The Internet, as used by the general public, is actually pretty old now. The Web really started to hit the mainstream in about 1995, so it's practically old enough to vote (and is legal to fuck in several countries). I work in a relatively young field, and started going to conferences in it also in about 1995. And that year, one of the big, important people in the field had died. And everybody was hit hard by it, because unlike long-established fields, most of the pioneers were still alive, and a death was an unusual occurrence. The Internet is now old enough that many things on it that used to be fairly cool have now disappeared. Some of them have been replaced by newer, better alternatives...but other things are gone, and for long enough that we can start to even be nostalgic about them. Some things may even disappear for a while, and then re-emerge suddenly with sort of a retro-cool vibe. FOCUS: What things used to be on the Internet (or pre-Internet, like GEnie/Compuserve/AOL) that are just plain gone now, and that you miss? ALT FOCUS: Did you ever find something on the Internet and then lose it, and not be able to find it again? What was it? Maybe other TiBbers can help you find it.
Focus: Back in 93-94 we had Prodigy and if I recall the name of the game was GUTS. Each day you had to answer 7 questions in a certain amount of time (15 mins?) and competed against other people online. Guess they couldn't do that game these days with Google, Wiki etc but it was fun scrambling to call people who might know or reading through our old set of Encyclopedia Britannica's looking for the answer. I wonder if there are people on this board who don't know that those are? Alt Focus: There was a YouTube clip of some chick being at work in what appeared to be a tanning salon and she lip syncs along to a pretty raunchy rap song. She had dark curly hair with blond highlights and short jean shorts. I was probably 27-28 at the time and had some ridiculous crush on her. Think I even JO'd it a few times to that video.
AOL Chatrooms. (In the late 80s, very early 90s before video and voice chatrooms) A somewhat witty, short, glasses wearing accountant type actually had a chance to strike up a conversation with a woman and maybe persuade them to meet for a drink. Good times. It might be on the internet somewhere, but a lot of work hours were wasted away playing Welltris. It was like Tetris, except there were four walls to move the pieces.
FOCUS: What things used to be on the Internet (or pre-Internet, like GEnie/Compuserve/AOL) that are just plain gone now, and that you miss? I used to use the airline flight service called SABRE (or something like that), before every airline had their own, Travelocity, Expedia, etc. It was a hilariously cumbersome interface, and you had to type in departure, arrival, date, airline codes, etc. exactly, but you basically could get access to fares and updates that only travel agents had prior to that. I don't miss it in that that old way (it may still be around) wasn't user friendly, but I miss the little joy of having success with it getting better fare than just calling the airline.
most of the things that I miss are more things that I grew out of. I don't miss those things exactly, I miss being able to enjoy them. Barren Realms Elite and Monarchy were my crack at different points. I played both far, far, far too much. I look back at those things and have no idea how I stayed awake, let alone how I stayed interested. Dikumuds and CircleMuds were crack at other times. I used to love IRC chats as well for a while. I have no idea what the fuck I saw in those time sinks. I do kind of miss Napster and Kazaa - file sharing with more discrimination. When you wanted one song, you went and downloaded that song, not the entire discography of the performing artist. Especially when you could just browse everything that person was sharing - if they had a bunch of music you liked and some music you didn't know - it was a discovery engine. If they had a bunch of great porn - you could just rip as much of it down as you could get before they went off line. I mean everything about file sharing now is better, I wouldn't even think about going back. But I do kind of miss the wild west feel of those early days.
I miss old-school flash animations. Homestarrunner, AlbinoBlackSheep, The End of the World, Xiao Xiao / other stick figure fighting animations. They've become rarer as Youtube made live action sketches easy to share, but there are some still carrying on the tradition:
Alt. Focus: I'm going to come out of left field on this one and say the "Booyah" video aka the "Aww N***a" video. I know I'm not the only one here who has seen this little clip. For those of you who don't know, it's a video in which a few black dudes are wacking it and encouraging Tony Everready as he fucks a white girl and proceeds to stick his nuts in her ass as his penis is still in her vagina. While this video does not conform to my taste in porn, the commentary in this video is comedic gold. I first saw this video four or five years ago when it was shown to me by my cousin but I believe it was shot during the late 90's or early 2000's. This video used to be on flurl.com but has since been removed. I tried finding it to pass along to a friend in the spring only to find that it was nowhere to be found on the internet. Maybe one of you idiots knows where it can be found.
MSN/Yahoo chat rooms when I was a teenager in the 90's. Hell, my friends and I met and ended up hanging out with some girls that went to a nearby high school on there. Good times. Alt Focus: There used to be a site called hardcorestories.com that was basically erotic stories that you could set to scroll at various speeds. Hands free, baby. I just remember that it was awesome because it got the job done without needing the ultra fast T1 line it would take to download a 20 second porn clip in the hours I had before my parents got home.
The first porno video clip we downloaded off a AOL .gif chat room was a collage of porn shots set to Looking Glass's hit "Brandy" it was awesomely hilarious. I think we still have the Mac it is on some where. Im sure if I looked it would still be hidden in the Sim City 2000 file, cleverly placed way out of the normal sized window.
It's from a 'blacks on blondes' video. The move is called 'a dog in a bath tub' because keeping the balls in the asshole is like trying to keep a dog in a bath tub. Video - http://xxxbunker.com/dick_in_pussy_balls_in_ass_
Thanks to malignity my week has now been made. Several friends and I have been looking everywhere for this but somehow I forgot that it also went by the name of "dog in a bath tub". Ahh yes. The early days of internet porn. I remember in late elementary school/early jr. high having Napster and my friends and I would wait for hours for a clip for some porn clip to download from a 56k connection. We would then stash the downloaded clip in a folder buried in a few other folders so that the parents wouldn't find it. Napster rocked our worlds. No longer did we have to settle for the free preview of paysites. We could now enjoy full length porn if only we had enough patience. There wasn't massive dissemination of videos from paysites that could be watched on free sites back then. If you wanted to watch high quality porn, you had to be dedicated and wait for that shit. Kids these days have no idea how lucky they have it with fapdu, xhamster, redtube, etc. Although, compared to my dad's generation, I had it pretty fucking good.
A few memories: AIM, ICQ, MSN Messenger, and Yahoo Messenger. I spent ungodly amounts of hours on those programs chatting with friends. It was the precursor to texting. I'd have five or six windows open talking to friends. I had friends who asked girls out and broke up with them via AIM. One guy I knew had an entire relationship with a girl in Massachusetts and it was completely via AIM and the occasional phone call (Eventually he convinced a bunch of us to go with him to meet her, which turned into a completely cluster-fucked road trip, but that is another story entirely). Dial up sucked, and I can remember constantly connecting and disconnecting until I got the "fastest" connection, which was still slow as shit. I'd be thrilled if it took only an hour to download a song. I remember when I got to college and I was first introduced to "broadband" internet. I went kinda crazy with it at first until I got used to it. So. Much. Porn.
Usenet. I know it's not really gone, but there will always be a special place in my heart for newsgroups.
I miss some of the sounds of AIM. AIM was such an enormous part of my life in college. To the point that if I was away and didn't have an away message up, people were mildly concerned. Such an awesome place to be passive aggressive, hilarious, or over dramatic. Oh oh the dark ages of pron, I remember getting excited over a 20kb/sec download and when a 15MB video was a dangerously large file to download.
Edit: The links are NSFW. If you want the full scene then it is the 'Alisha' scene you are after. Preview: http://www.blacksonblondes.com/tour/interracial-porn/alisha/#scene The full scene: http://xhamster.com/movies/1124858/alisha_banged_by_bbc_039_s.html The fun starts at about 46 mins in.