None of that is a flex. ICQ is the same shit from the endless September. Personally I used to read Usenet on a mainframe, and thought it was cool we could see weather maps with gopher. I don't think any of this makes me cool at all. Just that I was nerdy and liked the escape technology used to be when the signal to noise was good.

Honestly, the people who were around in the early internet days helped build the online world we all use now. A little respect for the veterans of dial-up isn’t a bad thing. 😄

"I have usernames older than you" is actually a pretty sick burn

Shit, my steam account is older than most of the highschoolers I work with

Okay, I get this may be off-topic, but "It is okay to bully--", no, it's not okay to bully anyone. What is passing by these people's minds?

23715769

Social media used to be about socializing and communicating. These days its all drivel that has bren productized into a vehicle where streaming addictive brain rot keeps the advertisements flowing and lowers self esteem.

Gen Z may have adopted the internet but it was born of us- AIM, yahoo messenger, ICQ, IRC servers, news groups... all on a dial-up modem. The good old days where there wasnt enough bandwidth for all the ads of today, and the most intrusive ads were a 468x60 pixel banner at the top or bottom of the netscape page

I am one of the few people, it seems, that can not for the life of me remember my ICQ number... but I was there, using it.

Anyone remember Trillian? Having your Yahoo, AIM, ICQ, Messenger, etc all in one program..

I will invoke the old words

A/S/L

ICQ? Listen here, young man.

I grew up in outback Australia, in the before times. My first time online was a 1200-baud modem on a BBC Electron.

We did school over HF radio with School of the Air, had no phone lines, and barely reliable electricity.

Do not speak to me of the deep magics. I was there when they were written.

double biceps flex

farts

breaks a hip

BBS was the shiz in the olden days

Oh, you think the darkness is your ally. But you merely adopted the dark.

These kids have never been slapped around a bit with a large trout and it shows.

I have usernames older than you

Can't wait till I can use that did someday.

The dude who answers, reminds me of my dad.

...yeah, come back after you've pulse-dialed an acoustic coupler at 300 baud to network your terminal emulator with a shell account, kid...

I was on Usenet before AOL even knew it existed.

Assuming y'all aren't just fucking around, reading the comments here is actually really cool, tangentially interacting with people who have internet stories from well before I was born

I'm just from the dialup era, and I still feel old online a lot of the time, but then someone here is like "yeah, Berners-Lee invented HTTP just to make a website to mock me"

I remember ARPANET before it was privatized. Before TBL made Mosaic and the first web server, when all there was was USENET discussions, FTP, and Gopher. I set up mail and news over uucp dialup for clients in the 80s. I ran System III Venix on a PDP-11. I was a sysadmin on a team managing a dual CPU VAX 9000 with 192MB of RAM in 1990. Which was a lot back then. I'm old.

If you bought your dial-up internet from your local newspaper, there’s a pretty good chance I was doing tech support for it.

I've known adventures, seen places you people will never see, I've been on university work terminals and back... frontiers! I've stood on the back deck of Usenet bound for Mosaic with sweat in my eyes watching Netscape Navigator fight on the shoulder of the internet... I've felt wind in my hair, riding Lynx off of monochrome monitors and seen usegroups burn like a match and disappear. I've seen it, felt it...!

I was on BBS forums in the '80s.

You wouldn't be in my Top 8

I chuckled. I miss MySpace. Choosing a song for your profile was great. Facebook should add that feature to their profiles. So should Bluesky and Mastodon.

Yeah, seems there is a belief that past a certain age, you should have zero fun, be nothing but a wage slave, and die somewhere quietly, where no one will see what fate awaits you.

Well, I happen to think minors especially should not have access to social media, or at least somehow have minor only social media.

Prevents them interacting with predators, getting brainrotted, and most importantly: leaves us with more mature people to interact with.

Friends, hear my story…

In the days of old, the days where 300 baud modems were bought by us, the Early Adopters, there were meetings in dark places where code was exchanged on cassette, to be loaded from our tape drives, to create a new BBS, and you - yes you, dear reader - could be your very own SysOp. A king! Let them fall before you as you interrupted their email to live chat. Behold a world where encryption dare not tread, and you, My SysOp, could read the thoughts of all your subjects! Enter a universe where mom picking up the phone downstairs, only to be greeted with digital screeching, turned your conversations into garbled, alien characters before your eyes!

This is where it began. This is where I began. And thus shall I endure, today, tomorrow, and all tomorrows. The lore is mine and mine alone to carry.

Post on, dear friends. I did all this for you.

Adobe flash games and adobe flash videos. Beige computers. Monochrome monitors. Trackball mice. DOS. The original Doom. Newgrounds. Joe Cartoon, Killfrog, and Stickdeath. Napster and Limewire. Geocities. Forums for days. Browser games like Utopia.

I remember the rise and fall of icq. I laughed from the real internet as you kids played, knowing it was a fad wouldn’t last, not worth taking seriously.

I played online before the internet, when it was scattered individuals, or when you needed access to separate telenet and arpanet, when you could keep in your head all the accessible nodes, when the building blocks you take for granted were all new and exciting ideas

Now get off my lawn