Although I progressed from my childhood into my teens in the 90s, l don’t retain much memory of the internet back then as l had no exposure to it.
Although I progressed from my childhood into my teens in the 90s, l don’t retain much memory of the internet back then as l had no exposure to it.
First got AOL in maybe 1995/1996. That was back during the days of dial up and 1 phone line per house. Where you could be in online chats, then get knocked off because someone called your house. Finding your way into Warez/Server/Zeraw rooms run by AOL proggies like Fate-X and getting the first exposure to piracy. That’s how I first learned VB programming, Photoshop with EyeCandy, and Bryce 3D in Jr High. It’s also how my PC got crazy viruses. These had to be downloaded in from 10+ volumes via WinRAR. The game changer was when AOL finally added download resume so if you got knocked offline by a phone call when the download was at 90% you could simply resume it instead of having to restart. And you could queue email downloads, so you could have 20+ emails queued and let it download overnight.
The shit storm hit one summer when the AOL user base increased faster than they could expand and it was nothing but busy signals trying to connect. They eventually caught up but it was baaad.
Then came the era of “free” dialup internet services where it was a matter of having some ad bars run whole connected…but there were ways around that. Then About 2 year later cable internet started becoming common.
Also all the MP3s played on super early versions of WinAMP, back when the playlist and equalizer were dockable, long before the era of gnutella and Napster.
I almost never see anyone talking about AOL proggies.
Those things were so legit. Half of them probably were viruses, but being able to run games in chatrooms and such were so awesome.
Oh they were! I had a huge collection of those full suite proggies, a couple different punters, phishing tools, and servers. I even programmed my own punter at one point.