# Internet 1.0 Stories



## NOT Sword Fighter Super (Aug 22, 2018)

So the internet has been around for a while now, and some of us here have been using it for 20+ years.

  From making a Geocities page, to coming up with your ICQ handle, I'm sure we *all* have some pretty interesting stories.

  One that I've thought of a lot lately was talking to the AIM chatbot "Smarterchild".  It was an early (sorta)  intelligent bot that some company developed and put onto AIM as a way to show off their technological capabilities.  There were a few other chatbots developed by the same company, but Smarterchild was the one with the most functionality and was therefore more interesting.

  It was actually pretty cool.  It would ask you personal questions (name, birthday, height, etc) and would remember everything you told it.  You could even ask it about other AIM users and it would tell you what it knew about them.  

  One of the best things about talking to it was, of course, insulting it.  Most of the time it would make you apologize before it would talk to you again, and one time I was so harsh with it that it wouldn't respond to me for six months, after which it seemed to have forgotten who I was.

What about the rest of you?  Any good Internet 1.0 stories?


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## HomeAloneTwo (Aug 22, 2018)

Bonzi buddy was pretty cool when you're 8 and a gorilla says "pee fart".


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## TiggerNits (Aug 22, 2018)

EverQuest and Ultima Online were amazing because they let you be the biggest asshole possible without breaking any rules

A few friends and I used to go ganking whenever a player social event was held. We made so much money murdering everyone at an ingame wedding in Everquest and selling what we looted that a friend of mine was able to finance his 5 day trip to Vegas with it. It made atleast 5 people quit the game according to forums posts


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## Nekromantik (Aug 22, 2018)

I once found a website for gay Russian Space Werewolves. To this day I still don't know what the fuck it was about.


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## Flying_with_the_Penguins (Aug 22, 2018)

Most of my earliest memories are flash game sites like Newgrounds or Homestar Runner, but I also remember the time when I got a porn pop-up of a lady fingerblasting herself when I was around 4 or 5.  I only remember my mom freaking out when she walked in wondering about the noise.  
And thus began my long descent into depravity.


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## Yeeb-Renzo (Aug 22, 2018)

Pretty much my early internet days were filled with me playings flash games on the Cartoon Network and Nickelodeon websites. And a while after 2006 was me watching a lot of YTPs and Let’s Play vids.


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## A Hot Potato (Aug 22, 2018)

Reading these kinds of stories make me miss an era I was too young for.


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## TiggerNits (Aug 22, 2018)

WinNuke was a lot of fun. I remember randomly adding people to MSN and AOL IM and just sending them goatse and then popping off winnuke


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## ThePurpleProse (Aug 22, 2018)

Planet Nu (was called VGA Planets), I think they're still around, it was a game that never came to be, the idea was you got a ship, you colonize planets, get those nasty natives to work, expand, you get the drill, the thing that made it interesting was the multiplayer, each player had turns and it could take a full week to a whole 50 players to complete a round, by the time you got a turn again you would forget who the fuck was your ally, what you were doing and pretty much everything, was a real shitshow after 10 rounds.


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## Monsieur Guillotine (Aug 22, 2018)

I remember those times.

When there was MSN Messenger, but also AIM, Yahoo IM, and ICQ, and you needed all 4 because someone always used one of the others.

Looking into Khaled Mardam-Bey's dead fish eyes while mIRC loaded.

Tabbing through like 10 browser windows because tabbed browsing wasn't a thing yet.

Clearing history after browsing porn on Google Images because incognito mode wasn't a thing yet.


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## NOT Sword Fighter Super (Aug 22, 2018)

At one point I figured out how to make all the AOL sound effects "You've Got Mail", "Welcome", etc play in chat rooms.  I would have felt bad about it if  anybody on there had anything interesting to say.
God people fucking hated that lol.


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## drain (Aug 22, 2018)

i miss the 'internet legends', like the supervirus who would explode your computer or the shitty early-youtube screamer videos 
also myspace was so fucking cool for personal cows, i spent hours looking at weird vampire and scene people


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## TiggerNits (Aug 22, 2018)

Monsieur Guillotine said:


> I remember those times.
> 
> When there was MSN Messenger, but also AIM, Yahoo IM, and ICQ, and you needed all 4 because someone always used one of the others.
> 
> ...



Cerulean was the answer. Ran aICQ, AIM, MSN, IRC and Yahoo IM in one program


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## NOT Sword Fighter Super (Aug 22, 2018)

DrainRedRain said:


> i miss the 'internet legends', like the supervirus who would explode your computer or the shitty early-youtube screamer videos
> also myspace was so fucking cool for personal cows, i spent hours looking at weird vampire and scene people


The most annoying thing about MySpace was that some people would have songs play once you went on their page at full fucking volume.


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## Nekromantik (Aug 22, 2018)

Back in the early 2000s when Yahoo voice chat was just starting, some one came in to the chat room singing about the then Pope. "Pope JP is a big fat pig!" Than he made guitar noises with his mouth. "Ner Nar Ner Nar Ner Nar!"


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## drain (Aug 22, 2018)

Sword Fighter Super said:


> The most annoying thing about MySpace was that some people would have songs play once you went on their page at full fucking volume.



i remember one band called simple plan that was all the rage and their song 'welcome to my life' played on at least 9 out of 10 profiles i looked into


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## ForgedBlades (Aug 22, 2018)

I don't really have any specific stories that stick out. I spent eight hours every day between the ages of 12 and 18 on the IGN Boards, which explains a lot about the man I am now. 

I do remember I made a shitty Geocities site dedicated to that shitty PS2 game State of Emergency. I was so fucking hyped for that shit when I was an edgy 13 year old. The "site" was basically just copy and pasted IGN articles. 

I was also really into YTMND. I never got into making them, but I would spend hours on the site. Also, Joe Cartoon and Tourettes Guy.


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## NOT Sword Fighter Super (Aug 22, 2018)

DrainRedRain said:


> i remember one band called simple plan that was all the rage and their song 'welcome to my life' played on at least 9 out of 10 profiles i looked into


FUCK Simple Plan.  I'm so glad the Emo fad is (mostly) over.


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## FierceBrosnan (Aug 22, 2018)

ForgedBlades said:


> I don't really have any specific stories that stick out. I spent eight hours every day between the ages of 12 and 18 on the IGN Boards, which explains a lot about the man I am now.
> 
> I do remember I made a shitty Geocities site dedicated to that shitty PS2 game State of Emergency. I was so fucking hyped for that shit when I was an edgy 13 year old. The "site" was basically just copy and pasted IGN articles.
> 
> I was also really into YTMND. I never got into making them, but I would spend hours on the site. Also, Joe Cartoon and Tourettes Guy.


I had forgotten about Joe Cartoon! Between them, Camp Chaos, and Newgrounds I learned far more about flash then I ever wanted to.  I remember the day when Spongebong Hempants got a cease and desist from Nickelodeon and the Camp Chaos guys couldn't afford to fight it.


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## A Witty Name (Aug 22, 2018)

My earliest memories was sitting through that AOL connection. The phone chimes and buzzing noises from the dial-up connection are still in my head today.

I did get a broadband connection just before Runescape got big. There were far too many geocities websites about RS with Linkin Park on autoplay.


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## drain (Aug 22, 2018)

Sword Fighter Super said:


> FUCK Simple Plan.  I'm so glad the Emo fad is (mostly) over.



i loved the emos who posted 'cuts' with fake blood or some little scratches and called it 'suicide attempts'
i even made a fake myspace just to taunt emos and goths, i was already a little kiwi at heart


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## AF 802 (Aug 22, 2018)

I remember playing a lot of Neopets when I was a little kiddie. Being the autist I was (and still am), I'd play it all day.

That, and Toontown Online (being under the age of 10 at the time). God, my Internet taste was autism even back then.


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## ForgedBlades (Aug 22, 2018)

Oh shit, Kazaa and Limewire too. Can't believe I forgot those. The best were the files labeled shit like "britney_spears_hot_naked_anal.mov" and were like, 16kb. I learned an important lesson that day. 

And the original shock sites. Goatse, Tubgirl, Lemonparty. That shit was a rite of passage. 

I want to go back, lads.


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## NOT Sword Fighter Super (Aug 22, 2018)

DrainRedRain said:


> i loved the emos who posted 'cuts' with fake blood or some little scratches and called it 'suicide attempts'
> i even made a fake myspace just to taunt emos and goths, i was already a little kiwi at heart


A man after my own heart!


So who do you think was cringier?
Goths or Emos?


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## ForgedBlades (Aug 22, 2018)

I'm actually kind of sad I missed out on the peak of the emo fad. Back in 2002-2006 when I was in eighth grade and then into high school, you either fell in line with the emos/scene kids or the wiggers. I sadly chose the latter. Missed out on all of those emo qts.


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## FierceBrosnan (Aug 22, 2018)

Sword Fighter Super said:


> A man after my own heart!
> 
> 
> So who do you think was cringier?
> Goths or Emos?


I'm going to go with the Emo kids. All attention whoring all the time, they were the proto-instagram crowd and the twattery was insufferable. At least the Goths were funny sometimes.


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## drain (Aug 22, 2018)

Sword Fighter Super said:


> A man after my own heart!
> 
> 
> So who do you think was cringier?
> Goths or Emos?



Tbh, despite all the backslash that emos get (rightfully, but still), the majority of them were just edgy/angry/confused hormone-fueled teenagers. I was about 11 years old when I stumbled over these angsty emo teenagers and I laughed at them and moved on.
But the goths, dude, the goths were a whole new brand of fucked up for me. I mean, some were teenagers too, but the majority of them were fucking ADULTS, some even had kids, etc etc...
I remember I got so confused/amazed, because we had so many fucking adults quoting Nietzsche and Nightwish and Edgar Allan Poe and obscure poems, acting so fucking retarded and posing in cemeteries/next to graves, painting their faces white with dark circles around their eyes and dressing like vampires from the middle ages. 


After the initial shock, I just laughed my ass off and cyberbullied them with my fake account


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## NOT Sword Fighter Super (Aug 22, 2018)

FierceBrosnan said:


> I'm going to go with the Emo kids. All attention whoring all the time, they were the proto-instagram crowd and the twattery was insufferable. At least the Goths were funny sometimes.


I agree with you partially, but at least the emo kids had decent hygiene.  Most of the goth kids I dealt with just smelled...off.  Not exactly like BO, but more like a mixture of that and stale cigarettes.
Other than that, they didn't really bother me.


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## Nekromantik (Aug 22, 2018)

ForgedBlades said:


> New Oh shit, Kazaa and Limewire too. Can't believe I forgot those. The best were the files labeled shit like "britney_spears_hot_naked_anal.mov" and were like, 16kb. I learned an important lesson that day.


Bearshare, all the websites that had game ROMs before Nintendo got them taken down, all the weird ROM hacks with dicks, Nazis and drugs. The first hacked ROM I got was Mega Fag. I loaded it up and the first words I see on the screen are Shut Up!


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## FierceBrosnan (Aug 22, 2018)

Sword Fighter Super said:


> I agree with you partially, but at least the emo kids had decent hygiene.  Most of the goth kids I dealt with just smelled...off.  Not exactly like BO, but more like a mixture of that and stale cigarettes.
> Other than that, they didn't really bother me.


Most Goth chicks I knew were usually catty as shit on top of it. It's like girl you smell like the ashcan outside of a homeless shelter you do not get to be judgemental.


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## Disgruntled Pupper (Aug 22, 2018)

Yahoo chat was a big one for me. Me and my friend would spend hours trying to chat with people. At one point we met a kid around our age and after talking online to him for a while tried to call him, but his mom answered the phone and was really mad and all three of us got in big trouble.

I remember the hours I would waste playing pop it on pogo.com (which apparently still exists). There use to be a lot of those free game websites, everyone kind of had their own and you'd trade favorites with your friends.

I vaguely remember an early 2000s humor website that I would check daily. I've been trying to think of the name for years, but it's eluded me. I do remember it hosted the widely popular flash about bombing Osama bin Laden set to the tune of the banana boat song.

Before Livejournal there was Blurty. Don't remember much of the community/mechanical side of Blurty, but I have lots of good personal memories from it.

A little latter on Newgrounds, Albino Blacksheep, YTMND, heck even 4chan and ED were fun times.



Sword Fighter Super said:


> The most annoying thing about MySpace was that some people would have songs play once you went on their page at full fucking volume.



Probably one of the worst things I've ever done in my life was when I managed to rip the mp3 of 403 Forbiddena's Southern Cross from the 4chan City flash, put it on my profile and blog pages, and also hid the play button so you couldn't stop it. You either sat and got your face blasted off by terrible engrish and very loud guitars or you didn't get to read my thoughts on episode 8 of The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya.


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## ForgedBlades (Aug 22, 2018)

This is what autoplayed on my MySpace.


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## NOT Sword Fighter Super (Aug 22, 2018)

A Witty Name said:


> My earliest memories was sitting through that AOL connection. The phone chimes and buzzing noises from the dial-up connection are still in my head today.
> 
> I did get a broadband connection just before Runescape got big. There were far too many geocities websites about RS with Linkin Park on autoplay.







We had two phone lines in our house, one specifically for the internet, and one for phone calls.  Once my mom caught me talking on the phone and IM'ing a kid who lived three houses down from us.  She was so pissed off that she banned me from the computer for two weeks.


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## uncleShitHeel (Aug 22, 2018)

DrainRedRain said:


> i loved the emos who posted 'cuts' with fake blood or some little scratches and called it 'suicide attempts'
> i even made a fake myspace just to taunt emos and goths, i was already a little kiwi at heart



I used to verbally abuse the little fuckers back in high school. To bad the little pricks grew up to be hipsters and sjws.

Oh happy memories.

Oh yeah I forgot. My key memories of pre-broadband day are spending half an hour downloading tiny 30 sex clips from brutal dildos, shitposting on a photoshop site called worth1000 memorising my parents IP settings so I could connect to the net on an old pc at my grandparents place. Oh to be 14 again.


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## Neet Tokusatsu (Aug 22, 2018)

Man, i remember back in the early 2000's, when i was in middle school, and discovered sites such as Newgounds, TX Mafia, Action Flash, Miniclip etc., the pinnacle of internet entertainment back then was either short flash games, or the dozens or even hundreds of Mario vs Sonic flash animations, i also spent a lot of time on the official Starfox Adventures website, since i din't have the game back then, i played the shit out of the minigames of that page

http://f.starfox-online.net/archives/starfox.com/adventures/

this shit almost makes me feel young again


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## snuffleupagus (Aug 22, 2018)

Man I miss all those flash sites mentioned above. Killfrog was another huge favorite of mine and others but I can’t remember the names. I also loved bangedup before they started up the banged bus and it moved over to a porn site. All of those shock sites honestly. 

Oh and the hours I spent scouring the web to learn how to code my geocities page to have cool effects too. No google, ask geeves and yahoo. 

Snark sites were great too, Train Wrecks was one of my favorites may it Rest In Peace. 

I don’t miss the shitty dial up. I remember celebrating my first 28.8 modem by downloading a Cake song before I went to bed and it still hadn’t finished when I got up in the morning. 

When I got Warcraft II and played against a friend online it was mind blowing and so awesome to be able to play a video game with a friend on the computer and chat text smack.


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## sadstuck (Aug 22, 2018)

I was a weeaboo and able to get my grubby little hands on borderline hentai because my parents didn't monitor me at all. I remember making my pixel anime girl on gaia online half naked.


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## wellthathappened (Aug 22, 2018)

I carded my first 28.8 modem to a vacant house. Was a huge step up from 14.4


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## Some Manajerk (Aug 22, 2018)

Addictinggames.com and gamefaqs were my sites of choice when i was younger. the sheer amount of stickman murder games back they was amazing.

and i really wish i had some of the conversations that went on in the GF boards. so much spergery and shitty RP, and jumping around to boards for dead games because "heh heh, mods don't ever come here"


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## TiggerNits (Aug 22, 2018)

Sword Fighter Super said:


> A man after my own heart!
> 
> 
> So who do you think was cringier?
> Goths or Emos?



Depends on the era. 80s through the early 90s goth chicks were pretty hot before they all went on to be chubby wiccans. Once they started calling Halloween samhain or whatever it was all down hill. There was a while where hot goth chicks were the easiest chicks to hook up with 

Eno chicks all had that stupid haircut their boyfriend's did


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## Meaty Spaghetti (Aug 22, 2018)

I remember i came home from school one day back in 98, my brother said, hey i got something to show you, he shows me NESticle and lets say i was introduce to the greatest thing back then, i played a bunch old nintendo games for hours and one day there was a rom called FUCKO.NES and it was Super Mario Bros except mario was naked and his name was FUCKO and he shot sperm and fought giant penises and stuff then when i found out you could edit the graphics, little boy me was never the same, i like drew pee pee on all the characters in mario 2 because it was funny for 10 year old me, then i found a game called nuts and M I L K off of an old rom site called Ace Roms, and they were changed into penises, well i played the original game way later and fought the real one was the one with penises, and i also would go on Ftp.Cdrom.com to download Doom WADs back then on and i used to play online with people on Jazz Jackrabbit 2 alot and Quakeworld (Used to run around in a ronald mcdonald quake guy skin) and Quake 2 as well, having an older brother had it advantages, if it wasn't for him I don't think i would been a fan of NES games,


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## Nekromantik (Aug 22, 2018)

Way back in the day Mr. Nekro and I played Diablo 2 online. For reasons I can't remember anymore we played on the EU server. We made friends with a girl our age that mained a barbarian named Ugh. We would always do cow runs together. Farming stuff like SoJ. Me on my Necro, her and my husband on barbs. 

We kept in touch long after we stopped playing the game through email. Than one day we stopped hearing from her. We thought real life had gotten in the way or something, a few months later we got an email from a member of her family. She had passed away from breast cancer. She had a viking funeral like she wanted. I miss you Ugh even if you said my necro was too skinny. 

Farewell my first internet friend.


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## Kiwi Lime Pie (Aug 22, 2018)

Disgruntled Pupper said:


> I vaguely remember an early 2000s humor website that I would check daily. I've been trying to think of the name for years, but it's eluded me. I do remember it hosted the widely popular flash about bombing Osama bin Laden set to the tune of the banana boat song.



"Air Force come and we flatten your home!" I remember listening to that myself right after 9/11, but - like you - I can't remember the site's name.

I'm not sure if it was the same site or a different site, but some site hosted a Flash parody of Outkast's "Hey Ya" titled "Hey Allah" that featured an animated Saddam Hussein poking fun at America where "shake it like a Polaroid picture" became "hide it like a nuclear weapon."

(edit) Here's _Hey Allah_:


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## Sir Auroras (Aug 22, 2018)

Yeah I got some. I remember drooling over the thought of jumping on the gay ass Disney website with my slow as shit dial up connection.

Never could though, didn't have internet until much later and by then the last gen consoles had launched.


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## The Great Citracett (Aug 22, 2018)

Kiwi Lime Pie said:


> "Air Force come and we flatten your home!" I remember listening to that myself right after 9/11, but - like you - I can't remember the site's name.
> 
> I'm not sure if it was the same site or a different site, but some site hosted a Flash parody of Outkast's "Hey Ya" titled "Hey Allah" that featured an animated Saddam Hussein poking fun at America where "shake it like a Polaroid picture" became "hide it like a nuclear weapon."



Sounds like deadarab.com, deadarab.us, or fuckosama.com to me. Used to go there all the time and play Bin Laden killing flash games and watch goofy videos in class.


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## Keystone (Aug 22, 2018)

I remember old Counterstrike around 2001-2002 having a chat feature that I used like once or twice, pretending to be older (which the people I talked to on there bought somehow). Old Newgrounds also holds a special place in my heart for the myriad of Matrix flash animations, Krinkels' early Madness animations, and the adult section with that one hentai highschool RPG game with 3 bang-able waifus.

Oh and that German game "Tibia" that could run on a toaster of a computer. If you're a South American kiwi and were on the internet back then I can almost guarantee you played it or at least heard of it. To this day I'm convinced the "BR HUE HUE HUE" meme about South American players in online RPG games got its popularity in no small part from Tibia.

Oh and I remember Warcraft 3 custom maps having shit like porn, lemonparty, or goatse as the map thumbnail, right there on Battlenet. Good times


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## Thomas Paine (Aug 23, 2018)

Here's an oldie but a goodie: http://www.973-eht-namuh-973.com/

It's this schizophrenic fever-dream of a website, entirely coded and written by some insane (math professor/artist?) guy named David Denison that used to paint in the 70s/80s. Here's a picture of the author:



 

The whole thing is based off coincidences and matrices of intersections between Abrahamic faith, the bible, symbology, the numbers 9-7-3, etc. There are literally thousands (3.2k) of pages hidden throughout this website and some pretty warped original paintings by the author.

There were stories for years on boards like 4chan's /x/ about this website and the things it held. 
People said it contained instructions on how to summon demons, or even defeat them. Or that it reveals conspiracies. Sometimes about how it could be used to predict events... and so forth.
You know, shit about stars gorging on clay and archangels.

Halloween is coming up and this a great thing to show your friends.

Finding info on the author is pretty hard from what I've gathered. The only things I've been able to find are that he lives in the Wakefield, England area and he was born in 1939. It is impressively difficult to find info online about a man who publicly sold artwork and taught university.

Take a trip down the acid turnpike if you dare:


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## Zaragoza (Aug 23, 2018)

Anyone here remember Rotten.com?


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## UncleFezziesPantsPuppet (Aug 23, 2018)

I don’t remember the name, but I had this internet box you connected to the tv and you could go online.

AOL was another I used to use. Gotta love having to get offline for a phone call. 
If you want the AOL experience, try satellite internet.


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## TiggerNits (Aug 23, 2018)

Kevin Spencer said:


> I don’t remember the name, but I had this internet box you connected to the tv and you could go online.



WebTV

My brother got banned from our hometown Sears in high school because he and two friends went through and got in to the actual OS for it and locked every single display unit running it in the place to Goatse and Meatspin almost daily for a few weeks before they finally got caught. I'm told my dad was fucking HORRIFIED when the store manager showed him what had been posted. Its amazing he didn't murder my brother


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## FierceBrosnan (Aug 23, 2018)

Zaragoza said:


> Anyone here remember Rotten.com?


Rotten.com for all my edgy teenage gore needs. It and places like SteakAndCheese.com were /b/ before 4chan existed.


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## Nekromantik (Aug 23, 2018)

Zaragoza said:


> New Anyone here remember Rotten.com?


I will never forget that story of the woman that died in the tub and turned in to people soup.


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## TiggerNits (Aug 23, 2018)

stileproject had all the seriously fucked up porn and is why I automatically assume all Germans are terrible deviants


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## Drawets Rednaxela (Aug 23, 2018)

I remember a site called 'Image Imagine' or something to that effect that I'd frequent around '02-'03 and fap to the artistic nudes after school. I have no recollection why given how tame they were compared to actual porn. I guess I was just bored of vanilla by then and wasn't aware there was kinkier stuff out there.


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## Dolphin Lundgren (Aug 23, 2018)

In my day when I downloaded songs from file sharing sites it would take about an hour for that song to download. My brother used to pull the cord to disconnect when my downloading made the internet go slow.

I once went on some site that was a huge skull and crossbones. It was probably a virus.

Also there was the problem with Limewire where you'd download a song and it ended up being this bad Bill Clinton impression that was advertising some site.

This one time I befriended some guy who claimed to be 18 and he kept trying to romance me and meet me when I was a young teenager. Looking back on it, the man was way older and a creeper. Obviously I never met him.


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## Nekromantik (Aug 23, 2018)

Mr. T ate my balls and all the spin offs. I also remember a site called Buba Fett, Boba Fett's redneck brother that he was a shamed of. Buba was fat and had an EZ drinker with beer on his helmet.


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## Meaty Spaghetti (Aug 23, 2018)

here a few 1.0 sites I just Remembered called consumptionjunction and lunatic lounge if anyone else remembers those


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## CIA Nigger (Aug 23, 2018)

My favorite mid 2000s story was when I shat up some XP computer with malware just by opening up a website. That's back when malware went over the top to fuck with you, so it would do things like install at least 5 toolbars on IE, constantly change the homepage and open up more dodgy "internet search" and ad websites than you could imagine, and it brought that blazing fast Pentium 4 to a crawl. It was installing so much malware that I think the system straight up crashed once.


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## Zaragoza (Aug 23, 2018)

Limewire/Frostwire memories


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## James Howlett (Aug 23, 2018)

Kazaa.


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## Zaragoza (Aug 23, 2018)

ITT: Boomers
*sips Monster*
*AHHHHHHHH*


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## Nemo (Aug 23, 2018)

Mainly pre-Youtube stuff.

Flash videos by Marc M (Sick Animation) or Neil Cicierega (Lemon Demon). Sites like Albino Blacksheep, Mucho Sucko, and EbaumsWorld.

Stuff like The End of the World flash video:
https://youtu.be/kCpjgl2baLs
or looped stuff like badgerbadgerbadger.com


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## eldri (Aug 23, 2018)

Although I was old enough to enjoy the internet in the early to mid 2000s, my parents took courses provided by the police to better understand the internet and to protect me from it so I never really browsed the internet much until the later 2000s. Unfortunately, I now feel like a needle in the haystack when it comes to the absence of an internet presence or history.


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## Doc Cassidy (Aug 23, 2018)

My earliest trolling was going into foreign language chat rooms and demanding that everyone speak English. People would get really angry and indignant which I found hilarious as a child.


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## ColtWalker1847 (Aug 23, 2018)

E/N sites. It was what the internet did before blogging and social media became a thing. Almost every one had a forum and we started shit and raided each other constantly. Spamming other boards in the middle of the night when the mods were asleep.


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## TiggerNits (Aug 23, 2018)

James Howlett said:


> Kazaa.



Morpheus

Before that

Usenet



Zaragoza said:


> ITT: Boomers
> *sips Monster*
> *AHHHHHHHH*


Gen X, retard


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## Zaragoza (Aug 23, 2018)

TiggerNits said:


> Gen X, exceptional individual


The meme is called that you mongoloid.


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## TiggerNits (Aug 23, 2018)

Zaragoza said:


> The meme is called that you mongoloid.


Theyre called image macros and you get off my damn lawn


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## Zaragoza (Aug 23, 2018)

TiggerNits said:


> Theyre called image macros and you get off my damn lawn


>Lives in an apartment 
Got bad news for you.


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## Nekromantik (Aug 23, 2018)

Remember Stick Death. I also remember someone at my school bringing a bunch of Loony Tunes and Jetsons porn that they had printed out. They kept saying "Why would someone make this?" Oh how innocent we used to be.

Wait, now that I think about it. How did they find it?


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## BillionBisonBucks (Aug 24, 2018)

Diablo 1 was so good. was a harsh lesson in why client-side is ALWAYS a bad idea, but it was a riot at the time. I slugged away at the singleplayer for months before my folks agreed to let me take it online. As soon as I joined a game, the following things happened:

A player in endgame gear ran by, stopped, laughed at my weak shit, called me a noob, and then duplicated his entire set for me.
A wizard was setting fire to the houses in town. As spells were deactivated in town, this was interesting. When he saw me, he set me on fire and I died. This was interesting too, because I had pvp turned off.
Finally, someone opened Diablo's level and then killed him ~2 seconds later, which kicked everyone playing in that room.

It was utter mayhem, and everyone knows too much to ever let a game that breakable hit the internet again. It's a goddamn shame.


----------



## AllMightyCow (Aug 24, 2018)

I used to be addicted to video game forums and flash portals. 4chong & imageboards in general were also a huge part of my life back then. I was also a gaiafag back in the day. I played a shit ton of counter strike and spent hours talking to weirdos on different chat clients. Those are just a few of my old net memories that I remember most fondly.


----------



## Next Task (Aug 24, 2018)

Let's dig deeper. 

BBSes, for example. Usenet wars. Mosaic. PBeMs.


----------



## Kari Kamiya (Aug 24, 2018)

The earliest thing about the Internet I can remember is the dial-up noise when booting up AT&T and the first Pokemon movie website when it launched in 1999 with the shitty graphics, but it had some cool features on it, anyway, for the time.

I also remember the one time when I was like eight or nine my cousin tried to bring up a website she had found that she wanted to show me (think it had something to do with being a site for preteen girls), but accidentally typed the wrong URL and got to a splash page with an image of some chick's boobs hanging out and something in the background with a shirtless guy wearing a gold chain and cross sensually caressing a fading blue/purple image of a naked body. It was weird and I'm sure I'm remembering it wrong, but eh.


----------



## Francis E. Dec Esc. (Aug 24, 2018)

I remember the Phone Losers of America.


BillionBisonBucks said:


> Diablo 1 was so good. was a harsh lesson in why client-side is ALWAYS a bad idea, but it was a riot at the time. I slugged away at the singleplayer for months before my folks agreed to let me take it online. As soon as I joined a game, the following things happened:
> 
> A player in endgame gear ran by, stopped, laughed at my weak shit, called me a noob, and then duplicated his entire set for me.
> A wizard was setting fire to the houses in town. As spells were deactivated in town, this was interesting. When he saw me, he set me on fire and I died. This was interesting too, because I had pvp turned off.
> ...



_Shadowbane_ launched with a copy of the server admin tools in a hidden directory on the install disk. People were locking the admins out of their own game servers, crashing them, giving themselves billions of XP and gold, etc.


----------



## TiggerNits (Aug 24, 2018)

I had to sit through a sexual harassment prevention briefing that went for 4 hours on a Friday because a fucking asshole LCpl got reported for showing every chick that came through his shop the nastiest shit he could find on Ogrish


----------



## Dick Pooman (Aug 24, 2018)

Nekromantik said:


> I will never forget that story of the woman that died in the tub and turned in to people soup.



I remember seeing that and being freaked out because it looked like my bathroom and the hallway outside. My mom told me that the owner before the previous owner died in the bathroom.


----------



## Flying_with_the_Penguins (Aug 25, 2018)

Sorry for doubleposting, but I recently came across an old youtube video that me and my friends from elementary school shared with each other.  






Its pretty shitty, but it has a certain nostalgic appeal for a time when internet memes could just be dumb without any sort of irony or self-awareness.


----------



## Meat Poultry Veg (Aug 25, 2018)

I was a member of a forum that SomethingAwful targeted. No, I'm not going to tell you which one and I'm not even sure it exists anymore. But the aftermath was that the mods and admins had their hands full banning trolls. Good times.

Kiwifarms has that "Internet Forum 1.0 feel" which is why I joined it.


----------



## Super Collie (Aug 25, 2018)

I bought my own computer in the early nineties, but didn't have internet access until around 1995 or 1996. Back then I just remember the novelty of the internet, it was so strange. People would go to the local library and stuff just to see it, exactly like when people would go look at a futuristic concept car, or a new fangled "motion picture" just to go "huh, well that's cool". Yahoo had a web directory, there was the DMOZ, and I think AOL had a similar curated collection of links and sites. But search engines were in their infancy and not that effective. You just sorta... clicked around. You found one site by going to another one, and if you didn't bookmark it there was a high chance that you probably would not be able to find it again.

I don't really have any memories of mainstream websites aside from checking out things like Cartoon Network and things of that sort. I suppose VCL (the art site) also factors into "mainstream" just by size alone. Fansites were so much fun to browse, and I spent a lot of time lurking sites for all sorts of things that I liked near the turn of the millennium. Cartoons I liked, comics I read, Pokemon stuff, bands that I enjoyed (fuck RealPlayer). GeoCities was a crazy community and I'd just get lost in webrings for all sorts of dumb things, even stuff that didn't even interest me. I just liked seeing the kinds of sites that people would make about the things they were passionate about. 

It's a different world today, and that's kinda sad. But so many of the things I WISH were easily accessible back then are easily found today, like downloads of TV shows in resolutions larger than avatar size.


----------



## Tragi-Chan (Aug 25, 2018)

One thing I remember when I first got online in the 90s was how little there was. You could look up, say, a TV series you liked and find nothing at all. So many companies just didn’t have a web presence.

I also remember that you’d get a lot of websites that didn’t really have a purpose. Some guy would just create a site that just contained whatever he felt like putting on there, with no real focus or aim. Just “this is my website, here are some things I like, here’s a funny cartoon I found, here’s a crude MIDI of a Beatles song.”


----------



## NOT Sword Fighter Super (Aug 25, 2018)

Nemo said:


> Mainly pre-Youtube stuff.
> 
> Flash videos by Marc M (Sick Animation) or Neil Cicierega (Lemon Demon). Sites like Albino Blacksheep, Mucho Sucko, and EbaumsWorld.
> 
> ...


Which got credited to GroupX, but it wasn't them.  Kind of like that Zelda song by "The Rabbit Joint", that people thought was System of a Down.





How about downloading something off Limewire and the like that turned out to be not at all the thing it said it was?

I remember I was trying to download some movie (don't remember which one), which finished waaaaaaaaaay too soon.  Always a bad sign, but I opened it anyway just in case.

It was a cute naked Japanese girl sitting inside a clear plastic container.  "OK, not a total loss, let's just see where this goes"
Suddenly the chick looks up with this apprehensive look on her face and next thing I know, actual shit is raining down on her.

I will NEVER forget that look on that chick's face.


----------



## drain (Aug 25, 2018)

Sword Fighter Super said:


> How about downloading something off Limewire and the like that turned out to be not at all the thing it said it was?



Ah yes, it really was a cyber russian roulette every time I went to Limewire.
I remember being a pre teen and wanting to download 'horror movies' because my parents didn't want me watching 'gory scenes'. Me and my school friends would look for horror movies all night long, and one time, we downloaded some sort of porn short movie, where a dude puts some sort of oxygen mask over the woman's vagina and after he took it out, her vajay was all swollen and red. We cried and laughed in disgust and deleted the file lol


----------



## Syaoran Li (Aug 25, 2018)

Eh, I didn't get on the internet until around 2003-2004 or so, I was about ten or eleven at the time. 

We lived in a very rural area at the time and so all we had was shitty dial-up, I didn't even see the need for my own email address until my family moved to a place with actual decent internet, and that was back in 2007. I think I missed out on actual Web 1.0 but I was around when things were beginning to transition to the current internet culture of today. I guess it would be Web 1.5?

My earliest internet experiences were going to places like Simpsons Archive (I loved their Episode Capsules), as well as looking up my favorite movies, TV shows, and anime on stuff like IMDB and TV Tome (later on, TV.com) and subsequently lurking on their forums.

I also spent a lot of time on GameFAQs and Neoseeker, looking up stuff for my favorite games and again, lurking on their forums.

Hell, back in 2005, I discovered Wikipedia and was fascinated by it, I spent a year spending most of my time on there, reading random articles about stuff I found interesting such as anime and manga, dinosaurs, military history, video games, historical figures, and stuff like that, which in retrospect was pretty autistic of me, but looking up random information on Wikipedia was the best I could do considering I didn't have an email address and only had shitty dial-up internet back in 2005-2006.

When I was twelve, I played a lot of Morrowind back then on my family's desktop computer, and when I discovered the Unofficial Elder Scrolls Page wiki, I became hooked reading about the lore of the game like some weirdo autist. 

In addition to Morrowind, I played a lot of Grand Theft Auto and Dynasty Warriors/Samurai Warriors on my PS2, and watched a lot of InuYasha back then too. I even came up with my own ideas for various OC's and fanfiction for those fandoms that luckily were never posted online, mostly written for fun on WordPad or on actual notebook paper. It was pretty autistic and cringe-inducing, but I was like twelve and thirteen at the time.

After getting an email address and better internet connection in 2007, I discovered early YouTube and started posting on the forums I lurked on, such as GameFAQs and later on, GTA Forums.


----------



## drain (Aug 25, 2018)

Syaoran Li said:


> In addition to Morrowind, I played a lot of Grand Theft Auto and Dynasty Warriors/Samurai Warriors on my PS2, and watched a lot of InuYasha back then too. I even came up with my own ideas for various OC's and fanfiction for those fandoms that luckily were never posted online, mostly written for fun on WordPad or on actual notebook paper. It was pretty autistic and cringe-inducing, but I was like twelve and thirteen at the time.



I think we all had a similar phase during our early teens, because GTA was_ the shit_ for me back then and I lurked various forums about GTA/Driver lol

I also remember that, around 2002/2003, I visited the Cartoon Network and Nickelodeon sites and played all the games, like the Spongebob driving test and the Powerpuff Girls dress-up


----------



## Syaoran Li (Aug 25, 2018)

I also remember being a freshman in high school back in 2007-2008 and discovering the concept of forum-based RP's. As a young D&D fan, I thought it was the coolest thing ever and was obsessed with it for a while.

First online RP I ever took part in was a Resident Evil RP based on the old PS1 games and set in Raccoon City, I can't remember the site it was hosted on and it's probably long gone. Two of my high school friends also played in it, though someone else ran the RP.

The RP even had "character classes" with their own starting equipment (civilian, police officer, STARS officer, Umbrella mercenary, etc.) and I played a STARS officer who was also an anime girl because I was a dumb fourteen-year old weeb. Strangely enough, the GM accepted my character concept, and it was all autistic and dumb, but we had fun.

When I was fifteen, I ran my own GTA-themed play-by-post RP set in San Andreas, and there were like three people playing not counting myself and two of them were friends from school I convinced to join. We all made our own OC's (I was an Italian mafioso living in Las Venturas) and the RP fizzled out in like a few weeks, but it was fun when it lasted.


----------



## MrTroll (Aug 25, 2018)

Downloading a Medal of Honor: Allied Assault demo that was about 100mb and took a week on dialup with some shitty download manager. And it barely ran on my Dell Pentium III.


----------



## ColtWalker1847 (Aug 25, 2018)

Am I the only one who used Napster? I was in high school when that came out. On dialup it would take 20 minutes or so to download a low quality song. But considering the only other option was to buy the whole CD at Sam Goody at the mall for $10 it was a bargain. I bought a CD-RW drive shortly after that so I could take my pirated music elsewhere as MP3 players weren't a thing yet.

Then Metallica ruined it. Fuck you Lars.


----------



## Ask Jeeves (Aug 25, 2018)

Sword Fighter Super said:


> Which got credited to GroupX, but it wasn't them.  Kind of like that Zelda song by "The Rabbit Joint", that people thought was System of a Down.
> 
> 
> 
> ...



I remember downloading Limewire Pro through Limewire, the good old days. That and downloading songs that turned out to be bill Clinton's "I did not have sexual relations with that women, i did however go to ...{some random website name}" speech instead.


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## NOT Sword Fighter Super (Aug 25, 2018)

ColtWalker1847 said:


> Am I the only one who used Napster? I was in high school when that came out. On dialup it would take 20 minutes or so to download a low quality song. But considering the only other option was to buy the whole CD at Sam Goody at the mall for $10 it was a bargain. I bought a CD-RW drive shortly after that so I could take my pirated music elsewhere as MP3 players weren't a thing yet.
> 
> Then Metallica ruined it. Fuck you Lars.


Oh no, I used it.  I had this one joke program that was a fake Napster loading screen where it said something like "Stealing money from Lar's Account" or something like that.


----------



## Syaoran Li (Aug 25, 2018)

By the time I first got online, Napster had already caved into Metallica's demands and I didn't know how to download music from the internet, being a kid and all.

I can't remember if it was through Kazaa or Limewire, but my uncle did download music for me and my brothers and would burn it onto blank CD's for us to listen to. I had a lot of cool bluegrass and metal compilations.

It was great for me as a young bluegrass fan because the nearest FYE was a two-hour drive away and the local Wal-Marts and K-Marts rarely sold bluegrass albums save for the O Brother Where Art Thou? soundtrack and maybe a compilation album or two if you were lucky. And I think the only reason they would stock the occasional bluegrass compilation albums was because we lived in the middle of rural Appalachia.

Thanks to my uncle's CD's he would make for us, we could get all the cool songs we liked (as well as new songs we hadn't heard before) that you couldn't really find at the music section of the local Wal-Mart or K-Mart, especially niche genres like bluegrass, folk, or metal.

Seeing as I was a metalhead in a whole family of metalheads at the time, it was awesome being able to pop in a metal mix CD on the old CD boombox at our house and just jam out. We had a lot of cool stuff, mostly classic metal from the 80's and thrash metal, but we also had some black metal tracks on there too.

I remember listening to Bathory for the first time as a kid back in 2005.

I was twelve years old, it was after dark in the middle of winter and I was home alone, just me and my Dad while Mom was working night shift and my brothers were staying at my grandparents' house (I was feeling sick that morning and decided to stay home with Dad) and I started playing one of those blank CD's that my uncle had put a bunch of metal music on. There was no label on it, just a blank unlabeled CD, so I wasn't exactly sure what was on it.

The only lights in my room were from the boombox and a single shaded lamp on the nightstand. As usual, I had the volume cranked up way too high.

Then this started playing...

Scared the fuck out of me but I also thought it was really cool and badass at the same time. Before that point, I had no idea what black metal was, or any other form of extreme metal aside from thrash bands like Megadeth, which were nowhere as rough as Bathory.


----------



## Maxliam (Aug 25, 2018)

Sword Fighter Super said:


> The most annoying thing about MySpace was that some people would have songs play once you went on their page at full fucking volume.


I had a racist song playing at full blast on my fake profile. Also trolling wasn't as fun but seemed better in a weird way. Weens didn't really exist until Chris Chan. Before you'd troll and then move on.


----------



## liliput (Aug 25, 2018)

Thomas Paine said:


> Here's an oldie but a goodie: http://www.973-eht-namuh-973.com/
> 
> It's this schizophrenic fever-dream of a website, entirely coded and written by some insane (math professor/artist?) guy named David Denison that used to paint in the 70s/80s. Here's a picture of the author:
> View attachment 525488
> ...



Holy shit, I've always wondered about the artist behind those weird fucking images on that website. Seeing the inside of his house is a trip in itself. A lot of the art is actually pretty cool imo.



Spoiler: A smattering of examples 



The guy put inverse colored images of his paintings throughout this site, for some reason.


----------



## drain (Aug 25, 2018)

Maxliam said:


> I had a racist song playing at full blast on my fake profile. Also trolling wasn't as fun but seemed better in a weird way. I HAVE AUTISM PLEASE LAUGH AT ME didn't really exist until Chris Chan. Before you'd troll and then move on.



I had a fake myspace account and I pestered the scene/emo/goth users with things like 'lol if u so sad why just u dont kill urself lol'
Looking back it was pretty idiotic/weak from my part, but man, it was so much fun writing garbage and hit the 'send' button, it was like Kiwi Farms 1.0 for me


----------



## AF 802 (Aug 25, 2018)

Around 2007 (12 at the time), a forum that discussed trolling and internet drama infrequently (that turned into quite a lolcow community later on) is how I got into internet drama stuff. I remember there was a bunch of people who ended up taking the site over by force (which I mean protest) from this British guy in his 40's, and by about 3 or 4 years after that the site got into so much drama they went towards the way of turning into another NeoGAF/ResetERA, but instead of banning solely for political reasons, they would ban people for that and paranoia that someone was going to attack the site again (since they suffered several different server attacks in the past).

I kinda wish it didn't go to shit, it was a neat community.


----------



## Maxliam (Aug 25, 2018)

DrainRedRain said:


> I had a fake myspace account and I pestered the scene/emo/goth users with things like 'lol if u so sad why just u dont kill urself lol'
> Looking back it was pretty idiotic/weak from my part, but man, it was so much fun writing garbage and hit the 'send' button, it was like Kiwi Farms 1.0 for me


I did that too. I used to go on the Yahoo chat rooms for infertile women. They were a bunch of know-it-all white trash hicks so I'd love telling them they have raisins for ovaries. They'd get so butthurt.


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## drain (Aug 25, 2018)

Maxliam said:


> I did that too. I used to go on the Yahoo chat rooms for infertile women. They were a bunch of know-it-all white trash hicks so I'd love telling them they have raisins for ovaries. They'd get so butthurt.



Duuude, you made me remember about my Yahoo chat days...
I impersonated a muscular douche guy and one time, a gay dude in his 40's asked me to follow him to some webcam site because he wanted to see me shitting on the floor of my room. Literally shitting. On the floor. Like a fucking animal.
I blocked him and keep sperging retarded shit in chat until another gay dude asked me to roleplay as his son, and he wanted me to shit on his chest, in his fantasy. Blocked him too and left the site.

Now when someone mentions Yahoo chat it reminds me of gay people who likes shit. Literal shit.


----------



## SnowBall (Aug 26, 2018)

I remember making several attempts at a Geocities website and adding a chat room feature on it. You could also browse other chat rooms in it and I just visited random ones. Even came across someone with the username 10poundsofpulsatingpenis. Thankfully I was very educated in internet safety so I never gave out any personal shit.

There was this game program called BEYOND where people made awful custom mmorpgs. I loved joining random games and just being annoying as hell to everyone.

The homepage for our Windows 98 system constantly kept getting changed to porn sites.

Before Youtube was around I loved AlbinoBlackSheep. I still recall a flash video on it where Doraemon kills Osama while a Green Day song played in the background. 

My friend showed me rotten.com and it was my first exposure to shock images. That parrot image will forever be burnt into my brain.


----------



## NOT Sword Fighter Super (Aug 26, 2018)

DrainRedRain said:


> Duuude, you made me remember about my Yahoo chat days...
> I impersonated a muscular douche guy and one time, a gay dude in his 40's asked me to follow him to some webcam site because he wanted to see me shitting on the floor of my room. Literally shitting. On the floor. Like a fucking animal.
> I blocked him and keep sperging retarded shit in chat until another gay dude asked me to roleplay as his son, and he wanted me to shit on his chest, in his fantasy. Blocked him too and left the site.
> 
> Now when someone mentions Yahoo chat it reminds me of gay people who likes shit. Literal shit.


That's the problem with the internet. 

I mean sure, it's a great way for people from all over the world with similar interests to discuss said interests in a way that simply didn't exist before, but it's also a way for degenerates who would normally keep their gross and sometimes harmful kinks to themselves to form communities and start moving into IRL with their gross shit.


----------



## Maxliam (Aug 26, 2018)

DrainRedRain said:


> Duuude, you made me remember about my Yahoo chat days...
> I impersonated a muscular douche guy and one time, a gay dude in his 40's asked me to follow him to some webcam site because he wanted to see me shitting on the floor of my room. Literally shitting. On the floor. Like a fucking animal.
> I blocked him and keep sperging retarded shit in chat until another gay dude asked me to roleplay as his son, and he wanted me to shit on his chest, in his fantasy. Blocked him too and left the site.
> 
> Now when someone mentions Yahoo chat it reminds me of gay people who likes shit. Literal shit.


Gays are disgusting to begin with. Anyone who wants to stick his dick in another dude is already kinda fucked up in the head. To quote DMX, "how you gonna explain fuckin' a man? Even if we squash the beef I ain't touchin' yo hand!"


SnowBall said:


> I remember making several attempts at a Geocities website and adding a chat room feature on it. You could also browse other chat rooms in it and I just visited random ones. Even came across someone with the username 10poundsofpulsatingpenis. Thankfully I was very educated in internet safety so I never gave out any personal shit.
> 
> There was this game program called BEYOND where people made awful custom mmorpgs. I loved joining random games and just being annoying as hell to everyone.
> 
> ...


I used to love griefing people on games. I'd team kill, stand in a spot and block a player in, betray people right before we'd all finish an objective. Man my therapist was right, I have aggressive and deep seated urges to be anti-social and malevolent.



Sword Fighter Super said:


> That's the problem with the internet.
> 
> I mean sure, it's a great way for people from all over the world with similar interests to discuss said interests in a way that simply didn't exist before, but it's also a way for degenerates who would normally keep their gross and sometimes harmful kinks to themselves to form communities and start moving into IRL with their gross shit.


Yep. The internet gave all those weird sickos a chance to circle jerk their weird fetish shit out in the open. It also helped get the God Emperor elected.
jer


----------



## drain (Aug 26, 2018)

Sword Fighter Super said:


> That's the problem with the internet.
> 
> I mean sure, it's a great way for people from all over the world with similar interests to discuss said interests in a way that simply didn't exist before, but it's also a way for degenerates who would normally keep their gross and sometimes harmful kinks to themselves to form communities and start moving into IRL with their gross shit.



Yeah. I was always fascinated by weirdos (look at me, I'm a kiwi after all), but I think some of them really crossed the line. I was a teen at the time, so even if I laughed it off, it weirded me the fuck out. I abandoned the chat after some more gay dudes asked me to do depraved shit. Keep in mind I was a teen female impersonating some dudebro sperging nonsense (like, i would enter a conversation all of sudden and ask generic shit like 'do u even lift bro' or 'i have big dick whatcha bout u') so when gay older men asked me to shit on them out of nowhere, I thought it was time to me move on lol


----------



## TiggerNits (Aug 26, 2018)

Back in the old BBS days my dad brought home our first Windows  machine running 3.1. My siblings and I played on some MUD his coworker ran. My sister played it for about 2 years everyday and had a really good wizard or sorceror on it until she described to to another girl on her volleyball team in highschool and the let her know DnD was for fags


----------



## Maxliam (Aug 26, 2018)

TiggerNits said:


> Back in the old BBS days my dad brought home our first Windows  machine running 3.1. My siblings and I played on some MUD his coworker ran. My sister played it for about 2 years everyday and had a really good wizard or sorceror on it until she described to to another girl on her volleyball team in highschool and the let her know DnD was for fags


Oh my god...MUDs...you're going so old school now with that and Windows 3.1 and shit. I remember when we got Windows 95. And computers that didn't come with modems, you had to buy them separately. Yeesh I feel so old now.


----------



## TiggerNits (Aug 26, 2018)

Maxliam said:


> Oh my god...MUDs...you're going so old school now with that and Windows 3.1 and shit. I remember when we got Windows 95. And computers that didn't come with modems, you had to buy them separately. Yeesh I feel so old now.




Measuring speed in bauds, my man


----------



## Zaragoza (Aug 26, 2018)

Nekromantik said:


> I will never forget that story of the woman that died in the tub and turned in to people soup.


Is there a way to go back and see the pictures? All the links are dead and I'm here itching to see the "Don't try this at home" picture.


----------



## Tragi-Chan (Aug 26, 2018)

When I was a teenager, I had a blog on Opendiary. I actually looked back on it a few years back and it was pretty cringe, but fortunately the site is gone now.


----------



## DangerousGas (Aug 26, 2018)

I remember the Web being pretty sparsely populated in the early 90s, at least in terms of discrete sites. There was a fuck ton of content on usenet and the like, but it was nothing like it is today.
I remember all the 'free webspace with email account' providers really kicking into high gear circa 1996 or so, and there'd be geocities or angelfire websites all over the place, highlighting the fact that 90% of people who put syuff up on them really had nothing of value to share with the world. Social media just made that fact ever clearer.
I remember MySpace being a new thing, and how prior to that the closest we'd get to social media was exchanging email addresses, so we'd all get those bastard long email chains going, often with these ridiculously cringe worthy 90-question long questionnaires that were all the rage for some reason.
Msn and icq were pretty huge for a while, too. I remember having my first 'damned kid's moment when the fashion for stupidly long ascii art in user nicknames started being a thing. I'll never understand the whole xXx thing that people still apparently do. It was apparently something to do with being straight edge or whatever, but it just looked stupid as fuck to me.


----------



## totse (Aug 26, 2018)

DangerousGas said:


> xXx



I believe xXx was "scene" (also Vin Diesel)

Straight edge can be sXe, XXX, X


----------



## DangerousGas (Aug 26, 2018)

totse said:


> I believe xXx was "scene" (as in signifying that one is "scene") (also Vin Diesel)
> 
> Straight edge can be sXe, XXX, X (as in referring to the thing itself)


This predated the film and scene kids by quite some time. As far as I can remember, it was around 98-99.


----------



## totse (Aug 26, 2018)

Oh okay, I remember scene kids using it a lot but I hadn't seen it before then.


----------



## Nekromantik (Aug 26, 2018)

Zaragoza said:


> Is there a way to go back and see the pictures? All the links are dead and I'm here itching to see the "Don't try this at home" picture.


I'm sure someone has person boiled in tub pictures. It's been years and that was the only pic I really remember because it was so strange.


----------



## Francis E. Dec Esc. (Aug 26, 2018)

Maxliam said:


> Oh my god...MUDs...you're going so old school now with that and Windows 3.1 and shit. I remember when we got Windows 95. And computers that didn't come with modems, you had to buy them separately. Yeesh I feel so old now.



I remember playing DikuMuds. I played one where you couldn't directly harm other players, but you could forcibly teleport them to other places, like from the newbie goblin dungeon to the lich lord lair. 



Zaragoza said:


> Is there a way to go back and see the pictures? All the links are dead and I'm here itching to see the "Don't try this at home" picture.



https://web.archive.org/web/20030202031707/http://poetry.rotten.com:80/simmer/

Super NSFL, of course.


----------



## drain (Aug 26, 2018)

I remember when I was about 13/14 years old, I used a program called Ares Galaxy to download music. It was pretty shitty and most of the time the song wasn't even correct, but I had fun searching for my favorite bands at the time. 
You could also download games, movies or even wallpapers, but I really didn't like these options because most of the time it was weird-ass porn labelled as some kids movie.

I think one time I stumbled over CP, not really sure. I remember I had just downloaded some metal band wallpapers and when I opened it, it was a pic of a girl/woman (not really sure because the quality was super low) wearing a pink frilly dress and lifting it for the camera and she was naked under the dress. I deleted the picture and tried to find the original uploader, because I wanted to report him or something, but there was nothing I really could do.
Every time I think about it I still get a little uneasy.


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## totse (Aug 26, 2018)

I had a similar experience on Limewire except it involved discovering the existence of horse porn


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## drain (Aug 26, 2018)

totse said:


> I had a similar experience on Limewire except it involved discovering the existence of horse porn



I had so many "what in the actual fuck" moments with torrent/sharing programs that I'm now pretty desensitized.
The internet back then was very different, it was super easy to find weird shit without even trying. You didn't even had to type "horse porn" for example, it would practically fall on your lap out of nowhere.


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## totse (Aug 26, 2018)

There's a reason for that stupid excuse about "oh all this terrible porno just popped up suddenly while I was innocently browsing the interweb."
It used to be real, and sometimes it was a real race to close it because if someone saw it you knew they wouldn't believe it wasn't you.


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## Big Nasty (Aug 26, 2018)

True stories of download/filesharing WTFery back in the day:

Searched for busty redheads, got video of an old Asian lady throwing up in a bucket.

Downloaded Gangs of New York, got speech by Adolf Hitler.

Weird clip of three naked female asses right next to a hotel bed. Guy behind the camera whispers some sort of command in Japanese. All three chicks shit on the bed simultaneously.

Note: I have only experienced one of these. The other two happened to friends of mine.


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## drain (Aug 26, 2018)

Big Nasty said:


> some sort of command in Japanese



of fucking course it is in japanese


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## MysticMisty (Aug 26, 2018)

We didn't have internet in my house until sometime after 95 and of course it was one of the really early versions of AOL. I think my parents only got it just because it would be easier for them to communicate while my dad was stationed overseas for 3-6 months, however long it was that time (my dad was in the Air Force). I don't even think AIM existed for it yet, my parents could only communicate through email.

Although I played a fuckton of games on the computer I wasn't allowed to use the internet for a while. A big reason is because my parents can be pretty strict in some ways, but I think the main reason was because this was when they didn't give you a lot of free minutes every month. I distinctly remember one time begging my dad to let me play some game on Nick's website they advertised on TV, my dad opened the site and played the game himself for 30 seconds at most before telling me that he won't let me because we were almost out of free minutes for the month. God forbid someone other than himself use the internet for a change. Thankfully AOL started providing more generous amounts of free minutes around the time we moved to Arizona and I was finally allowed to create an account and use the internet freely.

Before then though, we were being taught how to use the internet in school since it was rapidly becoming something everybody had easy access to now. Some of it was really basic shit like using Yahoo to look up information for a essay, but in the latter half of my 5th grade year my teacher took it further and has us build our own websites using some program so we didn't have to figure out html programming. For the most part we could put whatever we wanted on our sites and even call it whatever we wanted (as long as they stayed school appropriate), but there were a few requirements. Like use our real names and ages, where we lived, and at least one photo of ourselves. Even though I don't think these sites ever left the school server for anyone and everyone to see them, telling us to put our personal information on these things was a hell of a thing to do.


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## snuffleupagus (Aug 26, 2018)

Nekromantik said:


> I'm sure someone has person boiled in tub pictures. It's been years and that was the only pic I really remember because it was so strange.



I remember that picture and wondering just how awful it was for the cleanup crew to remove the nastiness. Then my dad bought a house to flip (and the bubble burst a couple days later, and I still have the house as a rental property now that he’s dead). 

Anyway, I’m pretty sure I have paid off any karmic debt I’ve incurred looking at gory death pictures online back in the day because I helped him clean the house before he started rehabbing it. The previous owner had died in the tub and sat in the bath for three months before someone finally figured out the crazy lady wasn’t around. The body was gone, obviously, but we wore hazmat suits and full respirators until we got the house clean and aired out. 

If I allow myself to think about it, I can still taste that death smell on the back of my tongue. That kind of cured me ever looking at gory pics online. Well that and having kids, I kind of grew a bit of a conscience after spawning a couple humans.


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## Yaoi Huntress Earth (Aug 26, 2018)

I remember a thing called _Kisekae_ or KISS dolls.  They're pretty much online paper dolls that were actually a lot of fun at the time and there were some really talented artists. Eventually, all the good artists went on to other things and the last doll was made in 2012.


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## drain (Aug 26, 2018)

Was looking through my old games folder (bc this thread made me all nostalgic) and I found a game called "Jazz Jackrabbit 2" from 1998. I remember I loved this game, my father actually got me an copy on a floppy disk lol

I remember another game that took place inside a graveyard and you could choose to play as a 'gothic' woman with a sword or a werewolf. Can't remember the game's name and I don't have a copy anymore


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## RunRufusRun (Aug 26, 2018)

Was using Grokster or some similar program,on dial up none the less,to download Star Wars Episode 1. Spend 3 days downloading what was labeled as the first of 2 VCDs,who remembers those. It finished early one morning. I pop a bowl of popcorn and pack the bowl on my bong. Start the file... it was some shitty Eddie Murphy family comedy.


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## Yaoi Huntress Earth (Aug 26, 2018)

Two things I remember are the Portal of Evil which was the Kiwi Farms of its time where if found insane sites like dead baby (at fetus level) tributes (which were popular for a while), stories by people who believe they married Sonic the Hedgehog, a former politican who wrote a "libertarian" rape story, etc. I tried to hang out at the forums they had for certain links, but I wasn't at the level of snarkiness and jerkiness needed to handle it.

The other piece of weird were key fics. Where there was a key that lead to the room of a fictional bishie and the person wrote a story about the owner of the key and the prositute that lived in the room. Sometimes the story was the happy hooker type while others had the prostitues being slaves and rescued. It was fairly popular in the late 90s to early 00s among yaoi/slash fans and the first man-smut story I read was one.


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## queerape (Aug 27, 2018)

I first logged on probably about 97 or 98. My dad or grandpa had to call the phone line for dial up and that noise haunts me.

I remember what the chat rooms of various game websites like Pogo.com we’re like after 9/11. Aged 7 I was wondering if anyone else saw the planes hit the towers like I did on TV, and a lot of people were saying they were there or knew someone killed. I remember an  emoticon of these guys gunning down bin laden.


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## Francis E. Dec Esc. (Aug 27, 2018)

Yaoi Huntress Earth said:


> I remember a thing called _Kisekae_ or KISS dolls.  They're pretty much online paper dolls that were actually a lot of fun at the time and there were some really talented artists. Eventually, all the good artists went on to other things and the last doll was made in 2012.



Fun fact: that website is run by a crazy misanthropic troon named Jennifer Diane Reitz.


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## Big Nasty (Aug 27, 2018)

SnowBall said:


> That parrot image will forever be burnt into my brain.


Penisbird.jpg 

Fuck yeah.

The first time I encountered that was not actually on the Internet. A printout of it was taped to the door of a basement storeroom in a club I used to hang out and drink at.


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## TheImportantFart (Aug 27, 2018)

I love threads like these. Nothing better than wallowing in nostalgia.

Let's see... _World of Warcraft_ taking three days to install on our shitty dial-up connection was quite fun (especially since I only played the game for about three hours before getting bored after it did install).

VisualBoy Advance. I never owned _Pokemon Gold_ and _Silver_ as a kid because I didn't have a GameBoy Colour so getting to play them for free for the first time was amazing. Also discovered other great GameBoy Advance and GameBoy Colour games I didn't physically own and never could've afforded as a kid like _Minish Cap_, _Superstar Saga_ and _Oracle of Ages_/_Seasons_.

I logged onto the internet once without realising my Mum was also on downstairs trying to book a holiday. I still remember the roar of fury echoing all the way to the top of the house as she got cut off.

Metacafe. There's a longer story about it elsewhere which I'll link here, but it was before YouTube hit it big and I preferred it because you could download videos. I thought that would give it an edge over YouTube, but the way things worked out shows how wrong I was.

Me and my friends playing the _Sex Kitten_ games and thinking we were so naughty and edgy for doing so.

_Happy Tree Friends_. In those days you had to watch it on their  own website through Flash player because YouTube wasn't a thing. It was nearly half an hour of waiting for a three-minute video, and I was mostly watching because seeing all the cartoon blood and gore made me feel like I was a big boy, but I still loved it.

And of course sites like AddictingGames, Minijuegos, Miniclip, Stick Page and Newgrounds. I had a friend who had decent internet at his house and we'd binge watch a load of pre-YouTube comedy videos whenever I went round like the Gollum Rap, Mario Son of a Peach or _Stick Wars_ (parts of that still make me chuckle).


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## Trymskvida (Aug 27, 2018)

Oh man, I remember finding Adventure Quest and thinking it was the dopest shit ever, begged my parents for a guardian membership and never got it. 
Oh, and searching for anime episodes and they were cut into 15 parts and recorded on a potato camera. Being a weeb was hard back in the day


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## Yaoi Huntress Earth (Aug 27, 2018)

I'm sure some of you remember an online cartoon called, Neurotically Yours which had an angry, fast-talking squirel named Foamy and his flaky goth owner Germaine. It was relevant back in the late 90s and early 00s since it appealed to the Hot Topics and nihilist kind of crowds. My friends and I were big fans since there were geniunely funny moments.

Somewhere in the late 00s, the creator took a downfall and his issues with women can be easily seen with how he later on treated Germaine and used Foamy as a hypocrite mouthpiece. (His women characters are usually screwed-up idiots, will eventually get killed, or they agree with what his mouthpiece character thinks.) Didn't help that he called anyone who questioned him and his writing as stupid. He's pretty much now irrelevant and I don't feel like watching his new stuff if he's still around.


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## Buck Mullet (Aug 27, 2018)

Growl hopes Kim68 from SegaNet chat is OK.


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## Vilnus Asuncion (Aug 27, 2018)

Nekromantik said:


> I once found a website for gay Russian Space Werewolves. To this day I still don't know what the fuck it was about.


Well... About Gay Russian Space werewolved


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## Nekromantik (Aug 27, 2018)

Vilnus Asuncion said:


> Well... About Gay Russian Space werewolved


I remember the website asking if I was gay, Russian, a werewolf or a space werewolf. It made it sound like a club, and it was in a mix of English and Russian.

OMG! Someone made a book about it.




 
https://www.amazon.com/Shifters-Space-Werewolf-Mpreg-Erotica-ebook/dp/B00UMGUEQC


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## Big Nasty (Aug 28, 2018)

Anyone remember Webrings?


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## Francis E. Dec Esc. (Aug 28, 2018)

Big Nasty said:


> Anyone remember Webrings?



I remember back when frames were a big deal. They wouldn't work in Netscape, so you had to download Internet Explorer version 1.0


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## DrJonesHat (Aug 28, 2018)

ThePurpleProse said:


> Planet Nu (was called VGA Planets), I think they're still around, it was a game that never came to be, the idea was you got a ship, you colonize planets, get those nasty natives to work, expand, you get the drill, the thing that made it interesting was the multiplayer, each player had turns and it could take a full week to a whole 50 players to complete a round, by the time you got a turn again you would forget who the fuck was your ally, what you were doing and pretty much everything, was a real shitshow after 10 rounds.


Oh yeah! We played that in college, hotseat style. It was easier if everyone lived together, like in a dorm. We ran a game that lasted a whole academic year my freshman year. It was a blast! You could play it by email too, but like you said, that caused issues. We usually played with about 10 people.
BBSes were the net before the net. Before 1991, you had to either be in government, the military or in college to get internet access, or know a guy in one of those categories. I logged onto my first BBS in the summer of 1991. ANSI art, most only had one phone line so only one person at a time could use it. There were amateur networks that exchanged messages across BBSes in a form similar to newsgroups (they were called echos back then). Since the exchange occurred over the regular phone system, long distance calling was involved, so most did their exchanges at night, usually after midnight. I was active on the echos for Star Trek, and tabletop RPGs mostly. I got on the internet for the first time 1994, and it was a shell account, so I didn't even have access to the web, except through Lynx, a text browser. In the summer of 1995, I got my first dial-up PPP account, and could get on the web. Naturally, being in my late teens, the first thing I looked up was porn. I was not disappointed. 
We got broadband in 2003, and the world was never the same after that for me. I used all the old file sharing programs, then I discovered Bittorrent, and that was that.


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## TiggerNits (Aug 28, 2018)

The day after I showed my brother how to use WinNuke he went on to a Yahoo chatroom for Evanescence (which is fat girl music, btw)  and started telling them "Post your IP address and I will tell you what it means about you" and when tons of people started replying to it, he started just popping them one by one and even found a way to run a script that would do it at random intervals every few hours for days on end. 

I was really proud of him when he told me about it afterward


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## DrJonesHat (Aug 28, 2018)

TiggerNits said:


> The day after I showed my brother how to use WinNuke he went on to a Yahoo chatroom for Evanescence (which is fat girl music, btw)  and started telling them "Post your IP address and I will tell you what it means about you" and when tons of people started replying to it, he started just popping them one by one and even found a way to run a script that would do it at random intervals every few hours for days on end.
> 
> I was really proud of him when he told me about it afterward


I salute you for helping shepard the next generation of internet hooligans. Well done.


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## Smaug's Smokey Hole (Aug 28, 2018)

Doing script-kiddie shit to hack porn sites in the late 90's was fun. I guess they couldn't afford the best people to develop/secure their sites so by learning a few things a surprising amount of sites could be accessed by something as simple as adding an extra / in the url of the protected areas. www.bigbutsandbusts.com/members/ would require a password or show up as restricted but www.bigbutsandbusts.com//members/ would not. Loading up on proxies and cracking usernames/passwords was also an option for the enterprising script-kiddie.
Jokes on me though, even small jpegs takes a while to download on a modem.

Piracy in general was fun back then. Ripping a game(not to be confused with an iso release) sounds straightforward, but there were rules and standards to follow. A ripped game couldn't be larger than 25x5MB(275MB, used to be smaller with the individual archive size equivalent to a floppy IIRC). To shrink a (possibly multiple) CD game or ISO release down to 275MB took some skill and competition between groups trying to one up each other led to some really creative thinking and neat solutions.

For those interested in top notch scene nerdery here is the old rules sheet:
https://scenerules.org/t.html?id=srr_rules.nfo


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## Yaoi Huntress Earth (Aug 28, 2018)

Who remembers mailing lists? Also how easy it can be to accidently send the wrong entry to the wrong group.


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## DrJonesHat (Aug 28, 2018)

Yaoi Huntress Earth said:


> New Who remembers mailing lists? Also how easy it can be to accidently send the wrong entry to the wrong group.


Yeah I sent a recipe for M&M cookies to my bipolar disorder support mailing list. No one really said anything because a lot of people tried it and we set up a separate list to swap comfort food recipes.


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## Big Nasty (Aug 29, 2018)

Nothing more "90's Internet" than posting edgy jokes about Barney the Dinosaur on Usenet.


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## Smaug's Smokey Hole (Aug 29, 2018)

Another sperg post: networking used to suck big time.

In the 90's routers didn't exist as we know them and there were no real reason for a private citizen to own something like a switch so they had price tags targeting business, expensive stuff. The common technology for connecting computers together, at a LAN and such, was through coaxial cables. It's the type of cable you screw into a cable box. Without a central point to connect to you didn't need any expensive equipment, everyone just brought a bit of cable with them. The computers were then daisy-chained by screwing a T-cross into the connector of the network cards, then both ends of the network were terminated with a plug(a 'terminator'). Coaxial connections could be vampire tapped which is neat. Imagine a snake sinking its fangs into a hotdog, the hotdog and the snake are actually network cables, that was a legit method to put more machines on a network. All of this created a glorious network that _shared_ 10mbit of bandwidth.
It was cheap but it wasn't good.
If someone removed the terminator the network died, if someone unhooked a cable(or their computer) the network died, there were no DHCP to assign IP addresses so everyone had to assign them themselves and if they used one that was already in use things would get fucked. If someone used something in a range outside of the subnet mask or have anything else wrong with their network settings they were fucked. If Windows 95/98 felt like it things would be fucked. For some reason IPX was the hail mary protocol that seemed to work best but that meant that everyone had to be on the same page when it came to which network protocol to use. 

Years later WiFi arrived and the terror continued. It's good now though, but in the beginning...


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## totse (Aug 29, 2018)

Smaug's Smokey Hole said:


> .


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## Kiwi Lime Pie (Aug 29, 2018)

The comment about needing to know someone in college to have internet access  reminded me of an old (possibly VAX?) time-sharing system my university had access to during my time there.

I believe it may have been limited to CS students and those in other classes that had a need for an account there because my CS professors mentioned having to fund our accounts each semester. I think one of my professors even hinted that if we went over our budget, he may not have any funding left to extend our access for the rest of the semester. Another even promised extra time on the system to the first person to get an extra credit question correct.

Assignments on this system, whether Pascal or IBM 360 Assembly Language, were submitted as batch jobs - no big deal when everything worked as expect, but annoying as hell when it didn't and a pain in the butt to debug.

The most noteworthy feature for me, though, was its email system. Even though it was very crude, it also had a feature where one could edit (or even delete) a message at any time until the recipient read it. This came in handy when I found someone I used to know on this network and sent an email referencing an event I later realized involved someone else. Thankfully, she hadn't read the message at that point, so I edited out that portion.

Email could also be sent to select networks in the US and the UK. I seem to recall one such network having email addresses that didn't use @ to separate the user and domain but I forget the format, though, if this was true.

Although this system was retired a long time ago, I believe I still have one of the manuals for navigating the system up in the attic, along with the article in my alumni magazine about the system's retirement and former students' memories of it.


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## totse (Aug 29, 2018)

Kiwi Lime Pie said:


> Email could also be sent to select networks in the US and the UK. I seem to recall one such network having email addresses that didn't use @ to separate the user and domain but I forget the format, though, if this was true.



UUCP bang path?


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## Lunete (Aug 29, 2018)

Do any other girl kiwis remember those online dollmaker sites? I must have spent countless hours building and dressing those stupid things. The Doll Palace and Dollzmania we're two of my favorites I know what you're thinking but no, those aren't porn sites. Although I have stumbled on to a few porn sites while searching for them.


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## Kiwi Lime Pie (Aug 29, 2018)

totse said:


> UUCP bang path?



While I know what you're referring to, and that was covered in the manual, I think the odd address format I'm thinking about was for one of the networks in the UK. I may have to try to find that manual over the weekend to see if it's in there.



Lunete said:


> Do any other girl kiwis remember those online dollmaker sites?



Not a girl, but I remember those sites being so popular that it seemed like every other female I knew on social media at the time had those dolls as their profile avatar.


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## MysticMisty (Aug 29, 2018)

Lunete said:


> Do any other girl kiwis remember those online dollmaker sites? I must have spent countless hours building and dressing those stupid things. The Doll Palace and Dollzmania we're two of my favorites I know what you're thinking but no, those aren't porn sites. Although I have stumbled on to a few porn sites while searching for them.


Funny thing, in high school anything labeled as games was auto-blocked, because of course it was (it was a new feature because some of my teachers were pissed they couldn't play the games on Disney's official website anymore ) but that changed with the arrival of the South Korean foreign exchange student. The block did jack shit for foreign sites, and those dress-up games are/were huge in South Korea. So thanks to the foreign exchange student we could play games at school again. Even a few of the guys got into the dress-up games (but with male characters) just because it was better than nothing. Good times.


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## TiggerNits (Aug 29, 2018)

When I was statined in Kingsville in 97-98ish there was a book/movie store that rented PC games out for $2 a night. So I rented a bunch of games over the course of a few weeks and burned them all on to my own CD-R's. I had the best fucking games library until I PCS'd.

Thats how I ended up playing Everquest. Right before I left they had gotten a few copies to rent, having no idea how the online registration DRM worked, so if you got one of them first you had a $2 EQ account with a free month. 

Mom and pop places back then were so far behind the curve it wasn't even funny


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## LazarusOwenhart (Aug 29, 2018)

I did once have to convince my mum that my AOL account had been hacked because I got banned and when she rang customer services they read her a significant amount of my considerable body of work on AIM, everything from hardcore cybersex to some serious edgelordy "What the fuck did you just say about me you little shit" kind of stuff. Luckily my parents are totally tech illiterate and therefore she bought it 100%.


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## Super Collie (Aug 29, 2018)

Francis E. Dec Esc. said:


> I remember back when frames were a big deal. They wouldn't work in Netscape, so you had to download Internet Explorer version 1.0



*WELCOME TO CHEAT CODE CENTRAL*

FRAMES -- NO FRAMES​


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## Big Nasty (Aug 29, 2018)

LazarusOwenhart said:


> I did once have to convince my mum that my AOL account had been hacked because I got banned and when she rang customer services they read her a significant amount of my considerable body of work on AIM, everything from hardcore cybersex to some serious edgelordy "What the fuck did you just say about me you little shit" kind of stuff. Luckily my parents are totally tech illiterate and therefore she bought it 100%.


You are an exemplar, a true bastion of the Kiwi spirit. Semper fi.


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## DrJonesHat (Aug 29, 2018)

Are UUCP bang paths the ones that use ! instead of @ and you have to specify each hop to the destination? I vaguely recall reading about those.
My very first website was on Yahoo. I looked for it on the Wayback Machine, but it apparently wasn't archived. Which is just as well. It was awful.
I learned some very basic hacking skills because I didn't have a credit card and wanted to get into subscription porn sites. I never actually tried carding even though I wanted to.


MysticMisty said:


> Before then though, we were being taught how to use the internet in school since it was rapidly becoming something everybody had easy access to now. Some of it was really basic shit like using Yahoo to look up information for a essay, but in the latter half of my 5th grade year my teacher took it further and has us build our own websites using some program so we didn't have to figure out html programming. For the most part we could put whatever we wanted on our sites and even call it whatever we wanted (as long as they stayed school appropriate), but there were a few requirements. Like use our real names and ages, where we lived, and at least one photo of ourselves. Even though I don't think these sites ever left the school server for anyone and everyone to see them, telling us to put our personal information on these things was a hell of a thing to do.


Nowadays, any teacher telling you to do that would probably get fired and rightly so.


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## CWCchange (Aug 29, 2018)

I can't remember the link or even name, but I remember frequenting a Pokémon fansite with snippets for G/S before released in the West, and the creator really liked Meowth and had fan art everywhere. It played a really cheesy midi Sailor Moon song, too.

Of course, there was also Planet Zebeth, a Metroid parody comic by Kabutroid, which is still active!


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## MysticMisty (Aug 30, 2018)

CWCchange said:


> Of course, there was also Planet Zebeth, a Metroid parody comic by Kabutroid, which is still active!


I'm not sure if this is a story I really want to get into (long as fuck), but the really short version is that Kabutroid is a petty piece of shit who got me permabanned from the official (unofficial?) Planet Zebeth forum for no fucking legitimate reason.


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## John Titor (Aug 30, 2018)

Eric Conveys an Emotion
It was sad that he lost interest and decided not to update it. I'm surprised there's no spiritual sequel on tumblr.


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## LazarusOwenhart (Aug 30, 2018)

DrJonesHat said:


> Nowadays, any teacher telling you to do that would probably get fired and rightly so.


Ah those halcyon Web 1.0 days when everybody thought the internet would be the technology that would destroy all social and political barriers and bring about an information rich utopia instead of just being porn and cat pictures.


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## c-no (Aug 30, 2018)

While I can barely remember Internet 1.0 due to being a very young little sperg that had no literacy in tech beyond mashing a controller, I can remember a sort of email service that was called Juno. Beyond that was some website my brother showed me that I eventually realized was NeoPets. Only other Internet 1.0, if the year 2001-2002 counts as Internet 1.0 was going to my dad's workplace on a navy ship and seeing a sort of internet game where you shoot Osama in a liquor store while not shooting some shirtless hostage.



John Titor said:


> Eric Conveys an Emotion
> It was sad that he lost interest and decided not to update it. I'm surprised there's no spiritual sequel on tumblr.


Interesting part about that site is that one of Eric's emotions was used for the Van Buren Tech Demo for what would of been Fallout 3.

As for other Internet 1.0 stories, this one is pretty recent though it might fit here considering the site itself: @Guardian G.I. and I stumbled upon a website of some guy with a wolf fetish that managed to legally change his name to reflect his animal. His site was built around the 90's since one of its big focuses was on a sort of 3D chat client that could count as a predecessor to SecondLife. The site itself was filled with some ramblings from this guy, notably one of them was some sort of hatred he had of Goreans. I forgot the name of the site but Guardian G.I. might remember the details better.


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## John Titor (Aug 30, 2018)

Anybody remember Netzero and how it was meant to be free?


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## Big Nasty (Aug 30, 2018)

John Titor said:


> Anybody remember Netzero and how it was meant to be free?


No, what was that about?


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## Dr. Tremolo (Aug 30, 2018)

My mom worked at a hospital in the early 00s which had a then-brand new fiber optic internet connection. I remember enjoying the shit out of it every time I visited - I don't even know how fast it was, but it would load everything _instantly _because most of the internet was made for 56k modem connection at the time.


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## DrJonesHat (Aug 30, 2018)

LazarusOwenhart said:


> Ah those halcyon Web 1.0 days when everybody thought the internet would be the technology that would destroy all social and political barriers and bring about an information rich utopia instead of just being porn and cat pictures.


Don't forget Hamster Dance. You have to mention Hamster Dance.


John Titor said:


> Anybody remember Netzero and how it was meant to be free?


I vaguely remember it. Remember Juno? All it did was email.
Back in the dark ages of 2000, I had the misfortune of working for a company for the did tech support for a generic ISP. The company would sell access to it to companies that could brand it to themselves. Among their clients were Toys R Us and Kmart. Kmart's brand was bluelight.com. It was free, it was supposed to pay for itself by installing a small app at the bottom of your monitor that showed ads. Because it was free, the tech support number was a regular long distance number, not toll-free. It endlessly amused us that people were paying money to complain about something that they got for free. I worked the night shift, so when a drunk guy calls you at 2am complaining his internet went down, three guesses what he was doing.


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## TiggerNits (Aug 30, 2018)

I have a friend who was a network engineer for a major ISP in a very big city. He preferred to work the midnight shift until WoW came out, because prior to WoW it was just helping the occasional pervert get access to his porn. Once WoW was out, every late Monday night was just an endless stream of telling people that Blizzard's server maintenance was a weekly event that went for about  8-10 hours and it wasn't because their internet was down


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## John Titor (Aug 30, 2018)

Big Nasty said:


> No, what was that about?


Netzero was an internet provider that offered its services for free. The catch is there would be banner ads that will dominate a portion of your screen. Unfortunately, this became unsustainable and started charging a monthly rate, although the first 40 hours or so a month was still free.


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## Red Hood (Aug 30, 2018)

I remember waiting like 5 minutes for some titties to load up on CompuServe.


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## ERROR_ENTRY (Aug 30, 2018)

I remember watching this the week it was uploaded back in 2005, endlessly quotable.  I have fond memories of newgrounds, miniclip, youtube etc. from 2003-2007. Eveything went to shit after 2007, that was the last good year on the internet imo.


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## John Titor (Aug 30, 2018)

The Shadow said:


> I remember waiting like 5 minutes for some titties to load up on CompuServe.


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## Martys_not_smarty (Aug 30, 2018)

I remember back in the Wild West days when WinAmp had, along with their selection of shoutcast radio stations a TV section and was full of public access preachers, streams of Aqua Teen and Family Guy and Asian music videos but there was this one loop of a CGI cartoon short of what looked like a witch hunter or priest or something and was getting chased by a gargoyle, very well made just wish I could remember what it was called all I do remember was the credits were in French.


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## Kiwi Lime Pie (Aug 30, 2018)

John Titor said:


> Anybody remember Netzero and how it was meant to be free?





DrJonesHat said:


> Remember Juno? All it did was email.



Either Juno or NetZero, I forget which (maybe both?), required users to fill out a detailed profile in order to get the free access in return for being inundated with targeted ads that matched up with one's profile data. I know someone who wanted to avoid internet thirst and preserve her privacy, so she purposely faked her profile to claim she was a thirty-something gay male surfer. 



DrJonesHat said:


> Don't forget Hamster Dance. You have to mention Hamster Dance.



There were others such as Leprechaun Dance, Pikachu Dance, and Turtle Dance. I'm not sure if these were ran by the same person that created Hamster Dance, or just someone's idea of parody or look-alike sites. I believe some of these can still be found on the Internet Archive, but not all of the animated graphics got preserved.


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## Dirty Harry (Aug 30, 2018)

A 300 baud modem on a Commodore 64 using Q-link.  The thrill of being able to read text articles scrolling one line at a time. It was also incredibility expensive, especially during the day. I remember racking up $150 monthly bills on it.


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## Lackadaisy (Aug 30, 2018)

DrJonesHat said:


> Don't forget Hamster Dance. You have to mention Hamster Dance.



You fucker, I just got that song out of my head.


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## Dirty Harry (Aug 30, 2018)

TiggerNits said:


> The day after I showed my brother how to use WinNuke d



Oh GOD!!! I used to go into IRC chat rooms I hated like #gaydads&sons and run that on Linux (Slackware) and watch about 4/5ths of the users get a TIMEOUT ERROR from their Windows 95's computers crashing. I got pissed off at the local library and would always be nuking their computers to put them out of service for the day.


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## Pope Negro Joe the XIIIth (Aug 31, 2018)

Kari Kamiya said:


> The earliest thing about the Internet I can remember is the dial-up noise



That noise was the bane of my existence because I could never sneak online without it being announced to the entire house. My favorite memory from back then was discovering the ATM0 string you could add to the modem commands to silence the speaker, which meant I could wait until my parents went to sleep and then spend hours online without being bothered.

I'm sure that has nothing to do with my long standing Internet addiction and insomnia though.


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## Mr. Marcus (Aug 31, 2018)

John Titor said:


> Anybody remember Netzero and how it was meant to be free?



I used their email service to sign up to neogaf, a site that tried to require you to have a paid email account. That part actually WAS free.


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## DrJonesHat (Aug 31, 2018)

The 8 of Spades said:


> That noise was the bane of my existence because I could never sneak online without it being announced to the entire house. My favorite memory from back then was discovering the ATM0 string you could add to the modem commands to silence the speaker, which meant I could wait until my parents went to sleep and then spend hours online without being bothered.
> 
> I'm sure that has nothing to do with my long standing Internet addiction and insomnia though.


In the BBS days, I did the same thing at night, after my parents went to sleep. Once the internet was available,I did the same thing you did until I moved out and it was no longer an issue. 
Anyone remember virtual cash? It was going to be the currency of the internet until the credit card companies figured out how much money they could make and rolled out debit cards and such.


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## Zaragoza (Aug 31, 2018)




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## DrJonesHat (Aug 31, 2018)

I loved Joe Cartoon! Haven't thought about it in years.
Remember when Plug and Play wasn't refined yet and you had to manually configure settings to get your modem to work?


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## Smaug's Smokey Hole (Aug 31, 2018)

Something I remember from the internet boom of 96-97, around the time a lot of people especially teens, suddenly felt the need to surf that internet wave. Back then web-portals were huge and companies that were into media or telecommunication started their own and poured some big money(at the time) into it, to collect and direct the novice users. They had themed/topical chatrooms of course, accessible by the browser as part of the site, which was pretty neat from a user perspective. I think it used IRC as a back end of sorts with some commands turned off, I'm not that familiar with IRC but that was my impression.

No win-nukes/ping of deaths here, the people targeted ran WinNT 4.0 at companies big enough to have competent sys-admins that patched the systems regularly and threw in that hot-fix, so it didn't even work. But their hostname was visible, usually not that interesting unless it resolves to something like Ericsson, Volvo, something government related and so on... If you found someone like that in a chatroom at 10am chatting up teenage girls or goofing off they were sent a private message informing them that "Hey, not to be a dick, but we at the [their workplace's sys-admin office] have been requested to have a look at your ENTIRE internet habits during company time and maybe it's not wise to be..." with maybe a "knock it off and we'll be kind enough to start logging your activities tomorrow"

Scared straight and it always worked.


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## Chopinpiano (Sep 1, 2018)

When Newgrounds was actually the shit


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## Big Nasty (Sep 1, 2018)

There is a company that builds and repairs storefront signs that I've had dealings with. Their workshop is basically a hellscape of broken McDonald's signs. What is interesting about it is the fact that one of the guys that run the company was involved with boo.com back in the day.


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## DrJonesHat (Sep 1, 2018)

Remember Cuecat? It was a barcode reader you could plug into your computer and scan the barcodes of things and it would pull up a website about it. Yes, it was stupid.


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## Francis E. Dec Esc. (Sep 1, 2018)

DrJonesHat said:


> I loved Joe Cartoon! Haven't thought about it in years.
> Remember when Plug and Play wasn't refined yet and you had to manually configure settings to get your modem to work?



And you had to pick an IRQ that wasn't already taken up by your sound card or game card or something or else your system would get bricked.


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## Douglas Reynholm (Sep 1, 2018)

Chopinpiano said:


> When Newgrounds was actually the shit



That's a trip. Last time I visited that site it was full of Osama bin Laden and Taliban skits.


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## DrJonesHat (Sep 1, 2018)

Francis E. Dec Esc. said:


> And you had to pick an IRQ that wasn't already taken up by your sound card or game card or something or else your system would get bricked.


And it was a bitch to find one because some modems only worked on certain IRQs.


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## Pepito The Cat (Sep 1, 2018)

Ok, I just had an exceptionally good glass of Kentucky's finest honeyed Johnny's so I'll give my english a try. This isn't a story with any kind of ending or structure, just a recollection of facts. Also, I'm drunk.

The year was 1997 and ever since I was 7 years old I wanted a new PC as an upgrade from my stone age IBM 8086 XT clone. In 1994 I got a 486 DX4 at 100 MHz (a Texas Instruments chip, not even on par with the Intel DX2s of the time but it still did the trick) with a beautifully shitty Trident 8900 VGA card and 4 Mbs of RAM. No modem as the Internet was still the stuff of legends and BBSs weren't big here in Argentina but when 97 rolled in, I started to take an interest in networking.

So, one day I was chillin' with my cousin when he told me a neighbour was surfing "the net" using a BBS as gateway and that was also free! I felt intrigued so we went to the guy's place. He gave me the phone number for a BBS called "Los Pinos" (The Pines") who were offering a dial up access to the internet for every free e-mail subscription. You just needed to access the BBS, set up an account and use the login information to access the Internet through a long ass number. The catch? You only got 1 hour a week for a month.

So the quest for a modem started. Of course I wasn't going to actually BUY one but it turned out the guy running the local newspaper stand was also a techie and had a spare since he upgraded his old 28.8 kbps modem to a 56K. He wanted me to help him with the sunday edition for a few weeks and BAM! got a used 28.8K ISA modem. I remember this being the first time I opened my computer (the first of many) to replace or add something so it was the kick who started all.

So, hooked up the landline to the modem. Learned the _wonders _of interference over a unshielded copper twisted pair wire cable and how to assemble a RJ-14 jack. Opened the Hyper Terminal program that came with Windows 95 and... I was in.

I have many more stories starting from this point onward. Is anyone interested or am I rambling like a drunken lighthouse keeper?


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## Kiwi Lime Pie (Sep 2, 2018)

DrJonesHat said:


> Remember Cuecat? It was a barcode reader you could plug into your computer and scan the barcodes of things and it would pull up a website about it.



From what I remember (and confirmed from a net search), the device had huge privacy issues when it was revealed to be collecting information about the bar codes scanned through it.



Pepito said:


> I have many more stories starting from this point onward. Is anyone interested or am I rambling like a drunken lighthouse keeper?



I wouldn't mind more related stories.


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## HeirenPlaya (Sep 2, 2018)

I remember KISS dolls, anime webrings, Unreal Tournament 99 and its Counter-Strike-esque mod Tactical Ops, Geocities sites with hentai fanfics, downloading NES and SNES ROMs, Kazaa, hours of Medal of Honor: Allied Assault, Confound, eBaum's World, Newgrounds, making Flash animations and games, downloading 10-second WMV porn clips, playing chess on Playsite.com, Runescape 1.0, using the chat room on GameSite/CleverMedia to cyber, drawing swastikas in InkLink on Shockwave, Yahoo voice chat, Skype with Skype Me mode which I used to have cam sex with Japanese women, getting DDos'd in mIRC, thinking Tila Tequila was hot on MySpace and learning HTML to put swastikas in my profile's background, reading VNNForum and Stormfront, this "Choose your own adventure" game called Addventure,...


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## Russian Collusion (Sep 8, 2018)

Does anyone remember using the browser Netscape Navigator?


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## Big Nasty (Sep 8, 2018)

If I remember correctly, there was some issue with the earliest web browsers where you couldn't make printouts of web pages, but had to save and print out the actual HTML code instead?


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## AnOminous (Sep 8, 2018)

Usenet.  One of its best features was crossposting, where you could post one message to multiple groups simultaneously.  So you could say things that would infuriate all of them simultaneously and stand back and watch them get into a huge fight over nothing.  Star Trek and Star Wars nerds were really easy to get fighting each other and convince that the other group was invading them.

Similarly Apple and PC nerds.

And you could make the SF groups explode in mindless rage by just saying Heinlein was either great or was a fascist.

Old chat servers where if people were connected with the right kind of modem, you could type "+++ATH0" into the chat, it would trigger Hayes commands, and ATH0 was the command to make the modem hang up.  You could tell this worked when half the channel suddenly disconnected.

MUDs and MUSHes and MUCKs.  These were multi-user text games you could telnet to and in the original MUD, it was something like Zork but with multiple players simultaneously.  Later MUSHes, MUCKs and other variants were more social in nature, like Second Life in text, but usually with themes, like FurryMUCK.  The content was mostly player-created, and you could create places and objects by coding them.  So for instance, you could code a vending machine that spawned other objects.  And before they fixed this, you could have them spawn other objects that could themselves spawn other objects.

So you could create objects that would spawn other objects and have them go around doing annoying things or just spawning more and more until the server crashed.  (Later on, creating annoying objects that would fuck shit up became popular on Second Life and things like GMod but I'd lost interest in pure griefing for its own sake by then.)


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## Francis E. Dec Esc. (Sep 8, 2018)

Russian Collusion said:


> Does anyone remember using the browser Netscape Navigator?



I had version 1.0 on my 486 Windows 3.1 machine:


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## LazarusOwenhart (Sep 8, 2018)

I'm currently using K-Meleon on my 98SE machine. If I remember next time I'm using it I'll post Kiwi Farms 1.0 screens.


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## Pepito The Cat (Sep 8, 2018)

Russian Collusion said:


> Does anyone remember using the browser Netscape Navigator?


 Netscape 2.0 was a good alternative vs IE 3. I used it quite a lot.


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## DrJonesHat (Sep 8, 2018)

AnOminous said:


> Usenet.  One of its best features was crossposting, where you could post one message to multiple groups simultaneously.  So you could say things that would infuriate all of them simultaneously and stand back and watch them get into a huge fight over nothing.  Star Trek and Star Wars nerds were really easy to get fighting each other and convince that the other group was invading them.
> 
> Similarly Apple and PC nerds.
> 
> ...


I got my first internet account in college, back in 1994. It was a UNIX shell account, so I had to use Lynx to look at websites. I discovered binary newsgroups, and that satisfied my porn needs until the next year when we got T1 access in the dorms and could use browsers. The first one I used was Netscape. And I met my college gf on a MUSH run at our college. I got my roommate into MUDs, and he worked extra shifts to get a computer so he could MUD over the summer.


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## ASU (Sep 9, 2018)

A friend once told me that if you read Leisuretown while doing meth you can hear the characters talking. I don't recommend testing it to find out though.


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## Ebonic Tutor (Sep 9, 2018)

SnowBall said:


> There was this game program called BEYOND where people made awful custom mmorpgs. I loved joining random games and just being annoying as hell to everyone.



BYOND was the name of it and people still use it to play Space Station 13, which is pretty awesome to troll people in once you got "robust".

Freei.net? It was kinda like Netzero except you could just set up a manual dial-up connection in the windows network settings and connect without using their program that blasted you with ads constantly. I use to use it to play Dreamcast games and Diablo 2 online for about 6 months.


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## AF 802 (Sep 9, 2018)

I'm surprised W3Schools is still up. I used it back in the day to learn HTML4.


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## AnOminous (Sep 9, 2018)

Ebonic Tutor said:


> Freei.net? It was kinda like Netzero except you could just set up a manual dial-up connection in the windows network settings and connect without using their program that blasted you with ads constantly. I use to use it to play Dreamcast games and Diablo 2 online for about 6 months.



You could do this with Netzero too, at first.  And Bluelight.  And then they messed with it so you couldn't.  But you could still dump their shitty adware onto another nonexistent display and not have to look at it.  Probably the fact everyone was bypassing their ads with methods like this, plus just creating multiple accounts with bogus info to get around their other stuff, is why they had to start charging.


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## Ebonic Tutor (Sep 9, 2018)

AnOminous said:


> You could do this with Netzero too, at first.  And Bluelight.  And then they messed with it so you couldn't.  But you could still dump their shitty adware onto another nonexistent display and not have to look at it.  Probably the fact everyone was bypassing their ads with methods like this, plus just creating multiple accounts with bogus info to get around their other stuff, is why they had to start charging.



I could never get it to work with Netzero but I wouldn't doubt it working in the beginning for sure. The other stuff you listed is def why they had to start charging / went out of business though.

Pretty sure you could use proto-ad blockers on the stuff too.


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## Russian Collusion (Sep 9, 2018)

I remember using Tripod to make free websites. You didn't need to know how to code or anything. Being the weeb that I was back then, I made a Dragonball Z and an Inuyasha website.


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## ForgedBlades (Sep 9, 2018)

Is sixth gen online console gaming considered internet 1.0? 

I was on Live from day one on the OG Xbox. It feels like the Wild West compared to what we have now. I dumped pretty much the entirety of my junior high and early high school years into Phantasy Star Online and Rainbow Six 3: Black Arrow. 

I also got in to FFXI on the PS2. Talk about a pain in the ass to get running. Between the PS2 HDD and PlayOnline, I felt like a legit hacker when I finally got into the game.


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## totse (Sep 9, 2018)

Give Her The D said:


> I'm surprised W3Schools is still up. I used it back in the day to learn HTML4.



amateur web designer milestones:

- finding w3schools
- finding w3fools


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## Regu (Sep 10, 2018)

I first got access to the internet in the summer of 1999. I had gotten a N64 and Ocarina of Time a month beforehand and was obsessed with the game. Unfortunately for me this was roughly the time that I had started to view girls as something I wanted rather than icky. Between long forgotten porn sites, my own budding sexuality, and Princess Ruto (the fish princess), it's no surprise I came out somewhat fucked up.

aside from that, I mostly remember using limewire to download a lot of western stuff impossible to come by here. I always found it amusing when Bill would ask me to buy my favourite artist songs when such a thing was impossible.


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## Smaug's Smokey Hole (Sep 11, 2018)

I played through Chrono Trigger when ZSnes was able to run it past the intro and play the music and sounds. This was in the fall of 1997 and while the game worked well enough certain things were broken, like transparency layers were actually solid so turning on and off layers manually was necessary to get through some areas.

Emulation during that time was pretty crazy. Playstation games could be emulated on the PC while the PS1 was still the dominant console on the market. UltraHLE could run Zelda Ocarina of Time 2-3 months after the game was released and it made Nintendo very upset. Bleem! played a couple of PS1 games on the Dreamcast, it made Sony very upset. People had been plugging away doing fan translations of games from older systems as well and were releasing patches for the roms, that made things a lot easier for those that wanted to play some SNES rpg that never came to the west. Before that the alternative was buy the cart, play the game in japanese, frequently consult a stack of paper with the entire script printed out in English. It sounds impossibly ridiculous but some people did that.


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## Jinmen (Sep 11, 2018)

Does anyone remember a geocities website called Cosmo Canyon? It was a site full of parody Final Fantasy fanfiction and fake walkthroughs for fake games called I.A.Q.s. It was super autistic but I loved it when I was 11. I think the webmaster went on to write articles for GIA (anyone remember that site?) and opened up a new site called Qu's Marsh.

i also remember places where you could shorten the url for your geocities/angelfire/tripod site for free.


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## Nekromantik (Sep 16, 2018)

Who remembers the Crichton Leprechaun. It was one of the first viral stories I remember.



 





Turns out he was identified.


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## Zaragoza (Sep 24, 2018)

@Pepito


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## Pepito The Cat (Sep 24, 2018)

Zaragoza said:


> ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)



*YA, WEI. YA WEI.*


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## Irwin M. Felcher (Sep 24, 2018)

Smaug's Smokey Hole said:


> I played through Chrono Trigger when ZSnes was able to run it past the intro and play the music and sounds. This was in the fall of 1997 and while the game worked well enough certain things were broken, like transparency layers were actually solid so turning on and off layers manually was necessary to get through some areas.


Also that point in the future era where you have to hold down three controller buttons in order to open a plot-critical door, but the emulator was only able to register two at a time. That one frustrated a lot of folks.

Man, I was crazy about emulators for a good stretch. But years even before Zophar's Domain and AGTP, I was making a pest of myself on local BBSes and borrowing my dad's work account with the college to Telnet into MUDs or dick around on gag Usenet groups. Fuck, I'm old.


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## ForgedBlades (Sep 12, 2021)




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## serious n00b (Oct 5, 2021)

ForgedBlades said:


>


Why is his chin further back than the rest of his face?


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## Spamton (Oct 5, 2021)

I remember being told not to have a song in my status on AIM because i was "too stupid to have a song by said artist" as my status by some rando i met on an online game i shouldn't have been playing at my young age.
I also remember just in general being a retarded idiot-child on the internet and getting myself banned from a few forums for that.

I also vividly remember the first renditions of Gaia, if that counts, and constantly getting hacked because I stupidly trusted those sites that you put your information in to get free gold.


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## Apopheliac (Oct 5, 2021)

Most of my early days on the net consisted of browsing small game forums and being a complete sperg on them. I'm shocked I didn't get banned from them, but at the same time, I think back then everyone was that way in a sense.
Oh, and Geocities sites. I tried to make my own but it just turned into a page that just had a bunch of images I had saved on my PC on it and nothing else.
Speaking of making pages, I remember when Xanga was also a thing and I had fun making pointless pages with dumb gifs on it, too.


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## The Great Citracett (Oct 5, 2021)

I remember buying shit on ebay as a kid using an account I set up in my mom's name. Getting in bidding wars with people and trying to keep refreshing with my slow dial-up internet so I could win by a few pennies.

And you could still get good deals on stuff too. The first thing I bought was something like 3 complete Colecovision consoles, a bunch of accessories, games, manuals, etc all for like $13.12.

I'd walk on down to the post office, buy a money order, and mail it out and wait for my stuff to come. Was pretty much the norm to pay like that on ebay.

Weird to think about, since now I just buy shit off there in seconds from my phone.


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## Desu Mountain (Oct 5, 2021)

Auto-scrolling horror comics. They were basically creepypasta in comic form but when you scroll past a certain point it would hijack your browser screen and rapidly rush through panel after panel of something like a Grudge/The Ring girl rushing right at you with a rapid clicking noise from your speakers or something like that, almost like a screamer. Never managed to track them down again.


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## AnOminous (Oct 6, 2021)

Desu Mountain said:


> Auto-scrolling horror comics. They were basically creepypasta in comic form but when you scroll past a certain point it would hijack your browser screen and rapidly rush through panel after panel of something like a Grudge/The Ring girl rushing right at you with a rapid clicking noise from your speakers or something like that, almost like a screamer. Never managed to track them down again.


Here's the one I remember.








						Chiller - Bongcheon-Dong  Ghost - Horang
					

Stories that crawl up and down your spine.




					www.webtoons.com
				



Note:  spoopy jumpscare, obviously


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## Stardust (Oct 6, 2021)

1997 is when my home got the internet.  Our school had it, but things were limited, so having unrestricted internet was mind-blowing.  I used to spoil movies for others by reading about them online, and print out video game codes and walk-throughs to sell or trade at school, for money or snacks.


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## Desu Mountain (Oct 6, 2021)

AnOminous said:


> Here's the one I remember.
> 
> 
> 
> ...


That's the one I remember. Man, it's been a while. Forgot that it was in color rather than black and white.


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## OneMillionRPM (Oct 6, 2021)

Zan said:


> fake walkthroughs for fake games called I.A.Q.s


I haven't seen anyone talk about these in over a decade. Used to read a bunch on the site for Disaster Labs (the Arfenhouse guys) when they were still together, they had a guy named Matt who loved writing them. Mainly parodies of fighting games and Megaman X. I'm still trying to figure out where all the Disaster Labs guys are now. The only one I've seen recently was Seppel, who's made a furry porn card game and trooned out. Everyone else is MIA.

I remember Wikipedia's early days when it was total anarchy (compared to now) and you could add practically anything. Like a page on the aforementioned IAQs. Or individual pages for each character in a work you like, which nowadays would get bundled into "List of (work) characters" or the work's page itself. You could even plug your website in a page's external links as long as it was relevant. Used to do that with this shitty forum I made. Not that it drew in any traffic.


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## Realistic Elephant (Oct 6, 2021)

Ted's Caving Page, with the story of his discovery in a local cave.
		


A classic


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## Smaug's Smokey Hole (Oct 6, 2021)

Irwin M. Felcher said:


> Also that point in the future era where you have to hold down three controller buttons in order to open a plot-critical door, but the emulator was only able to register two at a time. That one frustrated a lot of folks.


(I know this post is old) That wasn't the emulator being wrong, at least not for me because I finished the game. Instead it was how keyboards couldn't deal with more than [number] keys being held down at once in key-cluster, I don't know if it was a PS/2 issue or something. The solution was to temporarily remap a joypad button to another key.


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