I remember we discovered the shorter the phone cable the faster our connection would be. So my friend bought a 2 inch cable and we had the computer right up against the wall for that extra 2kbps
this post was submitted on 11 Jul 2025
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My family lived in a remote place, we had just barely gotten phone lines, they were terrible and we rarely got higher than 11kbs no matter what I tried.
Somehow I still was able to play online games like Team Fortress, I just had to radically change how I played compared to other players.
That was me with Quake II. All my rich friends had cable modems when they were still a luxury item and the rest of us poors out in the woods had to make do with 12kbps. It was a slaughter every night after school.
Don't forget getting yelled at for "camping" because that's the only way you can possibly play.
I had no shame about it. If hanging out in the rocket launcher spawn area doesn't cause my latency to go apeshit then I'm hanging out there and shooting anything that moves.
Fuck you and your 45 mbps, Eddie and Ian!
i remember this vividly. going to my friend's house to watch the badger song, etc.
MUSHROOM MUSHROOM
SNAAAAAKEEEEE!!
When you entered, in the hallway there was a dedicated table that had a landline phone and paper phonebook on it. Possibly a pack of cigarettes and a lighter too.
Answering machine with the cute little cassette
I was the one whose computer had the internet. The cruelest thing I ever did was get my friend, who had no computer at all, addicted to Ultima Online and EverQuest.
That time when you had to wait for the image to load line by line only to realize, her boobs where covered, and the utter disappointed of the image either being cropped or she was wearing pants.
This but gaming instead.
As in, whatching our friend play aoe2 or something.
To be fair it's exactly the same as watching a streamer, minus the parasocial relationship.
I used to watch my buddy play WoW.
That was 2 fold. We did what this post talks about, but i also knew what diablo 2 did to me, and knew i couldnt own WoW or I'd flunk out of high school
Ahh.... Hanging with friends gathered around a PC and trolling pedos on AIM. So weird that age, sex, and location were the primary opening lines of communication for a while. Even stranger that creepy dudes in their 40s were so honest about it while trying to pick up kids on the Internet.
I never understood that, I never participated in that weird ASL greeting, even as a naive kid who didn't even have social experience I felt that was creepy and dangerous to share that kind of thing, and I resented how it basically turned every conversation into "Is it remotely possible we could fuck."
I'm so glad the internet outgrew that silly trend and became so much more refined, intelligent and respectful.
I remember (as a girl) wanting to talk to another girl my age in a chatroom. The rest of the room started asking if I was a lesbian.
Like we couldn’t just talk to people online without bringing sex into it. I just wanted to make some friends.
I feel like if parents took the internet more seriously from the start and were more actively engaged in what their rotten teenagers were getting up to online we might have had at least a slowdown of the awful decay of society as our worst intrusive thoughts now not only have space to be seen without consequence, we have entire communities supporting each other's rotten intrusive thoughts.
Honestly, if my parents had any idea how many creeps were on AOL, I probably would’ve been banned from it. We’re like the “grew up with no seatbelts and survived” version of internet users.
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My friends and I used to do that. We find some scumbag trawling the teen chat rooms on AOL and get them to IM us. The we'd say we wanted to send them a picture us and we'd send them gore, scat porn, and other gross shit. Some of the best nights of my teenage years.
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We would ride our bikes to the library because their connection was faster and we could sit next to each other.
I remember going to my friend Ray's house who had a 386 with a ten meg hard drive and dual three and five inch floppy drives. They paid $2,500 for it at the time. We used to visit a porn site called Ed and Eddies? Then we would play a tank battle game. He had a blistering 300 baud modem.
Dude that tank game brings back memories. The old 3D vector graphics tank game right?
The one with just the green lines? If so, Battle Zone, fucking classic.
Yeah that’s the one! Just a black screen, green lines, and simple shapes
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Ah, the good ol’ days, when my friend’s computer would get jacked up from Bonzai Buddy because she thought it was too cute.
I thought it was weird and didn’t care for it, so I never put it on my family’s computer. After it was discovered to be spyware, I felt vindicated.
it's not that old, it was still normal in 2010
You must mean it will still be normal in 2010, which is the far future when we’ll have colonised Mars and use our flying cars to go home to our floating home in the clouds.
We polished the prop to 28k in my full digits year. There better be 7 of us 28'ers here or we have failed - rule
I remember that one year a generic magazine put out the Christmas edition with a multimedia CD, with various stuff on it, some simple games and other crap, but by browsing the disk (the secret art of skipping autoplay by right-clicking and selecting Open) we found a grainy jpg with a naked Asian lady with fake boobs. Treasure!
My first hands-on experience with the Internet was at a friend's house in the early 90s in 4th or 5th grade. I'd seen it before on various classroom computers but I never got a chance to use it because the teachers all seemed to agree on putting the unstable desk-throwing kids in front of them for the school day to keep them distracted.
I used to play Doom with 2 other friends on the same keyboard. One moving, one firing and one (the most bored) opening doors and activating buttons.
OG multiplayer Doom.
you're the man now dog
two words, LAN party.
No shit. Everyone brings over their computer. For me my first network was the lan party net. It was 10base 2. Invariably at least one time a meet someone would kick a coax cable loose and we would lose the whole network. Thinking about it we didn't have the name lan party when we first started having them. We called it playing warcraft 2.
All the time! Showing each other the cool sites we'd found. Messing with settings.
No, cause I was the friend with the computer. My dad worked in computers, so we had a computer in the eighties and internet in (I think) 1995. We got cable internet really early too, and my first username was “guywithcable”.
Unknowingly, son of u/fatpipe & u/maxbaud
I'm only just enough old for the Wii lmao
That's an abnormal amount
Yeah my house was one of the ones with Computer
everybody coming over to watch the new smosh video
Modem Wars
First "online" game I played (over 300 buad modem)
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