Buying an adapter (so many DIP switches) to use my a dot matrix printer with my C-128. So I could download and print pr0n.
homestarrunner, obvs
ytmnd was good for a bit
This is a good index of old school sites still up.
I like the way Berkshire Hathaway’s website expenditure since 1996 is about $19.96
Unrelatedly, “Mr. T ate my balls” is a thing that is very difficult to explain to people who weren’t there.
LOL how does that work? Don’t you maybe need a few more pixels, and some color ink?
L33T LIEK JEFF K.
The Terrible Secret of Space
The Internet Jargon File
I had a few friends who used modems early on to connect to various boards and whatnot, but it was such an abstract thing to me that I didn’t pursue getting what was at the time, a VERY expensive peripheral and then connect to a pay service that was also expensive. It just wouldn’t have flown within my budget in late college.
That changed just after leaving college. I had a roommate who was a user on Sierra’s Imagination Network. It’s funny to think of it today but it was the dawn of a visual link that many of the other services lacked at the time. Imagination Network introduced visual avatars, semi-graphical chat, online games to play with others, an actual RPG that you could play with a human based party, etc. It was the hook. Not quite the internet at that point but I was sold, just the same.
My first solo online start was via BBS’s. Some weren’t so hot, some were full of VERY pixelated and slow downloading porn. Some had multiplayer games and would allow at least a few users on at a time, while others had to wait until someone logged off. Of those, Trade Wars 2002 was the bomb. Several coworkers and I played it all the time when not at work. Since we worked different shifts, naturally the different shifts formed corporations and would attack each other, then talk trash during the next shift change. That game rocked. A solid early game of exploration and later a great end game of corporate wars and setting bounties on others. So many memories from that period. Apparently Trade Wars is still a thing and people still play it. Here’s a link to someone keeping a server going.
Tons of memories for me in the early to late 90s playing MUDs and MUSHes. I landed and stayed at a few for quite a long while, one is still going: Realms of Despair. I even co-ran a MUD for a while. That was a task from hell. MUDs were my link back to the states while I was stationed in Italy. I remember it being something that struck me at the time as making the world a little smaller. If only I’d known then how true that would be now. This was also about the time PC gaming mags were in their heyday and I was an avid reader of several usenet groups.
.
You guys should reach out and connect with Scott on Facebook. He still occasionally has funny rants there. Mostly he is an old man with cats, not unlike many of us here.
In college, in the mid-90’s I played VGA Planets many times with a group of nerdy friends. The school’s clunky Pine email system didn’t allow attachments, so we’d drop off 3.5" floppies with the host on a regular schedule. It was glorious.
I think those early games of mostly text based fun were so endearing because we had to fill in the creative blanks with our imagination. Both friends and foes online were somehow larger than life in that way, for some reason. I miss those games sometimes.
One of my favorite local area LAN games was Netrek. I knew a lot of the comp-sci people in my school in the early-mid 90’s, and this was a huge treat to play on the Sun workstations. I imagine @BrianRubin would have loved it.
As I recall, the main BBS games I played were all variants on a theme (a theme which looking back on it was actually remarkably similar to Clash of Clans etc), with asynchronous play, a set number of action points per day, and the ability to raid other players. Space Empire Elite was one, I’m pretty sure, and some mediaeval/fantasy variant. Trade Wars sounds very familiar indeed but I don’t remember any graphics. Maybe there was a text-only ST clone under a different name.
Holy crap, doing a bit of research to jog my memory I’ve just stumbled across a letter to the editor I wrote as a young teen to an ST magazine. Talk about internet nostalgia
In the late 90s I played Archmage: The Reincarnation.
Not that I was any good at it. I tried again in college, briefly, and was only marginally better.
Fucking glorious.
It didn’t really have any. It had pop-up images for very limited things that happened in game. And they were ansi-images at that. Most of the heavier players used a client to play (similar to MUD/MUSH players.) The client reduced a lot of the monotony while upping the ability to do things that were hard tasks, like map out systems and areas for bases, etc. It was a trade game overlaid with a very nice PvP system pitting the lawless and lawful style players against each other, and sometimes against their own. Similar to what you mentioned, the version on BBS’s was turn limited in almost every version I played. With something like 2K (or less,) “turns,” to use per day, you could only do so much money making, repairing, base/planet setup and war.
I remember we got mad a the first shift guys since they wiped us completely off the map one weekend. So we all re-rolled as outlaw pirates and slowly built up several small hidey-hole bases. We then slowly started picking apart the ships and systems of our coworkers under the guise of our three accounts: Blackbeard, Redbeard and Yellowbeard. And the funniest and most satisfying thing was me having to go get some paperwork done on their shift one day and listen to them relentlessly complain about, “those f’ing beard guys are annoying the crap out of us!” Good times.
spent a lot of hours at university here:
I think. May have been another one. Looks like my character got reset to level 1 at some point. I remember one day people were pissing off the mods in some way and they threatened that the next person who did that action would lose half their levels, an insanely harsh punishment. I had been playing way too much so used this as a way to cripple my character and stop myself from ever wanting to play again.
Also this online boxing game where you wrote a fight plan using code.
I got into the top 20 in the world before I quit the day I woke up after dreaming about writing fight plans.
Ahh - the good old days of the internet - mid 90s edition - when I used to email the creator of Yahoo! to let him know when links were broken in the lynx browser (he’d fix it and email me back to thank me), or I would get outraged by SPAM and email the hosting provider to demand action (and they would fix it!).
Due to the resurrection of the Betrayal At Krondor or Realms of Arkania thread I’m reading through the Riftwar Cycle again. I first read Magician (then a 4 set) when living in Malaysia in the 80s, and diligently read each sequel up to the finale in 2013. I thought I’d look up some maps, and at the top of google for “midkemia map” is Fiests ancient website linking to Elvandar.com a site so old it doesnt even have a frame but it is part of a webring. I had a look at the source, its a few lines of html. I dont think any of his images are bigger than 20kb. He warns on one page it has an image and text that takes a while to load on a 28.8k modem.
So not only is it ancient internet history, its still number one.
My formative internet experience was mostly spent trawling through early-2000s music blogs, so the website I miss most is probably Hipster Runoff.* Granted, it’s newer than pretty much everything else posted in this thread and the functional death of indie rock would make its continuation irrelevant now, but from the years around 2010, it was seminal satire. Carles was such a brilliantly realized character. He might have held on a bit longer than necessary, but even without the music blog backdrop, his satire of status-obsessed twentysomethings was spot on. It’s a shame its archives are so difficult to sift through since he sold it. Otherwise, I guess I miss Stylus Magazine too. It’s a shame Pitchfork became the big music blog while Stylus had to die when its founder/EIC got a better job at a bigger magazine.
*HRO came about a decade after, but it took that long for the concept of ‘music blog’ to collect enough cultural cachet to be an object of satire.
Remember when Fileplanet was an awesome, no bullshit site to grab all the latest gaming files? Direct links even! Direct links as far as the eye could see! No account needed. No CAPTCHA. No shady download client.
And Gamespy 3D! The best server browser ever. Then they launched Gamespy Arcade and messed it all up.
Server scan complete
