ALL I WANT TO DO IS LOOK AT PORN YOU STUPID FUCKING COMPUTER!
Back in my day, porn was found in a magazine someone ditched along a forest path and that’s how we liked it!
How common was this? That was precisely how I discovered porn. Found a Hustler magazine on a trail I used as a shortcut between housing developments on my paper route when I was 11. Then found a whole stash of them in another part of the woods near a tree fort I built with some friends.
Haha, exactly! And with plenty of pubic hair so you’d still have to use your imagination.
I remember you had to pick and choose what images you wanted because of how long it took to download. Thumbnails were critical and nothing more of a cock block then the image getting corrupted part way through.
You’ve Got Mail!
… Jk, I never have mail 😔
Not even enlargement pill mail?
You weren’t using your email address right.
Man it was a real artifact of time that I remember some email newsletters back on AOL where the writer would get mad and kick you off the list if you didn’t reply to the newsletter thanking the author.
Back in the AOL days you would hang out in the Warez chat room, and you would subscribe to download files using email as the delivery. Chat for a few minutes and then next time you log in. You’ve got files!
What the internet was like? Glorious! No stupid internet points, no followers, no tracking. Just random content. Good times…
There was even a friendly purple ape named Bonzi Buddy who helped me surf the web. Couldn’t have something like that these days without spyware.
You never saw IE6 running on Win98 with a dozen toolbars installed, did you? The place was infested and you actually needed to know what you were doing.
Antivirus would be pinging constantly back in those days. I haven’t had my AV detect anything since the early 2000s.
Now you have catphishing, ransomwere, lot’s of different types of scammers and your credit cards can be stolen from some random e-commerce site. You also need to know what you’re doing.
Remember when we all suddenly needed personal firewalls after that one virus that kept shutting down the PC with 60 seconds notice.
The ICQ, AOL and MSN chats were a big focus then. I can still hear those notifications too. It was a simpler time before psychology was brought into hijack our attention.
They have done a excellent job of that with the latest generation of the web. It’s too bad we have lost much of the soul of the early web in the process…
A/S/L?
Oh my, that dad is young. The bwong bwong bwong came later with the faster transmission speeds.
Well to be fair the boy is asking the father, not his grandfather :)
I heard the whole thing.
Imagined that cartoon progressively downloading while I sipped coffee. The image size told the browser how much space to leave for lagging graphics. Text browsers were best over dialup untill mbs speeds arrived. Cable modems eliminated the modem speaker since they were never used for human frequency range
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://www.piped.video/watch?v=KSKBRWoGvL0
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Not a shitpost tbh. Too true.
Young whelps! I could debug my programs by putting an FM radio beside my rig and listening to the interference :P
half the time it sounded like this…
bzzzzzt… bzzzzzt… bzzzzzt… bzzzzzt… bzzzzzt…
Needs a Spongbob style “5 minutes laturrr” voiceover between the 3rd and 4th panel.
I’m old but I don’t know what the “bwong bwong bwong” is. Anyone?
I believe that part was doing a sound quality test to ensure the data rate could be reached. If the line quality was bad it would connect at a slower rate since it was based on frequency.
Yup, and whether the modem on the other side was able to reach the same data rate as well.
It’s a specific 56K protocol. There were a few different types of 56K modems and they did the last part of the handshake differently. One did the “boing boing” and another common one had more of an ascending tone at the end of the handshake.
You can hear the boing boing one at the end (1m54s) of that example https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xalTFH5ht-k
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://www.piped.video/watch?v=xalTFH5ht-k
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
