Nostalgia is a good product, there’s a steady stream of traditional media aimed at getting that feeling. I watched a Top of the Pops from 1988 tonight. I like watching “Back in time…” programmes looking at food, interiors, fashion and pop culture of various eras
Recently I’ve really had a hankering for the the years of my first time online, and PC gaming, for me the late 90s and early 2000s. The look/feel of Win 95/8 and Navigator. Animated gifs. Web directories. Chats with strangers on ICQ. Usenet. Webrings. Mailing lists. Altavista. Discovering warez, pr0n and p455w0rDz. Come to think of it, tYp1Ng Lik3 tH15. Making the mistake of using AOL as my first internet experience. The recently resurrected thread and the Lysator link was a big hit of nostalgia, reminding me of browsing through website folder structures or ftp servers.
So whilst I know you can use Wayback Machine, what would be nice is a virtual machine running a late 90s OS and as much of the net from that time they could recreate so you get the whole look feel of it too.
Anyway, an internet nostalgia thread. Please talk about old websites and online things you loved and miss.
Here’s a good start. I printed this website out and had it in a folder at work.
Back on the old Prodigy I played in an internet golf league, using the Jack Nicklaus Signature Edition PC golf game. That was still one of my favorite internet experiences.
As far as internet gaming goes, besides a trivia game on GEnie what I remember is Command and Conquer via Kali. And Warcraft 2 to a lesser extent.
The next big online game via Kali was Missionforce: Cyberstorm, which was so great for a month or two before Diablo launched and just killed it. I think after that Kali faded away and direct connects via the Internet were the thing, though there were still services launching that hoped to be the carriers.
Anyone know what happened to Kali? It was a one-man show. I think the guy made good money from it back in the day.
Waking up early, logging on to Paltalk and listening to some US students in Japan doing live commentary on Pride FC events. They were eventually shut down by a Yakuza visitor.
Exit Mundi - End of the World Scenarios. I printed this out at work (i was an IT support guy with my own office and printer and no one had a clue what i did) and always carried it to the loo as reading material. http://www.exitmundi.nl/exitmundi.htm
and this to
AOL gave you Neverwinter Nights for free, and unlimited access. Prodigy was still charging by the hour when my family switched. I can’t say I missed the screeching sound of a modem but the days of introducing yourself by age, sex and other random attributes would seem creepy as hell these days.
Chat rooms were huge when I was a kid, and we never seemed to talk to anyone we actually knew online, just complete strangers… Geocities were where it was at later for anyone wanting a website, and Netscape, oh Netscape, webCrawler, Ask… somthing there were a few before Yahoo and then we finally got Google.
I searched email for any account info, but that was back in the day when I was running hotmail. At some point MS dicked me over and deleted all my saved email in hotmail after I had switched to gmail. Now even my account seems to be gone.
I think Kali was $15 to buy back in the day and the guy who made it had sold over 100,000 copies, so he made good bank on it. He was a net admin in his day job so he probably was happy.
Back in 98 or 99 I stumbled across a super hero mush (Avante Garde) that I dove into and played for about 3 or 4 years until the group grew apart for various real life reasons. It had some of the most fun role playing I’ve ever been involved in and a core of a half a dozen players with another dozen or so coming and going thru the years. The logs and short stories used to still be up at an old site until 2010 or so and I’d go back and read them for time to time.
I played an ASCII based space game on Compuserve. I think it was called MegaWars. There were several different kinds of ships, including mine layers. I once warped to an area that had one guy just laying mines.
You would press L for lasers and M for missiles. I would get killed a lot at first. Until I realized that spamming L and M constantly did not allow the enemy to attack at all. So llllllmmmmmlllmmmllllmmmmlllmmm. Win.
I can’t say I remember Case’s ladder, but I damn well remember playing C&C on Kali. I think i had some degenerate-ass strategy to to get a flying vehicle out fast and harrass the enemy harvester, at which point people rage quit.
I had a rich posh mate and i remember him dialling into a BBS on his BBC B and downloading a pixel art picture of some boobs. Way before my time. My first PC was a P2 233 which i bought because 1st gen GFX cards had just came and PC gaming at last was getting better graphics than consoles and arcade.
LtM was how i found QT3, it was a good site for EQ/MMOG fans and gamers. The SlowNewsDay meltdown was a big slice of internet drama at the time and most amusing. That time the furry mod’s furry friends turned up and posted Doug Winger pics and there was much wailing and gnashing of teeth.
