I’m guessing the OOP was born early to mid 80s.
83 baby here. Perfect timing. Grew up during the early internet, before Facebook and phone cameras. No such thing as online bullying and nobody could film you getting beaten up.
Not necessarily, I did that as a kid in the late 2000s. My friend’s parents had an old mac in their basement that we would play flash games and watch stupid youtube videos on.
I did it being born in 94. It wasn’t about who has access to the internet, it’s that I wanted to hang out with my friend in person like a normal 10 year old but the Internet was the coolest thing to do at the time.
Hell, friends and I were doing it 2008 in college. 6 or 7 of us all gathered around a single 24" monitor watching the latest episode from Nostalgia Critic or something similar.
One of things I miss most about my college years was when I lived off campus in a rambling old house with a bunch of friends, and we had an entire room for our PCs - so we weren’t crammed around one monitor, but we were physically hanging out together while each using their own rig. Permanent LAN party, for three years!
Could even be late 90s or early 2000s in some places
Born in 2000, my parents had a computer (running Windows XP) but it was only for work. Went over to my friends’ houses to experience the information superhighway.
I remember my friends would be cramming around our buddy’s computer watching him play Sim Ant. Ran on DOS I think.
Remember that one friend you had who’s parents would let them play DOOM so your group of friends would all go over to their house and take turns being exposed to all the blood and violence a kid could ever hope for? That was me. I was that kid with the young cool parents.
I remember sharing porn on floppy disks in highschool. I didn’t have Internet yet so a few of my friends were gods among men.
Click here if you’re over 18?
Not much has changed there. Unless you live in a nanny state of “small government” and “save the children”. Bitch you turned out fine! Let em rub one out in peace.
So this guy I knew was trading porn. Mostly pics, a few low-res clips. Some warez here and there, too. Most people did not have fast internet yet, let alone a CD burner. He’d lug around these large wooden crates filled to the brim with home-made porn collection CDs. It was totally out there.
Cardboard box of playboys in the woods, but for the digital age
I remember printing out pictures that, in hindsight, were Photoshopped, but it was before I knew what Photoshop was. I learned a lot between 2000 and 2005.
Her head wasn’t glued on quite right.
If AI figures out fingers, we will really be in trouble.Or that fire doesn’t belong in a tent I guess .
I think a few months ago I was hearing “GPT 4.0 has finally figured out fingers” and seeing examples of correctly generated fingers.
Still seeing AI images with fucked fingers, though. Guess GPT still isn’t that good at it, or maybe they’re using some budget AI.
My friend used to print out pics on plain paper and distribute to us. what a champ
Son: Mom! We need more ink!
Mom: What!? I just bought ink last week!
Mom: What have you been printing!?
Son: IDK!? School Stuff!?
Mom: Okay sweetie. I’ll get you some more from the Office Max!
set to the tune of Treat the Kids Right by The Interrupters
Let the kids wank
Or you’re gonna get a spank
I first learned about the Internet reading about it in the encyclopedia. We had CompuServe and I would chat and play Neverwinter Nights (not the Bioware game).
I’m sure it’s a normal distribution with a pretty amazing skew for late 30s to mid 40s and a high peak.
Man I’m early 30’s and this tracks
I think this was probably still a common thing for people in their 30s now, it wasn’t that long ago
I remember going with my friend to his parents flat to play the OG Doom on their computer. Good times.
Same. Firing up Doom and Wolfenstein from the DOS command prompt at your friends house and everyone taking turns was definitely normal
I’ll do you one better…we’d use the internet together. Probably the inspiration for that well-known NCIS hacker-fight scene, except one of us would be on the mouse and the other on the keyboard.
I hope I just unlocked a core memory for a few more lemmings.
Shit, I remember when our public library got some fancy new computers with an internet connection which was super high tech at the time. Two of my buddies and I rode our bikes down there and we couldn’t believe how cool this new thing called a “chatroom” was. Like… there were other people on there just talking to each other, long distance, mind you, and FOR FREE?!?!?!
As a kid, all of us nerds got our own computers eventually after much begging. (Commodore 64s and such.)
And occasionally, we had the magical moments when we got to visit the occasional person who had a big computer. (PC clones)
No information superhighways yet!
I’d say the window of overlap for “look at the computer” and “information superhighway” was actually pretty small for most people.
Maybe 1996-2001?
So then you factor in how old people would have been during that period who would have done this. Being generous, I’d say 9-18. At different ages in that range “going to my friend’s place to look at the computer” would have been a euphemism for different things.
But the range there would be from 1977-1992, which is actually pretty impressive for a cultural moment. Essentially, most millennials.
I remember use of the phrase “information superhighway” only really existing for a short window around the early days of the WWW while it was still novel and exciting and before it started to become mundane. I’d say you’re bang on for the window.
Those were the best days of the Internet, and not just because I was a teenager who’d discovered there were pictures of boobs on it.
“information superhighway”
The term was actually coined by Al Gore in 1978 but came into widespread usage in the mid-1990s as the Internet took off.
That’s just what we did until like… Jeez… 2006?
Not even, I was playing EverQuest in 2000. And WoW in 2004.
okay and?
People weren’t just hanging around looking at what the Internet could do in 2006, they were using it for all manner of shit. The Napster/ Metallica lawsuit was in 2000. Shit, the first YouTube video was uploaded in 2006.
Methinks people don’t remember their timelines, and are forgetting how quickly we stopped gawking at the Internet, and actively utilizing it.
I think you assume your personal experience was everyone’s experience. I didn’t have an internet connection good enough to watch YouTube until I started college in 2010. The neighborhood I grew up in still doesn’t have high speed internet except over 4g.
I had barely functioning dial up Internet, while my friend had cable before YouTube existed. My first ever experience was on January 10, 1997. I was 16 and we borrowed a friend’s AOL login info to use that “browser” for limited number of minutes.
Not even 3 years later was it possible to play games and have a lawsuit with Metallica due to p2p distribution. I’m basing my previous statements off of the popularity of these very things.
??? The fuck are you talking about? We’d go hang out together to play games and torrent shit. That’s literally what I’m saying we would go hang out in front of cathode ray tubes to do. None of those things are mutually exclusive?
Whatever. I’m apparently not explaining well enough, and / or you aren’t understanding. And I’m too tried. So just ignore me from here on out.
i think you might be a bit confused. No, no 17-20 year old sat with their friends before a computer just to gaze at the internet in 2006 in the USA.
But 10 year olds still did. And so did teens in countries where the internet was still new then.
Just because you all have grown up and it stopped being a novelty doesn’t mean it was a universal shift.
I remember my entire primary school class in 2010 gathered around the one kid who had a PSP, none of us spoke English so we were navigating it completely blindly through trial and error. I also remember being invited to my friend’s home to just, use the computer, now it wasn’t as fascinating as it could be for US kids (most of the internet was in English after all) so after playing a coop flash game or two we did other things but it was still a fascinating new device we didn’t get to use much.
the phenomenon of “kid goes to a friend to look at computer for a while” was alive and strong in 2006, and well after that as well. youtube beginning most likely gave it a boost
I think I stopped going to a neighbors to hang out and look at internet shit together around when I got a Facebook account. I was in highschool. It was when we bought a mobile broadband stick from Verizon. Before that us and the next-door neighbors had dial up and it was slow as can be imagined. Like… I feel like we mainly hung out and to use the internet together to show each other the things we’d found on our own and also because you had to do something together while you waited for whatever it was you were looking at to load. I think the thing we did the most was used limewire to download morning radio shows like Johnboy and just laugh at the antics of characters trying to sell boats and whatever.
I guess you’re too young to get the meme then :)
No I mean literally we as in my cohort did that until 2006. A we that I was in. Me and my people
My people too. Especially after discovering weed, smoking some bowls and watching 1.21 Gigawatts in my buddy’s computer room, and him and I absolutely dying of laughter, and his mom just wondering what was happening. Was probably 16 or 17 at this point. Maybe we were holding on, but so many memories of just pulling up some chairs around an old CRT and cruising the highway. Shit, I’m just about to 37 and we still do it. It’s just how we learned to share, and I’d rather share a screen than have everyone in their phones.
Not everyone had a good Internet connection or even a computer during those times. We would still go use the library computers and sit next to each other because they had broadband and I only had dialup and my friends didn’t have a PC at all.
Not everyone has a good internet connection now. Much of rural America still awaits high-speed internet connectivity
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Yeah, and I was behind the times.
I remember there was this claymation loop site where it was people and animals pooping over and over
Did you just incept that memory in my head and all I really remember is a trend (meme as we call it now) of clayimation stuff on the web, or did I also see this site at my friend’s house
But only on weekends when dialing in was cheaper.
UK centric view here, but there were a number of key points in the rollout of narrowband internet access here.
Freeserve was probably the biggest turning point - scrapping monthly subscription fees and just charging by the minute for local rate calls. In the era of CompuServe and AOL, that was a big shift.
Next up was probably a mix of BT Free Weekend - paying an extra tenner or so a month so access the internet on 0808 numbers (free at point of calling for non UK telephony nerds), then expanded to evenings and weekends for 2hr stints. That, or Xstream who allowed 1hr stints on a free number, where capacity allowed and so long as you used their dialler and banner software. It used to get royally hammered at 0001hrs on a Monday.
After that, there was nothing special until ADSL services swooped in and killed dial-up and ISDN services for all but hardened/secure line requirements.
It got to a point where calling someone’s landline was next to pointless on the weekend unless you liked busy tones, but then this did coincide with the takeoff of 2G mobile telephony services so the next best thing to do was send a text message anyway.
Y’all remember the computer room? Like that guest bedroom or whatever that wasn’t really used for anything other than housing The Computer?
I could never find the computer room.
id use it to play backyard baseball all day
When my mom took my computer out of my room, I used to crawl to the computer room after she went to bed to use it. Fun times.
After my dad had locked me out of the computer room, I learned how to pick locks. And I’m not even kidding.
I knew a kid whose mom didn’t want him using the internet after she went to bed so she unplugged their cable modem each night and locked it in a goddamn safe lol. I think he eventually found a similar model at CompUSA or Best Buy and just got his own.
The dads of two guys I knew remodelled their entire basements to accommodate “the computer.” Now writing this down, it sounds like they bought VAXes or something, but it was just plain old Pentiums, plus printers and stuff.
They were just looking for an excuse to remodel the basement and “the computer” made it seem like something they were doing for the family.
And it was always cold because someone’s father would always say something like “I’m not paying to heat that room no one is ever in it.”
Yeah, it’s called an office, I still have one to do work and game in.
Me and my brother established ourselves as like The computer kids so my extended family just dumped off all there broken and old computers
Now we have a room, not for using them but to store all the random tech we have accumulated
I can still hear the white noise ringing of the hard drives that hit you as soon as you walked in. So good
Plus all the accoutrements that invariably went along with The Computer.
A printer and a scanner
A filing cabinet for all the things you liked to print and scan
A rack full of CD-ROM disks like Encarta 95 and Ecco The Dolphin and CorelDRAW 4
A beige container with clear plastic lid for storing floppy disks, that for some reason had a lock on it as if floppy disks were the Crown Jewels
…i miss having no responsibilites.
I still have all this stuff and the room. probably because I am not good at cleaning. also the office chair straight out of 90s. Maybe if enough time passes of not throwing things out I will be able to open a museum and make some extra
We definitely upped our chair game since then. That’s for sure
I don’t know, I feel like office chairs are made for some aliens. Never found one that is comfortable so I always sit like some fucking crab in a jar, feet on the table, hands desperately trying to maintain stable connection to peripherals.
Truth to be said I gave up on sitting. I do all my work reclined, slightly stoned, half nude with an air fan on max setting in a 25 wet bulb celsius
I had about 4 different boxes of floppies, with different keys for each. Any key worked in any lock. The handle of a spoon worked in any of the locks.
Just don’t forget to put the dust cover back on the CRT monitor and keyboard when you were done!
A do miss the degauss button.
Edit: There has to be an app that would simulate the button, right? I did a quick search just now and found one for iphone, another for android, but too old so it’s no longer available/working. I’ll look some more tomorrow.
So many accoutrements! This was also the original home of the box of random cables that lived under the bed. Some day I’ll be buried with those cables.
Yeah, unless you grew up in the Bible belt then it was in the corner of the dining room with no privacy.
We put internet on mobile and things went to shit.
Being constantly connected is bad for us because we haven’t figured out the right coping mechanisms. I bet the generation Gen Z raises will do a lot better since Gen Z will be familiar with exactly how hooked on simulated connectedness you can get
I doubt that. My mother was addicted to CompuServe back in the day and I was a neglected child because of it. I give my kid all the attention I can, but he wants more than I can possibly muster.
Well. Then maybe the next gen after that will be the cohort that for the most part raises their kids like you are. We all try to protect our kids from the trauma we went through, and raise them to interact with the world in better and healthier ways than we do. Right now the fight is to make sure the next generations get the chance to do better
I agree and hope that continues to get better for more children. I just feel bad for the kids that don’t have as empathetic parents.
I doubt that since most of gen z is injecting the feed directly into their arteries. They suffer fucking withdrawals if disconnected for more than a few minutes without something else to occupy them.
Those withdrawal symptoms are what they’re gonna want their kids to avoid. They’re so addicted because their parents didn’t worry as much as they should have about if all that connectivity would be okay.
They’re addicts, they won’t look past their own needs long enough to think of others. Social media addiction isn’t as physically destructive as meth but is out it right up there mentally
Remember? I still have one.
We call them “home offices” now but ultimately they’re still the same thing lol
Be me, 6 or 7 years old, scrolling through BBS stuff for many hours, blissfully unaware of our ISP being long distance until my mom realized what was happening and totally freaked out
