Asklemmy

IRC and playing Warcraft “online” by dialing my friend’s house. One time we messed with a telnet client. That was neat.

You guys remember pMachine (evolved into ExpressionEngine)? That shit blew my mind when I got it installed. No more Adobe Pagemaker.

I miss the HTML chats. It was like a whole world to explore.

I remember when you could use a credit card generator (I actually learned whatever "algorithm" to create valid Visas as a party trick) and sign up for porn sites for free. Then you could download a crappy, compressed, ten second video if you waited for what seemed like forever.

Now that I think about it, that aspect of it was terrible. Thank goodness I'm alive now and didn't die before free HD porn was readily available on tap.

I do miss ICQ. And running BBS softwares.

"You the man now dog!"

@Provider It's the "Just call!' of the internet. Somehow, people think that having an extended interaction is peoples' preference.

I would kill for a transcript.

@Provider I miss the freedom of the old Internet. It truly was INTERnet as everything was connected to everything. Geoblocks, censorship, blacklists, etc were almost non-existent. It felt like an open global world where everyone was welcome and everyone was free to decide who they wanted to talk to.

I kept thinking "wow, this is what the future is like" and naively expected the offline world to eventually follow. I guess it was very naive.

I miss the dial-up sound. I can't really put into words why. It was like looking at a progress bar I guess.

I also miss hosting, just because it was the few things I could organize without having to like...organize I guess. Like the group just needed someone who could figure out how to get it to work.

Like the other guy said, written FAQs. Used to go onto gameFAQs all the time. I still go there sometimes, though it's only really useful for old games now.

I dunno where everyone is getting all this ad-less crap from. This was before adblock and even before a lot of spyware/malware protection was implemented. Modern ads still aren't as aggravating as getting Windows System Alert ads. And that stuff could be put onto your PC so easily....