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"uh-oh!" ..oh ICQ, how I've miss you

Discussion in 'General Discussion' started by walt, Jan 2, 2011.

  1. abneretta

    abneretta
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    Isn't that what POS meant (parent over shoulder)? Or something like that. I don't remember, I just got in trouble for babysitting kids whose parents didn't care what I did when I was there and I documented that via MSN and my mom read it somehow. I never did anything while babysitting, by the way.
     
  2. Aetius

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    There were probably at least a dozen girls in my class who had the following conversation with myself or someone else:

    "So do you have AIM?"
    "Yeah, my sn is [adjective][misspelling of "girl"]12"
    "Why 12?"
    "That's my age"
    "What happens when you turn 13?"
    "..."
     
  3. abneretta

    abneretta
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    Mine just ended with 05 since that will always be the year that I graduated. I was smart like that.
     
  4. Kubla Kahn

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    Mine was [childhoodnickname]69

    You know cause 69ing is you know ehh ehh??? I had it from middle school until a few years ago when facebooks chat was introduced. As I grew older I got tired of the middle school laughs of referencing 69. But I was too lazy to change it. AIM did have a really cool feature where you could directly link with someone and send huge files to them real fast. Facebook doesnt have that shit.
     
  5. Rush-O-Matic

    Rush-O-Matic
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    At my old firm, I was the "IT guy" because I was the youngest partner, and supposedly understood the interwebs. I know exactly shit about computers, but it was more than everybody else. During the Clinton presidency, there was particular bill that was to be signed that would impact or work. So, one of my partners wanted to see if the White House had release any statements yet.

    We had two computers that had internet access in the office: mine and one of the secretaries. We shared a dial-up connection, and had to buzz each other on the intercom to say, "Are you online?" If the answer was "no," we would flip a toggle switch that sent the phone connection (shared with a fax machine) to our computers.

    So, my partner and I walked over the secretary's desk to access the White House website. She says, "What do I type in?" As another partner joined us, and two other secretaries looking over her shoulder, my partner says, "Try WhiteHouse.com." None of us really understood differences between .com and .org at that time. If you don't know how quickly we found out, you never went to whitehouse.com back then. That website is now defunct, but you can read what Grandpa R-o-M is talking about here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitehouse.com
     
  6. theillest

    theillest
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    The earliest incarnation of the internet I can remember was some archaic version of email over a university server my dad showed me in the late eighties. I remember the little yellow, DOS text popping up saying "hello" and my dad saying "That was [coworker] talking to us through the computer." !!!! I remember thinking it was pretty amazing being 5 or something at the time.

    I remember Mosaic as my browser on my US Robotics 14.4 dial up modem in the mid-nineties. ICQ, how awesome napster was etc., all the stuff already mentioned here.
     
  7. Fracas

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    Focus: Newsgroups.

    I learned a lot of great useless information from these, and witnessed some hilarious examples of how the net effects extreme personalities. Little boards for every imaginable niche and prurient interest, from rec.drugs to alt.flame to alt.suicide.holiday. Depending on what you were into, it was easier to find specialized, elevated discussion then - most of the better groups signal-to-noise-wise were far enough outside the mainstream to attract little attention, and awful grammar and bad nettiquite weren't nearly as taken for granted. (The dark side being that the old-school nerds hadn't yet accepted the AOL revolution and often treated the new people like shit. The more things change, I suppose.)

    The trolls were much more sophisticated and sometimes genuinely frightening. Not the needy, obnoxious /b/tard nihilists of today, but often genuine cranks who held very specific grudges against particular posters and would dedicate their lives to harassing them, sometimes creating alternate personae and completely breaking down in the process. High weirdness. Now they're all spammy graveyards.

    Ah, yes, the Ate My Balls meme. I laughed and laughed, and now I shed a single tear for GeoCities.

    There's still this, at least. (Seriously, set aside an hour, if you're bored and prone to nostalgia.) And I'm perenially shocked to realize Homestar Runner is still going strong, even turning down offers from Adult Swim. Keepin' it really real.
     
  8. Puffman

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    My stepson was 13 at the time and had a project due for school. The only computer with internet connection was down at my office so off we went on a Saturday so he could do some research. He gets going on his Alta Vista search or somewhat and I left the office to do some filing and cleaning. When I returned, He was on some chat room chatting up a sixteen year old pretty hard.

    Had to have the talk that day and I made sure that when we got internet at the home the computers were always in a public area. Of course now he is 26 and we just trade porn sites.
     
  9. lust4life

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    Bianca's Smut Shack.
     
  10. Aribidi

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    My saddest experience with MSN Messenger came when my dad added me to his profile, or whatever the hell you call it. So whenever I logged on, he started talking to me. It was so sad. I knew I was the only contact in his list and I knew he only got MSN to talk to me. But we never actually talked very much in person, so I had no idea what to say to him online and neither did he. It was just the run of the mill "hey, how are you, how was your day, are you coming home this weekend" etc etc.

    So, like any self-absorbed and unfeeling 18 year old asshole would do, I blocked him. When he found out he didn't get mad or anything. He just looked to the ground and said 'oh well, I just thought it would be nice to talk from time to time". It was more heartbreaking than watching a labrador puppy with no legs get hit by a bus full of terminally-ill children.

    I vowed to never use MSN after that (and I did, for about a month).
     
  11. JWags

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    Oh man, the early internets. My first memory is our family's first computer back in the early-mid 90s. My dad informed me that there were bunches of computer games we could download through this new crazy thing called a modem. I was young, so I don't know how exactly it worked out, but he would have text files of all the stuff you could download, from a server I'm sure, and I could scroll through and write down a game or 2 I wanted. He would then connect to the internet overnight on most likely a 14.4kb connection (can't tie up the phone during the day you know) and I would wake up in the morning to new games, hurray! I also remember him carefully monitoring what section of the text file I was scrolling through. I realize now because there was probably a whole bunch of porn.

    I remember first getting AOL. We didn't have the full dial-up service, we would just connect through TCP/IP and basically download any emails. I had no idea instant messaging was an option for awhile after.

    I was so into AIM freshman year of college through maybe junior year. Away messages became our methods of expression as well as for informing others as to our locations and plans. I was so diligent that my mom, once she got onto AOL and instant messaging, would be worried if I didn't have an away message up and was not active. Kind of sad really.
     
  12. cpt0

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    The fun thing with technology is that it "evolves" and yet remains the same. To fix the "only 1 person on this chat network" thing, i got pidgin, which allows me to stay connected with all my friends on msn and icq at the same time. And chat on IRC. I love that thing so much.

    I remember trying to use the scout sniper rifle in counter strike with a usr56k. it's hard to snipe with 250ms of latency, and yet i was doing it. The day i got DSL the usual people on the server i went to kept wondering why i was always within the top 3 all of the sudden :)

    I also remember this thing which brought a lot of happiness to me and my friends back in the day : the anarchy file. It had many recipes for mayhem, including " How to destroy a Mcdonalds" "Getting high with bananas" and the hilariously informative "fun with termites".
     
  13. thevoice

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    My first Internet Memories Consist Of:

    - Roleplay wrestling federations (From age 12 - 14 I was hooked).

    I would spend hours typing up these extremely detailed interviews and scenarios involving my wrestler. My pals and I would always brag the next day at school about our various roleplays. If you were the champ, you were GOD in our group of friends. I'd like to think that it helped my writing and my imagination, yet as I type this - It's hard not to feel extremely dorky.

    - Going into Excite chat and fucking with people / Trying to hook up With Girls Who Lived Nearby.

    It worked. Once. She was fat.

    As I got older (16-18) the internet's purpose in my life changed slightly:

    - If my friends and I weren't hanging out, we were chatting on MSN.

    Homework at the computer was simply an excuse to log on and see who was online. My buddy Alan and I would always talk about hockey, girls and other high-school stuff. There was always that hope that the girl I liked would be online, and I would try to wheel over MSN. As I got older, my internet 'game' got a lot better.

    - Porn.

    Hopefully self-explanatory.

    These days I use the internet for everything. I play PS3 online, facebook, shop, hockey stats and info. Life before internet was not even life at all.
     
  14. Fracas

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    Focus: Using the AOL e-mail client, and knowing other people who used it who weren't Filipinos or grandparents.

    For those who've forgotten, AOL e-mail had a feature that allowed you to delete SENT e-mail, provided it had gone to another AOL user and remained unopened. In my foolish, drunken youth, this occasionally saved my ass.
     
  15. BeCoolBitch_BeCool

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    I don't know if it's just an age thing, but I have fond memories of being able to masturbate to pictures. Hell, sometimes they weren't even naked.
     
  16. Frank

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    Signing into AOL, hearing "You've got mail!" and seeing that open mailbox with yellow envelopes to let you know that someone, somewhere took the time to send you a message. This novelty wore off very quickly when spam started.

    I was also in high school and college during the heyday of AIM. One of my friends started a group called the AWA (AIM Warning Allegiance). I don't know if anyone remembers, but AIM had a warning system, where you could warn someone once for each message they sent you and if your warning level reached 100% you were blocked from AIM for a few days. Four or five of us would start a casual conversation with one of our other friends and once we all hit five or so responses we would send out the signal WARN AS ONE! and get them banned for a few days.

    AIM was pretty much the only way you could communicate with everyone in college since texting was still new and expensive so this would cripple your social life, people missed parties because of this. Things came to a head when the creator drunkenly broke into someone that had been dodging attacks dorm room, got on their computer and sent messages to people in the AWA asking them to warn the username he was currently on. Ahhh, the good old days.
     
  17. Rush-O-Matic

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    Heh. That reminds me . . . you could change that "You've got mail!" and the "Welcome!" sound to any wav file. One time a coworker made a racist comment that just made him sound dumb. He's was not computer savvy at all. While he was away from his desk, I changed the "Welcome!" sound to be Tom Cruise's line from Jerry McGuire, where he's on the phone screaming, and says "I LOVE BLACK PEOPLE!" I had cranked up his speaker volume really loud, too. I don't know why I found that so hilarious, but when he logged in and it played, it was just as funny as I hoped it would be. Makes me laugh thinking about it now. Good times.