Do you remember the days of http://www.

57Deluxe

I wrote my very first website on a palmtop PC using just it's TEXT editor!

AND - It's still live!!

 http://home.freeuk.com/hieroglyph/index.htm

Emp_Fab

Grumpyrocker said:

Flanging_Fred said:

There are 2 people in this world, whose very existence is due to my discovery of ICQ in 1999.

There are three more in this world thanks to my use of the internet.

.... and probably several trillion less due to my use of the internet!

Emp_Fab

guitartango said:

I used to visit a website called astavista (not altavista) , plenty of software cracks  

You mean Astalavista I believe.

darthed1981

PolarityMan said:

darthed1981 said:

PolarityMan said:

A stack of 200 1.4mb floppies with a disk spanned zip across them for moving *ahem* large files. Then finding out that disk 123 had a bad sector.....

Which is why the rest of us just bought the DVD

This would be well before DVDs.

Yeah I figured it was probably a bit before then after I wrote it.

I remember installing big software packages from sets of floppy disks.

darthed1981

Grumpyrocker said:

Snags said:

MSN Messenger? You arriviste!  IRC, ICQ, Trillian ...

For me it was IRC for work, MSN Messenger for girls. 

Met quite a few via MSN profiles, chatrooms and Messenger. 

Same for me, except no work bit, I just used MSN Messenger for the laydees...

guitartango

Emp_Fab said:

guitartango said:

I used to visit a website called astavista (not altavista) , plenty of software cracks  

You mean Astalavista I believe.

That's the one, no malware just some lovely patches to make your software go past the 30 days trial

darthed1981

Emp_Fab said:

Grumpyrocker said:

Flanging_Fred said:

There are 2 people in this world, whose very existence is due to my discovery of ICQ in 1999.

There are three more in this world thanks to my use of the internet.

.... and probably several trillion less due to my use of the internet!

Dopesick

I remember the first ever ISP we had back in 1998 was AOL. I just kept using their 'keyword' feature instead of web addresses. When my dad decided to go for another ISP a couple of months later (because AOL was fucking gash) I finally started to use web addresses correctly.

FTR, I was an avid MSN Messenger user up until the late 2000s. ICQ started it off for me in 1999 though.

Bridgehouse

1993.. started at uni and got sucked in to the underground world of the on campus BBS. 

It was massive at the time - probably 1500 users campus wide - live chat, message forums, and a whole heap of time typing crap into emacs or vim. 

And there were fights, trollings, bannings, controversies, nastiness and all the usual shenanigans you get today.

It's easy to look back with rose tinted spectacles, but as an early user of forums and messaging boards I totally refute the claim that it was all nice and cuddly back "in the day" - nope, it was exactly the same as it is now. There's no descent into nastiness, no loss of manners or any of that stuff - it's no different. 

Paul_C

Grumpyrocker said:

Flanging_Fred said:

There are 2 people in this world, whose very existence is due to my discovery of ICQ in 1999.

There are three more in this world thanks to my use of the internet.

No children were conceived as far as I'm aware, but an AOL chatroom did once result in a lady who called herself Mad Maz driving up from Luton for a beer and a shag, much to my surprise.

Dave_Vader

Bridgehouse said:

1993.. started at uni and got sucked in to the underground world of the on campus BBS. 

It was massive at the time - probably 1500 users campus wide - live chat, message forums, and a whole heap of time typing crap into emacs or vim. 

And there were fights, trollings, bannings, controversies, nastiness and all the usual shenanigans you get today.

It's easy to look back with rose tinted spectacles, but as an early user of forums and messaging boards I totally refute the claim that it was all nice and cuddly back "in the day" - nope, it was exactly the same as it is now. There's no descent into nastiness, no loss of manners or any of that stuff - it's no different. 

I kept my PC next to the piano, and learned to play it while waiting for the page to reload after posting some deliciously vicious barb perfectly composed to unsettle and disarm my antagonist.

(No, you fuck off, Balrogs do have wings)

I may have spent too much time on Lord of the Rings forums back in the late 90s/early 00s

DiscoStu

I remember the late 90s period. When different search engines gave wildly different results given the same search criteria.
Now it's all Google and we all get the same thing. Not sure if that's good or bad.

I remember the first song I downloaded.  Ash's 'Warmer Than Fire' from the Radio 1 website, and the excitement of watching the progress bar gently fill across the screen... It took over an hour to get a 3 minute song but oh my it was incredible!

Grumpyrocker

Another heavy user of my university bulletin board system here. It was great fun. Though you had to go to a computer room to use it - it was the days before Ethernet connections in accommodation and way before WiFi.