Sup Holla Forums, don't know if this is the right place to ask, but are there any oldfags here...

I was into arcade games back then. Computers were expensive and mostly for adults but I did get to play on the Atari when it first came out, playing Pong and Frogger. I got the original Nintendo when I was about 12 or so. Shit was so cash. My first computer that I was allowed to play with was the Commodore 64, playing old DOS games and the original Sid Meyer's Pirates. When I was in my early teens Yahoo and AOL just came out, but when I was younger we didn't have networked computers. I think I was 14 when a family could actually purchase an intenet subscription. BBS was shitty back then, but then I was a kid too, I wanted them anime tiddies. Now I actually like to read, but back then using the internet for serious business was for a middle-aged guy in a sweater, you know the type.

I really wish there was documentation on this kind of stuff apart from some old archives. Only book I could really find was Net.Wars, and even then, that only really covers post 1993.

I keep getting this kind of response, and I'm wondering if the internet would have been a better place if it remained that niche.

and miss out on pepe? Insanity.

Because a lot of the software was proprietary, once a company closes its doors, the history is lost, the source code is not available. Stallman-sama is very admirable for his visionary thinking in this regard. Dosbox is a DOS emulator and you can find alot of the programs we used in the 80s.

It's not so much about emulation, but more about recording the history, or at least there being more viable primary accounts. It does suck that once the software hits the shit, so does every piece of info it once had goes down with it.

...

I remember browsing usenet on my Dad's 286.
I still miss the sound of modems.
In a way it sucked more because speed was low, but in another way it was better because it wasn't so bloated and commercialized. You couldn't download movies and TV shows, but you could find out certain types of info easier.

Couldn't afford a computer back then, let alone an internet connection. I've seen the subsequent waves of normie immigrants though.

There's a brief period at the beginning where you're in shock, then over a few weeks or months you become desensitized to it. Eventually you just go on with life, a little more broken inside than before, knowing you'll never get back the good old days. Normie morons are like goatse.

I've been browsing 4chan since 2006. That was high school for me. I remember coming home and reading Holla Forums stuff after school. Kept on going through college and beyond and now I'm here. I'm 27.

I used Prodigy as a child--not sure when. A few years before the next anecdote. Prodigy had some madlib story games, a penpal system, stuff like that. I wrote to a prospective penpal, a girl who said she hated school, to tell her that I also hated school. My message was blocked by Prodigy because it included the word "hate". I never sent another message. To this day I have not even dated a girl.

At around 1995 I discovered IRC and remained on it for 48 straight hours, before crashing from exhaustion. On IRC people would throw SJW-tier fits over your behavior, but only about poor grammar and spelling, and about being shit at asking proper technical questions. IRC became like a third parent to me.

The internet today is depressing as fuck. But as I've read my Ourorboros--on the mechanical extension of mankind, I realize that the old internet persists. Those people are still around, and new people like them still pop up. There's just all this normie shit as well, now.

I got a SunOS dialup shell account in 1995, so I guess this was technically after the "eternal september" started, but I think the real downfall started happening with the heavy commercialization that started in late 90's, which eventually led to Web 2.0 disaster. Around that time, spam was starting to become really obnoxious, whereas in 1995 it wasn't a big problem yet. My ISP didn't filter the mail in any way, so I got all the spams, and there really wasn't much to speak of yet. But that all changed in the matter of just a few years.
Anyway the old days were fun. It was more about exploring on your own, instead of mindlessly punching stuff into google or looking shit up on stackexchange or whatever.
Also, I just like text interfaces in general, so I really enjoyed the shell account stuff, and also the dialup BBS that I used to call in early 90's.
Also it's nice that you could use any kind of computer, like old IBM XT/AT, Amiga, Atari, Apple II, Commodore 64, or even some text-only CP/M box. So long as your computer could accomodate some kind of modem, you could get into the BBS and Internet world. Because the text medium has very low requirements and is very portable. The new Internet is the opposite: it locks you into special, heavy web browsers, and soon DRM and so on, that also depend on recent hardware in order to run at acceptable speed.
Here's random video of Amiga BBS:
youtube.com/watch?v=Lxx9UsopV9k

I'm working through a fuckton of coast to coast episodes I downloaded. Good stuff although I don't agree with art all the time and I definitely don't agree with all the hack "prophets" he had on before 2000.

Actually a whole lot of stuff was "open source" back in the very early days of microcomputers. Even computers themselves were fairly open, with stuff based around 8080 or Z80 cpus and the S100 bus. The Apple computer was pretty much designed for hardware hackers from the get-go. It was very popular for that reason in labs even into the 90's. And you could even realistically build your own computer, thanks to books like this:
modmypi.com/download/BuildYourOwnZ80.pdf
With enough memory such a machine could run CP/M, and with that you could do things, because there was a CP/M program for just about everything.
But back to software. There was a ton of source code in various languages published in books and magazines like Dr. Dobbs's Journal. And if you didn't feel like typing all that, it was possible to send in for floppy disks or tapes. A lot of the user groups you could join had some mail operations like this going on. I guess if you were lucky enough to have a modem and phone line, you could also call a BBS and download that stuff, but I never had anything like that in the 80's (we just used pay phones for the longest time).
Anyway my first computer was an Amstrad CPC6128, with the green monochrome screen. Pretty cool system, because it had a ROM BASIC (and a very nice BASIC dialect at that), plus a sound chip and CRTC and 3 graphics modes, so you could play nice games on it. But it could also boot CP/M, since cpu was a Z80. I would often buy some Amstrad magazines, which had listings in BASIC and asm. But I was also able to convert some games for other BASIC dailects to it, scavenged from library books and whatnot. It was a lot of fun and a good learning experience. Here's a video of someone dialing into a BBS with a slighly older Amstrad model (and a 300 baud modem!)
youtube.com/watch?v=3WPMq80wYFY

BTW, I think there's a dump of the entire known Gopherspace from many years ago, that's floating around somewhere. It's like several GB, which is why I didn't download it, but I really should. I'll try to find link...

Well here it is, almost 15 GB of pure Gopher goodness.
archive.org/details/2007-gopher-mirror
It uncompresses to 40 GB, so you'll need lots of space! But there should be some interesting and old stuff in there.

Discovered the Internet/Usenet in August 1986. Got 'write access' in 1989. One of my first postings to Usenet (asking about LZW compression on non-16bit CPUs) got a reply from Dennis Richie! (He mentioned that the DECUS archive had an implimentation for the PDP-8 ... Of course I still vividly remember a moment like that!)

Everyone had their real names. Abuse was extremely rare ("misusing computer center resources...") Everyone was fucking smarter than the average bear. No-one wanted Mainstream users on the network-- Compuserve was greatly hated. AOL was hated even more. We wished 90% of netcom.com users would fuck off and die.

Imagine the best-ever threads here of all time-- they come close to what the early-1990s Usenet had.

What would even be the use of having that?

see