NETSCAPE.

Fuck your AOL.

ya so

thats just the browser

I found how the ISP's stuff was converted so you could use it to dial the service directly and didn't need the dialer software.

almost everyone used it at one point

I had infinite internet.

XD

My parents worked for the phone company.

Well I was big into chat room Roleplaying.

It was this deal with the phone company, and the dialer would keep track of the time client side.

Back in 1994.

i had 4 peoples dialup passwords and would just swap them out

good times

They were simpler times

lol

You know what is crazy... you hardly find chat rooms anymore.

I remember downloading gba roms... on dial-up

so much haxorz back then

Equally insecure, but with fewer threats

They pretty much hardly exist anymore.

```AIM WAS THE SHIT
But, I am glad it's gone.```
Concurred.

and they wouldn't put you in prison for shit like that, like Aaron Schwartz.

hell, i like discord because it reminds me of the old aim chatrooms

wild mother fucking west up in this bitch

It's just IRC for the new age

The reason chatrooms were like clamped down hard upon... was pedophiles.

I like Discord because I can post JABBLEWOBBOBB here

They were preying on people.

JABBLEWOBBOBB

JABBLEWOBBOBB

they shut them down because they werent making the companies any money

This is the future, right here.

in any way

Snap.com

Was the place I went to all the time.

Can you still sign up for MySpace?

Snap.com turned into Yahoo.com

The other chatrooms I went too was before hotmail.com

http://hmpg.net/

I can't remember the name.

there is your old shit there

What was the website called before MSN.com took over?

netscape navigator i thought

...I still sometimes use one of the usernames I made up for neopets...

no wait

I think the biggest contrast is that the internet used to be exciting

Now it is only terrifying

The internet is dull now.

Along pretty much every conceivable axis

i cant remember, i didnt look at anything but porn back in those days on the net

I mean back then, we could practically do whatever we what.

porn and diablo2

There was nothing restricted to us.

lol

that was my need for the internet

It was truly the wild west.

But, IRC is surprisingly active still.

ya it is

For better or for worse

I guess they could have turned IRC into something like Discord.

At the time... we had access to all of the webs.

Period.

There was no dark web or deep web.

Because they were the web.

im a distortion

BRB

Almost of all of it was deep web.

back then, the dark web, was just stuff you didnt know the link for

No, the dark/deep web have always existed

Most of the fun places weren't accessible by crawlers.

becuase no one realized someone had put up the page lol

having to get the webcrawler to crawl your site

It qualifies as deep web to me if it's not public and not just indexed by search engine, you actually have to find it yourself.

I think usually to be deep web it also has to be generally inaccessible

i do remember being like 13 and the first time like 5 of us got together and one kids dad had AOL, we snuck into the AOL chatrooms late at night to just talk shit

Also, I used Altavista then.

So, an unindexed public-content site is not part of the deep web

Ask Jeeves... I remember trying to phrase things as questions as a kid

we thought we were the coolest mofos in the world those days

But e.g. every private torrent tracker is, despite having a public IP and DNS name

@TylerC Hahaha! Yeah, the shit talk in the chat rooms was funny.

People actually took it seriously.

We got this one guy really upset on this dating website.

We were pretending we were some hot chick.

@Undead Mockingbird ya at like 3am it was basically just other kids that snuck onto their parents computers

It was the first time I trolled anyone online.

YES

before anyone ever said troll

aye

and we were just assholes lol

and peopel didn't say "click" instead of navigate

TBH I think part of it is that the internet became such a serious place

i fucking hate it when the media says "just click this URL"

Or, more accurately, dominated by serious places

Click was always as in mouse click

oh ya, i see what you mean now, but ya i get that too

quake was so amazing

i still love breaking out d2

decades later, i FINALLY managed to read the source code