I hope I'm in the right board, I'm going to ask about old technology, Sup Forumsuys

I hope I'm in the right board, I'm going to ask about old technology, Sup Forumsuys.

I was a child during the pre-"Eternal September" days and we didn't had a PC in my home, much less Internet/Usenet.

If anyone here was there around those days, I'm curious, were people really better controlled (the whole"Netiquette" thing), or was it just a small group of circlejerking who'd kickout the era's "normalfags" every September? What was so different about those days? Besides the lack of video-streaming, easy/fast file downloading and such.

Other urls found in this thread:

faqs.org/faqs/csh-coke-machine-info/
twitter.com/NSFWRedditVideo

It had more pedophiles, but was also more innocent and naive. Websites were focused more around providing content rather than ads, you appreciated your downloads because your favorite Brittney spears tracks would take 3-4 days downloading on dialup from limewire. There was more focus around privacy.

I preferred it back then 2bh, it's just too convenient now.

It was like going to an abandoned library frequented by autistic hobos.

I miss it.

Some random thoughts

-More weirdos, and especially more people who would roleplay as a character all of the time
-No one cared about piracy at all.
-People understood the phrase "Don't feed the troll", and you could get banned for doing it.
-IRC was always a pain in the ass but most of the good stuff came from there

>It had more pedophile
I have a vague memory of this in the mid-90s, when I was actually around 6 years old, my first search online (the word "entertainment") somehow lead me to cheese pizza.

Computers and especially CRT monitors ran hot, and a lot of old houses didn't have central air yet. Your room at night with the door shut would become a sauna.

Everything was slower unless you used a chat room. If you posted a message on an old forum you could expect a few replies by maybe the next day. End of the week in some places. Sometimes months in obscure corners.

>People understood the phrase "Don't feed the troll"

Huh, so the term "troll" is actually that old?

>More weirdos, and especially more people who would roleplay as a character all of the time

You still see that though, especially in Sup Forums and Sup Forums.

Sexual tastes of the internet have changed a lot.

Back in the early 2000s there was a lot more love for really huge muscular steroided out manly chicks that you never see anymore. BDSM seemed a lot more in fashion and was the interracial of that time period in terms of taboo and popularity.

You hardly ever saw any "thick" women back then. Proably for a few reasons: the parts of the world where those women were living didn't have much internet access, the old white guys running things didn't care for thick women, and the cultural push towards the appreciation of it hadn't started yet.

They called them "rats" way, way back in the BBS days. But troll has been around at least 25 years.

The asstr has not changed in years and years. Sup Forums won't let me post the address because it thinks it's spam, which is shameful.

Alt Sex Stories Text Repository

Browse it to get a taste of the old internet.

I remember the first BBS I joined to talk about Zelda and Mega Man, I kinda miss those days, people seemed more amicable.

Nowadays, fandoms of all sorts seem really, REALLY vitrolic and eager to kick out any new guy who wants to join conversation. It doesnt help BBSs and Forums as a medium are dying.

What I miss about BBSes and forums is they were owned and operated by a regular guy out there. Each one of them. And there were thousands.

You could talk to those guys. See them making posts. If you sent a pm they would reply in a matter of hours or minutes.

Now, everything is consolidated into a few discussion sites like Sup Forums and reddit. The admins are ghosts. You can't communicate with them at all, and they consider themselves above the userbase. You never see them making comments, only sending out proclamations and rulings.

What we should do is create and anti-reddit. Make a site which is a public listing of discussion sites which are -completely- detached from the hub site in terms of ownership and control. Basically like an old links page or web ring, but this time listing all of the best old-school forums still running dedicated to a variety of topics.

Around the mid 2000s I'd sat that's when it began.

The admin was seen as this "god"-like figure in a Zelda forum I used to go, he NEVER posted, or at least I never saw him post, all interaction was through his Mod goons who were always an asshole to users who were under 500 posts.

Only after making 500 posts they would consider an user "worth of their time".

The SysOp with a god complex was a common thing for many years. It's what killed a lot of good forums.

>What we should do is create and anti-reddit. Make a site which is a public listing of discussion sites which are -completely- detached from the hub site in terms of ownership and control. Basically like an old links page or web ring, but this time listing all of the best old-school forums still running dedicated to a variety of topics.

How much I'd love this to be a thing.

Even on sites that are still like that though it's kind of shitty, instead of some retarded ghost that barely knows his community you get some smug shithead with his head in the clouds because the community sucks them off for "graciously providing a free website to them"

A lot of it is nostalgia from being a carefree kid or teenager, or not such an old crinkly grandpa. Old internet was slow as fuck and had a whole lot less, and everything was harder to find.

There was a sense of wonder, though.

I remember reading [spoiler]fan fiction[/spoiler] as a kid while listening to midis, it was so new to me.

Ok, I've thought for a little while about this subject and I've remembered another thing.

It used to be people were not thinking about making money on the internet. Just now I had a pang of thinking "maybe I shouldn't have mentioned that anti-reddit thing", because someone could steal the idea.

People used to not think like that. They put everything out there completely for free with only the hope that another person might enjoy it and appreciate it. They expected no recompense.

Now, everything feels like everyone has an ulterior motive.

If I had a blog or a website and I wrote an article for it I couldn't even make a thread with a link to it on Sup Forums. That would be "promoting" my blog with the idea being I'm looking for hits and ad revenue. Nevermind the idea I just want people to read what I wrote. No, I couldn't want something as simple as that.

The internet started to suck when everyone started to want to make money with it.

There was also something exciting about seeing the site load and reading "3 elements remaining" when it loaded.

>brittney spears
>limewire

that's post eternal-september.

I've never thought about this until now.

How horrifying, no wonder sites nowadays take long to load because they contact and wait for response from ad services instead of actually loading the actual site.

Fan fiction, fan art, and fan games were a huge revelation coming onto the internet around 2000. Previously if you enjoyed a particular series you were limited to what you could find to do with it. It was pretty easy to have a near 100% completion rating for everything Zelda up to that point, for example.

But then you go on the internet and there are hundreds or thousands of pieces of fan art to collect, fan fiction to read, ROM hacks to play, and even complete fan games.

Now, years later all that stuff is still being produced and is far better quality than it was then, but now I would never even think about looking at any of it. Even though it is only a few clicks away.

You're extremely unlikely to find anyone on here who was using the internet pre- Eternal September, since it happened in 1993.

I don't know, some people here have already talked about BBSs and mentioned an old alt.

There was no clickbait, ads were pretty much non-existant.

Why did Web rings died? You could find so many different sites on the same topic/fandom easily, i miss webrings.

Thanks capitalism.

Social reality just leaked into the internet after business realized it was useful for $$$$$.

P much. Im in most of the art communities and its so pathetic seeing everyone do anything expecting to get popular or to get comissions after they make a piece of art etc. / Only make stuff in hopes for attention and money. Its commonplace but its grown larger and wasn't that way on many sites like DA or furaffinity for that matter. People are so starstruck with the mentality of seeing other people make money that tjey dont care to get any personal enjoyment out of it just for the hell of it. See stuff like lets plays / youtubers for gods sake. People of all ages seeing one person get fame and money they just jump in amd waste their time. God a lot of this is why i hardly laugh anymore on the Internet. So many people have been fake as hell for years and nothing original comes up nearly as frequently or quality as back in the 2000s. Who knows.

It actually bugs me, these people make money from playing videogames, but when their moment starts to fade away they complain when someone tells them "get a real job" saying YouTube its their job.

It's not a real job...

Google seems to have archived a good chunk of usenet, right?

Reading through alt.tv.simpsons is avtually hilarious. Apparently Season 5 was when the show got bad to them

No spam (not before Canter & Siegel). No ads. Barely any web. Gopherspace was a thing. More text, less images. Usenet was glorious, but the non-internet things like FidoNet were better. Curious thing about that: people used real names on there, because you just did. The other FTNs, not so much. They were cozy. Netmails took days to get through. .sig taglines in the tear were a thing. If you mentioned Kibo anywhere, he was almost sure to appear.

I'm not sure I can really describe it, except that it felt more personal, like penpals (indeed, swapping floppy disks via the post was also a huge thing).

Communities change once they expand past a certain size, never to return. Change isn't always a bad thing. The internet became pretty wonderful. But it'll never be quite the same.

God, I miss when Pratchett posted on alt.fan.pratchett now.

COLA was made soon after eternal september. Used to browse it, still browse it. Used to be cancer, still is cancer (with added niggers puppeted by snit)

>were people really better controlled (the whole"Netiquette" thing)
Yeah, sort of. A lot of it had to do with the fact that there were *much* less people involved, and anyone new was basically stumbling into what was essentially a long-standing and well-established clique.

There wasn't really any such thing as a "normalfag" in those days, at least not by any definition Sup Forums might use. If you were hopping on a service in the pre-ES days you had a reason for doing so, and that reason usually meant you had a hobby/job/educational focus that put you well outside the realm of "normalfaggotry" by the standards of the time.

Yeah, there was a newbie adjustment period when autumn matriculation put a certain percentage of fresh college students online, but it wasn't anything even remotely like a "newfag" trying to muddle his way through Sup Forums/Futaba culture for the first time. "Don't Bite the Newbies" was a common refrain in those days, and unless they said/did something completely fucking asinine any "corrective measures" were fairly gentle. Hell, they were downright pacifistic compared to the modern Internet.

Swapping floppies via post sounds cute.

And yes netiquette was a thing. It's a thing here too, it's just an entirely different set of rules: still there's the cry of "summerfags" when newbies Don't Get It, or namepost or tripfag.

Seriously, think about it though. When messages can take days to get through (Fido, UUNET) and most readers don't have threads, you trim your quotes and reply to multiple posters. If you think about it, that's one of the differences between here and Reddit, functionally rather than culturally: reply-threading.

I'd be lying if i said it wasn't a circlejerk. Small named communities are. But they can be friendly, and comfy, and overrun by cow jokes and Kirk/Spock slashfic. It was a different thing. I don't think id swap it for what we have now, but I do miss it.

Get off my lawn. Now I'm going to afternoon tea with my great great niece.

I swear time passes quicker these days.

>"Don't Bite the Newbies"
No such thing nowadays anywhere, sadly... It's all circlejerking.

asstr is god tier for eritica.

Please let this happen. Like the old Sup Forums where mods and moot would interact with the users

It was. There'd sometimes be a letter enclosed - my handwriting has always been a) purple and b) unreadable scrawl - or we'd write ASCII textfiles. Maybe there'd be PD software on there. Lol, or maybe diskmags/zines, demos, snippets of source, pixelled art, tracker MODs, whatever.

I swapped viruses (virii as we termed them at the time, purely because it was shorter, it's not correct Latin) with a lovely young woman in Slovenia: jiffy bags with strangely homoerotic pink-tinged notes - I think most people just got the floppies, but we'd got talking about her boyfriend and stuff - and vicious ahead-of-its-time handcrafted malware, purely as a demonstration I guess. (I miss her. She took a nightshade overdose in '95.)

Computer / tech guys on the "old internet" were a lot cooler and more interesting than typical Sup Forums cancer.
A funny writeup on a drink machine: faqs.org/faqs/csh-coke-machine-info/

Some excerpts:

Our drink system is composed of several parts, the drink machine
itself, the computer inside the machine, the serial connection to
our drink server machine, the accounting software, and finally the
wide area information systems (such as finger).

This
is the only program with permission to access "/dev/drink"

The drink(1) program offers several command line options. These
are:
-o [12345rg] where a number specifies a slot to drop a drink
from, 'r' specifies to drop a drink from a random
slot (choosing from the full-ones), and 'g' is
a special gamble option (to be described later).


Old internet was pretty kek.

You have a point there. Many BBSes/forums/media since, including this one, developed a less welcoming, boot-camp fuck-you attitude to newfags.

Probably because it was less common then. You feel like you could teach a few new people a month. Per minute, not so much.

The first webcam was set up to monitor a coffee pot (at MIT I think?) so lazy people in the labs, which were quite a walk from the pot, could see if it was empty before making the trip.

This in time naturally led to the HTCPCP April Fool's RFC, and the (418?) I'm A Teapot status code of course.

>a special gamble option
Kek.

It's a pity these days there's no fun allowed

Jan 1971 I walked into a computer room and met my one true love. By the mid 70's we were networking our computer into a huge mainframe for time sharing. By the 80's I was on PC development, tho no networking at that stage. By the 90's I had my ow 286 with a 2400 baud modem and hit every bbs I could find. The usenets were the best with sub subnets that were kinky I don't remember mutt-heads jumping on each other like today. The mid 90's brought the web sites and faster modems allowing for downloads. I used to have two systems with 2 phone lines and screamers of modems running 9600...aw the days. Then came commerce and the idea of making money with advertising

Ye olde computer science programs were filled with hackers (the original meaning, not the retarded "new" meaning), with unbounded creativity and a hint of laziness. Some of the most brilliant advancements in technology have come out of these institutions and it feels like it's all gone. Modern "computer science" programs are just pooinloos there to learn to code monkey away instead of push technology forward.

Who else here /nostalgic/?

What was the original meaning?

As much as I love that nostalgic shit, I'm one of those code monkeys in university now, learning java.

Feels boring and robotic. No humanity to it anymore.

we had ads, but they were only spam via email and usenet. around 1997 the ads started taking over the web; during the first bubble, everyone was making bullshit webpages with bullshit ads to get big money for nothing.

that's because the frontier is gone and the wild west is now a city with laws & police. the last gasp was Sup Forums before 2008.

passionate tinkerers who actually knew shit about technology and loved it rather than how fast it made their games go

You used to be able to be randumb. You would never get a "are you 12?" type of response because everyone was in on the joke and nobody wanted to seem to be the "cool kid" with the straight man mentality.

Then maybe seven or eight years ago randumbness became mainstream and the internet has hated it ever since.

People who took things apart, learned how they worked, figured out new ways to do things with them. People who found clever ways around common problems.

>If you posted a message on an old forum you could expect a few replies by maybe the next day. End of the week in some places. Sometimes months in obscure corners.

So nothing changed in that view.

Pity I had internet since I was born but never used it until those days were long gone, I wish I could say that I was involved the early forums and IRCs but I was too scared and tech illiterate to join in.
>poasting in comfy bread

This sounds modern, not pre-ES

Is Java still used?

I vaguely remember that, I was a kid in those days. I miss it.