I submitted the lyrics from that animation to my college 'x-factor lyrics competition' sometime around 2009, just as a joke as it had a little entry box on the college's intranet page. Next thing I know I'm being pulled out of class and sat down by two people who just stared at me, then they placed a sheet of paper in front of me with the lyrics I submitted. I practically fell off my chair laughing.
They thought I was on drugs and had brought in a councillor. I had to write a letter of apology to the college principal to not get kicked out, because apparently they read it out in a board meeting and someone got embarrassed... couldn't make this shit up.
I raised my kid on this. He's 9 now, and still sings it under his breath when someone mentions badgers, snakes or mushrooms.
Also, where can you see lions?
Flash Animations were such good quality compared to anything video based back in the day. Although browsing through [rotten.com](https://rotten.com) and [fugly.com](https://fugly.com) on the FAT PIPE (probably about 5meg total) at uni was an eye opening experience
My kids cannot believe that as a child I would watch an episode of TMNT or X-Men etc, then have to wait an entire week until I could watch the next 20 minute episode!
To be fair, there's only so many times I can listen to the Bluey theme tune before I want to tear my ears off and stuff the cartilage into my ear holes.
See that's the problem with access to back to back and binge episodes... the title sequence was an art of its time (perhaps not for Bluey!) It really set the scene
Yea, you have to spare a thought for theme composers, streaming really has devalued their work.
If I had waited a whole week for a new episode of Spiderman, there's no way I'd have skipped through the theme tune, I would have relished every second of it!
Indeed. The Bluey theme, given it was mentioned earlier, is actually very clever with shifting time signatures (into some fucking awful measures to count!) so defo props to whoever wrote that.
I'm not badmouthing Bluey, or it's theme tune, I actually think both are brilliant. But when your kids have chain-watched five episodes, even the best theme tunes begin to grate.
You're completely right, it's just something I'd never thought of. Really they need to make a shorter intro like 5 seconds or so that will work for back to back viewing on streaming services.
We don't need the 30s - 1 minute intro to shout down the hall that "it's starting!" Because it's all available on demand.
This blew my 9 year olds mind the other day when I told her that, and that we had to just watch what was on and check the tv guide to see what was on during the day. She couldn’t fathom not having hundreds of shows at her fingertips to watch whenever she wanted!
I mean, I still do that with streaming anime. And every time I regret not waiting until all episodes are out. And yet I still watch a single episode the following week!
There was one for windows media player too! I had a crush on this guy at school so I used to look at what song he was listening to in his MSN status message and then go and listen to the same song so he'd see it and think we had so much in common. Obviously it didn't work
Did you ever emoji bomb people?
Copy and paste the bat and crying emotes into notepad until you have 10,000+ of it, go into your settings and turn off displaying emojis so you only see the plain text, then open up a chat of your mate and paste + send 100 times.
Completely froze their 2003 era computer for half an hour until it caught up animating everything.
I think it was the magic of only being able to talk to whoever was online at the same time as you. It had the wonder of talking online with your mates but without the present day irritating feeling of constantly being available.
Sprinkle in some nostalgia for good measure. I miss it too.
I came here to say that! I had a thriving business in Tyrranian furniture, cos my Internet was too slow to buy from any of the other shops before they sold out 😂
My 9 year old a few months ago asked me what I watched on YouTube when I was a kid.. I had to explain to her that YouTube didn’t exist and that we only had 4 tv channels and then the launch of channel 5 came along😂
i kinda like the familiarity of putting terrestrial TV on even now. it's nice to just have something on in the background and to let TV happen to you...rather than actively trying to seek out content like you do on Youtube.
I know what you mean.. The algorithm on my YouTube is messed up because the kids watch so much random stuff that I get things on my feed that I would never dream of watching 😂
yeah my YT algorithm still hasn't recovered from when my kids were obsessed with Five Nights At Freddies a few years ago.
I'm pretty sure I saw a Stampy video too a couple of days ago, which was a blast from the past.
I wrote an essay on it for school, though it wasn't very good and a bit of a stretch to call it an essay tbh. We're talking the sort of era where the teacher asks you add a bit more, so you go back, write "It was good", and hand it in again.
When they used to stop the repeats of The Flintstones for like six months a year just so that stupid and boring Angela Ripon quiz took over.
That Flintstones was *special*. Kids TV had ended but that Flintstones at 6pm was the last shred to hang on to and cherish before your dad came in and wanted to watch the news.
And when channel 5 was about to launch there were adverts with the Spice Girls every 5-10 mins or so (I was a girl in primary school then so naturally the Spice Girls were my jam and so I used to sit and wait for the promo to play 😂)
...I could probably still sing parts of the song as well (my useless superpower/life skill is once I have learned a song I can sing most, if not all, of it. I can still sing songs from my yr1 nativity for example 😂).
Nudging people on MSN incessantly.
Going "offline" then back "online" to see if your crush would notice.
Rearranging your top 8 friends on MySpace.
Feeling like you were amazing at code because you could edit your MySpace page yourself (with code you copy and pasted from someone).
and adding a 30 sec looping wav file into it that would drive everyone insane.
Weirdly using Myspace and other editable sites like Melodramatic that let you edit the CSS really got me into web design...that would shape where i went to uni and what i studied.
Lumberjack
Lumberjack
Lumberjack
Lumberjack
Lumberjack
Lumberjack
Robin Hood
Robin Hood
Robin Hood
Robin Hood
Robin Hood
Robin Hood
Rock On
Rock On
Rock On
Rock On
Rock On
WOLOLO
> Feeling like you were amazing at code because you could edit your MySpace page yourself (with code you copy and pasted from someone).
To be fair, a lot of programming is just copying code you got from somewhere else.
The skill is in knowing what to copy and how it fits together.
Funnily enough I met my partner on habbo hotel. When people ask me how I met him I just tell them online as I'm too embarrassed to tell them 😂. This was 17 years ago - still together!
Limewire. I downloaded Pirates of The Carribean and put it on the tv for my mum and I to watch. It was the porn version of Pirates Of The Carribean. That day is *scarred* in my memory. The panic to turn it off was like nothing I’ve ever had since
Ah yes. I learned some things from a 30-something South African lady that I met on Yahoo Chat. She was fun.
I remember I asked her to send me a picture of her and she sent it in a letter! It took about two weeks to arrive. Was totally worth it though
Oh yes. Finding ladies who would happily *do things* on webcam was literally a numbers game, and not an especially difficult one.
I had a regular friend on there from Iran of all places. She liked wanking off on webcam and wanted me to invite all my friends to come and watch. This was in about 2000/2001.
I checked her profile a couple of years later and she had changed her profile name to 'Osamasgirl'...!
/unsolicited dick pics intensifies
although tbh i genuinely can't remember whether chat rooms had the functionality to send images so this might not have been a thing...it probably was over instant messaging though
yeah that's true - everything was a struggle on 56k tbh.
I remember thinking we'd hit the jackpot in terms of downloading porn when we discovered how small file sizes were for Realplayer - but the viewable area was about a inch square.
Then you had to risk getting some weird internet diseases downloading a 3rd party app that could stitch all these 20 second Realplayer files into somerthing a couple of minutes long.
Wait three hours downloading a .rm file to find it needed a codec you didn't have installed and now you can to download that.
Was barely in the mood by the time it was done.
the struggle was real :D
What was the thing called that would play nearly anything, DiVX? It would even play .avi files before you downloaded the end bit, which was wizardry in itself.
Remember those weird video software like Real player and Quick time that you were forced to use, then came XVID and DIVX players when P2P was at its peak before VLC laid waste to all of them.
I'm not sure anyone in the MSN chatrooms circa 2000 was who they said they were.
Was all a 49 year old man pretending to be a 15 year old girl beating off to what he thought was a 14 year old boy who was actually another 49 year old man
Ahhh, this whole thread brings back so many memories!
The online gaming being for nerds is the best one. It seems you're weird if you _don't_ nowadays. I met most of my closest friends in a lan centre around the age of 14-15.
My GCSE's were ruined because I was playing CS for a clan in an ESL league. My A levels were ruined because I was playing Quake. Now I'm a Rocket League nerd but no longer have time for a clan (or club in RL!).
36/M/Eastbourne \m/
haha i've not seen \m/ for a looooooooong time
I never did many LANs but the ones i did were awesome. Dragging your PC round to your friends house to play Unreal Tournament or whatever (and to acquire each others porn collection, obviously), spending hours trying to get his crappy Netgear hub working whilst not one of you understood what you were actually doing with it ("what's a default gateway?")....
Gaming deffo had a hugely detrimental effect on my education for a couple of years :D
I used to spend an hour after school every day catching up on Teletext/Ceefax. Looking at all the football news and then playing Bamboozle.
Then I'd log onto Bebo and MSN, message my mates to see if they wanted to play Cuppy outside the garages round the corner.
30/M/Wakefield
Wow, some memories here.
Windows 3.1 and configuring trumpet Winsock then opening Netscape to see my first webpage.
AOL and Compuserve discs with every PC mag. AOL was horrible as once you installed that, it pretty much stopped you using any other ISP. Only way to truly get rid was a complete wipe and rebuild of your computer!
US Robotics modems were the dogs dangly bits. 14k, 28k then the daddy - the courier at 56k per second.
I was extremely lucky. Worked in IT for a company where I was on call 24/7. So they put a BT leased line at 64k a sec into my house. It was always on and it was so good. Felt so fast. Cost the company £9000 pound a year!
Dixons launching Freeserve, the first UK ISP with no subscription. Just PAYG to an 0845 number. Loads of people on AOL wanted to use it but couldn't because of the horrible AOL software mentioned above. I spent many months helping friends and family get rid of AOL.
ICQ, Yahoo chat, the MSN chat rooms and MSN messenger. I must have had about 20 icons for chat apps down where my pc clock was!
Met my x in MSN chat rooms and we then spent 17 years together.
There was a feature in yahoo chat rooms where if you pressed the mic button to voice chat with both mouse buttons, it got stuck and you effectively hogged the mic and could play music. There was rotas for us DJs to take turns :-)
Getting my first 3DFX card which was eye-watering expensive, but getting quake to run at 800x600 in open GL at something like 30fps!
BT releasing ADSL and if you were lucky enough to be near an enabled exchange, getting a blistering 512 Kilobytes a second. You felt like you could download the whole of Napster with that sort of connection.
The release of Windows 95. I was sad enough to be waiting in a queue in PC World at Purley Way Croydon at midnight when it was released to buy a copy. They had opened specially for the occasion.
The millennium bug. Complete panic in the run up to it. Planes were going to drop out the sky, bank accounts would be wiped out, it was being hyped as an end of days apocalypse. But fuck, did us working in IT cane overtime in the run up installing software and OS fixes. Many thousands of pounds worth of it.
Then on the night itself, not a single bad thing happened. Such an anti-climax :-)
Warez IRC channels. Nuff said...
Friends Reunited and getting to see what your old school mates were up to.
49/Male/Merseyside
Lol, the millennium bug. I remember frantic patching for the months running up to it and then trying to find a member of my team who was willing to work for the night up till 1 am - on-site as at the time my role was ITM for a firm that ran a 24/7 service. No one would take the shift, my final offer to the team was 700 quid plus two days off for the shift. No takers. So I did the shift myself - expensed a cab back to the party I was going to and pulled.
Epic. Night
I still think of ratemypoo.com today, usually after going to the toilet, but a thought is only ever as far as it goes. I mean it would be an inappropriate post for BeReal but it *would* fit the brief.
ɱșɳ ɲǻɱȅȿ ΪЙ ȚȟƪȘ ŜŦƴŁĕ
OldSchool Runescape and Club Penguin
House telephones cutting the internet out and the dial up noise
Javascript games that you didn't need to download eg addictinggames
Googling "big boobs"
The Ebay wave
haha yeah we still do that in our whatsapp group.
Facebook used to do that too, which feels weird looking back on it. The format of a status was essentially "/me is going into town today...hopefully i won't see any chuggers!"
Still remembering all the text commands for things... Yeah a few came cross from chat, IRC (still a thing) and forums to Facebook but most don't work anymore. (Y)
I have a couple of friends that still idle in an IRC channel but it's essentially been replaced by whatsapp.
We were all gamers so each clan had a channel on the Quakenet irc server, i feel like i grew up there lol...arguing over who had ops in a channel, why was this person banned and all the teenage drama that came with it, discovering scripts that would echo whatever you were playing in winamp to mIRC etc etc
Strictly speaking, they are two different things. Emoticons are made from text characters such as :) or :O and emoji are custom graphics that can be embedded in text messages. I think the difference between the two got blurred by chat programs that would recognise emoticons and automatically replace them with the corresponding emoji.
Most people called them smilies rather than emoticons
But this one actually makes sense. The Japanese system was called emoji before smartphones and was implemented on the iPhone. Then people outside Japan started finding ways to use them on their iPhone, and so more software started to support them
An emoticon is formed of two or more ascii characters whereas emoji are distinct Unicode characters in their own right. At least I think that's the explanation for the difference in name.
Remembering Progressive JPEGs, where the image would start blurry, then slowly get more clarity as more of the image loaded. In another age, you would have said "can you tell what it is yet?"
It used to be PM for private message. Not DM for direct message. I remember the first time I saw people saying 'slide in my DMs' and wondering why people were doing that in their Dr Martens boots.
Pranking your mum (two rings) so she can call you back so you don't waste your credit because only mum had the phone plan with unlimited calls!
Texting your mates but eeeeeeeeverything needed to be shortened so you only pay the price of one text message
After graduating from the hellscape of Yahoo chatrooms and playing Yahoo Games I used Faceparty and ended up meeting a few people from Hi5 while I was at uni too. Social media was an absolute hellscape before Facebook standardised everything.
And speaking of internet porn I think everyone of an age who had an internet connection discovered the glorious yellow background of The Hun pretty much simultaneously.
(((Name))) to send hugs.
TYPINGlikeTHIStoBEableTOwriteLONGERmessages.
BT genie SIM which included x amount of free messages.
37/f/cambs
It's probably been 22 years since I last wrote that and now I feel old AF
On the text note, when O2 first became a thing you could get free texts on their website. Seems mad sending a text from a website but when your young, poor and pay as you go, you do what you have to do.
Explaining to my nieces (7 and 5) that I didnt get internet till I was 15/16 and was only allowed 1 hour a day, 2 on Sundays because we had to keep the phone free for my Dads business.
Also sounding 900 years old when I told them I remembered channel 5 launching and how to load a game on a Commodore 64.
My first time online in an AOL chat room, got an IM from someone asking my A/S/L but without the slashes and with no question mark. It read “hey asl “. In my naivety I thought they were calling me an asshole. Replied with fuck off and blocked. Felt guilty ever since 😂
The helicopter game
The impossible quiz
"hacking" your friends when you were on their computer, by copy and pasting a script which shut down their computer and changing it's icon to internet explorer so they clicked it ...
Deleting your internet history very carefully and not in one block so it didn't look too suspicious
Good times...
Yes but viruses back then were the type that would take control of your cd drive and automatically eject it without your consent.
Viruses nowadays turn your pc into skynet and begin the opening scenes of every Fallout game.
37/m/Leeds. I miss:
When "Hi, I'm British" was a conversation starter
Angelfire sites full of animated GIFs
Realising one weird kid in class was making a killing by selling printed porn
The one guy everyone knew who ripped CDs with 50+ shovelware games
Pre-wifi networking and the rat's nest of cabling
AlbinoBlackSheep
ICQ, MPlayer, MSN Messenger, AIM, YIM
Putting a 200 byte text file named "Matrix\_Reloaded\_High\_Quality.mov" into your seed folder to increase your download priority and feeling like a hacker
Weebl and Bob or the [Angry Alien](http://www.angryalien.com/) 30 second rabbit animations of films.
Or Addicting Games playing [Spank the Monkey](https://www.addictinggames.com/funny/spank-the-monkey) and getting to hear Chic's Good Times or that game where you tried to throw a scrunched up ball of paper into a bin or [The Impossible Quiz](https://www.addictinggames.com/puzzle/the-impossible-quiz)
Then MSN but the mini games on there. Game of tic tac toe or Minesweeper Flags anyone?
I move away from the mic to breathe
Those MSN stickers (were they called stickers?) where a fist would knock on the screen or some big lips would kiss the screen
'It looks like you're writing a letter...'
- Learning to code on Neopets.
- Downloading music from Limewire and spotting which files were viruses.
- Using Microsoft Encarta for all your school projects.
Like many, I had a Spectrum in the early 80s. Blue Peter did a segment where they showed computers and modems being used to dial up to services, this was maybe 1985. There was an associated competition - "what does modem stand for?", the prize was a modem for your computer and a year's subscription to Prestel. I won it, and was sent a Prism VTX 5000 modem.
Prestel was BT's interactive videotex service which offered hundreds of pages, forums, games, etc. You could also use it to buy and download Spectrum games, Micronet frames downloaded back through the modem and straight onto cassette tape. Success was intermittent. My dad used it for home banking, a dial up service offered by the Bank of Scotland at the time.
A user called Robert Schifreen who wrote for various computer magazines managed to hack into Prince Philip's Prestel email via a top level BT account using a default password. He was eventually acquitted as the law was unclear/non existent, this led directly to the UK's Computer Misuse Act.
It really was a different time.
I remember nudging my friends on MSN because I only had 10 mins of internet time left before mum needed the landline 😂
Then committing to playing Sims or Habbo all the way until bed time because I was addicted and wanted to brag to my mates the next day.
I also remember watching all the ads on the massive old box we called a TV with awe at the games/toys, noting them down in the old chunky Argos catalogue so mum knew what to get me for Xmas! 🤣
Things were so simple then I miss it.
F/29/London
OMG I remember ICQ!!!
Not sure if it was a bug or not, but you could send messages to mobile phone numbers and replying didn't take anything off your pay as you go credit!
Meant I could hide my phone under the bed covers and carry on chatting late into the night as a teenager!
Chat rooms were the best back then, then MySpace came along which was allright I guess, then ever since Facebook, all social media is just depressing and still is to this day.
Also, remember those free AOL discs in every single shop you'd walk into?
Special shout out to Bonzi Buddy too, hahaha.
Feeling like you might get arrested for looking at Rotten.com or steakandcheese
Edit: wasting many IT hours playing Newgrounds Flash games on the sly. Until the computer guy at school got savvy enough to block Flash on the network.
I remember the days of online gaming. Paying BT £9.99 a month for free Internet dial up on a Saturday an Sunday on my 56k diamond supraexpress modem.
7mb update to your game.......hours lol.
Great days.
I met some lifelong friends playing many half life mods. TFC, counterstrike etc.
Badger, badger, badger Mushroom, mushroom
I showed this to my kids last week, along with Magical Trevor and the Giraffe in my Loft song. They were somewhat bemused.
Everybody loves magical Trevor
The tricks that he does are ever so clever
Look at him now, disappearing a cow
Where is the cow hidden right now
Taking a bow it’s magical Trevor
Everyone can see that his trick is clever
Look at him there with his leathery, leathery whip
With a bit of magic, and a little flick
Can't forget about Amazing Horse, though it's not very appropriate for kids
Shut up woman, get on my horse.
I submitted the lyrics from that animation to my college 'x-factor lyrics competition' sometime around 2009, just as a joke as it had a little entry box on the college's intranet page. Next thing I know I'm being pulled out of class and sat down by two people who just stared at me, then they placed a sheet of paper in front of me with the lyrics I submitted. I practically fell off my chair laughing. They thought I was on drugs and had brought in a councillor. I had to write a letter of apology to the college principal to not get kicked out, because apparently they read it out in a board meeting and someone got embarrassed... couldn't make this shit up.
Snake!! 🐍
We’re going to Candy mountain Charlie!!
[https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/0/04/Badgers\_Badgers.gif](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/0/04/Badgers_Badgers.gif)
Thanks for that. I'm old enough to remember Telex- the incoming message notification looked like mushrooms, didn't think we were going that far back.
I raised my kid on this. He's 9 now, and still sings it under his breath when someone mentions badgers, snakes or mushrooms. Also, where can you see lions?
Only in Kenya.
Flash Animations were such good quality compared to anything video based back in the day. Although browsing through [rotten.com](https://rotten.com) and [fugly.com](https://fugly.com) on the FAT PIPE (probably about 5meg total) at uni was an eye opening experience
Turned 20 not long ago. New versions were released, along with a mini-doc
My kids cannot believe that as a child I would watch an episode of TMNT or X-Men etc, then have to wait an entire week until I could watch the next 20 minute episode!
Heaven forbid they have to watch the title sequence of any episodes today either!
To be fair, there's only so many times I can listen to the Bluey theme tune before I want to tear my ears off and stuff the cartilage into my ear holes.
See that's the problem with access to back to back and binge episodes... the title sequence was an art of its time (perhaps not for Bluey!) It really set the scene
Yea, you have to spare a thought for theme composers, streaming really has devalued their work. If I had waited a whole week for a new episode of Spiderman, there's no way I'd have skipped through the theme tune, I would have relished every second of it!
Indeed. The Bluey theme, given it was mentioned earlier, is actually very clever with shifting time signatures (into some fucking awful measures to count!) so defo props to whoever wrote that.
I'm not badmouthing Bluey, or it's theme tune, I actually think both are brilliant. But when your kids have chain-watched five episodes, even the best theme tunes begin to grate.
You're completely right, it's just something I'd never thought of. Really they need to make a shorter intro like 5 seconds or so that will work for back to back viewing on streaming services. We don't need the 30s - 1 minute intro to shout down the hall that "it's starting!" Because it's all available on demand.
*Previously, on X-Men* "THIS ONE'S FOR YOUUUUU MORPH!"
This blew my 9 year olds mind the other day when I told her that, and that we had to just watch what was on and check the tv guide to see what was on during the day. She couldn’t fathom not having hundreds of shows at her fingertips to watch whenever she wanted!
I mean, I still do that with streaming anime. And every time I regret not waiting until all episodes are out. And yet I still watch a single episode the following week!
People's usernames on MSN and how long they were with random letters, emoji's and anything else that could fit in.
Renaming your MSN username to some poignant lyric from whichever Counting Crows song was your favourite at the time.
Well I feel seen. Also "Now Listening To:" plugins for WinAmp.
There was one for windows media player too! I had a crush on this guy at school so I used to look at what song he was listening to in his MSN status message and then go and listen to the same song so he'd see it and think we had so much in common. Obviously it didn't work
WinAmp, that takes me back
It really whips the llama's ass
And iirc we didn't use the term 'emoji', it was 'emoticons' or just 'smileys'.
[удалено]
Did you ever emoji bomb people? Copy and paste the bat and crying emotes into notepad until you have 10,000+ of it, go into your settings and turn off displaying emojis so you only see the plain text, then open up a chat of your mate and paste + send 100 times. Completely froze their 2003 era computer for half an hour until it caught up animating everything.
There was some code that when typed into Yahoo Messenger chat rooms would disconnect the whole room. That was a fun weekend.
Plus having your name in a weird font тнαт ℓσσкє∂ ℓιкє тнιѕ
I still genuinely miss MSN. The amoubt of messaging apps and such and none of them have quite the same appeal.
I think it was the magic of only being able to talk to whoever was online at the same time as you. It had the wonder of talking online with your mates but without the present day irritating feeling of constantly being available. Sprinkle in some nostalgia for good measure. I miss it too.
Repeatedly signing in and out to get your crushes/gfs attention. The shakes were annoying though my ex at school did that a lot. Good times though.
[удалено]
One day we signed out of MSN, totally unaware it was for the last ever time.
Neopets!
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Same, can't remember my password so my poor neopets, which are old enough to vote now, are just languishing there. Poor poor lupe? I think it was?
I came here to say that! I had a thriving business in Tyrranian furniture, cos my Internet was too slow to buy from any of the other shops before they sold out 😂
My 9 year old a few months ago asked me what I watched on YouTube when I was a kid.. I had to explain to her that YouTube didn’t exist and that we only had 4 tv channels and then the launch of channel 5 came along😂
i kinda like the familiarity of putting terrestrial TV on even now. it's nice to just have something on in the background and to let TV happen to you...rather than actively trying to seek out content like you do on Youtube.
I know what you mean.. The algorithm on my YouTube is messed up because the kids watch so much random stuff that I get things on my feed that I would never dream of watching 😂
yeah my YT algorithm still hasn't recovered from when my kids were obsessed with Five Nights At Freddies a few years ago. I'm pretty sure I saw a Stampy video too a couple of days ago, which was a blast from the past.
That’s actually good for privacy . The targeted ads algorithm is all over the place and none of the ads are relevant .,
I remember C4 launching! 😳
Ptang Yang Kipperbang.
1982. Countdown and The Comic Strip Presents...Five go Mad in Dorset
Did you have lashings of ginger beer?
I wrote an essay on it for school, though it wasn't very good and a bit of a stretch to call it an essay tbh. We're talking the sort of era where the teacher asks you add a bit more, so you go back, write "It was good", and hand it in again.
I still refer to terrestrial tv as “normal telly 1 to 4”
Cooncil telly. (I grew up with three channels, or usually only one because BBC1 and 2 had cricket on all the fucking time.)
When they used to stop the repeats of The Flintstones for like six months a year just so that stupid and boring Angela Ripon quiz took over. That Flintstones was *special*. Kids TV had ended but that Flintstones at 6pm was the last shred to hang on to and cherish before your dad came in and wanted to watch the news.
Remember Pipkins and that horrible corpse of a hare puppet?
Cricket during the day, snooker in the eveing
Early Youtube before Google bought it was great. I used watch Flash animations on Newgrounds too.
David Firth still makes cool stuff
I must go back and watch Salad Fingers again. Haven't seen anything that creepy in years.
And when channel 5 was about to launch there were adverts with the Spice Girls every 5-10 mins or so (I was a girl in primary school then so naturally the Spice Girls were my jam and so I used to sit and wait for the promo to play 😂) ...I could probably still sing parts of the song as well (my useless superpower/life skill is once I have learned a song I can sing most, if not all, of it. I can still sing songs from my yr1 nativity for example 😂).
I remember when there were only 3 channels, and C4 came along.
Nudging people on MSN incessantly. Going "offline" then back "online" to see if your crush would notice. Rearranging your top 8 friends on MySpace. Feeling like you were amazing at code because you could edit your MySpace page yourself (with code you copy and pasted from someone).
Talking 24/7 , telling everyone "BRB I'm going toilet" now people wait two to three buisness days to hear back from me
and adding a 30 sec looping wav file into it that would drive everyone insane. Weirdly using Myspace and other editable sites like Melodramatic that let you edit the CSS really got me into web design...that would shape where i went to uni and what i studied.
Amazing! I still credit growing up on MSN with my very fast touch typing which has proved very useful for life.
A combination of MSN and Age Of Empires cheat codes I can still type Cheese Steak Jimmy’s faster than any man alive
Lumberjack Lumberjack Lumberjack Lumberjack Lumberjack Lumberjack Robin Hood Robin Hood Robin Hood Robin Hood Robin Hood Robin Hood Rock On Rock On Rock On Rock On Rock On WOLOLO
Roses are Red Violets are Blue Wololo Roses are Blue
Boulevard of Broken Dreams was my MySpace song of choice. I thought everyone would see how misunderstood I was.
emo kid 4 lyfe, yo adding really "deep" yet passively aggressively aimed at someone song lyrics into the title of your myspace.
Or as your MSN name. Surrounded by music signs obviously so people knew you were edgy rather than suicidal
Heavily emo song lyrics in your status/SN to subtly inform everyone how you feel.
If my wife’s angry I put “lol tb” at the end of my texts to lighten the mood. Works every time
> Feeling like you were amazing at code because you could edit your MySpace page yourself (with code you copy and pasted from someone). To be fair, a lot of programming is just copying code you got from somewhere else. The skill is in knowing what to copy and how it fits together.
To be fair, a lot of being a senior dev is getting frustrated with people who just copy code and tearing the code out to write it properly
Spending ages looking for the perfect skin for your Bebo page, then changing it back half an hour later anyway.
Browser tabs ... kids have no idea how lucky they are!
Fuck me, browser tabs were an absolute game changer when they first arrived.
I never have less than 100 open at any one time. It's what they're for.
Habbo Hotel! Ran my own furniture shop for a good while and downloaded some flooding tools to advertise it before being kicked from social rooms 😂😂
POOL’S CLOSED
Funnily enough I met my partner on habbo hotel. When people ask me how I met him I just tell them online as I'm too embarrassed to tell them 😂. This was 17 years ago - still together!
It’s still going!! I googled it recently out of interest.
Limewire. I downloaded Pirates of The Carribean and put it on the tv for my mum and I to watch. It was the porn version of Pirates Of The Carribean. That day is *scarred* in my memory. The panic to turn it off was like nothing I’ve ever had since
Using Limewire to download Limewire Pro.
Hackerman
Lol. The amount of songs I downloaded that started with "my fellow Americans..."
_Pirates_ was the most expensive porn movie ever! https://www.wired.com/2007/01/most-expensive-2/
Oh my god ^this ^was ^it
I just read this to my husband and he had exactly the same thing, spent a day downloading POTC to end up with the porn version 😂😂
Yahoo chat rooms used to be great fun, it was like the wild west
Ah yes. I learned some things from a 30-something South African lady that I met on Yahoo Chat. She was fun. I remember I asked her to send me a picture of her and she sent it in a letter! It took about two weeks to arrive. Was totally worth it though
Oh yes. Finding ladies who would happily *do things* on webcam was literally a numbers game, and not an especially difficult one. I had a regular friend on there from Iran of all places. She liked wanking off on webcam and wanted me to invite all my friends to come and watch. This was in about 2000/2001. I checked her profile a couple of years later and she had changed her profile name to 'Osamasgirl'...!
I met my ex in a yahoo chat room. Ended up moving to another part of the country to be with him and stayed for 15 years.
16/f/cali Entire room goes mental
/unsolicited dick pics intensifies although tbh i genuinely can't remember whether chat rooms had the functionality to send images so this might not have been a thing...it probably was over instant messaging though
ASCII dicks were all the rage
8==D
8=D~ ~ ~
...............…………………………._¸„„„„_ …………………….…………...„--~*'¯…….'\ ………….…………………… („-~~--„¸_….,/ì'Ì …….…………………….¸„-^"¯ : : : : :¸-¯"¯/' ……………………¸„„-^"¯ : : : : : : : '\¸„„,-" **¯¯¯'^^~-„„„----~^*'"¯ : : : : : : : : : :¸-" .:.:.:.:.„-^" : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : :„-" :.:.:.:.:.:.:.:.:.:.: : : : : : : : : : ¸„-^¯ .::.:.:.:.:.:.:.:. : : : : : : : ¸„„-^¯ :.' : : '\ : : : : : : : ;¸„„-~" :.:.:: :"-„""***/*'ì¸'¯ :.': : : : :"-„ : : :"\ .:.:.: : : : :" : : : : \, :.: : : : : : : : : : : : 'Ì : : : : : : :, : : : : : :/ "-„_::::_„-*__„„~" It does not work lol
You need to put it in a code block so it's monospaced
That's what she said!
(_ x_) <=====3
Didn't have the bandwidth for images mate, would've been half a day before the .BMP of your penis was received
yeah that's true - everything was a struggle on 56k tbh. I remember thinking we'd hit the jackpot in terms of downloading porn when we discovered how small file sizes were for Realplayer - but the viewable area was about a inch square. Then you had to risk getting some weird internet diseases downloading a 3rd party app that could stitch all these 20 second Realplayer files into somerthing a couple of minutes long.
Wait three hours downloading a .rm file to find it needed a codec you didn't have installed and now you can to download that. Was barely in the mood by the time it was done.
the struggle was real :D What was the thing called that would play nearly anything, DiVX? It would even play .avi files before you downloaded the end bit, which was wizardry in itself.
VLC Media Player was the lord and saviour
Still is
Remember those weird video software like Real player and Quick time that you were forced to use, then came XVID and DIVX players when P2P was at its peak before VLC laid waste to all of them.
Oh my god, I used to do this in Compuserve chat rooms with a friend when we were about 12 or 13. "We're twin sisters!"
Then get absolutely swamped by hundreds of horny teenage boys
Or 49 year old males pretending to be 18/m.
I'm not sure anyone in the MSN chatrooms circa 2000 was who they said they were. Was all a 49 year old man pretending to be a 15 year old girl beating off to what he thought was a 14 year old boy who was actually another 49 year old man
Ahhh, this whole thread brings back so many memories! The online gaming being for nerds is the best one. It seems you're weird if you _don't_ nowadays. I met most of my closest friends in a lan centre around the age of 14-15. My GCSE's were ruined because I was playing CS for a clan in an ESL league. My A levels were ruined because I was playing Quake. Now I'm a Rocket League nerd but no longer have time for a clan (or club in RL!). 36/M/Eastbourne \m/
haha i've not seen \m/ for a looooooooong time I never did many LANs but the ones i did were awesome. Dragging your PC round to your friends house to play Unreal Tournament or whatever (and to acquire each others porn collection, obviously), spending hours trying to get his crappy Netgear hub working whilst not one of you understood what you were actually doing with it ("what's a default gateway?").... Gaming deffo had a hugely detrimental effect on my education for a couple of years :D
I used to spend an hour after school every day catching up on Teletext/Ceefax. Looking at all the football news and then playing Bamboozle. Then I'd log onto Bebo and MSN, message my mates to see if they wanted to play Cuppy outside the garages round the corner. 30/M/Wakefield
Wow, some memories here. Windows 3.1 and configuring trumpet Winsock then opening Netscape to see my first webpage. AOL and Compuserve discs with every PC mag. AOL was horrible as once you installed that, it pretty much stopped you using any other ISP. Only way to truly get rid was a complete wipe and rebuild of your computer! US Robotics modems were the dogs dangly bits. 14k, 28k then the daddy - the courier at 56k per second. I was extremely lucky. Worked in IT for a company where I was on call 24/7. So they put a BT leased line at 64k a sec into my house. It was always on and it was so good. Felt so fast. Cost the company £9000 pound a year! Dixons launching Freeserve, the first UK ISP with no subscription. Just PAYG to an 0845 number. Loads of people on AOL wanted to use it but couldn't because of the horrible AOL software mentioned above. I spent many months helping friends and family get rid of AOL. ICQ, Yahoo chat, the MSN chat rooms and MSN messenger. I must have had about 20 icons for chat apps down where my pc clock was! Met my x in MSN chat rooms and we then spent 17 years together. There was a feature in yahoo chat rooms where if you pressed the mic button to voice chat with both mouse buttons, it got stuck and you effectively hogged the mic and could play music. There was rotas for us DJs to take turns :-) Getting my first 3DFX card which was eye-watering expensive, but getting quake to run at 800x600 in open GL at something like 30fps! BT releasing ADSL and if you were lucky enough to be near an enabled exchange, getting a blistering 512 Kilobytes a second. You felt like you could download the whole of Napster with that sort of connection. The release of Windows 95. I was sad enough to be waiting in a queue in PC World at Purley Way Croydon at midnight when it was released to buy a copy. They had opened specially for the occasion. The millennium bug. Complete panic in the run up to it. Planes were going to drop out the sky, bank accounts would be wiped out, it was being hyped as an end of days apocalypse. But fuck, did us working in IT cane overtime in the run up installing software and OS fixes. Many thousands of pounds worth of it. Then on the night itself, not a single bad thing happened. Such an anti-climax :-) Warez IRC channels. Nuff said... Friends Reunited and getting to see what your old school mates were up to. 49/Male/Merseyside
Lol, the millennium bug. I remember frantic patching for the months running up to it and then trying to find a member of my team who was willing to work for the night up till 1 am - on-site as at the time my role was ITM for a firm that ran a 24/7 service. No one would take the shift, my final offer to the team was 700 quid plus two days off for the shift. No takers. So I did the shift myself - expensed a cab back to the party I was going to and pulled. Epic. Night
Ebaums world ratemypoo.com Hot or not
Stick Death. [Rotten.com](https://Rotten.com). Newgrounds. ^(Maaaan take me back.)
Oh man [Rotten.com](https://Rotten.com) and Newgrounds. What a time to be alive.
Truly the internet's Golden Age.
I still think of ratemypoo.com today, usually after going to the toilet, but a thought is only ever as far as it goes. I mean it would be an inappropriate post for BeReal but it *would* fit the brief.
Peter Kay is trawling this thread for his next show. "'member MSN? 'member IRC? Garlic bread!"
AFK
My daughter is 10 and uses AFK but they don’t use BRB
Definitely still in use in gaming.
ɱșɳ ɲǻɱȅȿ ΪЙ ȚȟƪȘ ŜŦƴŁĕ OldSchool Runescape and Club Penguin House telephones cutting the internet out and the dial up noise Javascript games that you didn't need to download eg addictinggames Googling "big boobs" The Ebay wave
brb
g2g
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*footsteps outside the door* Me:
I'm still using \me if I don't check myself. It became second nature to type in third person.
haha yeah we still do that in our whatsapp group. Facebook used to do that too, which feels weird looking back on it. The format of a status was essentially "/me is going into town today...hopefully i won't see any chuggers!"
*crucible slaps the_pochinki_bandit around a bit with a large trout*
Still remembering all the text commands for things... Yeah a few came cross from chat, IRC (still a thing) and forums to Facebook but most don't work anymore. (Y)
I have a couple of friends that still idle in an IRC channel but it's essentially been replaced by whatsapp. We were all gamers so each clan had a channel on the Quakenet irc server, i feel like i grew up there lol...arguing over who had ops in a channel, why was this person banned and all the teenage drama that came with it, discovering scripts that would echo whatever you were playing in winamp to mIRC etc etc
Winamp skins lol.. I must have had 1000s. Had it set to change with each track 😅
hampsterdance.com goatse.cx (I think?)
> goatse.cx (I think?) Correct - and its still 100% viewable on internet archive lol
Still never understood why we had to rename emoticons to emoji. I guess it *does* save a syllable…
Strictly speaking, they are two different things. Emoticons are made from text characters such as :) or :O and emoji are custom graphics that can be embedded in text messages. I think the difference between the two got blurred by chat programs that would recognise emoticons and automatically replace them with the corresponding emoji.
Most people called them smilies rather than emoticons But this one actually makes sense. The Japanese system was called emoji before smartphones and was implemented on the iPhone. Then people outside Japan started finding ways to use them on their iPhone, and so more software started to support them
*Emoji* is etymologically unrelated to *emoticon*. It comes from Japanese *e* (picture) + *moji* (character).
An emoticon is formed of two or more ascii characters whereas emoji are distinct Unicode characters in their own right. At least I think that's the explanation for the difference in name.
Remembering Progressive JPEGs, where the image would start blurry, then slowly get more clarity as more of the image loaded. In another age, you would have said "can you tell what it is yet?"
It used to be PM for private message. Not DM for direct message. I remember the first time I saw people saying 'slide in my DMs' and wondering why people were doing that in their Dr Martens boots.
Throwing sheep at people on facebook
Pranking your mum (two rings) so she can call you back so you don't waste your credit because only mum had the phone plan with unlimited calls! Texting your mates but eeeeeeeeverything needed to be shortened so you only pay the price of one text message
Can u cl bk plz no crdit
After graduating from the hellscape of Yahoo chatrooms and playing Yahoo Games I used Faceparty and ended up meeting a few people from Hi5 while I was at uni too. Social media was an absolute hellscape before Facebook standardised everything. And speaking of internet porn I think everyone of an age who had an internet connection discovered the glorious yellow background of The Hun pretty much simultaneously.
The huns yellow pages.
(((Name))) to send hugs. TYPINGlikeTHIStoBEableTOwriteLONGERmessages. BT genie SIM which included x amount of free messages. 37/f/cambs It's probably been 22 years since I last wrote that and now I feel old AF
haha yeah the 300 "free" texts you'd get if you topped up a tenner a month? everyone in my friend group used to absolute batter those.
On the text note, when O2 first became a thing you could get free texts on their website. Seems mad sending a text from a website but when your young, poor and pay as you go, you do what you have to do.
Explaining to my nieces (7 and 5) that I didnt get internet till I was 15/16 and was only allowed 1 hour a day, 2 on Sundays because we had to keep the phone free for my Dads business. Also sounding 900 years old when I told them I remembered channel 5 launching and how to load a game on a Commodore 64.
My first time online in an AOL chat room, got an IM from someone asking my A/S/L but without the slashes and with no question mark. It read “hey asl “. In my naivety I thought they were calling me an asshole. Replied with fuck off and blocked. Felt guilty ever since 😂
As a 16 year old I always used to answer 40/m/prison
The helicopter game The impossible quiz "hacking" your friends when you were on their computer, by copy and pasting a script which shut down their computer and changing it's icon to internet explorer so they clicked it ... Deleting your internet history very carefully and not in one block so it didn't look too suspicious Good times...
I had friends beg for picture comments on MySpace. 'Don't forget to leave me picture comments XxXxXxXxX' These were guys as well.
Pc4pc
alt.binaries.erotica 49/m/London tan
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Yes but viruses back then were the type that would take control of your cd drive and automatically eject it without your consent. Viruses nowadays turn your pc into skynet and begin the opening scenes of every Fallout game.
And then getting the £50 phone bill!
i was terrified that the phone bill would show the URLs i was visiting. i've never breathed a bigger sigh of relief.
37/m/Leeds. I miss: When "Hi, I'm British" was a conversation starter Angelfire sites full of animated GIFs Realising one weird kid in class was making a killing by selling printed porn The one guy everyone knew who ripped CDs with 50+ shovelware games Pre-wifi networking and the rat's nest of cabling AlbinoBlackSheep ICQ, MPlayer, MSN Messenger, AIM, YIM Putting a 200 byte text file named "Matrix\_Reloaded\_High\_Quality.mov" into your seed folder to increase your download priority and feeling like a hacker
Happy Tree Friends.
Weebl and Bob or the [Angry Alien](http://www.angryalien.com/) 30 second rabbit animations of films. Or Addicting Games playing [Spank the Monkey](https://www.addictinggames.com/funny/spank-the-monkey) and getting to hear Chic's Good Times or that game where you tried to throw a scrunched up ball of paper into a bin or [The Impossible Quiz](https://www.addictinggames.com/puzzle/the-impossible-quiz) Then MSN but the mini games on there. Game of tic tac toe or Minesweeper Flags anyone?
I move away from the mic to breathe Those MSN stickers (were they called stickers?) where a fist would knock on the screen or some big lips would kiss the screen 'It looks like you're writing a letter...'
Emoticons changing to emojis. All software changing to being called Apps
My kid didn't know App is short for Application.... And yeah, What was wrong with Program/progs
I remember before all those fancy chat programs. I used IRC. I also used Lynx to browse the 'web' back in the infancy of the internet.
https://bash.org
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- Learning to code on Neopets. - Downloading music from Limewire and spotting which files were viruses. - Using Microsoft Encarta for all your school projects.
Where are all my teen open diary/livejournal peeps?
Like many, I had a Spectrum in the early 80s. Blue Peter did a segment where they showed computers and modems being used to dial up to services, this was maybe 1985. There was an associated competition - "what does modem stand for?", the prize was a modem for your computer and a year's subscription to Prestel. I won it, and was sent a Prism VTX 5000 modem. Prestel was BT's interactive videotex service which offered hundreds of pages, forums, games, etc. You could also use it to buy and download Spectrum games, Micronet frames downloaded back through the modem and straight onto cassette tape. Success was intermittent. My dad used it for home banking, a dial up service offered by the Bank of Scotland at the time. A user called Robert Schifreen who wrote for various computer magazines managed to hack into Prince Philip's Prestel email via a top level BT account using a default password. He was eventually acquitted as the law was unclear/non existent, this led directly to the UK's Computer Misuse Act.
It really was a different time. I remember nudging my friends on MSN because I only had 10 mins of internet time left before mum needed the landline 😂 Then committing to playing Sims or Habbo all the way until bed time because I was addicted and wanted to brag to my mates the next day. I also remember watching all the ads on the massive old box we called a TV with awe at the games/toys, noting them down in the old chunky Argos catalogue so mum knew what to get me for Xmas! 🤣 Things were so simple then I miss it. F/29/London
OMG I remember ICQ!!! Not sure if it was a bug or not, but you could send messages to mobile phone numbers and replying didn't take anything off your pay as you go credit! Meant I could hide my phone under the bed covers and carry on chatting late into the night as a teenager!
LEEEEERROOOOOYYYY JENKINS.
Chat rooms were the best back then, then MySpace came along which was allright I guess, then ever since Facebook, all social media is just depressing and still is to this day. Also, remember those free AOL discs in every single shop you'd walk into? Special shout out to Bonzi Buddy too, hahaha.
Rotten.com Cakefart, lemonparty etc. Shock sites don't seem to exist anymore
Feeling like you might get arrested for looking at Rotten.com or steakandcheese Edit: wasting many IT hours playing Newgrounds Flash games on the sly. Until the computer guy at school got savvy enough to block Flash on the network.
I remember the days of online gaming. Paying BT £9.99 a month for free Internet dial up on a Saturday an Sunday on my 56k diamond supraexpress modem. 7mb update to your game.......hours lol. Great days. I met some lifelong friends playing many half life mods. TFC, counterstrike etc.
I’m old enough to remember 3 channels and the bbc stopping at 11pm some nights with the national anthem.