Staying up till 2am to play BRE (Baron Realms Elite) on a local BBS. 2am because that was a time I could dial in without the line being busy.
I also played a little LORD (Legend of the Red Dragon), but BRE was my favorite.
this post was submitted on 24 Jun 2023
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Asklemmy
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Check out bbsemu if you wanna relive that. I know they have LORD for sure, and itβs a really quick setup - unlike the old BBS software.
Thanks for the suggestion, I did not know about that. It will be fun to relive those old games.
Configuring a TCP to PPP socket so I could dial in to my college account. I always like getting things to work more than the end result. Like I have more memories of editing autoexec.bat and comfig.sys files than actually playing the games that helped me boot up.
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Creating my own Proboards message boards and discovering Alien Adoption Agency.
Discovering that Burning Man exists. I'd never heard of it until I followed a link from Boing Boing and my head exploded.
Definitely Chatrooms π
Earliest thing I remember was, as a kid of maybe 6 or 7, my family got internet installed (circa 95/96), and I found an early PokΓ©mon fansite (via Yahooligans, most likely) that listed all 150 PokΓ©mon and the "meaning" of their names (ie Hitmonchan and Hitmonlee are combinations of "hit" and Jackie Chan and Bruce Lee respectively). I was of course only just learning to read, so it took me a few visits to the website to read though every entry, but I was so stoked to see such engaging content on this new "internet"-thing
Downloading a file and after hours of downloading it gets stuck at 99%
Vbulletin boards and general forum sites before the likes of Facebook and Reddit got big. Made a lot of friends on there.
Neopets was great as well. Loved the minigames.
I admin-ed my own vBulletin board around 04-06. The script itself cost about Β£90 back then. It was so great though. Small community of like-minded people all chattng. It was like a slow-Discord or a more intimate Reddit.
I installed a ton of extensions for people to play Flash games at one point too.
One day I accidentally forgot to pay hosting and the site vanished. Lost it all. Never bothered relaunching.
Newgrounds most definitely. And as an earlier poster stated, muds. Specifically MUME. Oh man many hours have been spent playing that game
"You got mail"
BonziBuddy destroying the family computer.
It's not that early, but eyezmaze.com (which apparently still exists) was one of those sites I found one day and regularly played on for years.
If you want to get a feeling of the old internet, look here: https://search.marginalia.nu/explore/random
To be clear, those are not (only) old sites, but a lot of them feel like the old web.
Eyezmaze β€οΈ
When there were dedicated websites to silly gimmick/songs like Hamster Dance, Boogie Blocks, etc.
Probably watching an old Ed Edd N Eddy fan animation I found on yt that I cannot find a trace of anymore, or just the old yt shit post videos in general. That, or things like getting on Nitrome or any other site to play flash games. Mutiny on Nitrome was one of my absolute favorite flash games and one I never beat since I was still young.
So many!
MS Comic Chat and their weird VR Chat, the former was always very lively and a great introduction to the world of IRC, the latter was just experimental and trippy.
Usenet and finding lively discussion, flamewars and so much porn and spam under one roof.
Instant Messengers like ICQ and AIM being the lifeblood of the social world.
I think the thing I miss the most is that there was so much to discover and discovering it was very much a word of mouth thing, you had to find links from friends, follow webrings and pointers from sites that made it onto Altavista and Yahoo (or astalavista for the less legit stuff), now everything is consolidated onto a handful of platforms, it feels less open than ever.
astalavista
Oh my god - I'd completely forgotten about that place! I just checked and it's stil alive: https://astalavista.box.sk/search/
I remember it being dark blue when I used it back in the 90s though.
I wasn't born back then, but it would have been the fact that search results weren't total crap like today: only reddit seems to offer decent results if you don't want sites like wikihow to come up... I wrote a more elaborate blogpost partly about it.
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An old browser strategy game called Archmage, run by a company called Mari, if I remember right. You accumulated turns over time, and then you spent your turns casting spells, summoning armies and attacking other players for land. All text based, but with a fair bit of complexity.
MUDs too. I played on one called Elsweyr, that was a good time.
making a geocities with friends
I was a big MST3k fan back in the day. When it was on Sci-Fi, they had a MST3k-themed site called "Caption This" where it took screengrabs of whatever was on the channel at the time and you'd crack jokes about it.
It doesn't sound that interesting now, but if you're familiar with the show you'd see the appeal.
Also having to wait five minutes for a single JPEG of boobs to show up. Really helped teach a person patience.
The AOL kids home page with all flash games. I played a lot of the tom and Jerry blueprint game.