Wednesday, April 18, 2012

What is the coolest thing ever?


Remember when the internet was first sort of becoming popular and e-mail was, like, PINE? Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha! Holy cow, I wonder if my Pine email is still active? I don't even remember what it was.

Also... I seem to remember that having a girlfriend was way better than the internet. I suspect this is still true, O High Schoolers Everywhere.

Alright, Old Timers... share some memories of what the world was like before "the coolest thing ever" came into existence.

5 comments:

  1. I remember begging my parents for a second land line so I could use the phone & the Internet at the same time. Oh the days…

    ReplyDelete
  2. All right, here you go: dialing in to a BBS server on a 2400 Baud Modem - man, that was waaaaaaay faster than the old 1200 Baud models used to be! And once there, you could post messages and read other people's messages - in plain text, no avatars. No graphics at all, in fact: if you wanted graphics, you had to make them out of ascii characters.

    Let's see if that still works...

    n .'''.
    .'''. .". '''
    ''' / -=\ ...
    n |. -=.| n '...'
    .../-\:.===.:/-\
    '...:=:|:/o\:|:=: ....
    ''. |H|.'|T|`.|H| '....'
    '' ,'='=,-:-,='-'.
    :-|/o\|:|;|:|/o\|-:
    ., |'|---=======---|'|
    ;:;, .,, ..,|;_.;;..;;;..;;.|;|,,. .;.
    :::;|___|=========================|___| ,.
    :;:;;===| .::. .:::::. .::. |===|;;;
    ::;;:___|_|;;;;|_|;;;;;;;|_|;;;;|_|__.::::
    :;:;,,,/===/,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,\===\::;;;;
    l42::/===/:::::::::::::::::::::::\===\;:;:
    =================================================

    There you go: Sacre-Couer.

    Dragging and dropping? Nope. Anything you wanted to do, you did with text commands. Even our video games were text-based.

    Oh, and that server that we dialed into? It had a 1 MB hard drive. Yes, you read that right. It was really that big - I mean, absolutely huge, we were never going to be able to fill up that much storage space.

    We didn't share URLs for sites; there weren't any. We shared phone numbers for BBSs and other servers. Search engines? Ha! No such thing.

    Well, you know, until we did.

    Ah, the good old days...

    ReplyDelete
  3. Oh, man, the comment form ate my ascii! Oh, well - follow the link - he has examples in his lessons.

    Here, we'll try a simple one - have a kitty cat:

    =^_^=

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  4. MM -- I convinced the company that I worked for to fork out $1000 so I could connect to those BBSes even faster. I thought I was in heaven.

    Remember CompuServe? It was like the pre-internet. You could read, download, chat, play games, look at news ...

    Oh, and here's a kitty with eyes: =^..^=

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. The $1000 was for a 9600 bps modem ...

      Delete