BBS was the shiz in the olden days
deleted by creator
UltraGiGaGigantic slaps BonesOfTheMoon around a bit with a large trout
None of that is a flex. ICQ is the same shit from the endless September. Personally I used to read Usenet on a mainframe, and thought it was cool we could see weather maps with gopher. I don’t think any of this makes me cool at all. Just that I was nerdy and liked the escape technology used to be when the signal to noise was good.
I was on Usenet before AOL even knew it existed.
Removed by mod
Ive been around the internet since early dial up days, and while I haven’t used every social platform that appeared, Facebook was the one where I saw everyone was really just posting their projected self, the world is amazing fake lives. I dont think it necessarily started immediately like that, but it quickly became that. Its the first place I saw it anyway.
Couldn’t disagree more.
Prior to fb, there was dedicated forums for the music scene I was in to in my area. Everything was in them. Finding what was on was easy as all the promotors used them.
Then fb came along, the forums slowly faded and finding events became unreliable in fb’s chaotic algorithm bullshit. Now some things are not on it, some are insta only etc.
Fuck META.
I like how they specified before the algorithm and you cite the algorithm for why you disliked it
Let me clarify.
Before the algorithm when both fb and forums coexisted was still annoying.
Some events would be on forums.
Some on fb
Some both.
Occasionally I would miss out on early bird tickets or tickets all together.
There was never a point where Facebook made anything better on that front.
Don’t even get me started on the fuckery that fb marketplace is vs what we had.
Used to be. There was a time when forums and facebook both existed and worked well in their respective niches.
Discord is (unfortunately) filling the gap now. Why have a bbs when you can have a shitty chat platform with shitty search and conversations that are impossible to track?
I’ve never used discord outside of multiplayer online gaming. And not for years now…
It has IRL event promotion on it now?
They have events that can be scheduled with RSVPs. I was in a local meetup that used those to stream the IRL meetings with the virtual crowd.
It’s nice that your area had that. Mine didn’t until Facebook, or at least nothing a somewhat tech savvy 15 year old new about.
Then fb came along, the forums slowly faded and finding events became unreliable in fb’s chaotic algorithm bullshit. Now some things are not on it, some are insta only etc.
It gets worse on the mobile app because there’s much less control and so much slop, versus accessing FB on a browser with a Violentmonkey script applying custom filters getting rid of unwanted suggested pages.
Back when I was booking shows it was great because you could blast a small event and know it was reaching a lot of people. Bands would share it, every band member would reshare it. But then I noticed the growing discrepancy between the amount of people who claimed they’d attend online and who showed up. Like so much on FB, the illusion of being a part of something became more important than actually being a part of something. But yeah, for a brief moment there was a bit of “social” in social media. Then came the yelling.
rofl tell me you do not understand how FB got started without telling me…
That shit’s been a privacy nightmare from the beginning.
Zuck has been selling personal info from basically day 1. He’s been abusing people since day 1.
The day people realize convenience does not equal good is the day humanity grows up from a petulant child to a moronic teenager… Too bad it’s looking more and more like we’ll never make it past, “petulant child”.
It was 2002-ish.
A much younger korazail saw how my friends were leaving highschool, going to different colleges and foresaw they would continue to spread out after that.
He had an idea of building a website to help keep track of friends so we could keep in touch despite physical distance and enable networking; a blend of Facebook and LinkedIn.
I was a CS major and built a forum and database architecture that my local friend group used for a little bit to chat, but we were all still mostly local and it didn’t seem super useful, and while always on Internet was a thing, I didn’t have it and my server needed to be online to use my application.
A few years later, Facebook.
I wonder sometimes how the world would be if I’d promoted my idea, figured out how to host it outside my bedroom, etc. I might have also just been a Myspace or live journal, but maybe I’d have gotten there first…
I don’t think I’d be a megalomanic asshole, but I can’t prove it.
Why now he has a doomsday bunker in Hawaii, and I’m damn sure he also has a squad of PMCs on retainer.
Before Zuck hired Joel Kaplan to specifically cater to right wing interests.
It was kinda nice yeah.
Events was what kept me on the site for far too long after they went bad. Being able to organise events with friends so easily was incredible. I can track the decrease in my social activity along with fb making their system worse and it makes me sad
Oh, you think the darkness is your ally. But you merely adopted the dark.
Do not cite the deep magic to me witch, I was there when it was written.
I’m not trapped in here with you. You’re trapped in here with me!
Bazinga!
These pretzels are making me thirsty!
I came here to make this exact quote. Good job bro!
“I have usernames older than you” is actually a pretty sick burn
Not really.
My Reddit account was 19 years old before I was permabanned by their stupid AI for liking Luigi pics and saying I wish Trump wouldn’t wake up in response to a pic of him napping 😔
Saw it on an episode of MASH.
Henry is dating a 22 year old nurse. Hawkeye tells Henry that Henry has bunions older than his girlfriend.
I will invoke the old words
A/S/L
WhiskyTangoFoxtrot slaps CaptPretentious around a bit with a large troutIt’s like I’m back on quakenet!
DiscworldMUD?
18/F/Cali
Weren’t they all…
55/male/Stalingrad
We were and still are all f16s
Nyeeeuuuuwwww kkkkkjkk bbrrrrrrrr
head nod
16/F/Cali
I actually was 15/f/ca. I love that it has become an internet inside joke. I spent way too much time in the Yahoo star wars chat rooms back then 😅
These kids have never been slapped around a bit with a large trout and it shows.
W98BSoD slaps usualsuspect191 around a bit with a large trout
I’ve known adventures, seen places you people will never see, I’ve been on university work terminals and back… frontiers! I’ve stood on the back deck of Usenet bound for Mosaic with sweat in my eyes watching Netscape Navigator fight on the shoulder of the internet… I’ve felt wind in my hair, riding Lynx off of monochrome monitors and seen usegroups burn like a match and disappear. I’ve seen it, felt it…!
Like ASCII tears in a digital rain
Time to dial
The true measure of your worth: do you prefer amber, green, or true B&W?
Pretty sure the first C prompt I ever encountered was amber. Will always have a soft spot for it.
We have a winner!
My terminal used to be set up such that local terminal usage was green & black and remote was amber.
So, that was a PC, or a color terminal? Either way, you’re probably a young old fart.
It was a color terminal starting with my upgrade from Mac OS 9 to Mac OS 10 (and Fedora around the same time). If I recall correctly my Claris works terminal was black on white in the 90s when I was in Usenet (alt.rec.scouting, baby (and others))
But I kept it that way because of my history growing up with Apple IIs (and an old interface to airline booking software in the early 2000s as well.
Born in 80.
When my main (only) programming language was TurboBASIC, I was amber all the way. On the other hand, that sweet sweet Apple IIe was green.
bye
Assuming y’all aren’t just fucking around, reading the comments here is actually really cool, tangentially interacting with people who have internet stories from well before I was born
I’m just from the dialup era, and I still feel old online a lot of the time, but then someone here is like “yeah, Berners-Lee invented HTTP just to make a website to mock me”
We are of similar eras. I just missed the days of building phreak boxes and it was always a bit of wonder to me.
While it’s harder these days for a litany of reasons I think it’s still in our collective interest to be bearers of stories, old and new, to the neophytes of the current generation.
I guess what I’m saying is, I am in your camp but to my kid’s generation we are still warlocks
So much of the wonder of computers and networks and just… all of it has been abstracted away
So many people just have phones or tablets as the majority of their computer experience
Get into Lora (meshtastic/core). When I settle into bed I check to see if my solar powered nodes made any friends or if the heltec I keep in the car pinged anything cool.
I did a meetup a few weeks ago and its a cool smattering of younger folks and HAM folks who go wayyyyy back.
People talk about it being useful in an emergency, and sure, but mostly it’s just cool.
I got my first “home computer” in the days of the BBS’s when there was such a thing as a “long distance call”. Internet access was crazy expensive and not for the average geek. Back then it was a bit “underground”. There were professionals and there were passionate hobbyists. Most people didn’t have or need a computer in their lives. Things changed in the late 90’s boom. A cultural shift when suddenly everyone joined in. The geeks were no longer king
When we upgraded from the Atari whatsit box to a 286 it was amazing
I remember getting a Hotshot/286 card which allowed me to upgrade my 8088 to a 286. I don’t even remember what programs I used back then but I’m sure they ran a lot faster after that.
IIRC correctly, the card was normally around $400 but I managed to get one for $150 and I was so proud of my dealmaking.
i just remember we had 2 games: King’s Quest 4: Rosella’s Peril and Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego, but we could only have one installed at a time.
A friend of mine had a Commodore 20 with no tape drive. Not only could we only have one game at a time installed, but also we had to manually type in the code for the game each time.
Shit, my steam account is older than most of the highschoolers I work with
My Steam account is almost 18 years old and I still have to select DOB when viewing “adult” games…
Well, I guess Steam won’t have a problem with California law
Steam could stop asking in California, since it’s now the responsibility of the operating system to tell Steam your age.
That might be.
Can’t be very sure about how it turns out for the Steam Deck.
The law’s definition of OS might not be on the same page as ours.
My steam account is older than the fresh University grad we just hired.
Friends, hear my story…
In the days of old, the days where 300 baud modems were bought by us, the Early Adopters, there were meetings in dark places where code was exchanged on cassette, to be loaded from our tape drives, to create a new BBS, and you - yes you, dear reader - could be your very own SysOp. A king! Let them fall before you as you interrupted their email to live chat. Behold a world where encryption dare not tread, and you, My SysOp, could read the thoughts of all your subjects! Enter a universe where mom picking up the phone downstairs, only to be greeted with digital screeching, turned your conversations into garbled, alien characters before your eyes!
This is where it began. This is where I began. And thus shall I endure, today, tomorrow, and all tomorrows. The lore is mine and mine alone to carry.
Post on, dear friends. I did all this for you.
pfft. ive cut better lines than yours before.
I was on BBS forums in the '80s.
wasn’t usenet fun?
Well not sure about the other poster but the BBSes I used were ones you had to dial into and you were the only one there. Well unless it was a fancy one that had multiple phone lines. I even ran one for a short bit my junior year of high school on my commodore 128 and a 1200 baud modem. Good times. Then I got to college and learned about usenet and IRC. This was like ‘89.
Still is. Y’arrggghhhh!
woah. i thought alt.tv.simpsons died
