Do not speak to me of the old magic, I was there when it was written.
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Social media used to be about socializing and communicating. These days its all drivel that has bren productized into a vehicle where streaming addictive brain rot keeps the advertisements flowing and lowers self esteem.
Gen Z may have adopted the internet but it was born of us- AIM, yahoo messenger, ICQ, IRC servers, news groups… all on a dial-up modem. The good old days where there wasnt enough bandwidth for all the ads of today, and the most intrusive ads were a 468x60 pixel banner at the top or bottom of the netscape page
I remember the rise and fall of icq. I laughed from the real internet as you kids played, knowing it was a fad wouldn’t last, not worth taking seriously.
I played online before the internet, when it was scattered individuals, or when you needed access to separate telenet and arpanet, when you could keep in your head all the accessible nodes, when the building blocks you take for granted were all new and exciting ideas
Now get off my lawn
I remember ARPANET before it was privatized. Before TBL made Mosaic and the first web server, when all there was was USENET discussions, FTP, and Gopher. I set up mail and news over uucp dialup for clients in the 80s. I ran System III Venix on a PDP-11. I was a sysadmin on a team managing a dual CPU VAX 9000 with 192MB of RAM in 1990. Which was a lot back then. I’m old.
You wouldn’t be in my Top 8
I chuckled. I miss MySpace. Choosing a song for your profile was great. Facebook should add that feature to their profiles. So should Bluesky and Mastodon.
Okay, I get this may be off-topic, but “It is okay to bully–”, no, it’s not okay to bully anyone. What is passing by these people’s minds?
Is it okay to bully nazis?
Just like what a butthead would say.
Uhh, shut up Beavis.
ICQ 2042903
Not even 6 digits. Child.
16577270 was mine not even close to op number.
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Shit, my steam account is older than most of the highschoolers I work with
My Steam account is almost 18 years old and I still have to select DOB when viewing “adult” games…
Well, I guess Steam won’t have a problem with California law
Steam could stop asking in California, since it’s now the responsibility of the operating system to tell Steam your age.
That might be.
Can’t be very sure about how it turns out for the Steam Deck.
The law’s definition of OS might not be on the same page as ours.
My steam account is older than the fresh University grad we just hired.
I am one of the few people, it seems, that can not for the life of me remember my ICQ number… but I was there, using it.
Anyone remember Trillian? Having your Yahoo, AIM, ICQ, Messenger, etc all in one program…
Or pidgin when it was called gaim.
Omg Trillian! I haven’t heard that name in forever. You just unlocked a flood of memories.
And Facebook Messenger and Gmail Chat (or whatever it was called)! There was a glorious period of time where you could talk to pretty much anyone on any service from one chat app.
I absolutely remember Trillian. It’s what convinced me to finally make an AIM account to talk with my “mainstream” friends who didn’t have ICQ or IRC, since I wouldn’t actually need to run any new software.
I also don’t remember my ICQ number, but I had one. And I remember my first time stepping into a 99 cent only store and their registers used that “uh oh” sound from it. I always felt like nobody else recognized where it was from.
18982172 here.
Fun fact. ICQ was the the go to messaging platform for the porn industry and was actively being used in the industry right up to the point it was bought by a russian company.
Anyone who tries to cut anyone else out of the herd is a dick, nothing more. I am the Army and Navy.
Army Navy Air Force baby.
Up here in Canada we have “Legion” clubs where veterans go to socialize (drink) and we also have “The Army and Navy” clubs where veterans go to socialize (drink). It may be the same down south but am unsure. I would never exclude the air force by design. 😊
Best fish fry on earth is held at the Legion. You could smoke indoors in a Legion until about 2010 I think? As long as people were done eating.
Maybe some kind of in-joke of air-force not getting to drink ) socialise ( because they have to be ready to scramble.
ICQ? Listen here, young man.
I grew up in outback Australia, in the before times. My first time online was a 1200-baud modem on a BBC Electron.
We did school over HF radio with School of the Air, had no phone lines, and barely reliable electricity.
Do not speak to me of the deep magics. I was there when they were written.
double biceps flex
farts
breaks a hip
I had to telnet into chat rooms. We had no browsers. I was old before you were born.
Telnet. An elegant tool for a more civilized time.
I see you, graybeard. And I pay respect.
Ooh, Australia, I have a question. Was PalTalk a big thing over there? Obviously way after what you described. I remember my father having an old classmate over from Australia and he introduced us to “The Internet”, and how instant messaging was possible a cross borders through PalTalk. Even though I never heard anyone using it in Europe, even years past that encounter.
No, not that I know of. We use to have local / oz only IRC channels, because overseas calls were expensive. So, you would dial into your ISP and then have access to city/state wide IRCs like AusNet. Later that became national. That was circa 94-99.
It was BBS before that.
I remember buying a small black and white TV from a second hand store to watch the 2000 Olympics and chatting to people over mIRC simultaneously.
The TV was sitting right next to a Apple Newton in the store. When I went back to get it, it had already been sold. Ended up buying a palm pilot 1000 instead.
Damn, I’ve been lied to 27 years ago! Thanks for sharing your experiences
icq 29533018 hit me up, but of course that was already an additional fancy layer on top of text only chat. I had it bridged in my bitlbee setup via libpidgin together with my gtalk and irc and other xmpp stuff, and had it run in irssi in a screen on my server (next to the other screen that ran mutt for my email).
and check this: to this day I consider it the best chat setup I’ve ever had.
I cut my teeth on bulletin boards. We actually ran a 2-node bbs with 2 dedicated phone lines out of our house.
