1990s websites

I remember my MSN chat name was JuIcY-JuGgAlEtTe got to meet a lot of weirdos that I befriended all over the world. Remained friends up until Skype took over MSN messenger.. All. Of a sudden, no name personalisation, no font personalisation.. Skype looked ugly.. I stopped using it.

I miss some of them folks from time to time. My my Irish friend, Chris. We used to chat for like 6hrs a night.

I remember I even admitted I think I was having way more feelings for my girl than just friends and he was telling me to go for it getting excited about 2 girls haha.

 

I can totally see that, that seems fitting.

I met a girl online in a Beastie Boys chat. This was when you would get teased and made of fun for online dating so I mostly kept it on the DL. I lived like 8 hours from her and we had one opportunity to meet when my family went to Disneyland over the summer one year but she couldn't make it. Things fell apart for us after that but in college we went out a couple times. It was pretty clear we were different people by then.

 

I don't know. I did different things back then. Internet here, when it's the middle of the summer and the place is full of visitors.. I can't even watch a three minute youtube video. Which actually bothers me not at all. But what's that got to do with what I said? I would have still preferred for websites to stay simple and basic, and the internet to get better and faster.

 

I used to chat in this particular AOL chat room, every night for a summer break for hours with the "regulars." One of them sent me a letter when their computer broke and one sent me a postcard from Paris, I still have those somewhere
And one girl and I wrote a book, we would send it back and forth and each write bits. It was a horribly offensive book lol, not even gonna say what it was about but it would probably make me cringe to read it now

And I liked trolling the over 65 chat rooms, but trolling wasn't a term back then

 

Speaking of AOL chat rooms... Does anyone remember the movie "You've got mail" with Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks?

They were 2 business rivals in person, but were having a romantic fling via AOL instant messenger without knowing it.

Nowadays there's no way in hell would a cyberdate last that long without sharing photos in the beginning.

 

is that how it happened in that movie? AIM never said you've got mail, that was just aol email.

 

Do you remember Sony Ericsson W800? It was the best phone.

 

i don't think i agree with the op's definician of "properly". granted they weren't designed for today's burden of traffic, but when the only people who knew or cared it existed, were the community of nerds who found a new home there, it didn't need to be. it was the new and open and truly free frontier. and yah, i miss all and everything, when it was first going public, it has been all about.

before it was discovered by bizniz, let alone corporate entertainment.
where you could always find someone who knew how something worked or how to do something you wanted to know or were trying to figure out,
who wasn't trying to sell you a book about it.

where websites weren't mindless 'social media' but forums focused on specific shared interests, that people who shared a specific interest, joined to do so.
then came the porn, but even that wasn't the beginning, and even that was mostly innocent to begin with.
but then people figured out they could use the internet to sell stuff, without having to rent a brick and mortar store front, or get a business license or anything at first.
and then the corporate world discovered they could get in on that and that was when what had started out got usurped and dragged down hill.

but there are, some of the origeonal dreams, like this place, and there are online galleries, that still manage to soldier on,
dispite the cacafony of mass marketing and monetary thinking.

when computers had an 8 bit data path and a 16 bit address space, and modems were 300 baud accoustically coupled because the phone company wouldn't let you connect anything physically, and your monitor was a little modulator box connected to a tv, and only displayed text in one color, and your data and program storage was a cassette tape, and your interface to anything else was rs232 serial, centronix parallel, or something you cluged up yourself using uarts and usarts to drive a to d and d to a converters.

oh wait, but that was sort of before the internet, and before "javascript:void(null)" was a thing that even existed. and your system roms included spagetti basic but no drivers for perifirals and not such thing as plug and play, and "its chind up me boys, never doubt never fuss, when you're integrating systems on the s-100 bus", and "its only ones and zeros after all".

 

yep. profit as the priority ruins everything.

 

well its not even profit in the sense of anyone accomplishing gratification, just gratuitous accumulation of symbolic value.
which is ok if you have lots of it and don't have to wast it trying to impress anyone just to keep having it,
but unless and until its actually used to materialize imagination, its just concept, that you know, is like the klingon's blood wine, that anything that might get in the way of gets run over.
and making everything have to be about it, not only screws over anyone who doesn't have a lot, but also, the big problem is what it incentivises doing to the environment,
which we don't even live without, and motivates hiding even that from ourselves.

not saying there aren't other ways of screwing ourselves too, just that they don't give it a free pass, nor make it a magic wand, nor make its warts go away.

 

i gave that one a pass, but i remember "do you want to play a game".
(and in the literary genre, "the adolescence of p1" about the accidental birth of a network distributed a.i.)

 

i remember fur nation, and tails from the blind pig. i remember vcl when it was the vixen controlled library. and of course i remember zen bazaar.
side-7 and biorust, i remember a bunch i can't remember the names of, and i remember socio-political ramifications.
i remember alt.sex.stories. lol. there was a hobby machinist site i've forgotten the name of. i remember what http stood for, and html also.
i remember dow jones, compuserve and the well, but that was 80s, before we had the internet, backwater/bwms, and bit bucket, which were local dial ups in portland oregon.

 

Yes!! I didn't have the internet until around the time of that website (& I suspect there really wasn't much out there before that). Oh my...

And then there was a thing called yahoo chat that I was super into! But that was a little bit later. I was a chatter!

 

Thought PC's could not get any better when I actually won once when playing this