Internet nostalgia

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.