• TimeSquirrel@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    Going to guess you were cruising BBS, FTP, and Telnet sites? I was just an ignorant preteen coding Qbasic garbage trying to learn programming on my Dad’s PC that year. When I read back on Internet history I was a little surprised it was already so active when most people weren’t even aware of it yet.

    At least now I know how Dad got all them free DOS games.

    • Madison_rogue@kbin.socialOP
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      1 year ago

      I did interact with a BBS site or two, but then got caught up in the AOL wave. I used their platform, Geocities, and a few other chat sites. Once ditching AOL around 1999 I ended up on a local forum we used for electronic music, and then in 2003 made my way to a Star Wars fansite forum called BlueHarvest (I moderated there the last couple of years before the admin shut it down in 2008 or 2009). A couple friends and I then communicated via a forum we made for ourselves. Then Facebook, then Reddit…now here.

      EDIT

      I also had accounts with MySpace and Friendster too…Twitter for a few years around Arab Spring, but I didn’t like it. Even back then The Bird was a toxic mess with rare moments of humanity. I think my avatar is still shaded green…if my account still exists.

      • livus@kbin.social
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        1 year ago

        Friendster was the OG! There was also Petster for people who were disappointed that Friendster didn’t allow profiles of pets.

    • originalucifer@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      aol/prodigy were ‘the net’ to the general public by 94. i remember writing xmodem scripts to download boobie picks from single line bbs’ ~89.

    • SickIcarus@sh.itjust.works
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      1 year ago

      Shit, I used to run a WWIV 4.23 BBS back in the day. First modem was 9600 baud. Then 14.4k, 28.8k, and lastly 56k - screaming fast! Nothing like watching boobie pics loading one line at a time…

      Edit: I remember signing up with Prodigy and participating in my very first AMA, with Quark and Dax from DS9. Good times.

      • originalucifer@kbin.social
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        1 year ago

        i just shut down a worlgroup server a few years ago… mostly up for majormud.

        i with those asshats at the majorbbs restoration project would just release all the source code. they clutch those pearls like theyre valuable in some way

      • Madison_rogue@kbin.socialOP
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        1 year ago

        I remember how excited I was to download the trailer for The Phantom Menace in 1999. Took almost an hour on a 56k modem. Or how it took under 10 minutes to download a 8 megabyte song off Napster on DSL.

        • SickIcarus@sh.itjust.works
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          1 year ago

          Lol, man I remember in ‘99 having a stack of 100Mb Zip disks, using the college’s computer lab to do all my downloading on their T1 then walking my goods back to my dorm room. I’d load up a queue in the morning, then swing back by in the afternoon after classes. Such simpler times.

      • KalChoedan@kbin.social
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        1 year ago

        Man, the nostalgia is real. It was Gopher and Usenet via CIX and Compuserve for me from around '88, and eventually “proper” dial-up via Demon Internet (in the UK) in '92. 9600 baud, 14k4, 28k8, 56k and eventually dual ISDN. I still have a 28k8 modem in a drawer in my PC parts graveyard.

        • SickIcarus@sh.itjust.works
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          1 year ago

          Lol I remember trying to get my parents to get an ISDN line installed back in ‘95 or ‘96 - the price was ridiculous. I was stuck on 56k until 2001 when I went to work for an ISP and was able to get a 1.5M SDSL line and was fucking ecstatic. Used it to run a CS1.6 server from my closet.

          Edit: actually I did have a 1.5/128 ADSL line somewhere in there for a little bit.