pre-social media internet memories

[Liliith]

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[Mercy]

I miss the sound of handshake. It was akin to starting an old car on a cold morning -- grinding and grinding and grinding until that sound that meant the engine turned over and one would soon be rolling along.

I do not miss the mass assault of janky animated .gif's, especially when accompanied by high-major midi files.

"Nobody use the phone for the next two hours, I'm downloading a 4K image file".

BBS's and froups FTW! Social media before there was a term.

MUD's and MUSH's and LAN parties, oh my!

Stile Sucks. Really. Since 2001. I blame 9/11. Prior to that, it was the wild west where men were men and so were most of the women, 'cause some things never change, and one put up or STFU. Terrorists ruin everything.

Mobile phone technology is the real driving force behind social media. Cellys brought ease-of-access and eschewed the need to be savvy enough to use a computer.

[CJC]

Ah the dial-up days. Since my brother was gregarious the phone line was almost always tied up. Internet spurts had to be brief and there was never bandwidth to do anything significant. Thus I was driven to the forum scene, with AGN being my first. I came here for technical support after my dad found Zelda Classic and presented it to me.

Over the years I followed the various splinter forums as they formed. Complete Zelda Classic. Beacon of Fantasy. Zelda Classic University. As is the nature of the splinter forum these eventually crumpled into inactivity and I returned to the wellspring.


I'd cite my experiences with the wiki phenomenon but those all began AFTER the advent of social media. Speaking of which, what are we using as the benchmark? MySpace or Facebook? ...Not that I have more to say, but it might be helpful for others who post.



Oh god, I summarized my entire history with the internet in two paragraphs.

[Brasel]

I miss the days of creating fan sites for video games, particularly Mega Man and Final Fantasy. You rarely see the crappy point and click fan sites anymore. Those were so much fun.

[bigjoe]

My first internet memories were walking to the library to participate in a sort of online writing forum type thing. This was before I had a computer. I enjoyed the little walk to get there, gave me something to do.

Then I actually got my first computer. It was a total POS. Somehow I managed to set up free-internet and get online. free-internet had chat rooms where I would go by the name Bob and chat with uh, interesting people.

I was introduced to sluggy.com or Sluggy Freelance, the first internet comic strip I'd read. What fun that was. It updated every day.

After awhile, it became all about the games. The simple, late 90s, early 2000s games that you could download on a 56k modem. Roms and stuff. Back in the day the simple Rom sites with only the popular games were the shit (plasticman's rom site is one I remember)

Then there was Zelda Classic. Found a link with a download on some old freeware site, which linked to whatever old site AGN was using at the time. Ended up here,where I would spend a considerably large portion of my life being retarded. I imagine I became less retarded at some point. Or at least I hope.

This place served as a sort of hub from which I would explore all sorts of other things. Mandrag Ganon's site led me to a game called Graal Online, which was a LTTP clone type thing with online play.Met some cool people there. One in particular.

Unlike most other sites I visit, I still choose to type the link to this site out manually when visiting. It's a sort of habit.


I miss the days of creating fan sites for video games, particularly Mega Man and Final Fantasy. You rarely see the crappy point and click fan sites anymore. Those were so much fun.

I miss old school Final Fantasy sites too. Had a lot of fun with those. Especially during my library trips. There was one in particular that I think was on Geocities that had a list of all the FF games on the side with all sorts of details about each. It was neat.

[Tim]

Low quality nudes and html frames.

(:

[MasterSwordUltima]

Geocities/Angelfire/Maxpages "Shrines" to various video game characters. Maybe a few random anime ones thrown in. Oh looks here's a listing of a bunch of animation cells or gifs from SNES roms.

I remember running a MUD server from my house in high school, and then a whole bunch of us in Computer Tech classes hopping onto it at school. That shit was dope.

I missed the atmosphere that AIM brought so much that I re-downloaded Trillian, slapped on a Windows98 skin, and then ripped the sounds from an old version install of AIM 5.0. It's neat because it basically turns your facebook friends' list into an AIM buddy list - door slams and all. *euphoria*

I miss cool forum shit, like Acmlm's board. The PHP integration in that gives me a boner to this day, and I'm pretty sure the only reason we don't see more of it is because people just want the web 2.0 look.

Really cool rom hacks. Although nowadays we've got people adding in all of the Smash Bros. 4 characters, stages, music, etc to hacked copies of Brawl - which is impressive in it's own right. But I mean like, who the fuck ever came up with Super Stick Bros? It's so simple, yet so satisfying.

I really miss screensavers. Ubuntu seems to still like them, which is cool. Nobody needs 'em, I suppose. Or like how it's been mentioned with portable technology dominating the front - so screens usually just turn off to save power.


OH OH, and ambient javascript, like falling snowflakes, or a big dumb clock that follows the cursor.

[Dechipher]

Floppy discs and printing guitar tabs at the public library!
Writing MIDI files!

[Mercy]

Ended up here,where I would spend a considerably large portion of my life being retarded. I imagine I became less retarded at some point. Or at least I hope.
It has been many moons since I last threatened to have you neutered so yeah, less retarded indeed.

[erm2003]

AOL... I probably don't even have to say much more than that, but I do remember going on to the gaming boards there, mainly the Zelda ones. Oh how AIM became such the in thing for so long! That was much more popular up here with most of the people I know, not so much IRC.

[Xyvol]

For me it all started back in my high school days, when all we had were dial up modems. My brother and I paid for our own phone line to use for calling around to local BBSes. My brother ran his own board. I believe we always had the kind of modem that you plug the phone cord directly into. I still remember the comments of other users about how someone would knock the phone handset off the modem cradle, and you’d have to sit there listening to the noise because replacing it could cause you to disconnect. Something like that. We would occasionally have events called MUPTs, Modem User Pizza Thingy, where people could gather and talk face to face. Bulletin Boards operated mostly like forums do, posting comments and quoting others in a thread. Games were turn based, you’d have a certain number of turns per day to use. Some of the better games had amazing ANSI art! This was the mid 90’s.

The internet was something you only used if you subscribed to AOL or CompuServe. By the time college came around, internet access was being made more readily available. Somehow we got signed up with an ISP and used Netscape to browse internet pages. I believe the package came with access to Tripod for making your own web pages.


Geocities/Angelfire/Maxpages "Shrines" to various video game characters. Maybe a few random anime ones thrown in. Oh looks here's a listing of a bunch of animation cells or gifs from SNES roms.
Not only do I remember the “shrines” you speak of, I made a few of my own! They were just a basic description of the anime or game franchise, what I liked or thought about it, and some pics and sound files taken from other sites. I used to browse those sites for hours downloading anime pictures and sound clips.

Chat rooms were a popular thing back then, and I remember I was infatuated with a girl from Sweden in whatever chat room I’d ended up in. I’d get up at 6am to catch her using the library computer and we’d chat for a while. This was before the concept that she might not even be female was prevalent.

Eventually instant messaging became a big popular thing. I don’t remember all the ones available in the early days, but ICQ was the one I used. I met two girls through that program, one I am still good friends with, and another that I dated for about 4 years.

At some point I got my own domain name and moved my stupid little shrine pages off of Tripod (I think I had them on Geocities as well). This was around the time I found ZC, I had a download page for the only quest I made that I actually finished and a link to the ZC site. BTW, if anyone knows where I could find a copy of xyvol.qst that would be awesome. The only files I can find seem to be empty or corrupt. Eventually the site was neglected and the domain name lost when I got tired of paying for it.


Mobile phone technology is the real driving force behind social media. Cellys brought ease-of-access and eschewed the need to be savvy enough to use a computer.
Now people just type (badly) on their cellphones and post pictures of their dinner. I put up with it though because there are many people that I would not be in contact with if I hadn’t found them again through Myspace or Facebook.

[King Aquamentus]

I used to talk a lot of smack on Elfwood, since it was pretty much the only place I could leave a mark on the internet before I got an email account.

Once I got one of those, I immediately hit up two forums. One was ZHQ2 which became The Hylia, and the other...





...was right here!

[Liliith]

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[King Aquamentus]

LadyJuliet?? I know her.

North Castle isn't terribly active these days, but it is still around and functional. That's actually where I met my girlfriend of six years now, Firehawk

ZHQ2 went fairly well and it was an excellent gateway forum for me... AGN... not so much. But, 2005.

No thanks to Breaker I ended up making my ZC home at PureZC instead. I largely ignored AGN after all this, including the slew of hacks it suffered. 2006 was kind of a great year for me and the many friends I made on IRC, including Rose, who was unfortunately lost in early 2007 to medical complications. But, I figured things couldn't get terribly worse, and for the rest of the year I'd say it was pretty much alright.

2008 started off innocently enough, but all hell broke loose during my spring break when an unprovoked cyberattack by Captain Cornflake caused me to lose most of my accounts. Thankfully I don't think he knew *anything* about AGN, and I was surprised to later discover that the account I tossed in a ditch was untouched. Actually so was the PureZC account, but I think his efforts there were reduced to a mere joke. My brief stint as a moderator at The Hylia ended after I had to disappear for awhile. I do still go there from time to time, but the place has slowed to a crawl. The only thing active there is a single message board game. 2008 had good parts too though. See: Firehawk.

2009 and 2010 were about the same deal. As these years rolled by, I hopped into AGN a little more, seeing what it had become. War Lord took over, and asked me to moderate a new feature he added to the site: retro videogame reviews. So, I did, and became active here again. AGN got hacked again, the feature was lost, the place became dead, and I largely forgot about it. again.

It was in more recent years (maybe two years ago) when CAD first started trying to resuscitate the place and fight off the adbots. I joined in the fight, and I've been here since :)

[firebug]

Hypertext, MUDs, 56K, Usenet, IRC, Napster, AGN lol.

[rock_nog]

I remember the first time I tried to connect to the Internet - I was around 12, my family had a 486 DX computer (man I miss playing Doom on that thing), and we had finally signed up for an AOL trial. The computer had a built-in modem, which we thought was fine, but the modem itself was like 1200 baud or something along those lines - when we tried to connect to the Internet, the damn thing literally melted. Actually, that's when I learned what ozone smells like. We eventually got a real modem, and I remember downloading game demos, making my own web page on Fortunecity (eventually migrated to geocities)... Oh God, my website... MIDI background music, frames (I opposed frames for a long time, but became convinced they were the web layout of the future, and that my web page would look outdated if it didn't have frames), promises of updates that never happened... Eh, it was fun while it lasted though. On the plus side of things, I used the Internet to learn how to program in BASIC, make Doom levels, and download Doom mods. I shied away from any form of online social interaction for a LONG time, though I eventually joined the forums here and at Doomworld. Oh gosh, and before I forget, of course there was the introduction of Flash... God, it's like 2002 was the perfect year to start college - broadband in dorms had become standard, and Flash cartoons were at their peak. Thus, there was tons of "Homestar Runner," "Mario Twins," "Badger Badger Badger," in my formative Internet years. Actually, now that I think about it, I remember being exposed to a Flash music video for the song "Everyone else has had more sex than me," and I still love that song and that video.

[Matteo]

Yahoo chat rooms, gamefaqs, napster, Netscape, Juno, aim. Man those were the days.

[mitsymckenzie777]

I wasn't hands on with it but I remember playing Final Fantasy 6 on SNES which I knew as 3 at the time. Well reason I'm posting this here is he would go online and find crazy rumors some true most untrue. Like fighting an impossible amount of Braceosaurs or what ever they were in that version that were in a forest and a Gold Dragon a appears you get a potion for resurrecting General Leo which was untrue. Plus one half true -=SPOILER=-

But yea with the new found internet it kept console games interesting but now a days it's too easy to find out if a game rumor is true or not.