Kids these days have no appreciation for a busy signal when trying to dial into AOL. Focus: There's unlimited porn, and it's FREE ?!?!?
Like a lot of people on this board, I came of age when AIM reigned supreme. If I was using a computer in middle school, high school, or the first few years of college, I was logged into AIM. Not coincidentally, my AIM usage dropped at exactly the same time Facebook added my school. While at home for Christmas, I booted up my old computer from high school -- why my parents still have it, I have no idea -- and found four years worth of saved AIM chat logs. Talk about nostalgia. The highlight was the first conversation I had with my high school girlfriend; I remember that night clearly, waiting on pins and needles for her to sign on after a mutual friend had given me her screenname. Other than that, most of my chat logs had something or another to do with Counter-Strike. That walk down memory lane got me thinking. AIM, MSN, and other similar applications have been long-since phased out. But in many ways, their replacements are lacking. If you logged on to one of these IM programs, you knew everyone online wanted to converse. If someone was away, you could see where they were. You could invite a couple of your friends to a mutual chat room. You had to actually know someone, or know someone who knows someone, to get their screenname, making your buddy list a list of your actual buddies. On Facebook, when I log in I rarely am doing so because I want to chat with people. I actually get pissed most of the time when I get an IM, especially when it's someone I haven't talked to in years. I open Facebook for several reasons, and having IM conversations is way, way down on the list, whereas on AIM it was the sole objective. I guess it's also my browsing style. I use Firefox, but only keep open two or three tabs at a time. Over a 30 minute period I may log onto Facebook three times, but I always close the tab in between. When someone chats with me, I feel like I have to leave Facebook open or come off as rude, and that annoys the shit out of me. On the flip side, I always feel almost intrusive when sending someone a Facebook IM, as I don't want to come off as similarly pestering. I'm big into social media, but I still long for the days when everyone you knew was constantly logged into AIM. I'm hoping Skype really takes off, even moreso than it already has.
My first real memories of the Internet was my dad showing me Usenet and how it worked. Another was logging on with 14.4 kb modem and playing a hangman game through Compuserve. What I wax nostalgic about the most is when I was about 12 or 13 and having to wait until my parents were almost in bed so I could use the phone line to dial up and play the original Counter-Strike. Any chance I could I would play through the night until the the sun came up. This was way back when CS was only a lowly HL mod and you had to use the shitty built in server browser or connect directly via IP address. Other fond memories... -BBS boards -Having to actually hunt around for viral videos instead of having them shoved down our throats and being told they are viral -Angel Fire / Geocities sites -Using Netscape -MIDI sound files and anything else pre-MP3
I, too, grew up in the heyday of AIM. Every time I logged on to the internet in high school (we still had dial-up. Remember dial-up?), it was to chat on AIM. When I got to college and had that broadband connection, my AIM was never disconnected. At any given time, I could talk to at least 4 or 5 friends at once. Bored in college between classes? Go to a computer lab and log into AIM and bullshit with friends for an hour. I rarely called ANYONE in college, we made plans through AIM. Facebook was only starting to get popular during my junior and senior year of college, and there was no chat options or anything like that, so AIM was still what everyone used. I had ICQ briefly my sophomore or junior year of high school, but that was because it was the only chat program that a girl I'd had a crush on was using. She was the only friend I had on there, never bothered adding anyone else. Those sound effects annoyed me to no end. I haven't logged into AIM or anything like it (MSN, Yahoo IM) in ages. I just call people now, as it is much easier. I found that the amount of time I (and my friends) spent logged in to AIM went down dramatically after college. Yes, Facebook was becoming very popular, but they didn't have any kind of a chat option until a couple of years after I finished college the first time. For a few months I'd stay logged in, but absolutely no one else would. Once college was done, people were working, had girlfriends/boyfriends or husbands/wives, and didn't have time to sit and chat endlessly with friends online for hours like we used to. Besides that, we were rarely tied to computers anymore. We didn't have to sit around because mom and dad wouldn't let us leave, or sit at the computer doing homework and chatting with friends. We could call each other and get together whenever we wanted, so why sit and chat on a computer when we can just go out and hang out?
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Remember when you actually had to pay by the HOUR with AOL? Jesus Christ the early days were lame. My fondest memory was trading porno in the "gif" chat rooms and amassing my first porn collection. I remember Napster being fucking awesome at the time. Does that company still exist? edit for Nettdata: Thanks for the porn, those work perfect on my dot-matrix printer.
And it was hilarious how we'd covertly print them out in our high-school computer lab (which was a big-ass mainframe with hundreds of terminals), and have binders full of printed out ascii porn. Late 70's early 80's, real porn like a Playboy, Penthouse, or (GASP!) Hustler, was almost unheard of, so we did what we could with what we had. Even had a few taped up inside our lockers at school. Yes, we were geeks. And now we rule the world.
Remember when Compuserve cost four times the minimum wage to use (and then, only after 7 PM), and AOL was called Quantum Link? Focus: My favorite memory is probably in late '94/early '95, after I started actually using Compuserve (it had become affordable), but before I started using the web: I'd GO USE5, and do a text capture in Autosig to download Newsgroup posts to a text file.
Chat rooms. Were you not astonished the first you could violently insult a complete stranger over their taste of music that was bigger than you and not have to worry about the fact he may kill you. YOU COULD SAY WHATEVER YOU WANTED TO ANYBODY!!!! The bad part was this: -OMIGOD is nobody send me a pic soon I swear. -A/S/L? -Who in here down with Bush and Gavin? -Pics, please. -LOL WTF OMG BRB etc. Blah blah blah. The death of good grammar, and unlike Jesus it didn't come back.
We tried printing out an actual picture file on our dot matrix. The subject? One Cindy Margolis. After a few hours it wasnt done and our parents were going to be home. We had to turn off the printer and forcibly rip the paper out since we couldnt figure out how to roll it out.
I use Skype for phone calls but rarely for chat. People use it as a regular IM service? At least amongst my friends, Gchat is super popular. I still have my AIM screenname and I still use it occasionally, but for the most part I talk to people on GChat. I find FB chat annoying as well. I don't mind so much FB having a chat option, I mind how shitty the service is. It just crashes IM aggregators. And the fact that the only people who IM me on FB chat are guys who I slept with in high school but never left town and still work at the same minimum wage job. I have a very similar memory, though I was visiting my aunt and uncle. A mutual friend gave me the screenname of the guy I had a crush on and I waited anxiously for him to come online. His name was Emerson and, last I heard, he's in rehab. Further proof my taste in men is questionable, at best.
I remember the first time my dad took the parental restrictions off of AOL. It was the greatest day. Although it was also the day I saw my first X-rated pop up.
Damn that's hot! It's giving me a raging eight colon colon colon colon colon capital d. Focus: I've posted this several times before, but I'll always remember being 11 years old, with this new fangled "internet." I was having a great time looking up Pokemon info, hockey stuff, etc, etc. and then I paused, struck by an unfathomable idea. "Surely it can't... no, this will never work... but maybe..." I thought, as I typed "naked ladies" into Alta Vista. And it DID work. My life has never been the same.
I remember being on MSN Messenger all the time when I was in junior high and high school. I thought it was the coolest thing ever when a guy I went to school with told me about it. Then, even the most innocent of things becomes less so when you arrange to meet with a boy under the railroad bridge in town to give your first blow job. We tried to arrange a meeting for sex too, thank god that didn't work out. Both of these occurred in high school, just thought I should clarify. Really though, I became best friends with my best friend via messenger. He and I were friends in school but since I had went to kindergarten with him then went to Lutheran school through 8th grade we had to become reacquainted. We talked online all the time and we usually watched the Chiefs game 'together' commenting on the game back and forth. I think we did the same thing when Bush gave his State of the Union address, we were nerds. I always used to have my sign on name be some dumb quote or funny saying and I got called out on it more than once. I think I had something like "For Sale: one set of morals, barely used" because I thought it was hilarious when I was a sophomore in high school (I was an idiot) and a friends' older sister saw it and said that made me sound slutty. I thought that made it cooler. I actually still have some floppy disks that have saved MSN conversations on them, but alas, I have no way of accessing them. Who would have known that the floppy disk would be phased out?
When I was like 14 me and my friends thought it was the funniest thing in the world to make fake AIM screen-names and pretend to be people we knew from school. We would friend request them, then be all "Hey its jacob i got a new sn lol." And of course they would always accept our identity instantly, after all, we did know who we were pretending to be and who we were talking to. Well one time we were getting bored talking to some girl and started making some crude sex jokes or something. One minute she was all "like omg nooo way thats gross" and the next it was xXsOcCergRRL56Xx: This is Renee's mother speaking. Do not ever contact my daughter again Jacob, or I will call the police. Do you understand? Do you understand?!? Woops, sorry Jacob. Also, I later learned that you could sign people up for certain mail items without it being traced to yourself. So in 8th grade I signed up one of my friends for a Trojan Magnum XL Free Sample. He had very protective (re: nosy) parents who opened his mail and then confronted him on why he was getting condoms in the mail. OWNED
I miss the random-search feature of ICQ. I've still got friends I talk to overseas who I met years ago on the random-search feature of ICQ, one of whom showed me around northern Italy this past October. Thanks to spammers and Turks who've seen too much Baywatch, nobody ever answers for fear that anybody randomly messaging is only out to rob, rape or murder them.
Please tell me there's someone out there who remembers one of the first widespread memes: the eight billion "_____ Ate My Balls" pages. I remember being 11 and using god-forsaken Prodigy, searching random topics on Yahoo and somehow always seeing search results that involved ball-eating. And it should probably be noted that I wasn't searching for the word "balls."
The first time playing video games with friends online is something I'll never forget about the internet. In the mid 90s I played a fishing game called Trophy Bass 2 all the time on Sierras WON servers and I'm pretty sure that was my first online game. All over a 33.6kbps modem[then eventually 56k]. I remember always having to disconnect and reconnect to my ISP until I got the fastest connection. Really though, back then most websites were so simple graphically that even with the ancient modems I don't remember them taking all that long to load. Now 15+ years later I'm still gaming it up. Also, porn. I remember finding topless pictures of Jenny McCarthy with my friends and we'd print them off in color and they would take forever to finish.
While at home for the holidays, I've been reading my old journals (which I've been keeping since I was 7) and I wrote a lot about this new-fangled internet thing in the journal I was keeping at the time I first started using it. (I also found some entries I wrote on "my very own coputer" that showed some funny distrust of technology -"Wow, I really hope you actually save because this was a good entry"- and cute childhood misunderstandings- "you can probably see and hear her, but if you can't my best friend christina is here and standing right next to me.") I wrote about my "friend" I met in a chatroom about horses and how I lied about my age and told her I was this, like, professional horseback rider, which I guess was just foreshadowing to when me and my friends would go in chatrooms to find guys to have funny cybersex with. There was another entry where I was talking about how I spent 3 hours on AIM, and how I was really excited because I knew a boy's screen name. It was pretty funny to have my first reactions to technology documented like that. I still remember my first AIM conversation. My screen name was "Jrwriter14," and it was with one of my friends and my dad was showing me how to use it. I specifically remember him teaching me what "lol" means and how to use it and immediately thinking it was stupid and deciding not to do it ever again. He also showed me the basic emoticons. Then my friend used a curse word and there was a scandal. And then she taught me some kind of code kids these days were using to tell the person they were talking to that their parents were nearby so they shouldn't curse or talk about anything bad because we were all on our parents' computers in the living room or whatever. I don't remember what it was now though.