Offtopic - The Fun Internet

Chatting online with actual people and not bots.  Mom picking up the phone and disconnecting your sweet 28.8 connection.  Running coax all of the house connecting PC’s together to run Duke Nukem. Finding that sweet spot on the cassette tape volume setting for a perfect load... ahh yes, the good old days.

The frustration of paying for all-inclusive dial up internet along with every other person and spending hours hearing an engaged dial tone ….. Duke Nukem and Doom though 😍

The one I remember is sending commands to open someones CD drawer in their computer (remember when those were a thing?).  LOL 🤣

IRC and using the NNTP protocol for what it actually was intended for

Oh wow, yeah, that brings back memories. Getting that last bit of the 40 MB download completed and someone disconnecting you because they picked up the phone. 🤣

To be fair, I have still used IRC as recently as a couple years ago. Lots of the Minecraft modding community was accessible only on IRC.

ICQ and/or mIRC for chatting with friends and hearing MP3s with Winamp 😅
Or beeing the personal supporter for some friends on LAN parties, troubleshooting their connection problems with IPX/SPX, while the other guys already started playing Command & Conquer, Quake or Doom.

but also, long before my first hands-on with network or even internet (i think i started with 33,6k):  
playing Monkey Island on my 286 system or any other game from this time, sometimes you had to edit HIMEM.sys to run special games, this was the best...

Winamp for music FTW! I was a ‘late bloomer’ to tekkie-ness as I was in the Air Force for about 8yrs. I didn’t start till 1999-2000’ish.

Oh yeah I forgot about WinAmp.  LOL 

How can you forget WinAmp? It really whips the llamas a**!

I’m that old I remember code for computer games was published in magazines, and spending all weekend typing it out (BASIC was the language of the time) , only to discover they misprinted a single : instead of a ; somewhere in the code…..pfft kids ..get of my lawn

Ohhhh....you just said BASIC! I remember writing that code in high school. 😂

so you where the guy who mastered Gorilla.bas and Nibbles.bas ?😅

I remember when Commodore software was sent by an Italian national radio and we would insert the tape cassette, press the record button and then use the game/software on our C64/128 using the turbo loader!

Or the first connections to BBSs that were in Rome and my father scolding me with every bill that came in…. it was such a learning experience!

Uhh...guys! 👇🏻

 https://github.com/WinampDesktop/winamp 😂😂

Oh man, BASIC! I remember writing programs in BASIC in school that would just write lines across the screen at different angles - over and over. I then wrote the same code on our home computer my Dad has just purchased and was amazed at how much faster those lines got drawn on the screen. That’s the first real taste I had of how different CPU clock speeds would affect programs in a very visible way.

I could have had a solid career as a screen saver programmer.

I still refer back to the homestar runner videos far too often, especially the “techno” episode of strongbad emails.

Also Switch to Linux is always a good time.

Easily one of my favorites. That or Trogdor the Burninator.
 

Oh wow. How have I never seen this before? This is the kind of gem I was hoping to hear of!

Oh man, if you haven’t seen that have you seen the Internet Helpdesk? From your side of the border as well.

That one I’ve seen! It’s amazing.

One I’ve loved to share is the Website is Down. Warning, some of the language is very colorful.

Back to HSR, did you ever see their 404 page?

Of course! Homestar runner was a regularly checked site back in the day. I miss it.

On the topic of odd videos (was that a topic? I feel it should be), have you see the Nutri-Grain commercial?

I can’t catchup there is too much too much :)

BBS? did anyone else phone those thing?