Internet 1.0 Stories - Tales of the internet past

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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
 
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.
 
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.
 
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.
 
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.
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Fun fact: that website is run by a crazy misanthropic troon named Jennifer Diane Reitz.
 
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).
 
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*sigh*
 
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.
 
Vilnus Asuncion said:
Well... About Gay Russian Space werewolved
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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.

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https://www.amazon.com/Shifters-Space-Werewolf-Mpreg-Erotica-ebook/dp/B00UMGUEQC
 
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.
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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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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
 
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
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I salute you for helping shepard the next generation of internet hooligans. Well done.
 
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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