Favourite "Old Internet" stuff - Let's reminisce about the Wild West days

[Freya]

Rotten.com

 

[Cherry Eyed Hamster]

I still have two older PCs - one Win XP and one Win 7 - to play older games on. The Windows 7 PC for older games I have on Steam, the XP PC for games I have on disc (or pirated disc images). There are ways to get Win 98 games to run on modern systems, but it takes a lot of fiddling and usually they have a lot of issues.

I hate modern Windows with a passion and would switch to Linux for my everyday usage if I wasn't such a tech-illiterate basic bitch. Linux sounds way too complicated for me.

How were you able to get these operating systems to run? Are you using virtual machines or did you buy old computers to run them? I’ve been wanting to have a computer run Windows XP for ages but the only way I’ve figured out how to do it is with VM’s, which isn’t the same.

Also I know the feeling, Linux is too sophisticated for my programming-illiterate ass to use. Might just end up dropping the ball in frustration and make the switch though. Fuck Windows, GoogleOS, and iOS with a thousand blazing suns.

 

[Vril-Dame vom Aldebaran]

How were you able to get these operating systems to run? Are you using virtual machines or did you buy old computers to run them? I’ve been wanting to have a computer run Windows XP for ages but the only way I’ve figured out how to do it is with VM’s, which isn’t the same.

My post says "I still have two older PCs", that's the trick. They're my original Win XP and Win 7 machines that I never sold or threw away, from 2006 and from 2014 respectively. Instead of letting them gather dust I use them for playing old games.

 

[Cnut]

All the old Ate My Balls stuff. Some was benign and some was nightmarish. Super Mario Ate My Balls. David Bowie Ate My Balls. Etc. That stuff freaked me away from the internet for a while and now it is like lost languages of antiquity.

 

[Oatchi]

WBS chat and Neopets

Neopets is still around believe it or not
Definitely not as active as it used to be, but TNT is still pushing out tons of small, dumb shit to make money.

 

[The Heartthrob]

I always had a lot of fun on Stickdeath.

 

[Cherry Eyed Hamster]

A website I used to frequent in my youth for Sega Saturn and Dreamcast cheat codes is still up and running! It hasn’t been updated since 2000. I’m shocked it’s still up.

 

[Looney Troons]

My favorite old Internet thing to do, especially if the person used an older version of Windows and was an AOL user (the latter especially easy to find out if they were on your IRC server) was sending the ”{S /con/con" command via instant message. I forget how it works because the exploit is over 20 years old at this point, but it exploited a vulnerability in Windows via the AOL client. You’d send this person the message with {S /con/con in it, they’d hear a chime, and then their computer would bluescreen. We called it “punting” back in the day, because it did very little than inconvenience the receiving user.

So, being a young teen at that time, I was an AIM user like anyone else. If I were playing a game like Counter-Strike or Tribes and wanted to punish them, if they were an AOL user, all I needed to do was get their screen name and send them one little string of text to get rid of them momentarily. Good times.

 

[1996 Toyota Camry]

I’ve been wanting to have a computer run Windows XP for ages but the only way I’ve figured out how to do it is with VM’s, which isn’t the same.

If you want a system to run XP, pick up or build a system with an i7-3770K, the best possible supported CPU for Windows XP, not sure what GPU would be acceptable though in terms of driver support, GTX 7xx series came out around the same time so perhaps that?

 

[Illumithotty]

Rotten.com

Specifically, the Rotten.com library section which was a really interesting collection of essays or sometimes just short paragraphs about various obscurities, conspiracies, fun stuff like that.

Abandonware sites in general, for digging up old favorites and things that I never was able to find when they came out, but Home of the Underdogs specifically. It was such a great resource that did a lot to try and categorize, cross-reference, and review all these mostly forgotten games. It wasn't always easy to get them running depending on what version of Windows they were designed for, but it was always fun to try something completely overlooked that was a hidden gem.

Older than that, I do miss Legend MUD a lot, which was a mostly feature-complete game from the get-go because it was just the passion project for a lot of established names in MMO design and implementation. And for internet historian trivia night; one of the 'fixture' players there was Karyn, and they were memorialized with an in-game tree after their death in real life. The head administrator wrote an essay about the intermingling of online and real personas and how their loss affected them deeply.

Unfortunately it was all bullshit!

I did know someone who knew someone once that claimed to be the infamous Mr. Bungle of the 'Rape in Cyberspace' debacle, and his story was that it was basically just a histrionic frame-up. The gist of their story was that Mr. Bungle was tired of all the 'glomps you and squees' nonsense and just started poking off unwanted attention with edgelord shit. Unsubstantiated, sure, but the whole LambaMOO 'Rape in Cyberspace' whinepiece has launched actual academic careers with no one, that I'm aware of, ever trying to do more than fluff up the ego of ancient furries.

I also miss the Memory Hole website and the Memepool. This was so far back in the day that memes were still more of an academic term than catch-all for funny images. It was mostly just a weblog of different links and stories, but they were always different enough from what was easier to find to be entertaining.

And before I talk myself into senility by reminiscing about usenet and BBSes, I do miss the Spinwebb collection. The Dysfunctional Family Circus and the different spinoffs; it was fun to see different catchphrases come up and there was a nice day to day consistency to crude humor with occasional jokes that really were hilarious. I never knew for sure whether the guy that owned the website really did have a heart-to-heart with the Keene family or if there was litigation on the way with an offer to bow out gracefully.

 

[William Tyndale]

PsilocybeFanaticus.com. Any mycologists may recognize the “PF Tek” for growing mushrooms and Psilocybe Fanaticus was the guy who invented it. I bought spores from him in college only about 6 months before he got raided by the feds. It was fun growing them but I got paranoid so I stopped after two flushes but DAMN did those “lab grown” mushrooms hit hard!

 

[Hepativore]

There was an online music label called Autoplate that specialized in artists making some really avantgarde and abstract instrumental music with electronic feedback and various electronic devices. It ran from the early 2000's to around 2009. You could download and listen to all of their stuff for free.

Fortunately, somebody made an internet archive of all of their catalog, so you can still find it.

https://archive.org/details/autoplate?tab=collection

https://archive.org/details/apl006/apl006-03-rngmnn_-_midnatt_00.00.mp3

 

[Colon capital V]

Did anyone else use to play with U. B. Funkeys when they were little?

This was kind of like the Club Penguin for me when I was younger. You were given these little plastic figurines to scan into your computer to play as that character walking around and do random shit, kinda like Amiibos/Skylanders in that regard.
Don't remember much about it other than customizing shit in your home and walking around places, and lest I ever forget the Nightmare Rift.

I still remember that worm thing in the bottom right pissing on me with its mouth, that certainly was an experience that never left me growing up.

 

[mister meaner]

Don’t know if this is relevant to the thread, but griefing and trolling used to be a whole lot more easier. You could just log into Minecraft servers and delete peoples houses, then call them niggers over ventrillo and then get banned.

Now everything’s over sanitised, Minecraft servers are full of bullshit plug-ins that neuter the game, and discord servers have the mob mentality of “please suck our dicks and don’t question anything otherwise you get immediately banned”. By the way - remember Skype? Lol. It’s becoming increasingly hard to find games where you can jump in and just start abusing people.

 

[vomitusdeux]

Wholesome thoughts: I miss the 90's and early 2000's cartoon network and nickelodeon. Yeah you know the ones. Where you could literally trade characters, do auctions, and decorate your rooms with your favourite shows, play shockwave games to earn new stuff and points. Why the fuck did they ever get rid of that. 12 year old me will NEVER forgive them for that.

 

[Dickhorn Magnetbutter]

It’s becoming increasingly hard to find games where you can jump in and just start abusing people.

I personally find Left 4 Dead 2 (specifically Versus mode, in my experience) to still be a good game to fuck with people in. Game has nowhere near the same kind of support from Valve like CS:GO does so the game's rife with hackers, griefing from regular players is still commonplace, and all that's really stopping you from joining a lobby is if someone in it has you on their blocklist. Tons of people of various skill levels all trash talk and it still captures what online games were like when the game was still new, in my opinion.

 

[Elysian]

Anybody here remember NetDisaster? You’d type a URL in and it would let you destroy a screenshot of the website in various amusing ways:

I remember once when I was a kid my mom caught me on it and got really mad at me because she thought I was destroying the actual BBC home page with my small child l33t hacker skillz. It was very funny.

 

[Vulkan]

Newgrounds, miniclip, Neopets, and games on Cartoon Networks sites were lot of fun. Then getting into WoW with my friends was fun way back in classic

 

[Rockin da Worm]

Not really as old as most of the shit here, but laughing at stupid comments written by children on YouTube around 2012 was good. Used to be Justin Beiber hate and "like if you agree" or "you're just jealous" on bad reviews or whatever, and the replies would be people making fun of them for twenty messages. Now it's just the same seven meme formats children spam or shitty jokes about Ohio, or kids saying "this is so underrated" even though the thing has overwhelmingly positive reception, and the replies are just other six year olds going "this ^^^^". It's boring now, and it's hard to find older ones that actually are good. I also like a lot of the old shit on rpgmaker.net, but that's all preserved and still up for the most part and not lost, so it feels a lot less like a bummer to think about.

 

[Artificial Stupidity]

I miss yahoo chat, back in the day where you didn't have to worry about being groomed by pedos and the girl you spoke to was a girl.


Using yahoo categories to find websites because Google just didn't exist and browsing random shit websites linked together via webrings, the closest experience you can get to this these days is by using uselessweb where it will take you to a random website

I did find myself getting into a topsite styled forum that was password protected on the main domain and to get the ftp access you had to have 1000+ posts, it was great I remember sending the owner CD-Rs with all my stuff I had acquired because it was faster to send them in the mail than upload it