What were you doing online in '95?



I was on some sort of college intranet system. My first real chat room. I was completely addicted. I can remember chatting all night, that giant monitor glow alighting my roomate's bed as she tossed and turned annoyed by my incessant keyboard clicking.
 
Anybody dare to go back another 10 years to 1985? We had one of the first BBSs up back then, and I actually had designed an online text adventure much like Infocom/Zork where you'd log in and play the game at 300 baud.

We were all chatting back then through D-Dial and other programs before people knew what the Internet was. Too funny.
 
I was probably on prodigy looking at all their ugly yellow graphics on my windows 3.1 machine that cost $3,000
 
1995 INTERNET CRED FAIL: (No Google yet - Yahoo was directory still, and searches were generally handled poorly by Excite and Webcrawler... long live Lycos!)



Domain Name: GOOGLE.COM
Registrar: MARKMONITOR INC.
Updated Date: 18-nov-2008
Creation Date: 15-sep-1997
Expiration Date: 14-sep-2011

1995 INTERNET CRED FAIL: (Technically, GeoCities did start in 1995 as Beverly Hills Internet, but it was limited to city areas and unless you were one of the first few thousand - which I doubt - you're off by a few years).



Domain Name: GEOCITIES.COM
Registrar: MARKMONITOR INC.
Updated Date: 18-nov-2008
Creation Date: 15-dec-1995
Expiration Date: 14-dec-2012

Not trying to shit on your thread, but if you're trying to build some Internet cred or whatever you're doing it wrong.

No one gives a shit about "Man I wish I was doing this back then" because first, there was no market for this (like CPA on Facebook), second the people that made money off early Internet ventures spent more time working their asses off and developing a long standing history with the early Internet that they were able to adapt over time and maintain... e.g., Ebay, Amazon (Bezos worked his ass off to build Amazon), ICQ...
The other successes for marketing have gone through a series of refinement, each making a better attempt at social interaction through the Internet combined with advertising: Geocities / Homestead, which became MySpace (in all honesty ThemeStream did it better earlier), which became Facebook (in spirit).

A better thread was "WTF were you doin' in '95 - man, remember those days with Delphi chat link through IRC, remember downloading BBS lists through Compuserve? Remember paying $400 for a 40MB MFM hard drive?"

... and yeah, that was cool. :)

You come here last month and try telling people what no one gives a shit about?

No one gives a shit about your two bit Internet detective skillz or whoever the fuck YOU deem credible. Fuck off son.

son.jpg
 
1995 INTERNET CRED FAIL: (No Google yet - Yahoo was directory still, and searches were generally handled poorly by Excite and Webcrawler... long live Lycos!)

Domain Name: GOOGLE.COM
Registrar: MARKMONITOR INC.
Updated Date: 18-nov-2008
Creation Date: 15-sep-1997
Expiration Date: 14-sep-2011

Jeez man... what the hell is wrong with you? I was "googling" on AltaVista back then, so what? and I wrote '95 in the thread title but I just mean that period from mid to late nineties... you're totally missing the point of the thread dude... the fact that you went out of your way to whois google.com is just pathetic.
 
I gotta give respect to the guys who created the Warez movement at that time... it's wrong in a way but honestly, they made all that overpriced software accessible to everyone. There was no way my parents would have bought me any of those apps.
 
Did anyone use to "punt" people in AOL chat rooms?

Hell yes, I was one of those dickheads who'd also do ASCII pictures in the chat rooms... This was one of my favs:

....................../´¯/)
....................,/¯../
.................../..../
............./´¯/'...'/´¯¯`·¸
........../'/.../..../......./¨¯\
........('(...´...´.... ¯~/'...')
.........\.................'...../
..........''...\.......... _.·´
............\..............(
..............\.............\...
 
Hell yes, I was one of those dickheads who'd also do ASCII pictures in the chat rooms... This was one of my favs:

....................../´¯/)
....................,/¯../
.................../..../
............./´¯/'...'/´¯¯`·¸
........../'/.../..../......./¨¯\
........('(...´...´.... ¯~/'...')
.........\.................'...../
..........''...\.......... _.·´
............\..............(
..............\.............\...

LOL :-P
 
Started on Prodigy, but moved to AOL, where my internet crime career began. Phishing, spamming (AOL was so easy to spam, no wonder it's #1), etc. I had fake Ecard and other sites set up, and would get passwords of kids at school who I hated and would fuck with their lives.

Also, lol @ Kani. I had a few HOST and OH's to my name. Also had a few 3char screen names. My favorite was JSN.

I like to think I am a more mature person these days :)

Memories....
 
Hmmm... right around that time period I was using AutoMouse to spam AOL's bulletin board system in the video games category - sending all the clicks to a fake home page where all links lead to allclicks/bulkclicks at .03 (before it dropped to .01)

AKA - I got my mom banned from AOL.
 
Anybody dare to go back another 10 years to 1985?.

Hah. I had a green monochrome monitor and a floppy (floppy-floppy) that played "Pop Goes the Weasel" through the internal speaker while a caterpillar walked around the screen. I was 3 at the time, but it's still one of my fondest computer-related memories.

Props to the Prodigy users. I used to play some turn-based strategy game over BBS on Prodigy... Medival? Something like that. Then we got Compuserve, and eventually AOL and a 56k internal.
 
I didnt get the net till 97 but first thing i wanted to do was to be a hacker lol. Quickly realised that its not as easy/glamorous as the film and computer nerds dont look like Angelina Jolie in real life.

I was trying to make money though (though usually through questionable means)

Click fraud with CaCa
Alladvantage bots
Picture sites with those "emal a friend" boxes
 
Like many others, I keep thinking to myself: if only I started this online stuff when I first had the internet in the mid-nineties... I would be billionnaire right now :rasta:. But noooo.... instead of thinking ahead, here is what I was doing back then on the internets:

- Looking up Warez to find cracked games and appz
- Googling cheats and codes for my favorite games
- Chatting with fat hoes on IRC LOL
- Looking for XXX passwords to get into paid sites LOL
- Write about useless stuff on my GeoCities homepage LOL

What about you? What were you doing back then, instead of investing into .coms, SEO and Aff Marketing? :rasta:

i would have been 11, so all of the above