• RavenFellBlade@startrek.website
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        1 year ago

        How common was this? That was precisely how I discovered porn. Found a Hustler magazine on a trail I used as a shortcut between housing developments on my paper route when I was 11. Then found a whole stash of them in another part of the woods near a tree fort I built with some friends.

      • thorbot@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        this is my porn origin story, found a crusty old magazine in a sandrock lean-to that was clearly a person’s hidey hole. we buried it in shame after it seared into our memories

      • NaoPb@eviltoast.org
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        1 year ago

        Haha, exactly! And with plenty of pubic hair so you’d still have to use your imagination.

    • ramble81@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      I remember you had to pick and choose what images you wanted because of how long it took to download. Thumbnails were critical and nothing more of a cock block then the image getting corrupted part way through.

      • funkless_eck@sh.itjust.works
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        1 year ago

        Man it was a real artifact of time that I remember some email newsletters back on AOL where the writer would get mad and kick you off the list if you didn’t reply to the newsletter thanking the author.

    • netburnr@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Back in the AOL days you would hang out in the Warez chat room, and you would subscribe to download files using email as the delivery. Chat for a few minutes and then next time you log in. You’ve got files!

        • netburnr@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          For me it started in AOL, once banned for taking over the Disney chat I then learned about IRC and from there I learned of usenet. Been usenet ever since.

  • Jikal@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    And you could tell from the sound if it was gonna connect at a good rate too

  • ExLisper@linux.community
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    1 year ago

    What the internet was like? Glorious! No stupid internet points, no followers, no tracking. Just random content. Good times…

    • son_named_bort@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      There was even a friendly purple ape named Bonzi Buddy who helped me surf the web. Couldn’t have something like that these days without spyware.

    • pHr34kY@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      You never saw IE6 running on Win98 with a dozen toolbars installed, did you? The place was infested and you actually needed to know what you were doing.

      Antivirus would be pinging constantly back in those days. I haven’t had my AV detect anything since the early 2000s.

    • WashedOver@lemmy.caOP
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      1 year ago

      The ICQ, AOL and MSN chats were a big focus then. I can still hear those notifications too. It was a simpler time before psychology was brought into hijack our attention.

      They have done a excellent job of that with the latest generation of the web. It’s too bad we have lost much of the soul of the early web in the process…

  • froh42@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Oh my, that dad is young. The bwong bwong bwong came later with the faster transmission speeds.

  • ares35@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    half the time it sounded like this…

    bzzzzzt… bzzzzzt… bzzzzzt… bzzzzzt… bzzzzzt…

  • m3t00🌎@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Imagined that cartoon progressively downloading while I sipped coffee. The image size told the browser how much space to leave for lagging graphics. Text browsers were best over dialup untill mbs speeds arrived. Cable modems eliminated the modem speaker since they were never used for human frequency range

  • Arghblarg@lemmy.ca
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    1 year ago

    Young whelps! I could debug my programs by putting an FM radio beside my rig and listening to the interference :P