another "worst" site linking to a mall restaurant that had its own website. how ridiculous!

http://blogs.sfweekly.com/shookdown/hamsterdance.jpg

^^^ in retrospect a pioneer in how people use the internet today

http://i637.photobucket.com/albums/uu92/damien_stone/Ukoad3.jpg

This is my page .......

WELCOME TO MY HOME PAGE !!!!!!!!!

I KISS YOU !!!!!

I have in front of me a copy of 'The Internet Directory', a 700+ page book published in 1994. It has two pages about the WWW.

Also from 1994, 'The Whole Internet - User's Guide & Catalog'. 538 pages, and 35 pages on the WWW.

:30 second mark here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yl8a2RkjRpU

Unlike most of you, I first encountered the internet as an adult, roughly aged 40. I had just been hired as a technical writer for a high tech company and it was early 1994. My wife was a librarian and she had already attended talks about how the internet was the coming thing, and she'd spoken with me about it, but at work I became familiar with it.

I'm not kidding when I say I was exposed to Mosaic within a few months of its introduction. First I'd ever heard of CERN. The software engineers were very excited about it.

I recall being shown some web pages, too. They were mostly the "personal" pages of other techies at work, with long lists of links to their favorite sites, like NOAA and various university computer programs, with maybe a poorly digitized, low res photo of the techie embedded on the page, and a simple HTML text about the page's owner.

My first reaction was, if this is the WWW, I don't see where this is such hot shit stuff. More like a clunky toy for tech heads.

I swear that within months of my first seeing the web, one of the software engineers got in trouble for downloading pr0n to his company workstation and showing it to all the other engineers who came into his office.

As for nostalgia for that version of the web, I have none. I do sometimes hate on how commercialized it all is now, but that's just me bitching and moaning about the world, not really serious.

I was an adult as well, and in the fortuitous position of being at university. Still it took our Communications Networks lecturer saying "You're at university. While you're here, you have a free e-mail address and free Internet access. Use it, because in the outside world people have to pay and right now it's very expensive." before I looked into it seriously. But once I was hooked I became a bit of a missionary about it. This brought up the first real problem of the early WWW - I remember saying to a sceptical housemate "yeah, you can find anything", and him writing out a list of not particularly obscure stuff, and saying "OK then snoball, find this stuff", which I more or less failed to do.

Actually the university even supplied students with a small amount of personal webspace, so I could have been sitting here in a rocking chair on the porch saying "hmmm yes, youngster, before you were even a 1% complete in your papa's progress bar, I had my own personal webpage...". Except I can't because I didn't use it, except for a single assignment where the the text had to be published online. Excuse me... (snoball jumps into time machine and goes back to 1994 to slap some sense into 20yr old snoball)

Anyone remember this thing?

http://macarlo.com/images/hotdog6w2kanim.gif

(I actually worked for them for a little bit in 1999)

When Napster came out, I had this whole contraption set up where I had a cord coming out of the headphone jack on my work computer's keyboard, going into an adaptor and going into my mic input on my Sony portable jambox. With this, I would tape songs off of the Internet It was the only way I could think of to get stuff like the Foo Fighters' version of "Baker Street" or the 12" version of "The Glamorous Life" back to the house.

Later, I figured out how to save them to my office's network drive. I was lucky because my employer had just got a CD burner for one of the studios. We were only supposed to use it to burn CDs for clients, but I would sneak in there after hours to burn the downloads onto a CD in real time. Most of my tracks from that era has about a 1-2 sec. lead time because I'd hit record and then stretch over to the computer to hit the space bar to play.

My dad downloaded and taped a bunch of Harry Potter audio books for his car in that manner as recently as last year.

so awesome

Original video on this thread isn't loading for me, keeps stalling and buffering, just like 1995.

Not v. nostalgic for that time, tbh. You could see how it would eventually be immense in theory, but the practice was dial-up, empty chatrooms with people going "hi!" and "HI!! :-)" to each other and Netscape mail choking on Sinister.

Course now we're here and it's shonky 3G, stupid hashtags and iPhone Mail choking on Amazon receipts.

http://www.phreedom.org/cyberpunk-style-guide/

http://web.archive.org/web/19961017235908/http://www2.yahoo.com/

http://web.archive.org/web/19990117032727/http://www.google.com/

http://web.archive.org/web/19961224025757/http://pitchfork.com/

anybody remember the company that would pay you to surf the web, i.e. you would install their program and watch their ads while surfing and they'd send you a check?

also, FTPs

LOLLLLL @ pitchfork.com

i worked dial-up Internet tech support in 99/00 and got to the point I could troubleshoot connection problems by listening to the modem noise:

"Hold the phone up to the modem"
"skrrrrrrrrch-bing-bong-bing-bong-bing-bong-bing-bong-xxxzsxzxszzzzzzsssxxx"
"OK, go into My Computer / Control Panel...."

by the way, I am very pleased to note that not only have animated gifs lived on in web 2.0, they are undergoing a renaissance of sorts in fact

a world without gifs is a deeply impoverished world

massively impressed by herb albert's modem listening diagnostic skills!

yeah, that's hero-level

Haha I used to do modem-noise diagnostics too. *embarassed*. Also had endless strings of DNS addresses memorised. Ah, helpdesk days. I do not miss you and your PEBKACs.

Haha yes, I totally got to bust out PEBKAC at a wedding luncheon, and no one had ever heard it. (My mom-in-law was trying to claim she could not open an MP3 because her husband's computer "doesn't have enough RAM," which...was...not true. It turns out she'd never tried to open it.)

With her it's mostly just PE
in general
in ever part of life
a problem exists.

ANd, that 'quip' was my most successful moment in Sept. 2010. It was a great month!

remember when browsers supported blinking text? now u gotta do that shit in javascript

wizard jon fucking loves the blinky text

xxxpost yeah, I was hardcore. advanced technical knowledge soon rendered totally worthless. had a massive celebration when I quit that job and moved on to Web Dev

Bloody marquee tag...

Personal home pages with ENORMOUS 3" font!

Every webpage with grey background!

playing Everquest and dinner's on the table. "MOM! i can't just pause it! you don't understand. there are people DEPENDING on me!"

i'm sure that happens all the time even now, but EVERQUEST!

Bondage and leather people outnumbering norms 5 to 1.

Old Man Murray.

Before MP3s took off, amassing MIDIs of popular songs.

Once MP3s took off, Audiogalaxy.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ate_my_balls

http://flamesgif.com/archive/ate_my_balls/img/ba01.jpg

Ate my balls was an early example of an Internet meme. In the late 1990s, some web pages were created to depict a particular celebrity or fictional character's relish for eating testicles. Often, the site would consist of a humorous story or comic featuring edited photos about the titular individual eating testicles. The photo editing was often crude, a reflection of the state of software at the time.

A compendious repository of old internet memes.

Oh god frog in a blender I remember that one from my days on nightshift on an ISP helpdesk.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pvz8cTuleG0

Related:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GyKmoPhAebw

One of the student workers I know regarding this:

http://www2.warnerbros.com/spacejam/movie/jam.htm

"Good god. I didn't know websites were this ugly in 1996."

Oh, poor innocent.

That looks significantly nicer than the ANSI art from my BBS.

Yeah I was expecting a disaster and I'm all "Well, it's not very dynamic but my god there was a lot worse then."

Another friend: "at least it doesn't have FRAMES!!!"

did a view source on that site. here's the first couple lines:

<html> 

<!-- Copyright 1996 Warner Bros. Online --> 

<!-- Badda Bing, Badda Boom --> 

later:

<!--**************Ads - Don't Touch!*************************************--> 

yay html comments

there ARE frames on most of the subpages!

also

Cool links and hijinx!

Click above to find out more about our sponsors and the various hip sites that make WB Online the jammin' place that it is.

I am willing to bet whoever wrote that still thinks that's of-the-moment slang.

Clicking on "Warner Bros. Studio Store" reveals, via frames, a little Internet before-and-after.

why tf is that site still online??

No Spacejam news at the moment!

http://www2.warnerbros.com/spacejam/movie/cmp/bball/img/n-games.gif

Hello my future girlfriend; this is what I sound like

Hanson Sucks!
http://lord.xopl.com/ulpage3a/band.gif

http://lord.xopl.com/ulpage3a/no!!!.gif

napster...the very first thing i downloaded over my 56k was fucking Deon Estus - Heaven Help Me. 45 minutes later i was on my way to my first ever mix cd with a friends burner that took approximately 30 minutes to burn a 10-12 song cd.

it was filled with such classics as the theme from Welcome Back Kotter, Deon Estus, The Goats, Chucki Booker. One of my greatest.

http://www.getzsome.com/picts/SlapSpice.jpg

http://cheshirecatalyst.com/lynx1.gif

The first website my friend and I ever made: http://www.angelfire.com/ak2/camels/

Sign my guestbook!

Oh man, I made this huge one with loads of frames and hidden links containing rude words. Had so much fun doing it. Would have to be dead now.

dog latin at age ??

DISCLAIMER
ACHTUNG!
This site has nothing to
do with camels or camelling
asides from the name.
If you do see a camel or even
a dromedare on this
site, please inform us and
we shall have it shot promptly in the head.
Don't think that we won't - me and Adam are
total and utter bastards that way.
So anyway - you know the score.

I made it yesterday. what?

http://i52.tinypic.com/svgy9l.gif

/whois internet nostalgia

I was super stoked to find out my favorite teen girl website from my teen girl years is still around, and still posting great, helpful content like this:

http://img192.imageshack.us/img192/9466/screenshot20110228at827.png

they still have this story about giant nipples <3

dude u guys have to check this site out
boobs.com

http://www.11points.com/images/animatedgifs/underconstruction.gif http://www.11points.com/images/animatedgifs/underconstruction.gif http://www.11points.com/images/animatedgifs/underconstruction.gif

http://www.11points.com/images/animatedgifs/emailme.gif http://www.11points.com/images/animatedgifs/emailme.gif http://www.11points.com/images/animatedgifs/emailme.gif

http://www.11points.com/images/animatedgifs/counter.gif http://www.11points.com/images/animatedgifs/counter.gif

gonna go update my angelfire page

<iframe title="YouTube video player" width="640" height="390" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/JUs7iG1mNjI"; frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JUs7iG1mNjI&feature=related

8,N,1

^ rich kid

http://img826.imageshack.us/img826/3313/weirdlinks.png

^poll

http://memepool.com/

^poll

was just thinking that

Yes, it's a horse inside a car. Click to enlarge.

heh-heh!

http://www.metaphoriclabs.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/03/suckcom.jpg

http://home.bway.net/slutboy/home2.html

Does anyone remember the "Wonderwall", a wall with a lot of band website links?

"to-day is gonna be the day that they link it right back to you"

http://replay.waybackmachine.org/19971108163436/http://www.beat.co.uk/beat/wonderwall.html

This is what it was like (the backing wall has gone tho)

http://paulkatcher.com/archives/000219.shtml

Yeah that's right stet. Eat your heart out. ZMODEM BABY

JUSTIN'S LINKS TO THE UNDERGROUND

I remember crying my eyes out with laughter at this, back in the day.

http://web.archive.org/web/20010605230406/www.thespark.com/science/stinkyfeet/day1.html

Does anyone remember the "Wonderwall", a wall with a lot of band website links?

that were good that

holy cow, www.niftyness.com is still online.

http://www.niftyness.com/graphics/mrjohn.jpg

Trumpet winsock scripts!

one of my favorite insane places (non-political) on the webbernet is still alive!

http://taxi1010.com/

I just got ahold of a copy of the Details "music issue" from '96. It has a big article on "The Internet's Greatest Hits-A music lover's guide to the best sites and sounds on the World Wide Web" and is just dripping w/this stuff.

The lead for the "Music Shopping" section (which singeled out CD Now*, CD Europe, Music Boulevard, CDWorld & BMG Music Service):

Shopping online is convenient, but nothing like walking into your local megastore. Most online "shops" are simply text lists of artists and albums, with an occasional album cover on display. Without the stimulating sensory experience of walking through an actual record store, browsing isn't as likely to inspire that I've-gotta-have-it reaction. However, if you know exactly what you want beforehand, these services are great places to come and get it.

*Which they claim was the best, using for an example buying a double-lp jazz album for $25.97 with next-day delivery for an extra $5.48 and yr encrypted AmEx #.

totally miss geocities

i remember my earliest internet travelling and coming across Stile Project, and being like OMG INTERNET JUST HAS EVERYTHING

My first online music-discovery sight was IUMA: Internet Underground Music Archive. ISTR finding out about a lot of cool bands at the time, but I couldn't tell you now who they were. There was also Garageband.com, where musicians and bands could put up music and critique each other; used to spend a lot of time on there.

one of my favorite insane places (non-political) on the webbernet is still alive!

http://taxi1010.com/

Dude, wow. There is bucketloads of crazy on that site.

i know it is the best

woooooooooow

This is nearly like plunging the depths of ulillillia city.

gimme your balls FOOL

my favourite early internet find

http://www.alcyone.com/oo/

still the 5th result for Yinka Dare: http://www.angelfire.com/stars/yinka/

http://www.almostamazing.com/flash/hyaku.swf

I remember loving this back in the early 90s:

http://www.realchange.org/quayle.htm

http://www.realchange.org/tallskl2.jpg

my favourite early internet find

http://www.alcyone.com/oo/

― plax (ico), Wednesday, March 2, 2011 3:29 PM

This is a decade-plus favorite of mine, too!@

Trumpet winsock scripts!

Congratulations to Trayce for really giving me a blast of nostalgia. Haven't thought about Trumpet Winsock for God knows how long and I never really knew what it meant. I think it was something I clicked on in WIndows 3.1 when there were problems with the internet connection. Beyond that, fuck knows, but what a phrase. Trumpet Winsock!

And it had a little windsock as an icon. I think they were based in Tasmania.

My modem was always crummy so I was constantly writing dialler scripts to make it re-dial, handshake repeatedly, etc. I completely forget how to do all that shit now.

Guy behind Trumpet Winsock basically made no money out of it, because ISPs worldwide gave away the pay-for version without paying him. Now nerds are donating money to him, just because http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2282875

caught an old episode of Buffy the other day. Here is a joek I hope to use soon:
"I met him online."
"On line for what?"

― elephant rob, Friday, October 1, 2010 1:09 PM (5 months ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

i was literally just watching a buffy episode from season 7 (ie the last season) where willow explains what google is to xander

http://www.superbad.com

that's ca 1997

Space Potatoes
The Internet Oracle (still going after 15+ years)
The Cleveland Freenet
...and the other Freenets

http://www.tiedyes.com/thetofuolympics1996.html

http://www.tiedyes.com/tofuimages/tofuwtorchline.gif

Guy behind Trumpet Winsock basically made no money out of it, because ISPs worldwide gave away the pay-for version without paying him. Now nerds are donating money to him, just because http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2282875

Lol at nerds making it completely baffling how to actually donate until someone intervenes halfway down.

Art!

http://www.cbc.ca/news/arts/story/2011/06/06/f-digital-archeology-exhibit.html

Those iMacs are 13 years old?!

Of a sooner kind of nostalgia -- Web Sheriff, still around! Fronted by Ricky Gervais! Oh wait...

http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/la-et-web-sheriff-20110609,0,2614591.story

I have wondered when "digital archaeology" was going to become a common term. I guess that time is arriving.

Hey, the grad students in sociology etc. need to write their thesis papers on something...

I like the internet archive - it IS nostalgic!

http://laughingsquid.com/mtv-news-takes-a-look-at-the-internet-in-1995/

~cyber journalist~

Remember when Adam Curry was some sort of Cybergod because he hosted a chatroom on his own website?

Tunak Tunak Tun always makes me nostalgic. I kinda think this may have been the first "truly huge" viral video among my generation. I honestly think you could play it in a nightclub and it would kill.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real_Ultimate_Power

still can't hear "Big Pimpin'" without thinking about ninjas

from Ned's link

"web enthusiasts talk of many marvels to come. the wonders of virtual reality, which can talk to someone pretending to be a penguin"

Remember when "speaking to people in other countries" was such a huge deal? Now a FAP with foreign pals is u&k on any holiday.

Hard to remember when people maybe had a penpal somewhere and that was it.

I found a webring last night.

Remember when "speaking to people in other countries" was such a huge deal?

In the early Nineties, I chose Compuserve over AOL specifically because it was international.

i am feeling early-Internet nostalgic
but is there a thread for pre-Internet nostalgia?

because i was talking to friends yesterday about how i can hardly remember how i used to make plans with people. and then i remembered: we called each other in advance and made actual plans and stuck to them! those were simpler times.

A neighbor could walk down the block and make conversation. Now a man is staring at facebook lamenting a lack of invitations and no friends online.

xp wow i don't know anyone who makes plans via the internet

plans as in, "so what we doing tonight then"

i think facebook sometimes makes plans for us, but often they are fake plans, or hoped-for plans
and then, if we are serious, or old-school, we email/txt/phone to see if those plans are real

I message via google talk a lot at the end of the work day and it transitions into text messages if plans weren't finalized.

i am bad at plans despite all newfangled communication devices

Roffle:

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,977654,00.html

Oh 1993.

That issue of Time got me into a bunch of interesting books

"we will all be cyberpunks"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyberia_%28book%29 was such a dope book to me when i was about 13 and none of the people mentioned in it have mattered for fifteen years.

Wow, the post-hippies of the 90s really aren't that relevant anymore, are they?

I've read a book by one of those dudes and met another in person and he was waaaay creepy.

"Huzzah!"

I remember seeing this everywhere on the net in the '90s, yet not actually hearing it anywhere

to my shame, i still say that

"Huzzah!" was an MST3k popularizing of a vague Renaissance-Festival vibe, right?

For damn sure. I know that because that's how *I* started using it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CsxfMZLKsgw

Heavens!

pre-internet nostalgia = you had to live next door to ned raggett to know who he was

NOT THAT I'M NOSTALGIC FOR THAT TIME ;-)

You were always a kindly neighbor, a bowl of sugar whenever I asked.

i said "huzzah!" about something not an hour ago! i started because of MST3K, but Futurama reinforced it

My step-brother had a cat named Huzzah, but he did work at Renaissance Festival.

Nevertheless, cyberpunk may be the defining counterculture of the computer age. It embraces, in spirit at least, not just the nearest thirtysomething hacker hunched over his terminal but also nose-ringed twentysomethings gathered at clandestine RAVES, teenagers who feel about the Macintosh computer the way their parents felt about Apple Records, and even preadolescent vidkids fused like Krazy Glue to their Super Nintendo and Sega Genesis games -- the training wheels of cyberpunk. Obsessed with technology, especially technology that is just beyond their reach (like BRAIN IMPLANTS), the cyberpunks are future oriented to a fault. They already have one foot in the 21st century, and time is on their side. In the long run, we will all be cyberpunks.

i don't quite understand the capitalization in that article. i mean, i get that most of the time it's supposed to refer to a "new" term, or something that needs to be defined (hypertext, cybernetics, etc), but other times it's just odd ("WILLIAM GIBSON, a 44-year-old American now living in Vancouver")

TECHNO-EROTIC PAGANISM
VIRTUAL SEX

AKA any My Life With the Thrill Kill Kult song around that time.

you guys

real audio

http://www.oocities.org/suonnoch/Mythmyst/rnmark.gif

dammit, we could listen to these awesome 30 second clips of the upcoming Vines album, but this computer doesn't have the Real suite of tools installed!

.asx

"_00 hours free!!!" AOL CDs regularly appearing in mailbox

― haven't you people ever heard of theodor a-goddamn-dorno (bernard snowy), Saturday, October 2, 2010 12:23 PM (1 year ago)

AOL CDs regularly appearing under coffee mugs as coasters.

Remember the feeling that you couldn't go on internet unless you were a "cyberpunk"??

On a related note, everyone I know who did raves stayed off the internet!

They Might be Giants - Fish Heads.mp3

lol frogbs

many xp I never used Real Player because I was too busy making WinAmp skins & hosting them on my XOOM website for people to download

I was too busy making WinAmp skins & hosting them on my XOOM website for people to download

winamp - it really whips the llama's ass! i was making really bad ok computer skins and posting them on Green Plastic.

mine were Sean Lennon but I was on fake plastic (no?) looking up Radiohead lyrics, I assure you
actually met most of my first internet friends on a RH chat room. a BeSeen chat room.

i was making really bad ok computer skins and posting them on Green Plastic.

yeah I think I remember you mentioning that on your diaryland.

*used to do website designs for diaryland*

fuck my friend and I went out and met the guy who created diaryland at 2am on a beach in toronto. we were dumb kids. he was dumb too luckily, because I live on.

lol Andrew!

Andrew was short! He said he'd buy us cigarettes.. that's what gets two 16 year olds out to the east end of Toronto at 2AM.

full circle to ILX
***I designed ENBB's diaryland account, this is why we are such buds!!***

x-post

I know we've mentioned this on other threads but FFM actually designed my Diaryland page when she was like 15 or something. lol. We were friends on there for a years but eventually we both stopped using that site. FF about 10 years and she posts a picture on WDYLL and all of a sudden it just clicked and I was like woah Toronto, that pic - OMG that's Alexis!

I webmailed her and was like "Uh, this prob sounds nuts and I'm fairly certain you won't remember me but . . .".

Anytime I feel like feeling old, I go see how old Ms. Smartypants' little girl is these days.

OMG FFM that was 12 years ago!!!

hahahahahahaha. I was so happy when you webmailed me!

I just did some googling of our combined usernames and you had an idea to open a clothing store & I was going to design the site and we should probably do that!

TWELVE YEARS?
oh Lord. Amazing. Happy 12th baby! <3

Wait - really? I wanted to open a store?? Funny. That was probably when I had a PT job in one, actually. We should!

Holy cow - the whole thing is still up? That's nuts. I don't think I realized that!!

HAha, yeah! I found mine a few months ago and had a field day reading through the old entries. Then I locked it 0_0 Your username is safe with me! Sad the design didn't survive, haha.

found this in the course of my internet nostalgizing:

Name: Sean Lennon
Comments: I just wanted to say hi! Thanks for making this web page. I'm
very flattered. You know the picture to the left of list?
Well If you don't mind changing it, I hate that
picture...thanks.

love,

Sean

p.s. I'm working on writing new songs now...hope you'll like
'em

Tuesday, August 3rd 1999 - 07:35:21 PM

There are usenet posts from the mid-90s where I'm talking about magic the gathering I think

how mortifying

dude, a significant portion of my friends still play magic - be happy it's just in your past!

LOL

Oh my God I was so young and angsty and annoying lol.

I actually went through a phase where I purged or just gave away a lot of stuff that I now kind of wish I had. Fleeting impulses, I guess.

hahahaha, E, I know what you'll be doing all day! ;D

Are you kidding me? I'm gonna read this whole damn thing start to finish. This is hysterical.

i was making really bad ok computer skins and posting them on Green Plastic.

i may have used one of these at some point! iirc i couldn't work out where any of the buttons were so reverted to my awesome legend of zelda: a link to the past skin.

E - U/P for mine is lex/lex - a glorious snippet when I was still hanging onto a pseudonym:

Well, Adelaide has to go to school now. She'll try to seduce her teacher for the umpteenth time, and come home and complain about it being unsuccessful. Bye!

Wait- what's U/P??

lol nm - I'm in! :)

Not much, what's U/P with you?

(Jokes nostalgia!)

winamp - it really whips the llama's ass!

I still use Winamp and installed it on a new comp yesterday and it still uses that DJ Mike Llama thing when you first load it.

I still have fond memories of "Cliff Yablonski hates you", the Jeff K website, and all the Newgrounds.com celebrity assassinations, but I suspect I'd find them all very unfunny if I looked at them again...

MIKE JITTLOV

the guy was a usenet celebrity, he seemed unimaginably cool and knowing to me at the time

about:jwz

  o================================o:; ,::::,*.:::::.*.::::::::::::
  |   Mike Jittlov - Wizard, etc   |';* ';;'..`::::'   `:*`:;::::::
  |  jitt✧✧✧@gu✧✧✧.c✧.calt✧✧✧.e✧✧  |;.;+,  '* ```:'o   o `   `::;::
  | c/o 902 Maltman, LA 90026-2714 |,',.::.. .' .' |\^/|:. `*:.. `*
  | (213) No-Human (noon, to moon) |...May All Your \Y/ Good Dreams
  | {Please allow 1 yr 4 response} |and Fine Wishes /_\ Come True:)
  o================================o===============_/ \_===========

gah, auto-replace email address code!

i like the ascii cheerer in the middle of the inspirational quote on the right

listening to belle & sebastian last night and the line 'boo to the business world!' triggered some early message board nostalgia

was anyone else on dc++ back in the day?

is that actually old enough to count as "back in the day"? :)

I spent the entire summer of 1996 playing Quake and talking on irc

/slap mh

xpost
sure! why, youtube wasn't even a gleam in dc++'s eye...

i still remember ICQ...*whap whap whap whap whap whap* "uh-oh! uh-oh!" my God

early 2000s def qualifies as pre-web 2.0

i met two of my best friends on dc

I know a few old-skool ilxors used to chat on WarpComm - anyone else?

what is wrong with that? I had a great summer that year!

my ICQ number is 1071xx /braggin

I had an 805xx IIRC! Wish I knew it. It was such a source of pride.

UH OH

I had a livejournal from 2001-2007

I still have one, but I have a different one now and its private entries for my eyeballs only

all the Newgrounds.com celebrity assassinations

The Arnold Schwarzenegger one is pretty good - he's dressed as a ballerina dancing around on a bandstand, and the 'you win' message is 'GOOD JOB SICKO!'.

Also I remember the first time a colleague showed me Mr. T Ate My Balls!. He thought it was the apex of comedy.

the AIM screen name of a good friend of mine has been mrtatemyballs for many, many years

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/0/03/Aybabtu.png

No. Just no.

I did always enjoy this iteration:

http://jmz.iki.fi/static/images/2007/04/ayb_calvin_and_hobbes.jpg

lol, never seen that one before

realultimatepower.net already feels like a long time ago

I remember seeing the "All Your Base" photoshops and not thinking it could possibly be fake, like I didn't think you could actually use photoshop to create something that real-looking (also I was like 13 at the time)

Academic type pages unreadable due to 3-inch letters.

I have a 5 digit ICQ # as well! Fuck if I can remember what it is anymore though :( It'd be set up on one of my old laptops I spose.

Also have had a livejournal since 2000, and before that was running a literary journal type blog on my own website in 98-99, before the word "blog" ever existed.

FIDONet vs. RBBS

I miss AOL keyword NICK

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AQeQvhp9ftg

I have zero internet nostalgia. Days-worth of time c. 1993 was spent staring at the Netscape logo, waiting for the page (with images turned off) to load.

I do miss BBSing though, I miss trading MP2s, having a 80-character e-mail address, and watching ANSI animations made with thedraw.exe

spent many an hour using thedraw.exe

never used RBBS but I used to download massive conspiracy theory threads from FIDOnet

a guy that I ate lunch with in high school was a w a r e z courier, he is now a subject matter expert in digital forensics

he's published like 7 books

word.com

and no one's mentioned suck?

SUPPOSEDLY the guy who wrote AOHell also went to my high school, but I'm not sure if I believe that. If it's true, then the guy who took credit for it died a couple of years ago. He had a heart attack / possible overdose, at the time he was selling "life extension" drugs.

http://battellemedia.com/images/1995.jpg
http://files.codeulike.com/uploaded_images/yahooearly1995-734813.jpg

'Entertainment' had its own 'Ate My Balls' category with over 200 sites. I had totally forgotten any of this. Thanks for reminding me snoball

guys, guys - The New Times York! The Washington Pissed!

http://c3f.com/nty/ntyarchv.html

I preferred it to the Onion because it was way more crazed

$249 Billion will go to a project in Newt Gingrich's hometown, which will police all sci-fi anti-novels of the future and make sure they're written in sections short enough to be read entirely while holding in a single hit of pot.

$248 Billion will go to Henry Hyde so he can do intensive research to determine the answer to the question, "Yes, but where is the face-sitting oral madness? The lesbo hooch humps?"

$10 billion will go to Tom Delay to personally train clandestine para-military troops to deal with the consequences of actually finding out just where the face sitting oral madness and the lesbo hooch humps really are.

$20 billion will go to Dick Armey's wife to develop a complete line of expensive clothing designed specifically for losers going nowhere.

$20 billion will go to George W. Bush to make sure nobody cheats during the upcoming November electrocutions.

Encarta95 Microsoft Encarta
It's my time! Finally, my shot at the spotlight! It's only taken me seventeen years! Wikipedia? Who needs it! Encarta '95 is here to stay.
7 hours ago Favorite Retweet Reply

Ah, the days of Kibo, and sig.file humor.

I really liked the game on encarta

mindmaze

Oh my God I remember that game!

Grew up with BBSes, mainly through the Doom mod scene. I ended up making some Doom II level packages and putting them on boards. One of them was featured in a PC Gamer magazine in 1996, when I was 15.

When I got on the internet I had a Beatles bootleg blog that hosted MP3s of outtakes, started around 1997 or so and going for a good 2 or 3 years. I remember my first MP3 ever was downloaded from a site called The Inner Light and it was something from the Get Back sessions.

Also I had a big Flaming Lips fan site too, I think on fortunecity.

Yeah me too, wow xp

I remember the first time I heard an mp3, on headphones, it was like somebody had invented magic. "It's only like 2.5 megs!!!!!" In the days of 1GB hard drives that was pretty major. I got everyone else in the office to come over and take turns with the headphones.

In '95 and '96 I had a Smashing Pumpkins website which in fact I put on dark one day, just like wikipedia today, after a fan died at a concert in Dublin or so. I used to scan in pictures from magazines and such, and it was a thrill to see those pictures being linked to all over the world. Lol teens.

My best friend in HS was a big Smashing Pumpkins fan, I remember her talking about that Dublin death ;_; Slightly related (or very if this was your site!) - I got a posted signed by the band and gave it to my English teacher because her son was a big fan - got back a note thanking me and asking if I ever 'post on the message board Netphoria' :*)

omg netphoria you are throwing my mind back to dark days.

right? You're welcome. My friend wasted many, many hours there as hmm, Mayojar I think. :)

I actually didn't spend much time on netphoria, I was on the "O-board" back in the day, just before they broke up and it turned into the ZOMB. But there were always netphoria "invasions" on the O-board.

Ahh, gotcha. I was never much of a fan (hence giving away the poster) so never went to any of them. I was all about a Radiohead chatroom called Polythylene.

Lex, you didn't get the signed poster from me/my site. I still remember the name of the girl that died in Dublin, Bernadette O'Brien.

I was on Listessa and its "secret" spin-off June, which was a mailing-list more like ILE tbh

Days-worth of time c. 1993 was spent staring at the Netscape logo, waiting for the page (with images turned off) to load.

I used to edit the URLs of Altavista by hand so I could search without having to wait for the page to load. I sent them an email moaning when they changed the URLs to something complicated, telling them I was going to switch to the Google Beta.

LBI: I got the poster signed by the band at an HMV meet-n-greet here in Toronto, the kid who I gave it to wondered if I ever visited Netphoria - presumably so we could be online buddies or something :)

Hehe, online buddies is a very internet nostalgia thing too :)

When I entered this thread I thought we were going to talk about sending e-mails and myspace or smething

I had no idea you people were so old lol

average age on ilx is nearly mid-30s by now!

Yeah geez I still think of myself as kindof a n00b because I *just* missed BBS/pre-WWW days, only started using the 'net in 1995 when the first (was it Mosaic or Mozilla?) browsers came to be.

How can email be nostalgia?

the real action is on fb msg and bb etc

Which is hilarious cos dont most ppl still use FB's email notification function to know they GOT a FB message anyway? It seems so *pointles*.

Maybe I am just old.

I used to edit the URLs of Altavista by hand so I could search without having to wait for the page to load.

I still did this until I downloaded Chrome last year! In fact I still do it when I am browsing at work in lynx/elinks, so I don't have to press the down arrow like 10 times to get to the search box.

(I am also still intermittently mad at Yahoo for making Altavista rubbish, and at various other search engines for not having the same features they did 12 years ago)

I used a couple of BBSes when I first got my modem 1996 but the only one within local rate call area was rubbish and my dad was not very pleased when I spent 20 minutes connected to a national rate raytracing BBS, so I sent a cheque to an ISP and waited for my 3.5" floppy with Trumpet Winsock and some crappy no-frames browser to arrive instead.

I remember before search engines were a big thing, there was a brief window where publishers would actually release "yellow pages" books of internet sites. Whoever thought that was a workable idea was insane.

i found a notepad where i used to write down useful web addresses. like, the full things. wtf.

xp Ha, mr spacecadet has a "Best of the 'Net" listings book 1995 which I have, uh, spent some drunktime flicking through in a haze of nostalgia. It has lots of references to cyberspace and lists of hot guitar tab newsgroups.

Haha yes, and in those days URLs were always long and completely non-intuitive as well, like https://www.sparklingpondscum.com.au/~fredsplace/chookshed/myphotos/lol.jpg

OK lol I wasnt expecting that to turn into an actual link.

I have a couple of those directory books - 'The Internet Directory' and 'The Whole Internet', both from 1994. And a smaller book from 2002 called '500 of the Weirdest & Wackiest Web Sites', which a relative got me for Christmas that year. Sample entry with long non-intuit URL:

Walking Machine

http://www.fzi.de/ipt/WMC/walking_machines_katalog/walking_machines_katalog.html

If it walks and is a machine, then you will probably find all the details about it's invention here.

http://photosurf.net/photos/celebrities/shae-marks/shae-marks-163423.jpg

my youth = downloading 45-second mu-law .au files and later (drum roll) newfangled .mp2 files (which would take like 10 minutes to open in CoolEdit, the only software I had which could read them - so much for realtime decoding) from Addicted to Noise

sometimes I would snip them into 1.6-second samples and load them into ScreamTracker 3 to stitch into my own terrible noises

and then draw "artwork" for the resulting largely imaginary albums using NeoPaint

http://img802.imageshack.us/img802/1126/screenshotqd.png http://img17.imageshack.us/img17/6073/screamtracker321.png

I have been on the internet six billion years and still don't know how to work the img tag obv
http://img802.imageshack.us/img802/1126/screenshotqd.png http://img17.imageshack.us/img17/6073/screamtracker321.png

I remember once setting my pc and its 33.6k modem to download a new install of Netscape, which was iirc something like 30mb which was HUEG back then and it was going to take 2-3 hours.. so I went to the shops... came back, saw it was at about 96%... and accidentally bumped the ESC key and cancelled the download ;_;

try begging your teen sister not to pick up the phone for three hours in evening primetime.

try beggin your friend's dad!

So glad I was in my mid 20s by the time the internet got going properly.

(actually, also glad of this bcz it means I didnt spend my young teens being an utter spaz all over the internet, which I *know* I would have done had I been 14 or 15 when it came to be).

yeah, am pretty glad most of my internet stuff from then went into the memory hole. The thought of being 25 and having a FB timeline that went back to being 15 or w/e is horrifying

having an ilx timeline that goes back to when you were 23/4 is quite bad enough i assure you

I already have a livejournal archive full of hilarity! (its 99% locked private now tho, has been for years)

I was only two when the WWW was invented but I had an AOL email by the time I was like six; in middle school I helped maintain the school website as part of an after-school club, used Netscape Composer to edit websites for school clubs. I think I also discovered some website called like coollogos.com or something and used it to make weird sparkly headline images for each page.

We were also occasionally equipped with digital cameras that used floppy disks to save photos onto, held something like seven 640x480 images per floppy disk.

Oh man I remember those cameras! They were Canons, I think?

I dunno, all I know is they were like the size of like a modern pro DSLR and took six seconds to save a photo. The library computer lab was full of iMacs so we had to use the USB floppy drives to get the pictures. When we were done with a site we would put it in a shared network drive from which the librarian would use Fetch to FTP the pages to the web server.

…and now I am a shitty freelance programmer!

also I totally tried to make complicated games using HyperStudio in middle school. I don't think I got very far.

usb floppy drives a fairly late-in-the-game addition i'd have thought

When I was doing my professional writing/editing diploma in 95-96, one of my lecturers was really excited about internet tech and showed us this animation that'd been made in Director called "bad day on the midway", and was on this huge tip about how Director/Flash was gonna CHANGE THE WHOLE INTERNET... I guess he was kind of right, really.

(tho "bad day" wasnt an internet thing now I think about it, it was a CD ROM, but still)

Oh also in…I dunno, the mid-90s, my parents had a contract to write a book called "Seniors in Cyberspace", so for a while we had free access to Prodigy, CompuServe, and AOL. I remember that CompuServe was boring and prodigy had some freakish sesame-street interactive book thing going on. AOL was the dial-up service we "actually" used so after they canceled the other ones they tried to get AOL to start charging us again, but apparently that never worked; I think we had free AOL for the rest of the dial-up era.

i am nostalgic for playing this one star trek game (written in basic) on my school's trs-80s. when you fired a photon torpedo, a * would dance across the screen.

you damn kids don't even know what an a drive is

our science teacher used to talk about the information super highway and how it would change television forever

he was a crazy dreamer but we loved him

why did they try to get AOL to start charging you again?

al mcgore? xp

Dude I remember what a b: drive was ffs!

jesus multixpostarama.

yeah better be some other damn kids, I was playing games off of 5-1/4" diskettes into kindergarten, b:\ for life xps

iatee I think they were just trying to be honest since they were no longer you know evaluating AOL for its suitability for Seniors in Cyberspace

they gave up trying to pay for it again after one or two tries of c.

ppfft, drives, we wished for a computer with 'drives'

book fell through incidentally after a hard drive crash, my parents never became famous published internet experts

anybody else ever play "Baby Keys" in DOS

DOS? never had it so good, DOS i ask you

aw man i briefly knew how to do really useful things like print the screen in assembly language

The AOL account I got in '96 existed to exchange a few emails with friends for the better part of a year. The newsroom at which I was editor didn't get internet until fall '97, which meant Netscape. As for AOL, it served as my primary browser until 2001 or 2002, which I didn't mind because discovering the gay chatrooms in summer '99 made for a fabulous incentive to keep it.

gad I remember when Bowie posted "Telling Lies" as an INTERNET EXCLUSIVE in fall '96.

8" floppy disks on sun (unix) ftw tbh

ppfft, drives, we wished for a computer with 'drives'

the disappointment of finally getting hands on a C64 disk drive and discovering it was like as slow as tape.

xp xenix, not unix

our first computer worked on an eastern european knockoff called DONTS

Bowie had one of the most exhaustive fansites I'd seen c. 1995, can't remember the name though...

SunOS was the first thing i got on to the internet with. I used read usenet with rn and chat with irc. simultaneously awesome and awful. xp

I remember spending an inordinate amount of time trying to come up with a cool AIM name. for some reason I got 'tigreazul' and stuck with it until about '95. my friend had 'iraq' and sold it for $30.

Yeah my initial internettign was on the RMIT local usenet forums, and using PINE for mail and NN for usenet I think.

at some point in my childhood my real father gave me flight simulator for christmas, but we didn't have a monitor capable of running it. so i read the instruction manual religiously for several months until my stepfather relented and bought a color monitor.

i still remember curiously much about the geography of the cities it featured: chicago, seattle, sf/oak, la, ny/bos.

rip meigs field

so i read the instruction manual religiously for several months

Nn was like this wonder of software when I finally got it.

^

aww i love you too, ilx system

Wait did I use NN or TIN? I cant even remember :(

I do know my .plan file said something like "I wouldnt know a cunning .plan if it jumped up on a table singing "cunning .plans are here again"

BowieNet, wasn't it?

Does bjork.com still have /unity/? Great URL.

Well jeez! I found it! 1996.

http://phil.cts.com/bowielps.html

Ha, it seems so small now. "Phil" stands up for Aladdin Sane and Pin Ups and I'm glad he did

Designed for viewing with Netscape Navigator 3.0

<3 <3 <3

I found it by searching "smashing atoms in the basement". Phil's Aladdin Sane write-up begins: One of Bowie's all-time best. Startled me when I first heard it, didn't know what to think. Wow, every track, no fat, except for the sound of that fat guitar smashing atoms in the basement.

My middle school friend's AOL SN was Basketball. That's like having a state-issued license plate that's only 3 characters long

http://img17.imageshack.us/img17/6073/screamtracker321.png

Yeah! Screamtracker. I made hundreds of tunes on its big brother, Impulse Tracker.

LOL I think R0bot still uses impulse tracker on occasion!

Anyone still using IT (or who just misses it a lot) might like to take a look at Schism Tracker:
http://schismtracker.org
which is a free open source updated remake which is still being supported and has some new features (but still pretty much the same interface and most of the old key combos still work)

it will write your song to disk as a .wav, load .mp3 files as samples, has better midi and filters, and probably other stuff I don't know about

I feel like I can't really get on with modern music software because it's not enough like IT, but then I go back to Schism and realise I can't get on with IT any more because it's not enough like the things I've used in the 10 years since

Trapped between the future and the past...

Have you used/tried Buzz, spacecadet? Thats what r0bot (sorry, should explain: my ex bf; doglatin knows him, does excellent electro-prog music) uses and he seems to love it, it has accuracy IT doesnt, the only catch is live guitar parts have to be added in, from what I gather?)

I feel like I can't really get on with modern music software because it's not enough like IT, but then I go back to Schism and realise I can't get on with IT any more because it's not enough like the things I've used in the 10 years since

This - absolutely. I was a master at using IT back in the day - could make it do all sorts of things it wasn't really designed to do, but then I got a new PC that wouldn't run it so I eventually migrated to Reason which just isn't the same. Once Schism Tracker came out, I couldn't remember anything about shortkey cuts, FX codes, anything.

tried Buzz too, but it seemed like a foreign country

Yeah, Buzz is the main thing I've used since IT. It's a lot of fun to play with but I've made hundreds of 10- to 45-second loops and pretty much no complete songs in a decade of using it. (Well, not really a decade as I more or less gave up a few years ago.)

I always felt this was because it has so many shiny FX sliders to play with while playing your patterns on loop that I get distracted from the actual business of adding new patterns, whereas IT doesn't really afford you that luxury. It's my fault and not the software's that I fall for it, of course...

Yeah, same with Reason - I get a good thing going and suddenly it all goes wrong, like I add an fx or unplug something or try to get too clever with it, and then I'm just left with a messy 1 minute snippet with no beginning middle and end. The great thing about IT is you could copy and paste sections and parts really really really quickly using simple shortkey cuts. IT was such a simple program.

i had a sorta proto-blog in 1999 called Losers Anonymous. i updated it everyday (by adding and subtracting tables and content in index.html) with tales of high school woe. i was the most generic Sad Teenager in the world and i let it show. after a while i started to add people i knew to Losers Anonymous. i would add pages for them, put up a picture of them, give them space to talk about their lives, basically blog stuff. they were also Sad Teenagers. somehow, all of this started to get popular and i noticed that when i walked into the computer room at my high school library there would often be people visiting my website.

then Columbine happened. the next day, i was called into the counselor's office and told that my website was shut down (a friend of mine provided the hosting and they called his mom and she took it down the whole domain). they also called the parents of all of my friends with profiles and told them that they were part of a collective that was potentially dangerous and suicidal. the counselor also mentioned that she thought i was suicidal and possibly homicidal as well.

the 90s!

ha ha, that's awesome. "What you say, this teenager is sad? That must mean he's gonna shoot the place up!"

i also played a lot of videogames at the time. and one of those games was...

DOOM!

the evidence against me just kept stacking up...

I bet you listened to sad/angry music as well.

nope, i was heavily listening to dave matthews band and ben folds five at the time. i even had t-shirts

awww ZS <3 you are my heart (except for that DMB stuff.. heh.)

I miss tables. Remember when we got CSS and we could manipulate the borders really specifically? GLORY DAYS.

And frames. I used to nest frames like a champ. Then iframes came along and messed it all up.

Oh man, speaking of Doom and Columbine, one of the Doom levels I made was based on our HS. Luckily only my parents knew about it and they're sane people so they didn't give a shit.

well that's certainly the way to deal with a bunch of kids who you suspect are depressed and suicidal.. shut down their means of expressing themselves! sheesh

I'm pretty sure a really rough map of every high school has existed as a homemade first person shooter game level

My AIM screen name is the race/class combo I played the first time I started playing D&D circa sixth grade.

xps to whoever was talking about that like fifteen posts ago

Screamtracker reminded me of this Assembly demo.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o9hsIG9ZJdA

seriously, check out the Touched By An Angel (www.touched.com) and Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman (http://www.drquinnmd.com/) websites. it's like 1997 never went away

such a rush

This is the place

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y7PX3JAF_5Q

I love those old demos, and most of them are on youtube these days.

Also, that Star Wars fan cut reminds of the ASCII version that came out way back in the day...

"tried Buzz too, but it seemed like a foreign country"

have you tried renoise? it is very tracker-y, and the online tutorial is very Irish, I think.

Flashback!

http://laughingsquid.com/the-restoration-of-the-internet-underground-music-archive-iuma/

holy shit, that means a bunch of my terrible high school lo-fi "songs" just rose from the dead

delete delete delete

Jason Scott is a superhero, his good works touch us all.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sQHM4KmDstM

lol

http://oi48.tinypic.com/mh5cmp.jpg

That is the coolest thing I've seen in a long time.

i get the fat chicks in party hats song stuck in my head whenever i see this thread title

wow even the severed heads gigapus cdrom isn't that appalling. though it was from a year later.

welp, i love this

hyper
people

a/s/l

Can't stop laughing. Poor Billy, he meant well...

ESCAPE

new username, thank you

Can't stop laughing. Poor Billy, he meant well...

nah he didn't, openly said he hadn't even been on the internet but someone had told him it would be a good idea

http://highway62.tumblr.com/post/27863460910/phoning-it-in-holavicente-johnny-mnemonic

http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m7mk6fJpHF1qcf2rso1_1280.jpg

[ BLEEPING ]

i actually tried to watch (rewatch? i'm sure i saw it when it came out but don't remember!) that movie on netflix a couple of months ago but i just couldn't

It's no Hackers