How It Used To Be

Keith W

Keith W

Suspended / Banned
Messages
7,408
Edit My Images
Yes
Do you remember how it used to be?

I do

theouternet.jpg
 
I remember when the internet was decent and basically consisted of message boards and a few online shops like amazon... And the days when ebay was good. Now its just a haven for piracy and crap basically.

I also miss the nostalgia when you'd send off a mail order to complete your shareware episode of "Duke Nukem" et al and if you were lucky enough to have a modem you could play online.
 
I remember those days, ebay was great back then - fees were affordable, paypal wasn't part of them and ebay payments was free and better. The bargains were impressive. Amazon had every book under the sun and they were in stock there was none of this marketplace nonsense, and Google wasn't plastered in sponsored ads or spammed with adword spamming link websites that have no relevance to what you searched for.. Everyone's own personal website was hosted on angelfire and if you wanted a map you went to multimap or the ordnance survey.
 
Last edited by a moderator:
I remember playing Duke Nukem on a PC about 10+ yrs- sorry but just thought I'd ad that :lol: Was a cracking good game...
 
Eeeeeeee, those be the good ol' days. At a time when I used to be able to take a tram into town for ha'penny thrupence half crown - aaaaaaaaaand still had enough change left over for a good time.

:D
 
I miss it.

The worst part for me is when you actually do meet up with your friends and they start 'checking in' and replying to comments about where they checked in instead of actually being there in the moment.

My girlfriend came round to see me last night, poured herself a glass of wine, sat down next to me on the couch and then proceeded to play Drawsome literally all night.

Maybe I'm just dull company
 
^lol my OH does that.

I've never checked in ever, I don't even know how :lol:
 
trencheel303 said:
I remember when the internet was decent and basically consisted of message boards and a few online shops like amazon... And the days when ebay was good. Now its just a haven for piracy and crap basically.
Click to expand...

I remember when the internet consisted of usenet and email, as Tim Berners-Lee hadn't turned on the first HTTP server.

The world was not a better place then.
 
Trig's said:
I remember playing Duke Nukem on a PC about 10+ yrs- sorry but just thought I'd ad that :lol: Was a cracking good game...
Click to expand...

I seem to remember losing 6 months of my life playing Doom!

Still THE single best video game EVER - Wolfenstein invented the genre but Doom perfected it
 
And there was Creamola foam.... Ah,.... Them were the days
 
Last edited:
oh you mean the days when i'd get a bill off compuserve for £200 for a MONTH'S ACCESS to the internet!! I only used it to dial in to our Midland Bank Invoice Finance (aka Griffin Factors) service, upload invoices, check balances etc.. then again i always wondered where my business partner got those 'screensavers' and 'wallpapers' from :naughty:
 
DC2Z said:
And everyone seemed to be on freeserve
Click to expand...

I was with Demon Internet, even then. Still have my "tenner a month" dialup account, not that I ever dial into it.
 
footman said:
I started off with Delphi before a GUI type web was thought of. The search engine was called Gopher and I got thrilled by trawling the exhibit list of the Smithsonian!
Click to expand...

Gopher was the browser and server - the search engine was called VERONICA - Very Easy Rodent-Orientated Network Index of Computer <something>... or some such. Never thought it would catch on - when you had telnet access to library & museum catalogues (and internet shops)... all this graphics and page mark up won't work on dial up (9600 baud back then if you were flashy - most people at 1200 or 2400 or the Rolls-Royce 2400 with MNP5 compression).

First modem I had was 300 baud, allowed me to go online to Maplin's order computer (I'm old enough to have a 4 digit customer number at Maplin which throws all the "yoof" on the tills) - place the order and pay for it all in as little as 15 minutes. Then a series of upgrades before I got online "proper" via Newcastle Uni's PAD (I wrote a letter to the Computing Department and asked - they said yes...) at 9600 baud.... ah those far off days.

<Waits for the packet radio geeks to show up with KA9Q/NOS, tales of 1200 baud, 30% packet loss, the bloke in Silksworth who advertised himself as a gateway to the rest of the world, buggered off on holiday and came back to find his antenna had been felled>
 
hunnymonster said:
Gopher was the browser and server - the search engine was called VERONICA - Very Easy Rodent-Orientated Network Index of Computer <something>... or some such. Never thought it would catch on - when you had telnet access to library & museum catalogues (and internet shops)... all this graphics and page mark up won't work on dial up (9600 baud back then if you were flashy - most people at 1200 or 2400 or the Rolls-Royce 2400 with MNP5 compression).

First modem I had was 300 baud, allowed me to go online to Maplin's order computer (I'm old enough to have a 4 digit customer number at Maplin which throws all the "yoof" on the tills) - place the order and pay for it all in as little as 15 minutes. Then a series of upgrades before I got online "proper" via Newcastle Uni's PAD (I wrote a letter to the Computing Department and asked - they said yes...) at 9600 baud.... ah those far off days.

<Waits for the packet radio geeks to show up with KA9Q/NOS, tales of 1200 baud, 30% packet loss, the bloke in Silksworth who advertised himself as a gateway to the rest of the world, buggered off on holiday and came back to find his antenna had been felled>
Click to expand...

Wow, I thought some of the photography threads got a little technical! I understood literally none of that :lol:
 
I still have an old Heathkit(?) 1200 baud modem with 5 pin DIM serial port that my uncle built and gave to me, it probably still works too. I remember being over the moon when the first provider offered 1p a minute flat rate access, I could play U.O for 60p an hour!
 
onomatopoeia said:
I remember when the internet consisted of usenet and email, as Tim Berners-Lee hadn't turned on the first HTTP server.

The world was not a better place then.
Click to expand...

As they say these days, (well the probably don't any more) Usenet FTW!
I even asked my ISP to register a new usenet group a.b.pandora 'back in da day'. I used to be a bit naughty.
 
What was the other payment system that rivalled paypal, for a while anyway?? I think I've still got an account for it somewhere
 
footman said:
I started off with Delphi before a GUI type web was thought of. The search engine was called Gopher and I got thrilled by trawling the exhibit list of the Smithsonian!
Click to expand...

I used an Atari ST with half a meg of memory and a 520 disc.. no HD. I could log into a shell account and use all the above..Made my first web page using an Atari ST :)

My first ever internet connection was an IRC connection that got me on the first day talking to Alexander Clauss who was on the atari channel..he made the first internet browser for the atari (icab).. he sent me the right config files and got me online (nice fella)... the browser was icab that went on to be a mac web browser..
 
Also it's how much you get for your money, technology having made such huge strides.
Today I received a Seagate drive, 2Tb for about £98 delivered.

I can remember having an Amstrad back in about 1988/89. It had 2 floppy drives but no HDD, I didn't actually know what a hard drive was!
A little later I had a 30Mb hdd put in at a cost, I think, of about £60!
 
dod said:
What was the other payment system that rivalled paypal, for a while anyway?? I think I've still got an account for it somewhere
Click to expand...

Billpoint was Ebay's own provider until they took on paypal. Nochex was also very popular
 
fabs said:
All this nostalgia about the days when it took minutes to load a web page and, if someone else was on the phone in the house, you were stuffed anyway! :lol:
Click to expand...

That's why I never got any sleep, 0800 dial up through the small hours lol made some good Internet friends in auz funnily enough lol
 
I got hugely addicted to this which came with my first PC in 1999. Windows 98 on a "Tiny" 450 mhz Pentium III with 128 mb ram and 8 mb AGP ATi graphics card. :geek:

167481-800-600.jpg


Only bought such a PC so that I could get on the internet and have my own email address.
At first connecting up to the internet used to cost me the price of the phone call so I made a point of logging on after 9 pm when it was cheaper - then it was a fixed 1p a minute before eventually made it unlimited acesss for a fixed monthly fee . . . and that was it, my social life died on that day, even though I was still using a 56K modem. :geek:
It was with AOL - and still am with them to this day where I use the same email address.

Yeeeeeeeeeees, AOL still does exist - well, at least in name only. :lol:

I owned an Amiga A1200 before that PC, but that's another story for another day.
 
I sometimes wish I grew up in different times. The internet, the facebook obsession and the online gaming obsession gets really annoying and teenagers are becoming dumber and lazier year by year. I'm sure it was so much better back in the day when people hung out with their mates in the park, did more sport etc.

Of course there were drawbacks then as well, but everything has.
 
trencheel303 said:
^lol my OH does that.

I've never checked in ever, I don't even know how :lol:
Click to expand...

whats checking in?

were still on freeserve, well my parents are, its now talk talk after orange bought out freeserve, then talk talk bought out orange broadband, they have still got the email too !!!
 
Its when you go on facebook and "check in" at the location you're at which is then recorded on fb. I'm pretty ambivalent towards the whole thing to be honest, but he loves doing it. Hell I only joined facebook properly last year and it took a lot of convincing. (Well, I did have it previously but got rid after a few days).
 
would much rather of lived in the days before so much technology existed and you had to go to the pub/play sport etc to see/find out what your mates have been upto rather than been sat on the computer all the time
 
I remember growing up in hong kong with free telephone calls so people were running their own BBS systems you would have to dial up to to chat and play glow war, was lucky with an old IBM pc with a 20mb hard drive before the Internet was around...
 
c6 cya said:
would much rather of lived in the days before so much technology existed and you had to go to the pub/play sport etc to see/find out what your mates have been upto rather than been sat on the computer all the time
Click to expand...

No one's forcing you to use it! Try something radical like switching your gadgets off and go out :)
 
bartoszwozniak said:
teenagers are becoming dumber and lazier year by year. I'm sure it was so much better back in the day when people hung out with their mates in the park, did more sport etc.
Click to expand...
I have not seen my families or friends children in years. Everytime I visit friends and family, I say where are the kids. I expect the answer to be, oh they are out doing something. But no, they are locked away in their bedroom on the computer!

But there again I am always on the computer :) But I was always out and about as a kid, just like the rest of us!
 
I spent most of my life as a kid outside but to be fair we never had a computer and in my younger years our summers were blessed with mostly good weather.

I do think the weather up here has genuinely changed over the last 15 years, we used to get weeks of sun at a time, now we're lucky to get a few weeks of dry and properly nice weather over the entire year.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top