Anyone Miss The Old Internet and Tech?

[TwinkleSnort]

I miss Napster and LimeWire.

 

[Sergeant Politeness]

I miss Napster and Limewire.

I remember when I was really little, my parents were super into Limewire and we got tons of music and bad VHS rips of old cartoons off there. I still have the DVDs we burned of those somewhere. I'm amazed we never got any viruses, given how much we used it.

 

[Muncie Anderson]

I first got online in fall of 1996.

Back then, the internet was still considered a luxury item for a lot of people. One month, I'd be talking to someone online, and then later I noticed that they had completely vanished, because they couldn't afford the subscription costs for whatever ISP they had signed up for.

I definitely don't miss all those free AOL discs giving you anything from ten to fifty free hours. God, those things were literally everywhere at one point in the late nineties.

Also, back in those days, it was still kind of a novelty to admit to people that you had friends on the internet. Dating someone online was something entirely different, though.

 

[TwinkleSnort]

I used to love Excite's Virtual Places (VP) Chat. It was free, you could make avs and gestures, go on "tours", and you could browse the net while in VP, alone or with friends. I met tons of people from around the world, and it was SO much fun, until Excite messed up and sold it to Halsoft, which sucked the life, soul, and fun out of it and charged $$$ for membership. I hate you, Halsoft.

 

[Audit]

I miss the days when you could just buy a piece of software and run it for as long as you wanted. Nowadays, companies force you to pay a monthly or yearly subscription fee.

I also miss being able to disable java script on a page without breaking its functionality.

 

[Daisuke Jigen]

I miss the simplicity/style of Windows 98 & XP. I mean, they run like shite now, but the aesthetic is what I miss.

 

[Mimic]

I find myself wanting to use old school programs like ICQ and stuff sometimes, but I know fifteen minutes later I'd realize why they're dead and returning to modern luxuries.

 

[Guardian G.I.]

I miss the days when you could just buy a piece of software and run it for as long as you wanted. Nowadays, companies force you to pay a monthly or yearly subscription fee.

To be honest, software which used to have a price tag of more than 1000$, like Adobe Photoshop, became more accessible with subscription fees. Before that, pirating was the only way to get it in piss-poor parts of the world, like the former USSR in the late 90s-early 00s, because greedy Adobe (and other foreign software developers) charged American prices for everyone.

Anyway, here are some things that I fondly remember:

• Flash games, as said by @Sonicsis. Does anyone remember Yetisports, for example? Also, various Flash cartoons like the Russian series "Masyanya", which was very well known in the former USSR.
• Similarly to that, the website of Discovery Channel used to have fun flash games about various stuff. I especially liked this one and this one.
  
• Arkanoid-style games like DX-BALL 2. They were the shit in the early 2000s.
• DVB-S cards for PCs like SkyStar 2, which allowed you to connect your computer to an average satellite dish and watch foreign TV on your PC. Also, you could use satellite Internet with it.
• The so-called "satellite fishing". The way satellite Internet worked back then, one could intercept the files downloaded through it with a special "sniffer" program, because instead of establishing a single connection with the user, the satellite broadcasted everything downloaded over a wide area, unencrypted. Most shit I got was useless parts of various rar archives, but I also caught some small games and even a Lineage 2 client once.
• These things from Windows 98 era that lived on your desktop:

• Active Worlds - like Second Life, except older and more obscure. A colossal pain in the ass to use with dial-up internet, though, but the idea of a MMO 3D chat and exploration game looked very cutting edge back then.
• Internet scratch cards. I remember saving money in mid-00s to buy a scratch card from a local ISP called BASNET.
• When I was a kid, there was a tiny VHS/video game rental shop in a grocery store nearby. However, my dad had cracked Alcohol 120%, so I cheated the system by making disk images of everything rented, acquiring them forever. Everything there were pirate CDs, though.
• The Russian Internet a decade ago, before the rise of social media. The so-called "entertainment portals" like Anub.ru reigned supreme and the Olbanian language was still trendy. Here's an example of an ancient Russian meme from 2005: 1, 2.
  
• The days when lolcats were a novelty and the early YouTube.
• Sharing Java games and phone themes for early mobile phones via Bluetooth. The days when Sony Ericsson k750i was the phone of the cool kids.

And now some things I don't fondly remember:

• Windows 98. Rest in piss.
• Dial-up internet in general, which blocked the phone line. It was so fun to download several megabytes for 20 minutes!
• Following dial-up, shitty early ADSL with limited traffic. Also not fun.
  
• Shitty commercial file hosts like RapidShare and DepositFiles, good God. You deserved being kicked off the market by torrents and sane file hosts like Openload and Zippyshare, you unreasonable greedy bastards.
• Shareware software, especially shareware games.

 

[DecrepitSimonla]

I miss the way that the old internet was more about freedom and it was more relaxed, now companies are more about upholding their agenda rather than having a open environment with free speech. Also there was something about old memes that was good.

 

[Dewey Manlove]

I've heard tales of a time between the internet becoming common in universities and AOL buying Netscape and opening the www to the great unwashed masses. No corporations, no children, and an average user IQ perhaps 30 points higher than today. Newsgroups were at their height, alta-vista was the cutting edge search engine and you downloaded your porn and shareware overnight--so every morning felt like Christmas. That must have been a magical time indeed.

 

[Some JERK]

I miss the old mechanical keyboards that were heavy enough to be deadly weapons.

 

[Reynard]

Shit, man. Sometimes I honestly do miss that simpler time. Granted, I was too young to really know of any of the real world shit that was going on, so maybe that's why I remember it so nicely. Though I never found myself on forums back in the day. I mostly looked up cheat codes to games (a practice that has since died out), Runescape, or going to pointlesssites.com. I was late to the whole internet culture thing. I wasn't interacting with people online outside of Runescape until, like, 2012 or something.

 

[GentlemanFaggot]

I miss amber monochrome monitors and the sound of a 2400 baud modem connecting.

Pfft. Amber.

Green monochrome master race reporting in.

 

[Mariposa Electrique]

Anyone miss the old internet and tech? Back when Skype was decentralized and the hot new shit? When Windows XP was cutting edge and your friends played Runescape together with you? Flip phones, Gameboys, CRTs, laptops that didn't have chiclet keyboards and non-replaceable batteries, carrying an iPod with you as well as a phone, etc...

I miss the social aspects of it, which were basically very sparse. There was not much comparing fake lives.

 

[The_Truth]

I kind of miss the days before social media gave a platform to the dumbest people on earth.

But other than that, no not really.

Trying to get a game to run by tweaking your Config.sys file to free up enough memory?
Only being able to play a four player game of Doom 2 as fast as the fastest machine in the lobby?
Waiting 40 minutes for an MP3 file to download?

No thanks, there's a lot of things I look back nostalgically about the local BBS days of the 1990s but I'd never want to go back to that.

 

[DangerousGas]

I miss the days before Eternal September.

 

[SwanDive]

I miss the good ol' yellow subscribe button

I do not miss videos being 11 minutes max tho

 

[Ti-99/4A]

I don't miss having a 2 megabyte inbox for email that filled to capacity with spam if you didn't check it every day.

 

[Sure Thing Idiot]

I miss waiting eight days for a song to download and getting disappointed with the download stopped at 97 percent, but the thing I miss most is when you could only find oldschool through-the-seat shaky bootlegs of that one specific new movie you wanted to watch and you could hear the distant whispering of people a few seats down or a giant head was in the way.

 

[Positron]

I miss win.ini and system.ini files. At least they're in a sorta human language; the Windows registry that superseded them from Windows 95 onwards is completely opaque.