this post was submitted on 23 Apr 2026
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Old enough to know what RealPlayer was. And to use Netscape communicator.
RealPlayer still exists and I use it.
I remember when Netscape Navigator came out and it was brilliant, better than mosaic, but slow to load by comparison and we all called it bloatware.
We had internet at work (you could rlogin to different servers and some of them were fast and had internet access), but at home it was pay per minute dial up - check no one is using the phone, dial in, download email via pop3, disconnect.
I wasted hours of my life on irc but nowadays I waste hours of my life on lemmy instead.
I'm so curious, why do you use RealPlayer? I remember only ever using it because some downloadable videos were in their format. They never struck me as good quality or especially good compression. And the player itself seemed to get worse and more bloated with every update.
Uhhh, if there's a video that you don't want to be held hostage to intrusive ads or buffering during a bad internet connection, realplayer can help with that.
Interesting. So you can watch arbitrary web videos using it? That's so different than how it started!
Uhhh, the browser extension offers to download from pretty much any youtube video, but not always all. If there's one that won't download, it's worth trying again after the next realplayer update.
The videos end up in my real player videos folder, from whence I can watch them uninterrupted.
Netscape? We didn't have Internet when I grew up.
I had to learn from magazines how to configure autoexec.bat to load DOS in high memory, and ask me on boot if whatever game I wanted to run needed extended or expanded memory, and which drivers (mouse, joystick, sound card...) not to load in order to leave enough precious kilobytes of memory available for the game to fit in...
Heh, I got a computer at the end of the DOS era. For all of the things like that, a friend of mine guided me through. You might find it hard to believe but I had to wait 3+ years to even get the Internet at home after getting a computer, so my experience with browsers was mostly at school and a job I got in highschool. At home, I did get secret internet access against my parents' wishes by sharing that same friend's internet account creds and dialing in late at night. If caught, the excuse was always that I'd dialed into that friend's machine to download some files. Technically was true like 1% of the time haha. So yeah I didn't have real Internet access myself either, for a long time.
I remember editing a config/ini file to add the word HIMEM and setting IRQs manually for sound cards and things like that. Not sure I had to do all the steps you mentioned though since our first computer had 24 whole MB of ram. I think most people had 16 (or often 8) at the time!
Back then 640KB was supposed to be enough for anyone.
It wasn't.
HIMEM. SYS, if I recall correctly, allowed you to tell DOS to load as much as possible of itself (and maybe even some drivers?) into “high memory” (within the first, and probably last, megabyte, I believe) if it existed and the processor was at least a 286, freeing more of those precious 640KB for programs to run in (DOS by default didn't give them any means of addressing any more memory, even if it existed).
There was also expanded memory (EMS) and, from the 286 on, extended memory (XMS), different, incompatible, methods of addressing memory above that first MB (up to a whopping 8MB with EMS and an absurd 4GB with XMS), and depending on what the program you wanted to run required you had to choose one or the other (which became much easier once the memmaker utility came along).
Then true 32-bit software able to access the whole 4GB address space in 386s and later came along, and all that became ancient history, until we started needing more than 4GB and had to move to 64 bits.
I'm the right age to be in that venn diagram of having had an ICQ account in 1996 and a Snapchat account in 2014.
Where one of my favorite things about the iPhone was that it finally put the nail in the coffin of ~~Macromedia~~ Adobe Flash.
Nice. I loved ICQ. A friend of mine had this really cool online friend he made in Sweden (we're in the US) and it was such a feeling of connection then. I miss those days. Nowadays it's like a 50% chance of a snarky/negative interaction with random internet people. The internet used to feel friendlier.
haha upvote
fuck you
I remember when the iPhone was “doomed to fail” because it didn’t support flash
Did anyone seriously believe that though? Killing Flash is approximately the only good thing the existence of the iPhone brought to the world.
The only people at the time who thought it was a good idea were people that liked apple products. Everyone else just complained that the web was 90% flash, so iPads/iPhones are useless.
There was more outrage at lack of flash support than there was from removing optical drives, and people put up quite a stink with that as well.
I remember 2007 well enough that I can definitely say that that was not true in 2007. Flash was widespread, but nowhere near 90%.
no, just the fun parts were flash 😭
itch.io doesn't hit the same as newgrounds
Huh. I never heard that. I remember everyone being super stoked that Flash was going to probably die because of the iPhone, and everyone loving it. (I didn't at the time, but I get now why it was Flash that was itself doomed to fail eventually)
Really?? Damn. It was a huge thing. Got a resurgence after the iPad came out and still didn’t support flash. Was a big circlejerk about it in every tech forum
I guess I didn't use those (or many other) forums. I don't remember anyone saying much negative about the iPhone in fact. With a few exceptions like when people pointed out that it didn't initially ship with copy/paste or downloadable apps. Most people overlooked those temporary shortcomings though, because: shiny.
Oh man, I remember downloading Netscape versions that were probably the sand thing with a different version number. But you're still on dial up so it didn't matter lol. Don't forget downloading more RAM lol
Oh yeah -- I cannot remember what that program was called that everyone used for a while that "compressed" or "optimized" RAM usage but there was a feeling (placebo effect, maybe?) that it helped. It may have been something like RAM Optimizer Pro.
I remember spending a day and a half downloading the Halo 2 trailer to run on RealPlayer. Good times.