The internet as it was in 1996

  • Guest, it's time once again for the massively important and exciting FoH Asshat Tournament!



    Go here and give us your nominations!
    Who's been the biggest Asshat in the last year? Give us your worst ones!

Bandwagon

Kolohe
<Silver Donator>
24,452
65,765
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Vanessa

Uncle Tanya
<Banned>
7,689
1,417
TFW you're a bard in the year 2000 on dial up kiting mobs and going LD only to find your character naked at your bind spot on the character select screen upon logging back in.

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  • 1Worf
  • 1Triggered
Reactions: 1 users

a c i d.f l y

ಠ_ಠ
<Silver Donator>
20,062
99,466
AladainAF AladainAF what BBS? I recall playing Doom/Doom 2/Heretic during the DWANGO years on a private BBS - Bigtoe BBS. They eventually got an addon that let you play WC2.

Wasn't until a local company opened up an internet service that we had "official" internet. Had a CC generator and loaded up free months of AOL before that. They even added an internal browser in AOL 3.0 or some shit. Barely worked, but I could visit Nintendo.com, not just the unique pages AOL had back then.

We daisy chained about 4 or 5 PC's in my house via 10baseT, and ran a software gateway ap on my system. Can you imagine sharing a 26.4kbps (fastest we could connect with our lines) between that many systems? Granted the most extreme thing my sisters or mother would do is AIM chat or LiveJournal, so there was just enough bandwidth for me to still play Ultima Online, and Napster/KaZaa at night.
 

cabbitcabbit

NeoGaf Donator
2,671
8,256
I used to get an hour a night to play games so my buddy and I would connect on Warcraft 2 to see who could build towers and gryphon/dragon nests first. It was usually a stalemate by the end of the hour.
 

Asmadai

¯\_(ツ)_/¯
3,219
9,278
Someone in the house picking up the phone when you were currently online, thus kicking you off.

I haven't felt rage on a level like that in years.
 
  • 6Solidarity
Reactions: 5 users

Bubbles

2022 Asshat Award Winner
<Bronze Donator>
45,896
-59,709
also if you didn't have a geocities page with multiple under construction gifs and a visitor counter at the bottom (the blue square one, can't remember the name), you weren't all that. I know I had one
 
  • 2Like
  • 1Solidarity
Reactions: 2 users

Junky

Lord Nagafen Raider
133
125
Hated that shit when someone would call the house back then...Therefore 2 phone lines
 

Haus

<Silver Donator>
13,056
50,944
Drudge report looks the same.

It's maintained a remakable aestetic consistency over the years. A programming/design technique I call "Lazy".

I still remember running a BBS on my old Apple ][e. I was a pimp in 89 because I had a 10 meg hard drive so I could host files...

Still remember a dear old friend (now departed) who came over to a party of mine in the early 90's. Installed something called a "TCP/IP stack" on my system (as an excuse to keep drinking in my apartment and get solo time hitting on a chick while the rest of us hit the pool) , and pointed me at what I believe was an old netcom dial up and introduced me, via telnet, to IRC.

get off my digital lawn....
 

Armadon

<Bronze Donator>
3,717
6,734
My parents let My brothers and I run a second line into the house but we had to do it ourselves. Just think everquest really changed our lives. Who would of ever thought of having 2 telephone lines into a house. We were able to use both lines after 9pm so we could group together.
 

Lanx

<Prior Amod>
65,963
150,310
ya'll remember for 33.6 there was i think lucent 56k and us robotics x2 (56k), two different protocols and you called up the phone number depending on which one you had.

also i think it was usrobotics x2 that was selling their modems new, but it was just a regular 33.6 w/ updated firmware (cuz 56k is really just compression), so just download the firmware, and save yourself 100bucks.
 

Aychamo BanBan

<Banned>
6,338
7,144
Remember fucking around with modem init strings? AT&F1&R2!

I ran a BBS too. First one was Tag, then Renegade, then Iniquity. FidoNet, RGSNet, etc. FrontDoor. I remember the struggle of setting up a .BAT file that would work with FrontDoor because it would quit with an error level based on what function it needed to perform so you had to catch that. DesqView, etc. God that shit was so old!!!
 
  • 1Like
Reactions: 1 user

Gamma Rays

Large sized member
4,019
9,606
Back in ( I think ) 1994, I was sharing a unit with a flatmate. He would log into BBS's , at the time there was little of interest to the common person in the WWW that was more just university libraries or something.

One distinct memory I had . . . to explain, there was like a 3 year gap between US airings of Star Trek TNG and when they finally got shown in Aus. In fact anyone who was a fan would get it quicker than the TV airings here by renting the VHS tapes from the local video store, as they'd be there only several months after the US TV showings. Today a lot of people probably forget the huge gap we had between us and the US for entertainment stuff.

Me, I knew people who knew people (etc) and was able to get tapes copied off Canadian TV and have them, only a month or so after the airing. Real Alpha nerd god stuff back then.

So the flatmate had been a member of some Sci-Fi TV / Movie BBS. He wanted to score points with them or something and was actually about to offer them that he could supply them copies of these tapes. He asked me if I didn't mind him doing that and using our address as some sort of mailing hub ( some idea where they would send in blank tapes to be loaded and a pre-paid mailing bag - then he'd send the tapes back to them ) he asked me as some 11th hour thing before doing it as the tapes were mine.

Me: Ummm . . . right, well the problem with that is we're not supposed to have these tapes, as in they're sort of illegal and you wanna supply our address. Nope!
 
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jayrebb

Naxxramas 1.0 Raider
14,719
14,643
Everything was fine until 2008ish maybe 2009 then Google took a shit on its top 10 hits algorithm.
 

Lambourne

Ahn'Qiraj Raider
2,905
6,928
While we're in "old man yells at cloud" mode, I hate how all gains in CPU and download speed has been negated by webpages getting increasingly bloated with javascript, pointlessly large images and other crap in the last decade. Pages still regularly take 5-15 seconds to load completely, and God help you if you don't have adblock.

This graph only goes to 2014, it's more than doubled again since.

202572




We're not exempt as the FoH forum front page is over 7mb nowadays... entire games used to fit into that.

202570



 
  • 2Like
Reactions: 1 users

Lanx

<Prior Amod>
65,963
150,310
While we're in "old man yells at cloud" mode, I hate how all gains in CPU and download speed has been negated by webpages getting increasingly bloated with javascript, pointlessly large images and other crap in the last decade. Pages still regularly take 5-15 seconds to load completely, and God help you if you don't have adblock.

This graph only goes to 2014, it's more than doubled again since.

View attachment 202572



We're not exempt as the FoH forum front page is over 7mb nowadays... entire games used to fit into that.

View attachment 202570


lulz did you forget for a 3year period websites were all shit, cuz everyone discovered macromedia flash in 2000?
 
  • 2Like
  • 1Worf
Reactions: 2 users