this post was submitted on 04 Apr 2026
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Well, you’d wake up, walk to the computer room, hit the power button, head to the kitchen, throw some poptarts or whatever in the toaster, head back to the computer room, maybe it finished booting, log in if it was, head back to the kitchen cause breakfast is probably ready, head back to the computer room, and maybe you’re logged in and booted. After that you’d launch the SBC Global dial-up program, and wait for it to connect, hope no calls came in while it did its thing. After that you’d launch Netscape and watch the little stars fly by, wait some more for the webpage to load line by line, and you’re on. Of course if your parents needed to make a call they’d have to kick you off the internet.
So not hard, just a lot of waiting.
Of course anytime a program stopped responding you’d also have to perform some good ‘ol’ percussive maintenance, aka give the tower a swift kick.
Back in my day, the internet came to you in the mail
There was also stuff you had to look out for. Like every website had a toolbar they wanted you to install.
You’d have to look out for random .exe files back when people were way too trusting.
You could download almost any media with ease on Limewire, but you had to be careful cause you’d stumble on viruses and illegal shit galore
And of course the same parents who listen to AM Radio, Fox News, and Truth Social now used to tell you “you can’t believe everything you read on the internet” when talking about using Wikipedia for school
Aware this was very rambl-y. Just practicing for later in life