Asklemmy

I remember my Technology teacher in high school (1998-ish) showing me what websites I could go to for downloading full albums for free. He initially showed me a directory just filled with Pink Floyd tracks.

You can still find things in open directories, but it doesn't have that same feel of being wild woolly and free.

I miss early social media like LiveJournal weirdly. 1999-2005-ish was wild times.

I also remember hosting DJ Dangermouse's "Grey Album" which was a mix of The Beatles White Album with Jay-Z's Black Album on my website as protest. The album was released for free, no money was made from it, yet Dangermouse was sued and banned from distributing it.

Before the internet, there was this thing called Fidonet which is a BBS that also allowed transferring files. It was such amazing technology at the time. You had your computer connect to the network using an acoustic modem and then at 300 baud you were on a very early version of a peer-to-peer network.

I remember the pre-facebook era, it was about the same as now just less visually appealing. Ads were worse; they were able to redirect people to pay per view (on your phone bill) sites without notice; if you had a windows pc viruses could literally be installed by visiting a website; installing crackz was a gamble of wether you were infecting your pc or actually getting o play a game; downloads took an entire night and a day for an album; albums actually were sold per song; songs cost money; YouTube didn’t exist so TV was god; we called Friends via landline and listend to them to walk down the stairs as their mother held the apparatus in their hand, waiting to be relieved from her duty. That and most of my now bosses made most of their money scamming people and their competitors. It’s much more civilized now - trust me

I miss Netscape.

It being much less busy with the general populace and corporation

I remember when you could use a credit card generator (I actually learned whatever "algorithm" to create valid Visas as a party trick) and sign up for porn sites for free. Then you could download a crappy, compressed, ten second video if you waited for what seemed like forever.

Now that I think about it, that aspect of it was terrible. Thank goodness I'm alive now and didn't die before free HD porn was readily available on tap.

I do miss ICQ. And running BBS softwares.

IRC and playing Warcraft “online” by dialing my friend’s house. One time we messed with a telnet client. That was neat.

You guys remember pMachine (evolved into ExpressionEngine)? That shit blew my mind when I got it installed. No more Adobe Pagemaker.

Java chat applet embedded in niche websites

Did anyone else play digimon quest to save the net? That was one of the first online games I played on dial up.