CompuServ chat rooms when I was 8.
I turned 8 in 92 by the way 😄😄😄😄😄😄😄
Anything to do with nickserv ??🤔🤔🤔
lol no. It was pre-IRC. Technically pre-WWW. This was in a weird period between when the first commercial ISPs became a thing and websites as we know them today began to pop up. It was all kind of self-contained. You were connecting to a curated network of things and not untethered to explore everything connected to “the internet.”
You mean before the dot com boom ??🤔🤔🤔🤔🤔
I mean slightly before dot com even existed.
First social media account I signed up up for was msn to talk to a girl I liked. Msn is long gone, but that girl is now my wife
Here is to us that met our wives on the internet before online dating. We will be married 25 years this year.
Congrats! My wife and I hit 21 this year… though we met in person, in a cage filled with vending machines.
Crazy to think she has been a contact on almost all of them, at least the main ones of the time AIM/ICQ/IRC/MSN/YAHOO…
What sort of cage is that ??? Not in a zoo of course ??😳😳😳
Lol… Nah, there was an area at our high school with a row of vending machines, to keep kids from buying stuff outside of lunchtime they put two big sliding metal grates in front of them with a padlock on it. At lunch they would remove the lock and slide the grates in front of each other a bit and put the lock back on. It left us with a little cage with an entrance on each end.
🤯🤯🤯… You actually remained married that long ??😳😳😳😳😳😳
You get less for murder
Does Neopets count? I think I made my first account there in either late 2002 or early 2003.
I too had opened my first account around that time, but I came across Neopets today.
IRC… Does that count?
I still jump on IRC from time to time
What’s that ??🤔🤔🤔
Internet Relay Chat. It was developed in the late 1980s or early 1990s, I dont remember which. Its still going. I’m using it daily.
Could you tell me how to register on this ???
You don’t need to register… but, this is where things get complicated… First you need a IRC client (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_IRC_clients), doesn’t really matter which one, some are more simple, some are not. Some look nice, some dont.
When you have a IRC client, you need to find a IRC network (https://netsplit.de/networks/top100.php), then you have to connect to that network.
Then you have to find a channel in that network to connect to and then you can start chatting. Note that all networks have their own channels. For example if theres a #India channel on Quakenet, that is different from the #India channel in IRCnet etc.
Edit: A lot of IRC networks have a webchat possibility, for example Quakenet has one, https://webchat.quakenet.org/ Put in a username, write a channel you wish to join and click “join chat”
Does posting on BBS count as ‘social media’? Asking for a friend.
Totally counts my man. In the early-mid '00s my wife and I were stationed in Germany and she knew no one so I hatched a plan. I registered a domain, set up a basic BBS, and we had business cards printed out with her name, email, and the address. Anytime she ran into another mom at the commissary, px, or just around base she would pass them out and organize a playgroup. From what I’ve heard it is still around, it just moved to Facebook.
She really got out of her shell and she organized a ton of playgroups (reserving community centers or organizing backups in case of bad weather). It was called K-Town Moms (the K was for Kaiserslautern). Good times and fond memories.
Could you please elaborate what is BBS ??🤔🤔🤔
BBS. My bad, I should have added a link. But I insist: I’m not that old, I’m only asking for a friend 😇
WOW 😲😲 So it was used way back in the 70s ??🤔🤔🤔
We need to go back to these basics, considering how the big corps are tightening their noose around our neck.
I only started using it in the early to mid-80s myself, but yeah its kinda getting old… a bit like me, as a matter of fact ;)
We need to go back to these basics, considering how the big corps are tightening their noose around our neck.
I would love to see a lot of young people agree with you, but it’s already so late I’m not even sure it’s still possible to massively move back to a pre corporate-owned tech. People have been taught to expect convenience above anything else… it will be hard work to change that… which doesn’t go along very well with the idea of convenience.
To be honest, Zuckerberg and l are of the same age. He’s looking how to give younger people more convenience, whereas l would love to take the internet out of the clutches of the big corps.
Bulletin board system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulletin_board_system
Compuserve, dialing in, pre-internet
Absolutely new terms😄😄😄
Remember we used
fingerto list the users on another university’s server then usedtalkto chat with them. Thenbbsfor boards/forums,ircfor large chat rooms,mudfor game (shadows of the mind - the one I used to play on).Can I feel old now?
To any French person here. Skyblog
That shit was lit, everyone was on it in France at some point but it then disappeared when Facebook arrived.
Bolt was my first social media experience in the mid 90s. I hardly ever hear people talk about it and I didn’t notice anyone mention it in this thread. There were forums, games, chat rooms, and you could earn different badges. It was perfect for middle school me. I was introduced to a lot of good punk bands through forums there.
In the mid90s, l too was in middle school, but that was the time when l was actually getting acquainted with world wide web.
I started typing classes in 2nd grade and I spent a ton of time at my local library going into middle school. My intro to the internet was Bolt and the SciFi channel chat rooms in 6-7th grade. We watched a ton of SciFi channel stuff and they were constantly advertising their chat rooms.
Go Sliders chat!
Were you born in 84 ?? Anyways, since you’re so close to my age, I might learn more new stuff about internet history from you, as you’ve actually been using the internet back then.
I am an 84 baby! I don’t remember a whole lot about that time as I only had access at the library, but we did go a few times a week. Most of my time was spent on either Bolt talking about punk music and books or in chat rooms talking about Sliders, Star Trek, and science fiction. I was part of the initial push to renew MST3K way back in the day when online petitions were far less frequent. I remember building my first web page on Geocities and how everyone had a visitor tracker to compare how “popular” our websites were. It was a simple time with a lot less distraction.
I didn’t have a computer at home until I turned 18. When I finally did, I played a lot of Quake and hung out in some IRC channels. Again, talking about punk, scifi, and books.
Other than no longer having a Geocities page, my internet activities haven’t changed much over the last 30ish years. I still primarily talk about punk, Star Trek, science fiction, and books, now splashed with bunnies and plants lol
On the off chance that any of my old scifi channel chat room friends are out there, Pony says hi to Carly, Joe, and Drew.
It was in 98 probably… Definitely before the Y2K 🐛, that l got a hands on exposure to the internet at the British Council Library. Also to multimedia at the same time.
It’s good you still got in early so you can remember what it was like before enshittification. Libraries are magical places. I used to spend entire weekends there online or reading. I still go at least once a week to borrow blurays and books. I’m building a digital collection of moves and tv shows with my borrowed media.
What was the first place you remember hanging out online?
Myspace ??🤔🤔🤔
I guess, Gaia Online? That’s the first thing I can think of making an account on.
Do you remember when it was ??🤔🤔🤔
Oh man, 04? 05?
Hearing about it in 26.
Yeah I was in 5th grade I think. Long fuckin time ago. Lots changed since then I’m sure.
I’m an 80s generation by the way.
Oh right ok so you may have been slightly “too old” for that at the time.
Must have been early 2001 when I joined http://www.irc-galleria.net/
I think I was amongst the first few thousand users on the site.
I began my internet journey around that time. There was the internet explorer as the main browser back then.
I went from Netscape to Firefox. Never really used IE
From lE, l jumped straight into firefox. There was also a yahoo browser back then ??🤔🤔🤔
I wouldn’t know about that. Yahoo wasn’t really a thing where I am from.
I used yahoo for searching and mailing in lndia. Where are you from ??
Finland.
Okay 😊😊
Slashdot and Segfault.
At the time, all my online friends used it to discuss techie things.
First social network with real people in my local area? Whirlpool.net.au
It started as a site for peer support for one ISP but became a forum for local and regional technological issues.
There were also other niche forums for niche interests, including a Nissan Pulsar forum; we would organise cruises IRL and share technical information.
Most of these communities have been subsumed by Meta, which I believe is a terrible thing. Their platforms are not as conducive for that sort of socialising, without significant amounts of friction.
These names l’m hearing from you… Thanks for sharing 😃😃😃
I will admit that segfault was not a great community. It was a humour site, a parody of Slashdot similar to The Onion.
One of the features of Segfault was a poll. Due to how it was coded, it was trivial to add custom answers to any poll. Due to the nature of the Internet (with a capital I) at the time, quite a few ‘netizens’ were very deviant. Any time a new poll was created, one of the options would be “Natalie Portman Topless”.
I am pretty sure all the people responsible for this have either grown up and learnt the errors of their ways of gone to 4chan.
I remember that phrase now, Natalie Portman Topless😆😆😆😆😆
If IRC or Usenet count, sometime in the '90s for my own account. I had a myspace fairly early and Facebook back when it was .edu only (I forget which was earlier). I’m old
Oh yes… Now l remember… I had created account on myspace as well… Thanks for coming up with the name 😃😃😃
I think it was livejournal, but there’s a chance I had some forum account somewhere even before that.
Deadjournal had a better color scheme but thanks for the reminder.
Not a social media user back then, my first account was either in a forum or in roblox [2016 roblox 😔].
Both is lost.I messaged my friends using Whatsapp, my mom’s account
What’s app came in later, after apps got developed for mobile phones. Actually l grew up seeing pagers in people’s pocket. They were fairly well to do people according to our social standards.
I am not old man 😅
