Internet 1.0 Stories - Tales of the internet past

  • Want to keep track of this thread?
    Accounts can bookmark posts, watch threads for updates, and jump back to where you stopped reading.
    Create account
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.
Click to expand...

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
 
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
 
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
Click to expand...
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.
 
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.
Click to expand...


Measuring speed in bauds, my man
 
Nekromantik said:
I will never forget that story of the woman that died in the tub and turned in to people soup.
Click to expand...
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.
 
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.
 
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.
 
Oh okay, I remember scene kids using it a lot but I hadn't seen it before then.
 
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.
Click to expand...
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.
 
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.
Click to expand...

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.
Click to expand...

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

Super NSFL, of course.
 
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.
 
totse said:
I had a similar experience on Limewire except it involved discovering the existence of horse porn
Click to expand...

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.
 
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.
 
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.
 
Last edited:
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.
 
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.
Click to expand...

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.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom