I never got to use Prestel but it sounded pretty neat:
One for the Brits.
Oh and those days of waiting for patches and finding mirrors. I also notice Q2 community waifu 155 had her own column. She was a club dancer/model who was shit hot at Q2 and played for a top clan and like a strange alien in a community of 90s tech geeks.
France famously had Minitel around the same time, which was actually extremely successful and lasted well into the 2000s
Legend of the Red Dragon (and the main dev’s obsession with Jennie Garth). VGA Planets. I kind of miss the BBS games of old.
I played Zork I on Compuserve, but the main thing I remember from that service is Scorpia’s gamers’ forum.
In '94 I was introduced to the Internet by a customer at my Electronics Boutique store. He was gung ho on building websites. He also loved 3D and VR. This is him…
https://www.linkedin.com/in/chuckdurham/
I was in at the ground floor with “Global Internet Associates”. I was going to provide art for some of the sites and help with whatever but it required time that I could not get away from my (now ex) wife at the time because he was doing it as a night time thing while still working a day job in IT and I would have had to also. It didn’t seem like something I could do. I also hadn’t yet finished my degree in computer science. In hindsight, backing away from that was the dumbest thing I ever did. We lost touch after that. My understanding is he sold the original company for over a million.
Anyway, that tidbit aside, he also got me onto the Internet and USENET where I eventually met the fine folks who started this place as well as many who migrated to GAF (Gaming Age Forums… now NeoGAF or Resetera). Those were heady days of game discussion after so many years never really knowing anyone outside of local friends who gamed.
I played Quake on the original four or so servers that showed up in QSpy after a year or two of dinking around with BBS and direct Modem connected gaming in DOOM and Duke 3D. Quake was a revelation. I joined a clan and eventually figured out mouselook. Wow!
I’m very glad I was there at the beginning. I used Mosaic as my first web browser before moving to Netscape Navigator. Pegasus Mail was the e-mail client of choice. Redrose was my initial Internet provider based in Lancaster, PA. I lived it all since.
________ __ _____ __ .__ ________ _________ .__ ___.
/ _____/______ ____ _____/ |_________ _/ ____\______ ____ _____ _/ |_| |__ ____ \______ \ ____ _____ ____ \_ ___ \| | __ _\_ |__
/ \ __\_ __ \_/ __ \_/ __ \ __\___ / \ __\\_ __ \/ _ \ / \ \ __\ | \_/ __ \ | | \_/ __ \ / \ / _ \/ \ \/| | | | \ __ \
\ \_\ \ | \/\ ___/\ ___/| | / / | | | | \( <_> ) Y Y \ | | | Y \ ___/ | ` \ ___/| Y Y ( <_> ) \___| |_| | / \_\ \
\______ /__| \___ >\___ >__| /_____ \ |__| |__| \____/|__|_| / |__| |___| /\___ > /_______ /\___ >__|_| /\____/ \______ /____/____/|___ /
\/ \/ \/ \/ \/ \/ \/ \/ \/ \/ \/ \/BT had a service called Wireplay with its own client, servers and low ping. There was a great multiplayer fighter plane game on that. Perhaps it was Air Warrior
I like this quote
“Our internet access is aimed at the serious gamers’ market,” said Richard Warren, head of Wireplay. “We reckon there are a couple of hundred thousand gamers in the UK, and most of them probably have internet access at work or at college. However, a fair number would probably quite like to be online at home as well.”
and 20 years later gamer kids are being paid more in a year than Wireplay took in revenues over its entire lifespan but at least they had identified the market heh.
edit: no, it was Air Attack
https://web.archive.org/web/19991012165438/http://wireplay.co.uk/html/games/air_attack.htm
In high school, I played, for many months in the pre-WWW days, an irreverent, convoluted, and very clever MUD hosted by the Oxford Physics department called IslandMUD. I had to telnet into the MUD from my school’s computer lab to play it and it was awesome. I was just a dumb white-trash dude from a small American town chatting with people from all over Europe.
I also miss this, which was such a big part of the culture of my social group for a couple of years:
I vaguely remember playing something on Wireplay. Don’t think it was Air Attack though.
This is it.
Biggest change in my life from a cultural point of view was probably about EQ onwards when i start mixing more with US gamers and US sites and I was more in touch with US current events and pop culture and of course, had something Ive never had before, American friends. Of course this was also as the internet became more mainstream and a global culture started to homogenise.
I still love homestarrunner so much.
“It’s dot com!”
I poked around BBSs playing the above games for a little while. But my mom only had one telephone line, so I couldn’t go online often or for long except at night. We only had Juno, which was free dialup email/Internet with lots of ads. Oops, I used dialup BBSs prior to dialup Internet.
I feel a lot of nostalgia for GeoCities. Lots of interesting little websites were hosted there, including my own. The mirrored archives are incomplete, and several have gone dead.
The Red Dragon Inn on AOL.
Warn wars on AIM. When friend A warned you to 30% and mutual friend B said hey, was it safe to reply, or was it a plot?
Online dating 1980s style. I never tried that, but I did play trivia games on this service (of course this was pre-Internet):
The official web site of the Michael Jordan movie Space Jam still lives. Behold, state-of-the-art movie marketing, circa 1996.
https://www.spacejam.com/archive/spacejam/movie/jam.htm