Growing up before the internet

[Strakha]

I hope someone writes a book about this subject and sends it to me. But in conversation I realize that this is going to shape a generation. I grew up when the internet was barely a thing, I was 10 the first time I used the internet in 1993 and I was able to talk to my father abroad over a telnet type of communication. I did not know that this was interesting or special, I thought it was similar to morse code.

I had no idea that 20 years later I would be one of the foremost asm/c coders in the industry of server coding. Nowadays I just laugh when people tell me that their internet accounts were dozens of quid per minute. Mine was free and I coded one of the first free telnet servers for a friend and then realized how bad it was when I had a slackware build in the late 90s.

It was the wild west, it was an era where you could literally code your app and it was a new thing, nes and snes were a big thing at the time and i struggled to learn 6502 and 65c816 assembly to try to help convert emulators to linux and it was all for not, the real coding money was in html and the ability to understand it and to minimize your bandwidth usage.

It was a pointless struggle and still to this day i don't really understand much beyond the construction of settlements. Each company wanted a stake in some primitive settlement, chat, mail, games, etc.

I was wondering if before these land grabs if there were people with stories about the land that existed before the corporations, for me it was simple, you were on the internet and you could code your own things, now you can only code for a secondary company. Surely someone remembers a simpler time?

[Klingers]

I'm with you. It was a different, wonderful era.

I remember coding my first webpage by hand on Geocities back in 1996 at the ripe old age of 13.... Black text on red background, strobe light animated GIFs and all.

I also remember those last few years before the internet was "a thing"... Actual books in classrooms. Scary. My mum's a teacher and they're giving the Grade 2 kids iPads now. Nuts.

[Strakha]

I'm with you. It was a different, wonderful era.

I remember coding my first webpage by hand on Geocities back in 1996 at the ripe old age of 13.... Black text on red background, strobe light animated GIFs and all.

I also remember those last few years before the internet was "a thing"... Actual books in classrooms. Scary. My mum's a teacher and they're giving the Grade 2 kids iPads now. Nuts.

haha i had a graduate class bring in a windows 3.11 computer that had netscape navigator gold running on it, i gave them a fail because they didnt even try for an amiga or some kind of alternative OS at the time, even lynx on a nix kernel was out of their reach. this was in 2004.

[Deleted]

I didn't really get the net till 1999.

I remember only using the computer to play those magazine discs with like 20 demos on them. And games like midtown madness. I even did my homework by hand! Crazy!

[StayTuned]

My father bought internet when it was first available in our region. It was a 56k modem and made the same sounds as Pikachu. Our relatives thought we were dead because they couldn't reach us for days. Why? Because you could not be online and use the phone at the same time. Kids these days don't know this.

Good old times...

[chazus]

I remember TalkCity. PowWow. 5 digit ICQ accounts. AOL was amazing. I downloaded MIDI's like I download 1080p video (and took about the same amount of time to get).

I started a small web design business while I was still in grade school. I remember Eudora's GOD AWFUL HONK being the icon of email. I remember Juno sucking just as much back then, as it ever did.

I actually very recently wrote a paper a couple months ago about how the internet in part formed my identity. The generations before me didn't have internet at all, and the generations after me inherently grew up with it. My generation is unique in the fact that we literally grew up with the internet, reaching maturity at the same time.

[IntellectuallyChallenged]

I just had a nostalgia-gasm.

[Aliessil]

I first used the internet at university, in 1990. E-mail, telnet, FTP, SSH .. that was about all that existed. I think everyone I knew who had an e-mail address was also at my university. Browsers didn't exist in any form; instead, we spent ages reading usenet groups.

[KnibZer]

Because you could not be online and use the phone at the same time.

Yeah remeber that one! some ppl i know subscribed for 2phonenumbers, 1for internet and one for the regular Phone haha good times.
Remember the old 56k:s Wiieeeektshktskhheeeeeeeeeeeerrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr dong. Wow internet where downloading a file of 3mb would take 20-30mins to download.
Dident get Broadband at my parents house until spring 2008, my parents choose to live on the countryside

[Butler to Baby Sloths]

I remember having to go to the library to do research (aka find pictures) on the internet for a primary school project on polar bears.

[Cthulhu 2020]

That's the sound of nostalgia.

[StayTuned]

That's the sound of nostalgia.

Until today I don't understand where these sounds come from, or why it sounds like this.

[Tasttey]

First internet....circa 1992-93

BBS and MUDS on the old 9600 baud modem. Firing up the 386 and hearing that modem squeal...good times.

First ISP, good old AOL 2.0. Back before friends lists, color, and sounds outside of "welcome" and "you've got mail." I remember having an actual notepad by my keyboard with friends' screen names on it and having to manual check to see if they were online. Hell there used to be add on programs that would let you type in cascading colors.

I remember web rings, .gifs that took forever to load, old Webcrawler and Alta Vista search engines. When your only browsers were Netscape Navigator and Internet Explorer.

[zethh]

I remember leaving South Park episodes to download overnight and cutting the connection automatically upon completion with download manager, on our old 36k. All that effort and the quality was awful, damn Real Player files.

[Riaya]

haha i had a graduate class bring in a windows 3.11 computer that had netscape navigator gold running on it, i gave them a fail because they didnt even try for an amiga or some kind of alternative OS at the time, even lynx on a nix kernel was out of their reach. this was in 2004.

Amiga. Haha oh wow that takes me back. Yeah I never did much on the internet other then browse and play warcraft 2 on heat.net way back when lol.

[Deleted]

There was me thinking this was going to be a topic about growing up before the internet not when you first got it :P

Can't remember the first time I actually used the internet, I do remember playing Medal of Honor:Allied Assault online though. Used to play when everyone was on 56k, pings were like 350ms ha. Then people started getting ISDN and DLS with pings at like 100ms, shit was crazy back then. Remember the whole Napster thing when that took off then moving to WinMX, so recon I must have started using the internet around 99/00 but was only like 13. Wasn't really that much to do at that time other than download virus' and play fucking neopets. Think that's why I never really sat on the computer and rather went outside to rebel against the world with underage drinking.

[Klingers]

Does anyone else remember good old Avast back in the early 2000's? :-P

I remember once leaving the computer on downloading overnight and having the whole house being woken up by...

Your anti-virus has been updated.

At 3am. Bloody hell that frightened the life out of us.

[Deleted]

School would have been much easier with google at my fingertips, thats for sure.

[Ryme]

Call me a hipster, but I also feel like we've lived through the birth and golden age of the internet, whilst connectivity and usability have gone through the roof, the internet is just not the same any more. Remember old YouTube? God, that was a great place once

[Deleted]

Until today I don't understand where these sounds come from, or why it sounds like this.

Euhm, its a secret message from the aliens congratulating us on achieving a primitive form of singulatity, DUH!

-edit- not editing accidental typo because... hehehehe heh

School would have been much easier with google at my fingertips, thats for sure.

I wouldn't even be able to pass my finals without facebook, its awesome, just sharing notes and summaries, if I had this in middleschool I would've never had to dubble a year!