Internet 1.0 Stories - Tales of the internet past

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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.
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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?
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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.
 
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
 
Big Nasty said:
No, what was that about?
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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.
 
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.
 
The Shadow said:
I remember waiting like 5 minutes for some titties to load up on CompuServe.
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56k.jpg
 
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.
 
John Titor said:
Anybody remember Netzero and how it was meant to be free?
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DrJonesHat said:
Remember Juno? All it did was email.
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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. :epik:

DrJonesHat said:
Don't forget Hamster Dance. You have to mention Hamster Dance.
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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.
 
TiggerNits said:
The day after I showed my brother how to use WinNuke d
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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.
 
Kari Kamiya said:
The earliest thing about the Internet I can remember is the dial-up noise
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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.
 
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.
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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.
 
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?
 
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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