30 Internet Veterans Share The Things That No Longer Exist That May Trigger Repressed Memories

I had a bird that mimiced it. 15 years after I heard it last.

Sounded like someone was strangling R2D2

Then beg your family not to use the phone.

I had dial up till 5 years ago. Been online since 1981

I told my kids about this the other day, and they groaned in sympathy for what I had to endure.

and guestbooks!

And many of those counters were starting from arbitrary numbers, or were straight up fake. There used to be a lot of HTML or Java snippets to put into your code to do so.

completely forgot about that!

Yeah, well, most of those hit counters had serious software issues, allowed easy hacks of websites, and also had damaging code. Firewalls could end up blocking a site due to them

I've been on the web since about 1994 and that wasn't a thing back then 30 years ago. Ads and Spam go back at least that far.

Content was first and foremost, which I loved. What ads there were did not cover the content on the page and pull focus...unLESS they included the despicable tag!

But an overload of animated GIFs.

Memory loss makes the past better.

Heck, I remember the very first piece of email spam. It was from an Arizona law firm that specialized in immigration. Our sys admins were so pissed when they realized everyone in the office got the junk mail, they coordinated with sys admins all over in a denial of service attack. The company (just 2 lawyers who saw the digital future) simply restarted using another host. For a short time, the sys admins of the world thought they could stem the spam tide. Those were the days.

I remember when Amazon was dealing in books only, and they just launched Mechanical Turk, a crowdsourced task platform where you would get Amazon credit in exchange for completing some quick jobs (called HITs) like proofreading or image tagging. I got so much credit by doing HITs while commuting that I gave books for Christmas to anyone that year.

And again, I must ask -where do they get EVERY SINGLE THING you could possibly imagine to ship to you?

Oh for the good old days!

Me too. I moved to WA state in 1999 and Amazon was really struggling at that time. They nearly went under.

I remember when Amazon(s) were only some mythology...🤷🏽

Before Google dominated there were so many search engines. WebCrawler, Lycos, AltaVista, Yahoo, DogPile, those are just the ones I can remember off the top of my head.

I call my Google assistant Jeeves.

I used the following: www.startpagina.nl and www.ilse.nl (yes, I am Dutch).

Bloody hell i remember this .

I liked the Lycos dog.

MOMMMMMM!! Uhhhhhhh!!

My brother cried many times over his (sometimes) days long attempts to download games that kept getting interrupted.

Only being able to hit 9600 baud no matter what I did. I rewired the house with shielded cable and still stuck to about 9600.

GRANDMA NEEDS TO TALK TO HER SISTERS!!! I don't miss this time period 🤣

LOL yes

it really whips the llamas a*s!

I remember carefully "working" the equalizer as if I had some club state of the art surround sound system, not 2 beat-up computer speakers that no amount of "equalizing" would make the slightest difference in the sound! :))

Aaawwww fond teenage memories

Milkdrop was the best music visualization program I've seen. I miss it. I WISH there was something similar for Spotify but the only one I've found is pretty lame by comparison.

Still have 3.5s with my skins saved on it.

Bored Panda is the new ICanHazCheeseburger.