Oh, you think the darkness is your ally. But you merely adopted the dark.

"I have usernames older than you" is actually a pretty sick burn

I will invoke the old words

A/S/L

These kids have never been slapped around a bit with a large trout and it shows.

I've known adventures, seen places you people will never see, I've been on university work terminals and back... frontiers! I've stood on the back deck of Usenet bound for Mosaic with sweat in my eyes watching Netscape Navigator fight on the shoulder of the internet... I've felt wind in my hair, riding Lynx off of monochrome monitors and seen usegroups burn like a match and disappear. I've seen it, felt it...!

Assuming y'all aren't just fucking around, reading the comments here is actually really cool, tangentially interacting with people who have internet stories from well before I was born

I'm just from the dialup era, and I still feel old online a lot of the time, but then someone here is like "yeah, Berners-Lee invented HTTP just to make a website to mock me"

Shit, my steam account is older than most of the highschoolers I work with

Friends, hear my story…

In the days of old, the days where 300 baud modems were bought by us, the Early Adopters, there were meetings in dark places where code was exchanged on cassette, to be loaded from our tape drives, to create a new BBS, and you - yes you, dear reader - could be your very own SysOp. A king! Let them fall before you as you interrupted their email to live chat. Behold a world where encryption dare not tread, and you, My SysOp, could read the thoughts of all your subjects! Enter a universe where mom picking up the phone downstairs, only to be greeted with digital screeching, turned your conversations into garbled, alien characters before your eyes!

This is where it began. This is where I began. And thus shall I endure, today, tomorrow, and all tomorrows. The lore is mine and mine alone to carry.

Post on, dear friends. I did all this for you.

I was on BBS forums in the '80s.

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

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?

I have usernames older than you

Can't wait till I can use that did someday.

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..

If you bought your dial-up internet from your local newspaper, there’s a pretty good chance I was doing tech support for it.

23715769

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

Honestly, the people who were around in the early internet days helped build the online world we all use now. A little respect for the veterans of dial-up isn’t a bad thing. 😄

I watched the Adam Friedland interview with Clavicular yesterday, and Gen Z is so fucked. I realize not all of them are like that, but that someone like Clavicular has gained any traction is a sign the youth is not alright.

Old man yells at the Cloud.

Yeah, seems there is a belief that past a certain age, you should have zero fun, be nothing but a wage slave, and die somewhere quietly, where no one will see what fate awaits you.

Well, I happen to think minors especially should not have access to social media, or at least somehow have minor only social media.

Prevents them interacting with predators, getting brainrotted, and most importantly: leaves us with more mature people to interact with.

Adobe flash games and adobe flash videos. Beige computers. Monochrome monitors. Trackball mice. DOS. The original Doom. Newgrounds. Joe Cartoon, Killfrog, and Stickdeath. Napster and Limewire. Geocities. Forums for days. Browser games like Utopia.

My ICQ number was 737916. A hacker stole it 20 years ago because I thought, "why would anyone want this?" and used the password "buddha" for some reason.

I loved that platform. Those were innocent days by comparison.

Wish I could have gotten that number back.

I got a Gmail account back when you had to get an invite.

Drops mic

I remember trying to play online quake in the 90's, I live in new Zealand... We had dial up, my latency was around the 5s mark. I have up pretty quick.

If I wanted to play multiplayer games, it was taking my desktop computer to a friends house, connecting them together with 10Mb BNC networking, and don't forget the 50ohm terminators.

A friend spent a week trying to download the original pirated version on XP, the couple of hundred meg file would get stopped for various reasons.

I have my full name as a gmail account, I got it as soon as it possible. firstname.lastname@gmail.com

I'm so sad that I missed out on this era of the internet. I only got online in 2020, just horrible timing. all you older folk were so lucky