Person Asks “What’s So Ancient Only Internet Veterans Can Remember?”, 30 Folks Deliver
Nostalgia is a weird feeling.
When you’re young, you don’t really have anything to feel nostalgic about, and hearing your patents feel it so much so as to preach “the good old days” was, at the very least, annoying.
Well, now, 30 to 40 years later, you find yourself understanding the thing your parents felt all this time as you now begin reminiscing about everything that was cool about the early days of the internet (and tech of the time in general), and then you realize you have become your parents as you fight and possibly fail to push away that relentless urge to preach about the good old days.
Speaking of which, Redditors have recently been listing old-timer things from when the internet was young, wild and free. User Marambal17 went to AskReddit with the question “what is so ancient only an internet veteran can remember?”, and got loads of answers from said internet veterans.
Bored Panda gathered them all up oh so nostalgically and created a curated list for you to peruse. And while you’re at it, go vote, go comment, and tell everyone what’s an ancient piece of internet or other technology that you fondly remember from several decades ago!
More Info: Reddit
This post may include affiliate links.
awesabre said:
Winamp. It really whips the lamas a&s. So much time perfecting skins.
KlaatuBrute replied:
> "So much time perfecting skins."
Honestly that's kind of one of the things I miss the most about old internet—everything was unique down to the individual user. Flashing marquees, neon text on a different neon color background, dancing gifs everywhere. The entire internet had this cobbled-together look like an old alley in Hong Kong.
Now everything looks the same, like digital urban sprawl.
Conny_and_Theo said:
Having to make sure no one is on the phone so you can use the internet.
ltBurnsWhenlPvP replied:
When I set up our internet for the first time mid 90s I accidentally had it calling a long distance number. Dad received a phone bill for $2800. We no longer had the internet in our house after that.
grendel54 said:
Counters on webpages.
Wildcat_twister12 replied:
When doing research online—Wow this site has had 300,000 people visit, the information must be legit.
And if you created a web page then half of the count was you opening the page to check the counter.
Blackout1322 said:
When we used to risk getting viruses just to get cool cursors.
AmoreLucky replied:
Or smileys for your instant messenger like AIM, MSN, or Yahoo Messenger.
ThisBroDo said:
Dial up.
ResponsibleBase replied:
And that unforgettable tone sequence while connecting!
Having to actually type out “http://www.” before entering the website.
Some websites still require the .www if they havent put the redirection to the website without www in place.
ItsBulkingSeasonLads said:
If going on a long car journey, having to print off directions from MapQuest.
keb1965 replied:
And the first three pages were how to get out of your driveway.
When you printed the directions, you also printed all the pages with header, each advert, and literally anything shown on the screen.
Remember desktop themes? Changing all your icons, mouse pointer, computer sounds, etc., to images and sounds from, like, Dr. Katz: Professional Therapist or whatever.
joothinkso said:
Not being able to play flash games until the flash player had been updated.
the_hell_you_say replied:
Having to update flash player every time you turned the computer on.
drunk98 replied:
[That thing] updated hourly & never got any better, it's like me if I was an app.
Orinocobro said:
Real Player.
Also: uninstalling Real Player.
UebelKanuebel replied:
Yeah. And Quicktime.
1Eternallylost replied:
Reminds me of those postage stamp sized movies at 6 fps.
Having to physically carry your computer around to a friend's house if you wanted to play multiplayer
sev45day said:
Ask Jeeves.
Sht_Hawk replied:
I remember me and a friend using Ask Jeeves at school and thinking we had to type things in as questions.
Sad_Ambassador4096 replied:
2nd grade our teacher polled the class what to ask Jeeves because we thought we only got one question.
We went with: "Jeeves, why is it called a pair of pants but not a pair of shirt?"
gfyans said:
Having to clean the gunk out of your trackball mouse with your fingernail.
Jrxbrg replied:
I am so glad I don’t have to boil eggs for the new mouse balls anymore.
lightbulbfragment replied:
Really had to boil them a long time to get that good gray color and rubbery texture.
DriveCreepy9057 said:
Hamster dance is one I think of a lot.
Wyattbw09 replied:
Badger,Badger,Badger.
Woofles85 replied:
MUSHROOM MUSHROOM!
tiditidatiditidooouuu tiiiiiidatididouuuuu titititidi didididadidididooooouuuuuu ahahahaha
Keithninety said:
Floppy disks and CD’s that came in the mail containing 500 free hours from AOL.
HatchlingChibi replied:
One of my sisters friends decorated their dorm with those. They stuck them on the ceiling and had enough to cover the whole thing. It was interesting decor.
Lindseykkl said:
You forgot the construction worker excavating gifs and the under construction banner!
ricottapie replied:
Please sign the guest book!
discerningpervert replied:
Geocities was the [shirt]
R33Gtst said:
Signing up for a new email address and the username not already being taken.
Glorious times.
notyounaani replied:
I took like every free email with my first name and my first name and surname combination which was a mastermind move when I was 12. Sucks to be whoever has the same name as me though.
My mail address at Yahoo is only 6 characters long. SIX characters! I got it in 1999 and I'm still using it.
Having to be invited to GMail.
I remember getting invited to Google Beta, my cousin said its going to be big. Little did I know...
Ambitious_Nobody7698 said:
A/S/L.
SurferRosa85 replied:
I definitely inflated my A from 11 to 16 in the early days of ICQ.
injury_minded replied:
Using 16/f/Cali when I was really 11/f/middle of nowhere, because I just had to seem cool and sophisticated to everyone else in the chatroom.
Going into AOL chatrooms and saying, "Hey! They put a fireworks show into the chat! Hold Alt and hit F4 and you'll see it!"
Then watching as, one-by-one, chatroom participants disappeared.
usspaceforce said:
Putting a music CD into the computer to check out the "extras" only for it to load way too slow to do anything with.
FrogLegsAlwaysFresh replied:
The limited addition Deftones album White Pony had a little game on it. I had forgotten all about that, thanks for reminding me!
SyrupBuccaneer replied:
Back To School's single CD doubled as an Electronic Press Kit which was pretty novel and forward-thinking.
Old websites written in a notepad file with basic HTML using tables for spacing/formatting and images that took forever to load. This included lower than lo-fi midi audio files that auto played when the site loaded and "webring" affiliation links at the bottom of the page.
People thought making a personal page look professional meant it looked like a newspaper column with a "table of contents" link list on the left side in traditional roman numeral style list.
You still can write websites using notepad if you are really really really motivated.
jolloholoday said:
Encarta.
JerseyJedi replied
Anyone else remember that trivia game built into Encarta, where you had to answer trivia questions to get through this castle where everyone was basically frozen creepily into place and couldn’t be freed unless you made it to the end?
cherrytarts replied:
You mean MindMaze? Young nerdy me loved that game.
superwholockian62 said:
Playing pool in yahoo chat rooms.
Korncakes replied:
Oh man my buddy and I would play Yahoo pool for hours every day after school while simultaneously grinding on RuneScape together back in junior high/high school. Dude lived like two blocks away and we spent more time playing games online than hanging out in person.
Actually having to "switch on" the internet. Opening the shortcut, typing password and clicking connect and then waiting for the dubstep music to finish.
Auto-diallers did exist. We had one at work. Whenever one of the machines wanted to send an off-network packet, it would dial up the modem. Mainly it only did it for sending and receiving email, but if you opened a web browser (Netscape Navigator) and gave it an off-network address, it would also do it. Really only practical with a dedicated phone line.
Dialing into the bulletin board.
I'm aware this is not technically the internet, but it was a precursor and one of the things that made the internet possible.
My wife was the sysop of a very small BBS, and I called into hers. That’s how we met, back in 1994.
Oh yeah, and who remembers the excitement of upgrading from 2400 to 4800 baud?? 🤣
(Joints crack) I remember going from 300 to 14,400.
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I always try to explain BBS to others. I started using them (because my dad was a computer geek) when i was 9 (1987). I actually sold my fishtank on their little bulletin board, and got my kitten off the same one as well. I remember having to wait for someone to get off the BBS since their were only so many phone lines that could dial in. I'd sit there for hours listening to that awful noise until I successfully could get in! I had some cool remote friendships with those people, since it was such a limited group of consistent chat. You really got to know everyone. Then AOL. I hated AOL chat so much because there were like (i can't remember the limit honestly but I'll guess) 150 or so in some groups. And I never could get the same friendship out of so many random people in and out. End of my chat room experience!
Aww, the days of BBSs. My handle way back when was 'Sheila of the Jungle'. Havent thought about that in years!
Why does everyone confuse the world wide web with the internet? 1994 vs 1969.
Cuz really it's the same thing ... Just bigger. Not just scientists using it either. That's really the only difference. So easily made(the confusion)
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Actually, I used to run a Fidonet BBS, which was also a gateway to the Internet for my friends. It automatically dialled my Demon Internet account twice a day to grab mail and a few Usenet groups, and then processed both to formats compatible with the BBS. After about 3 years, my friends had all got their own accounts, so I stopped running it.
I too ran a Fidonet system. One day I added a 5 CD changer And became an extremely large Distributor of shareware. I also passed email internationally.
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I ran the "Penalty Box" out of Philadelphia on a Commodore 128 using New Image at 2400 Bd with a modified Lt Kernal unit that was boosted from it's original 20 Mb to a whopping 120 Mb! Also had Two 1541, a 1571 and 2 1581 floppies. Memories there!
Our city library had a dialup service in 1987. I remember thinking this is great. I'm in my bathrobe on a Sunday morning, drinking coffee, having the library reserve a copy of the latest Spyder Robinson book for me.
whip.isca.uiowa.edu! My handle was nature! "Gotta x someone!” It was great! Were you on Olohof.net too?!
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1992, I tried explaining telnet to others; that it was like a computer and computer together, and you can write people instantly! XD :) Command prompt: Open telnet: whip.isca.uiowa.edu Or Olohof BBS from my dear friend Hans in the Netherlands! Or Skynet in Mexico! Good times!
Awh the BBS. I once billed almost US$500 (with monthly telco bill average of US$10) due to me being crazy making IDD call/connection thru modem to a BBS (few actually) and got hooked, thus ended ne with those huge telco debt!!! 😭
A friend of mine ran one. There were days I could not wait to get the next turn in DSE. It was a great game and I would still play it if I could find it.
BBSes I only remember from old farts reminiscing about them when I was a kid... This really is ancient.
It's definitely 5-10 years before most of this list, more Atari people than Nintendo people. I was just barely too you for BBS's... alive, but not exactly reading or chilling online with strangers during that time.
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The Lower Lights, located in SLC, was the largest BBS in the country.
I met my husband on Fidonet, back in 1994. We've been married since 1995.
Qthaker283 said:
Neopets!
glennjersey responded
[DANG IT], I FORGOT TO FEED MY NEOPETS!
Eastern-Release4441 said:
Alta Vista.
ShadyFigure said:
And their Babelfish, the precursor to Google Translate.
Hashpool replied:
Wow when I was in middle school in 2005 they started using a network wide block for all the schools. I remember using Babelfish and other websites that translated well websites and we could circumnavigate around that [nonsense] for a while. Of course they eventually caught in on it. What a time!
Stickdeath.com. flash animations of stick figures being killed in funny ways.
At work I had a program that made cute little animated sheep drop in and walk all over the screen. They ate, pooped, jumped and did all the sheepy things. It kept me smiling.
MUDS.
Multi User Domains/Dungeons. They were the text only precursors to games like WOW and Everquest.
Surpised Napster isn't listed. Using that on dial-up was a b***h.....waiting god knows how long for the slightest bit of download to appear just to catch the first 3 seconds of a song to make sure it was the right one you wanted
And then finding out it was just a virus that infected your parents computer with porn ads.
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Can someone PLEASE take me back to the 1990s/early 2000s ?! I miss those years. (Or maybe I'm just missing my youth...)
I can take you back, but it's not as good as you hoped. I mean, the music was good, but trust me that you should leave some of those games and TV shows as "fond memories" instead of actually revisiting them.
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Friend of my kid up the street collects "old" computers and has that screensaver going on his daily driver.
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And then just before the good part mom picks up the phone, and.... it's gone
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Such youngsters! Try hooking up your computer to your TV as a monitor and attaching a cassette recorder/player to record your programs, which you of course typed in yourself as a series of If/Then. My first computer was a Timex Sinclair (1979, 80, or 81) that I had to assemble before using. Internet? Ha! I was thrilled when I was able to program a clock face that kept time!
I used to do that on my TI 99/4A. I'd also buy game code, type all the lines in Basic, save it on a audio cassette, and have to play the whole tape to load the game. Then I'd have to save my gameplay onto a separate cassette to be able to play from where I left off. It took forever but I learned a lot about coding that way.
Load More Replies...
When everyone downloaded their email to their desktop using a popular desktop app such as Eudora, which played a catchy little jingle whenever a new email landed
I don't know who downvoted this (probably someone who was like "fTp StIlL ExIsTs") but yeah, meandering through hundreds, sometimes thousands of unprotected files just dumped where anyone smart enough to guess that switching from http://[sitename] to ftp://[sitename minus HTML filename] could see them is something that hasn't been too common for a while.
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How does no one ever remember AOL punters? ShareBear, IRC, mIRC, AOL server bot chat rooms... I'm sure I'm forgetting lots of things, too. I see lists like this article and it's really very surface level stuff.
Pre-internet by far: My partner composed COBOL programs on punch cards. I composed messages on punched tape. Youngsters never had to deal with their chads.
When I was in high school, if you were lucky enough to beat everybody to the Apple IIe instead of getting a Commodore PET, you could put a landline (we called it "telephone" back then) handset on top of the modem and you could communicate all the way to the university 10 miles away! Later, when I was in college in Alaska, the computers in the math building could connect all the way to the University of Washington...but the rumor was that a guy in my dorm hijacked a phone line (each floor had one phone that could make local calls or accept long distance) and hooked it up to his computer...and used it to order books from the USSR! Wild, wacky stuff.
Oh, but the Commodore 64 was pretty sweet. A neighbor had that and all the cool games... for a while.
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I enjoy the time I'm living in, the technical advances, convenient internet banking and so much more. And I'm 60. I don't want to go back to dial up modems and slow internet!!
No, but it's fun to remember them, if only to be less frustrated when our 5g connection isn't perfect and we actually have to wait for something to load. My dad was born c. '50 and he's still a tech and gadget geek, but it's still fun to bring up his tetris high scores now and then.
Load More Replies...
Dang kids. Gopher. Veronica. Archie. Pine. ftp. telnet. "touch". vi. ppp.
I remember making a Geocities website and then finding other sites where you could "adopt" a virtual pet which was really just an image file! I had a ton of pretty fairy ones.
You can adopt virtual pets now. Pou is a good way to waste time.
Load More Replies...
Living back then sounds like fun, I was born in 2008 so everything is al modern in my childhood.
Born in 83 and suuuper happy I got to see that transition from old to new. Right there on the front row. That doesn't happen much in society. Industrial revolution, electrical revolution, then computer revolution. Before that it was like, the Renaissance and before that just different ways to sharpen rocks ever thousand years.
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I have vague memories of starting up MS-DOS to play games, on floppy disk. And years later getting those Disney discs in cereal boxes.
Using dial up internet and being charged per minute of use at each "session" which was totaled monthly. Typically purchase 10hrs/month for example. And making sure the minutes used in the family didn't go over! Connecting online and browsing had to be efficient...we even made up a paper list of things to check out when "connected", brings back so many memories writing this :)
I remember when we first got laptops at school, everyone secretly hoped that it would take more than 10 minutes to log in, because if it took too long you didn’t have to do the work Also those things did not load a single website in less than 5 minutes
Excite.com was my favorite community site Their groups were amazing and finding hookups through their personals...man that was fun
The AOL coaster sets were always fun to collect. ICQ was the schiznit. The Station@Sony.com had amazing chatrooms. I made friends that I still talk to from there almost 25 years later. MPlayer was amazing technology that really still hasn't been used the same way since it flamed out. Oh. I almost forgot Bert is evil and Dysfunctional Family Circus. 2 great sites for a laugh. BIE still exists in mirrors and DFC might still be mirrored or duplicated even though the original was deflated ;)
If anyone needs me I'm building a time machine, going back to 1999, and staying there.
Knowing more about computers than the teachers at school when they were introduced...and having "computer" learning classes!
Minesweeper was my go-to while I was waiting for the dial-up to connect, living on a farm made the connection even more patchy than in town! That's why we still used library books for research, the internet was too young and frustrating if you wanted anything done on time, those were fun days!
Such lovely memories to my youth... missed these times! Great post, thank you
Yeah...what about search engines that actually looked for what you wanted, instead of showing you what corporations paid them to show you. What about web content that was posted by people wanting to share intelligent and interesting information, instead of stupid people falling face-down into wet concrete. Meaningless content. But, I am not criticizing cat videos...they are essential, and an important part of our cultural history.
Look, I am too old to be on your lawn, but I'll make sure my kids stay off it.
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How many people of heard of Osborne portable computers? 4 inch monitor, a modem and 64k of memory. It weighed 25 lbs and was army green. I wish I still had it.
Oh! Oh! I got a couple: The Million Dollar Homepage - Own a piece of internet history!http://www.milliondollarhomepage.com Bonsai Kitten https://www.dailydot.com/unclick/bonsai-kittens-legacy/ https://ding.net/bonsaikitten/bkguestbook.html Netscape Navigator https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netscape_Navigator
Is anyone else familiar with "Jesus of the Week"? It was such a funny blog/site. Every week for maybe a decade (?) this fellow would post a new picture of Jesus. Produced somewhere by our collective culture. And he would hilariously describe it. You could go back and search the whole cache of his collection. And people were always sending in pictures of their own, too. Wow. It was great fun.
Some of these must have not made it to Australia, as I've only heard of them in articles like this. Or there was even more stuff my mum restricted than I realised lol.
Surpised Napster isn't listed. Using that on dial-up was a b***h.....waiting god knows how long for the slightest bit of download to appear just to catch the first 3 seconds of a song to make sure it was the right one you wanted
And then finding out it was just a virus that infected your parents computer with porn ads.
Load More Replies... Can someone PLEASE take me back to the 1990s/early 2000s ?! I miss those years. (Or maybe I'm just missing my youth...)
I can take you back, but it's not as good as you hoped. I mean, the music was good, but trust me that you should leave some of those games and TV shows as "fond memories" instead of actually revisiting them.
Load More Replies... Friend of my kid up the street collects "old" computers and has that screensaver going on his daily driver.
Load More Replies... And then just before the good part mom picks up the phone, and.... it's gone
Load More Replies... Such youngsters! Try hooking up your computer to your TV as a monitor and attaching a cassette recorder/player to record your programs, which you of course typed in yourself as a series of If/Then. My first computer was a Timex Sinclair (1979, 80, or 81) that I had to assemble before using. Internet? Ha! I was thrilled when I was able to program a clock face that kept time!
I used to do that on my TI 99/4A. I'd also buy game code, type all the lines in Basic, save it on a audio cassette, and have to play the whole tape to load the game. Then I'd have to save my gameplay onto a separate cassette to be able to play from where I left off. It took forever but I learned a lot about coding that way.
Load More Replies... When everyone downloaded their email to their desktop using a popular desktop app such as Eudora, which played a catchy little jingle whenever a new email landed
I don't know who downvoted this (probably someone who was like "fTp StIlL ExIsTs") but yeah, meandering through hundreds, sometimes thousands of unprotected files just dumped where anyone smart enough to guess that switching from http://[sitename] to ftp://[sitename minus HTML filename] could see them is something that hasn't been too common for a while.
Load More Replies... How does no one ever remember AOL punters? ShareBear, IRC, mIRC, AOL server bot chat rooms... I'm sure I'm forgetting lots of things, too. I see lists like this article and it's really very surface level stuff.
Pre-internet by far: My partner composed COBOL programs on punch cards. I composed messages on punched tape. Youngsters never had to deal with their chads.
When I was in high school, if you were lucky enough to beat everybody to the Apple IIe instead of getting a Commodore PET, you could put a landline (we called it "telephone" back then) handset on top of the modem and you could communicate all the way to the university 10 miles away! Later, when I was in college in Alaska, the computers in the math building could connect all the way to the University of Washington...but the rumor was that a guy in my dorm hijacked a phone line (each floor had one phone that could make local calls or accept long distance) and hooked it up to his computer...and used it to order books from the USSR! Wild, wacky stuff.
Oh, but the Commodore 64 was pretty sweet. A neighbor had that and all the cool games... for a while.
Load More Replies... I enjoy the time I'm living in, the technical advances, convenient internet banking and so much more. And I'm 60. I don't want to go back to dial up modems and slow internet!!
No, but it's fun to remember them, if only to be less frustrated when our 5g connection isn't perfect and we actually have to wait for something to load. My dad was born c. '50 and he's still a tech and gadget geek, but it's still fun to bring up his tetris high scores now and then.
Load More Replies... Dang kids. Gopher. Veronica. Archie. Pine. ftp. telnet. "touch". vi. ppp.
I remember making a Geocities website and then finding other sites where you could "adopt" a virtual pet which was really just an image file! I had a ton of pretty fairy ones.
You can adopt virtual pets now. Pou is a good way to waste time.
Load More Replies... Living back then sounds like fun, I was born in 2008 so everything is al modern in my childhood.
Born in 83 and suuuper happy I got to see that transition from old to new. Right there on the front row. That doesn't happen much in society. Industrial revolution, electrical revolution, then computer revolution. Before that it was like, the Renaissance and before that just different ways to sharpen rocks ever thousand years.
Load More Replies... I have vague memories of starting up MS-DOS to play games, on floppy disk. And years later getting those Disney discs in cereal boxes.
Using dial up internet and being charged per minute of use at each "session" which was totaled monthly. Typically purchase 10hrs/month for example. And making sure the minutes used in the family didn't go over! Connecting online and browsing had to be efficient...we even made up a paper list of things to check out when "connected", brings back so many memories writing this :)
I remember when we first got laptops at school, everyone secretly hoped that it would take more than 10 minutes to log in, because if it took too long you didn’t have to do the work Also those things did not load a single website in less than 5 minutes
Excite.com was my favorite community site Their groups were amazing and finding hookups through their personals...man that was fun
The AOL coaster sets were always fun to collect. ICQ was the schiznit. The Station@Sony.com had amazing chatrooms. I made friends that I still talk to from there almost 25 years later. MPlayer was amazing technology that really still hasn't been used the same way since it flamed out. Oh. I almost forgot Bert is evil and Dysfunctional Family Circus. 2 great sites for a laugh. BIE still exists in mirrors and DFC might still be mirrored or duplicated even though the original was deflated ;)
If anyone needs me I'm building a time machine, going back to 1999, and staying there.
Knowing more about computers than the teachers at school when they were introduced...and having "computer" learning classes!
Minesweeper was my go-to while I was waiting for the dial-up to connect, living on a farm made the connection even more patchy than in town! That's why we still used library books for research, the internet was too young and frustrating if you wanted anything done on time, those were fun days!
Such lovely memories to my youth... missed these times! Great post, thank you
Yeah...what about search engines that actually looked for what you wanted, instead of showing you what corporations paid them to show you. What about web content that was posted by people wanting to share intelligent and interesting information, instead of stupid people falling face-down into wet concrete. Meaningless content. But, I am not criticizing cat videos...they are essential, and an important part of our cultural history.
Look, I am too old to be on your lawn, but I'll make sure my kids stay off it.
Load More Replies... How many people of heard of Osborne portable computers? 4 inch monitor, a modem and 64k of memory. It weighed 25 lbs and was army green. I wish I still had it.
Oh! Oh! I got a couple: The Million Dollar Homepage - Own a piece of internet history!http://www.milliondollarhomepage.com Bonsai Kitten https://www.dailydot.com/unclick/bonsai-kittens-legacy/ https://ding.net/bonsaikitten/bkguestbook.html Netscape Navigator https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netscape_Navigator
Is anyone else familiar with "Jesus of the Week"? It was such a funny blog/site. Every week for maybe a decade (?) this fellow would post a new picture of Jesus. Produced somewhere by our collective culture. And he would hilariously describe it. You could go back and search the whole cache of his collection. And people were always sending in pictures of their own, too. Wow. It was great fun.
Some of these must have not made it to Australia, as I've only heard of them in articles like this. Or there was even more stuff my mum restricted than I realised lol.
