How was the Dial-up era, Sup Forums?

How was the Dial-up era, Sup Forums?

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I really missed the sounds it made and little gateway dialup screen that came on with the phone buttons that dialed when you wanted to connect. Not being able to use the phone, too.
Nostalgic times.

expensive, slow, miserable

You went online, did stuff you wanted to do, then went offline again.

It was beautiful...

pretty crappy honestly

it was "new" and "cool" cuz everyone had fucking AOL

i can still remember leaving the internet "on" all night to download AOL 4.0

i got on the internet at like age 4-5 in like 1995, i used it to look at lego and power rangers photos and played red alert at a friends house every now and then.

it was rudimentary and not very useful back then, only the motivated and tech savvy people were online, it was free of retardation and was just purely information driven.

I opened IE, it would show me a pop-up message saying that I have no access to the internet, and I would drag that message showing a nice cascade effect.

this i miss those care free days

It was slow but comfy, because we were smaller...

You pretty much just listened to college students bragging non stop about having a t1 connection the entire time they were on

girls didn't ask you about your height and you could have conversations with them without any pictures being exchanged from either of you

>be sneaky and download mp3s when dad's not home
>too retarded to understand that it will show up on the phone bill anyways
>sharing burned CDs on anime forums because you can't download all this shit
>spend the summer at my dads office cause they have top of the line internet there, which I can use with no limit
>download 100s of pages of DBZ video game movelists and print it out with their laser fucking future printers


it just made you cherish all this shit even more. I remember when we got cable internet with "fair use" I immediately got into the FTP scene (through my dad, back in the day he'd download warez at the office and give it to me if I wasn't being a fuckwad that week). That's where all the "I have access to everything, everytime" feeling started, and it all started to become less special.
Fuck the old days doe, I would be nothing without google and torrents.

It was shit of course. Your parents wouldn't let you on the internet for longer than an hour, the main communication medium was MSN, if you clicked a wrong link you could easily get +40 popup windows because adblock and popup blockers didn't exist, and if you wanted to watch titties you had to anxiously wait for 2 minutes as the image loaded head, eyes, mouth, neck, shoulders etc.

Also your parents probably installed 5 toolbars and funny_picture_from_granny.exe yet blamed you for the computer being slow because you played habbo hotel that one time

yeah, the internet before social media was glorious

Pretty awesome for me. It's when I discovered Unix in '94 since my ISP ran sun hardware and offered SunOS shell accounts. Imagine learning Unix without X at all. Built my first website that few people had holli.com/~username/index.htm. I traded tapes of mst3k with people on alt.tv.mst3k
and I chatted on irc non-stop on weekends.

it was a world of discovery for a person without a drivers license.

Oh man I remember shell accounts, forgot all about that. Found a bbs even in mid to late 90s a town or too up.

Isp also had its own internal network. Kind of like a bbs, maybe a custom shell. You could telnet, hit irc in a custom remote client, download Netscape and most importantly local chat and news section. This was a small town maybe 6k, maybe 15k in county and our line up to Portland and the wider internet would go down. I had moved into adjacent school district for tenth grade, a bigger one district too and i remember the line went down for several days the week before school started. so i logged into the local stuff and there were like 10 or 15 kids in there. Was able to meet some guys and gals (i shit you not) there that made the first day much less nerve-racking

It was probably better in some ways since you could talk about shit people never heard of or didn't have a lot of knowledge in so you didn't automatically assume everyone knows what google knows, it just changes the tone of a conversation to be more closer to a natural conversation you'd have with a person in person.

lol reminds me there would always be that one guy I knew a bunch of them, who downloaded so much shit his isp/tele company would cut service all the time

80% of the time it was "STOP PICKING UP THE FUCKING PHONE MOM"

I dont know

"girls"

it was all good times for me.
Imagine explaining to the parents why you got a vhs tape sent to you in the mail.

We also had a local irc room on dalnet that ended up being a small version of silk road. It was fun programming eggdrops and oping the channel.

"STOP PICKING UP THE PHONE MOM" turned into
>It's only 3 am, I can get enough sleep for school in the morning AND get phone time.
turned into dropout punk.

And websites I had some banging websites, studied html 3.2 and then 4 as it was being solidified, first era off css. Used to use xoom.net which had free ftp and 100mb space. Amazing for the time had a sick local page with a blog (before that was a thing) using pseudonyms and writing in third person i had howtos on how to fuck with undercover antitheft guy at fred meyerss (mr cash, as of 3 years ago tgey still at each freds use that codename lol), random hiwtos kinda inspired by the anarchast cookbook tho relatively benign,the parties over the weekend, galleries of digital photos with a creative webcam 3 and that sony floppy disc cam some music i did that got featured on mp3.com earning me a gift pack and a 20 dollar check from public plays via ASCAP. Total punk website that got a fair amount of visitors as we chronicled and documented those glorious years from age 16 to 20. Wish a copy would of survived and in hindsight we coulda got in some trouble had the wrong person read it

Old web was best web. I was a notorious cyber punk now.. im just a photographer that visits g

Oh how the mighty have fallen

There has always been a lot of them. I use to meet them in person after talking to them for a while. Probably met at least half a dozen of them that i met online. I don't know why that seems weird when there is tinder and shit these days and people meet each from being online after talking for like 15 minutes now.

Old internet was a lot shitter, but a lot more comfy.

I do miss some aspects, like offline readers and pull lists.

>free ftp and 100mb space
>100 mb
Hu-u-u-u-uge.

It sucked

I will never forget the sound of a dial up modem dialing out though
youtube.com/watch?v=gsNaR6FRuO0

They absolutely were girls, i ended up meeting them. They were meek farm girls, seemingly church goers which wasn't really my thing but they were nice and it was a cool experience.

There will never be anything local like that again. I'm glad I was there to explore this stuff before the government and big business and phone screens took control. It used to be all about the people.

It only sucked if your main interest was multimedia, gaming or if your parents were controlling.

Dial up era was absolutely wonderful simply because it wasn't as accessible, fun or glamorous.

Terrible for porn

> yfw mum picks up the phone while you're connected

Agreed, everything was soooo slow. Tho I did enjoy those sounds.

We got off to pictures, text and realmedia vid clips. It was great.

there was barely any porn on the internet back then anyway

>there was barely any porn on the internet back then anyway

HAHA!

>Grandpa, why is the computer playing dubstep?

>2 hours into downloading single .mp3
>97%
>someone calls

fun.
>Everyone was on IRC
>most of the pirated software you got it from ftps, hotline (mac) or shady sites
>ISPs were kinda expensive but you could always find accounts to use without paying, phone bill the same and yes even for that there were ways around
>Americunts had AOL, rest of the world didn't give a shit.
>You could download music whenever you wanted and nobody gave a fuck using audiogalaxy, napster fucked that up by becoming popular to retards
>Retards online were the minority
>cDc made some awesome and funny shit
>there was no facebook/instagram/bullshitsocialmedia

not everything today is bad, but certainly you could find more pros than cons since less fuckheads were around and even oblivious of it's existance.

>he didn't know the hayes AT command set.

that reminds me, there were a bunch of "download managers", programs that would let you stop and resume downloads, optimize your modem and computer settings for better speed, and provide other small sevices
they'd range from useful to useless to incredibly virus-filled

I miss the simplicity.

The modern web has so much gunk on top of it that it sometimes feels like there's been no improvement to speed at all...

Once plugins are dead and everything is OS independent the web will return to old times.

>add call waiting block to dialup string
>get yelled at for causing missed calls

I miss the web not being all-consuming to the point where it's all a lot of people even use computers for...

That's why you set the AT register. Parents wouldn't know why it would miss a call. And good luck with the telco figuring it out.

Even if they were dudes pretending to be girls, at least they weren't insufferable.

The internet was just plain better then. It's likely that it will never get good again. There's always the next thing...

Strange thing is web browsers are becoming their own OSes. Traditional OSes are just fading into the background over time.

Like anyone cared if it was a dude, nobody had webcams or anything like that anyway.

a/s/l

>go online
>send all Usenet shitposts you wrote since last time
>download all Usenet shitposts published since last time
>go offline
>read shitposts
>write shitposts
>repeat

In all seriousness though, not being constantly distracted by the Internet was great for productivity and actually doing shit with your computer.

It was glorious. Most of the people online were academics, professionals, and well off families (at least in the early days).

So you didn't get all this faggotry from niggers and trailer trash, since no one bothered to offer service in trailer parks or the hood.

What white trailer trash are you talking about?

Ffg

>always had broadband
>could use internet whenever I wanted
>tfw never had to yell at sister to get off the phone

This.

>being so poor you didn't have an ISDN circuit.
Dad would also have a chuckle when the monthly bill from the ISP would have more usage hours on it than what was in a month.

Slow, unreliable, expensive.

I didn't like being kicked off the internet when I received a phone call and I didn't like purchasing a 2nd phone line dedicated to internet.

Also everything was really expensive.

If you're complaining about the price or speed chances are you totally missed the point then, and you're still missing it now.

You have no idea what feelings you've kindled.
>waiting to connect to someone's bbs
>nearly all were only connected to a single phone line
>some were therefore only open for certain hours on certain days through the week because they had to keep the line free for phone calls
>on the popular boards someone was always connected to the one telephone line most were connected to
>it was a big fucking deal when some sysop upgraded his bbs by installing a second line
>unbelievably fun playing certain 'bbs door games' against a live opponent instead of having to log off and wait for others to log in and make their moves and log back in hours or days later
>lord bre sre the pit usurper .... so many games
>forums oh lawdy the forums
>serious shitposting
>...
>*sighs wistfully*
>...membarin' the goode olde dayes....

Dial-up was only good in that it created a barrier to entry. No smart phones + no cheap Internet with free home router + no wireless = no plebs.

>kicked off the internet when I received a phone call
That's not how telephone lines work.

Just a reminder: Some day in the future, you're going to think back to the good ol' days of Sup Forums, smartphones, and Windows 7/8/10.

Enjoy and cherish your time right now because you'll be missing it in the future and wanting it back.

Shitty.

Eternal September: "summerfags get out" has been a thing since '92. I take it that the BBS/Usenet days were far comfier for tech dorks, though to be fair I'm only 18 and dialup was fazed out at my house when I was like 5

Don't correct them. It's the "pretending to be an oldfag" flag.

>tfw having to call my friends and family telling them not to call me so I could surf the net on my extremely fast dial up connection

it was shit, you don't know how lucky you grow up in a time when dial up was already long dead.

Read the thread.

You can still do that with slrn and slrnpull.

>Enjoy and cherish your time right now because you'll be missing it in the future and wanting it back.
true words, I won't be missing facebook, normies, stupid normie shit, leddit the same as I don't miss the pain in the ass that was to download a game ripped from a CD that was near 600mb.

>tfw i had freeweb that I bought from a gas station for $5

Then explain why, when using the internet, we'd receive a phone call on the line used for internet and suddenly we'd lose connectivity.

This was around 1997-1999. Later we got a modem that put the call on call-waiting and gave us a notification on the computer about said call.

????

No idea but a live line doesn't get knocked out for an incoming line. A modem connection was a telephone call, so like if someone calls you when you're on the phone to someone else it would just come back as engaged for the caller.

> Error 650 - The Remote Access server is not responding.
Fuck you BT!

Because is a retarded broadband baby that never actually used that shit.

>modem detects call waiting signal
>modem disconnects call unless configured not to

Jesus are you batshit retarded?
Modems with caller-id detection enabled would hang up the current call. It was built into the modem. Look at the graphic here.

But newsgroups are only used for piracy these days.

>wow I really miss windows 10 and facebook
nobody, ever forever

>you're going to think back to the good ol' days of Sup Forums, smartphones, and Windows 7
I already miss windows 7 and it isn't even going to lose support till 3 years later

This. Except when I tied up the line all night trying to download porn when I had roommates. That annoyed them

>if you clicked a wrong link you could easily get +40 popup windows because adblock and popup blockers didn't exist,

somebody didn't know about proxomitron

>Slow, unreliable, expensive
Fucking a million times this.

My first computer was a Power Macintosh 7600/180 with an EXTERNAL 28k modem. Shit was slow as fuck and disconnected all the time. Not only that, but everyone in the house would yell at you because they needed to use the phone. I eventually got into the habit of going to the public library after school and using the T1 connection there to browse for a few hours before I went home. All the comfiness of the old internet with none of the drawbacks.

As a side note, something on the 7300/180 that was actually useful was the PC card. Even years later when my Macfag friends were stuck with OS 9 on their iMacs, I could shut down System 7 and boot up Windows 95 to play Railroad Tycoon 2. PowerPC and Intel, why choose?

It was novel to be able to dial up BBSes and communicate with other computers and the people using them. FidoNet was great, as were the other FTNs, and the BBS doors.

The actual modem part, that was clunky, slow, expensive, and it tied a phone line up.

Other than the BBSes, the early, pre world-wide-web internet I saw was comfy. Usenet (pre Canter & Siegel) was fun and useful. It was a bit hard to find stuff, because Archie, FTP and Gopher were very clunky. Chat was great, but IRC was truly brilliant.

The web took a little time to catch on, and started getting popular around when NCSA Mosaic (the distant predecessor of what would later evolve into Internet Explorer) was around, and then the "Mosaic Killer" project, Mozilla, which became Netscape Navigator. Next to that competition, even IE3/4/5 were actually pretty good - which speaks volumes about most of the competition! Then Netscape Communicator, then a pitiful offering of open-source which the community took one look at, threw in the bin and decided to rewrite from scratch, which became Mozilla SeaMonkey... good, but a little on the heavy side. Kmeleon and Phoenix were fast, and particularly Phoenix became really popular really quickly, before it changed name to Firebird, then Firefox. You know that one. The one I used to use a lot was CAB, but that one didn't make it anywhere except the Mac when it turned into iCAB.

ISDN could have been so much better, but it was hideously hamstringed. DSL made such a difference - even if the early ADSL was kind of a piece of shit, being always connected allowed instant messaging to actually be functional and made a huge difference to the way we used the network.

I do kind of miss the way we used to send long NetMails, however, which would take days to get through. People took time to compose them and they used to get long. It was kind of like having pen-pals, which we were also doing because of all the floppy disks in jiffy bags in the post.

RIP Scott Lemmon.

>not paying $8/hour to starcraft online at an internet cafe with dual ISDN

It was glorious.
It was the wild west, and we were free.

There was a lot less poor "people", sh*tskins, and women on the net.

I use to get kicked off line when the phone rang well into the 2000's

Back in the day, PC's where mostly used to play Solitarie, Minesweeper and Space Cadet Pinball.

Only geeks, hackers, academics, pedos, and criminals used the internet then. Twas a simpler time.

I got an extremely basic home phone line installed in my bedroom just for dial up when I was 14, totally worth it

More like there were a lot less edgelords like you, except around every September when all the newbies joining university would get Internet access for the first time and have no clue about netiquette. (Then AOL happened, all the old people got access who had no idea what to do with it or why, and the September never ended.)

The demographics reflected the connected universities, mainly, and there were indeed women: from rec.humor.funny posting cow jokes to posting (and laughing at) dreadful Star Trek slashfic.

Reality check: Even if you're old enough to post, they are now probably old enough to be your mum.

It's weird to think that it not so long we will be reading posts from a bunch of dead guys.

I will be one of them since I am old.

(((existential worry)))

pic related to thread. had one of these fuckers for Q2.

I got Q2 and never got a machine that would run it at like >10fps. I gave it away to a friend.

I was a god on Q2. I was doing a bunch of meth and never slept. Just played Q2.

Q2 was love, Q2 was life.

Actually there's been an increase in life on them since those shitty SBCs became mainstream. Same with a lot of telnet/ssh BBSs.

Guess they got to find some use for them, huh?

Slow + Noisy + Expensive + Ugly + Comfy.

ZMODEM ALL DAY

EVERY DAY

Yes. I also used Qmodem.

I started using a computer in the mid 1980's. There was only dial-up BBS sites. Then Compuserve came around with its text-based interface. Then a weird AOL showed up.

I still remember being excited when 56k speeds were introduced. And I remember getting really excited about the new protocols that were emerging back them. X-modem! Yeah! Y-modem! Woohoo! Me and my USRobotics 56K modem did a lot of downloading. It caused rage when a download would get interrupted by line noise or such. The entire download had to start over. Then came along a new protocol that promised to resume downloads. Awesome!

Things actually worked back then.

Just now I tried to get into an email address (hotmail) I signed up for back in the dial up days. Supposedly it looked suspicious. I had to send a verification email to an old gmail account. I try to sign in to it. Supposedly it looks suspicious. I had to send a verification email. It is sending it to the old hotmail account.

I hate how things work these days

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