Remember when...?

Bulletin Board Services, email with no attachments because .bmp, .jpg, etc. hadn't been developed, and chatting online and downloading in UNIX shells using UNIX commands.

14.4k modem!

Computers with 256K HDs. And that was considered a lot!

No grandpa and we don't wish to hear about it either.

I had dial up until just a year or two ago.

I liked the dial up noises.

Buying a 10-pack of 5 1/4" floppy discs only to learn that the "newer" computers only took the smaller 3 1/2" hard discs.

Printing something on the dot matrix printer in the office and then discovering some halfwit misaligned the holes on the wheel! Your document had to be shredded and re-printed.

I remember going to my school's computer lab late at night to write papers and look at porn. 1-3 minute clips on realplayer and quicktime.

We had two land lines, one for phone calls and one for the Internet.

On 9/11, watching the Miracle of the Inernet melt down because it couldn't handle the traffic.

AOL chatrooms and AIM

How huge and heavy monitors were.

How about standalone word processors, like the Wang and the Lexitron?

CompuServe Forums and AOL chatrooms, Delos BBS, alt.showbiz.gossip or alt.gossip.celebrities, so-and-so no longer shopping the pig and so-and-so in the stereo cabinet. Ah, memories!

No more See's candies in the Trailer Park...

Oh, yeah, I used to waste so much time on Usenet in the late '90s. alt.gothic, alt.childfree, alt.sex.stories and I don't remember the rest.

AOL chatrooms. Some people were so creative in naming their room.

Each chatroom only held about 35 people, and I spent so much time double-clicking on NYC M4M. And then I'd get in the chatroom and about 95% of the men were eldergays just wasting space.

I was stuck with the lower than 56k modem until I got broadband. Sometimes it'd take over an hour to download a single mp3, onto my 3gb hard drive.

[quote] And then I'd get in the chatroom and about 95% of the men were eldergays just wasting space.

And now you're one of them.

R16 how did you know? I was a kid then so didn't go in the adult rooms.

The Internet was fun. I remember laughing so hard in NY Times movie chat. I remember how bizarre it was when wavs were invented & chat rooms were suddenly making noise. And Datalounge was so funny I cried. I’d go to work & come back & I had to go back 38 pages to start reading where i left off.

It was harder to trace people on dialup. I’d get banned from a chat room & ask why & they’d say someone from my dialup had gotten banned and so everyone on the dialup at the time got banned too.

I worked in publishing. We would type up our copy on our Selectric typewriter then take it to the Wang room for the word processors to enter it into the Wang.

My husband used to type my papers on his old manual typewriter. Then he got a Brother word processor from The Wiz & was amazed. Problem was they broke down quickly. Brother stopped making them, I think, so he used Panasonics after that but never could find one he loved as much as the Brother, which would number the pages & keep a word count at the bottom of the page.

We bought a computer when I was in grad school. When we turned on Microsoft Works & there was a WHITE page - just like a real life piece of paper - and I could use a keyboard to put black letters on that paper - I was sold.

He kept his word processor for a few more years for his “writing” but I typed all my papers. I didn’t even write them on paper first & then type them. I composed them 100% on the computer. But I found I had a problem seeing mistakes & bad grammar on the screen. So I had to print them out and edit them a dozen times, just like when I wrote on paper. To keep from running out of black ink in the middle of typing the final copy on the day the paper was due (yeah, it happened), I used other colors. I’d print out in red, green, blue, yellow. When I was finally satisfied & ready for the final copy, I went black.

I think he bought at least one of his Panasonics at one of the scores of Israeli electronics shops in the area. These stores were spoofed on SNL in a recurring sketch where Tom Hanks & Dana Carvey bullied people into buying bogus electronics. “It’s got Sony guts!” Those shops were the worst. They sold cameras, radios, watches, landline phones, answering machines, typewriters. They’d stuff the window displays with every type of electronic there was & if you stopped on the street & looked at something in the window for more than 10 seconds a burly Israeli guy in an open shirt with his chest festooned in gold chains would come running out and yell at you. “Don’t look, come in! Come in store! Look at it inside store!” You never went in the store unless you absolutely knew what you wanted & the price you wanted to pay or you’d get banboozled.

Yaasss blurry ass video of porn.

I remember getting up at 5 a.m. Black Friday to buy a 28.8 modem at Circuit City. They were so hot back then, the ad said at least 10 per store. I bought one for my father in-law as well. I think there were about $29.99. Little did I know, that you had to have a clean enough phone line at the house; I was barely able to get like a connection at12 baud rate. Later, as my job allowed for mobile working, I got a laptop with 56.6 built in. I called the phone company and complained that my new 56.6 modem never got over 12! Their response? We don't guarantee phone line connections. Someone did some tweaking, and I got about 28.8. But work used Lotus Notes, and I replicated a lot of databases (keep a local copy of a database on the laptop, instead of needing a connection to a host server). It was virtually impossible at 28.8. I called again, and again. Finally I got a consistent 56.6 and replicated away. I could also peruse the Usernet, alt.gay.pictures.... videos. Etc. There would be threads that would have the file parse over several lines. I would download these parsed files, and use a combiner program, to make the final porn jpg, gif, Avi or mpg files. The video clips were about 30 seconds to 1 minute. I would leave my ex-wife in bed and go into my home office at 2am and jerk off. I learned how to do slideshows, so the pictures changed from one to another and ran automatically, and I would lean back in the chair and cum in 5 minutes. She walked in on me a couple of times, and I thought I hid it well. She knew.

I got a lot of dick from Yahoo chat rooms.

Flame wars.

Anyone who went through a flame war probably developed a tough hide which would serve them well in today's troll-infested internet.

Really, R25? How?! I mean, people couldn't really send photos of themselves back then. Was it quality or just quantity?

please wait while we install art