The end of an internet era

Geocities is shutting down: http://mashable.com/2009/04/23/geocities-shutdown/

huh.... I forgot about them

remember Compuserve? and collecting AOhell fdds?

Grtechguy wrote: huh.... I forgot about them remember Compuserve? and collecting AOhell fdds?

Oooh, AOHell. Man that's something I haven't thought of in years. Remember folks, never use your screen name as your password..........

My father in law still uses AOL. At least I got him to get high speed cablemodem a couple years ago, until then it was dialup.

Ha, I had one of those way back when.

It's really wierd to think I've been on the net since the 90's.

I think I've been on since 97, and that was when I was like...14

Since '94. Built my first site in late '94 or early '95.

Back then I got on the net through eWorld, for the old-school Apple types that remember it. When it folded I had AOL for awhile before I wised up.

Yet somehow I never had an geocities page.

Thank goodness its going away. I have several geocities web pages that have been online for years and years (probably like 13 years). All of the passwords have been forgotten, and I no longer have access to the email addresses I used to register so I had no way to access them or take them down...

Grtechguy wrote: huh.... I forgot about them remember Compuserve? and collecting AOhell fdds?

How about Prodigy internet? Or heck just direct dialing onto various bulletin boards. I use to have a little book that I wrote down the numbers to various servers along with passwords and user names for accessing them.

My first internet service was provided by a company called IDT. I paid for the service for a year canceled it I was going to switch to another. The service kept working and so did my emails for another year. Once it finally quit for grins I called them up about the email not working (I knew they had finally just killed the service), by this time I was very good at the art of "social engineering". Anyway I got them to actually reactivate the email service, which in term reactivated my internet account login . That account stayed active until they dropped all dial up internet services. It was always nice having a backup internet service...

I remember in the early '90s paying for different areas of the web thru compuserve, prodigy, and aol (like to check the weather might have been free but if you wanted to read sports columns that cost $.99 a month er something). For some reason we had them all and didnt pay for all the different things. Anyone remember Magenta and those warez programs for doing stupid stuff in chat rooms on AOL?

My first website was on geocities. Somewhere between then and now I realized theres no legitimate reason to have a personal site unless you're some kind of celebrity. So I don't.

I was on AOL before it was on the internet. My screen name was "mcdaniel". In 1991 I signed up with Texas.net for dial up access.

oh yeah....BBS's......2400 baud... I remember.

lynx "browser"

various emulators....fun times

weird memories, best left forgoten

Can anyone (besides JG) recall our old Compuserve address?

I still have Lynx installed. It's actually very useful for testing and optimization.

David S. Wallens wrote: Can anyone (besides JG) recall our old Compuserve address?

Ooh, ooh, I know.

Dammit. Apparently I've been preemptively disqualified.

jg

Tim Baxter wrote: I still have Lynx installed. It's actually very useful for testing and optimization.

and I thought I was a geek....

scary to think that i've had connections to remote systems since about 1988...

Hmm I had multiple geocities sites from my 4 years in web design throughout highschool. Man did I hate working with that, I thought it was redundant to keep on building sites through geocities, nor did we ever learn anything new when we did so. I guess that's what happens when you have a teacher who used to write computer code on punchcards....

AOL was a nightmare for my family. Parents hated it, I hated it, sister hated it, but it was the only option in our area for a while. I still use AIM though to keep in touch with people.

When I last moved I found one of my old 4 gig hard drives and knew immediately what drive it was (sick isn't it?). It was my old system drive, 4 gig drive in a 2 gig case and the drive had an invisible 2 gig partition that was only accessible by going into a command prompt and typing in a specific command and password. At that point the system would reboot into a completely different OS that I only used for late night mischief lol. When you shut down the system it automatically went back to the original Windows OS.

Sad thing is for the life of me I could not remember how to access that other partition.

I also found some old floppy disks and zip disks that had some of my old tools and programs I ran. I remember one that allowed me to send custom blue screens of death lol.

I remember downloading wolfenstien and it took for ever, dial up BBS, in the days of DOS

I still use my old AOL screen name as my AIM screen name. Not that I use AIM anymore since it forced me to "upgrade" to the crappy new version.

Oh, and trying to play games over the internet was almost futile. I remember trying for hours to get a game of Warcraft II going with a friend. We could do it though. And Doom II would only work over the net at his house while playing with another friend. Deathmatch RULES!

Tim Baxter wrote: I still have Lynx installed. It's actually very useful for testing and optimization.

Which is nice because I occasionally browse here with Lynx when I don't have access to a high-speed connection (i.e. boonie towns in Indonesia.)

J

What's with all the AOL hate? I still use it, and don't have many problems. What should I be using?

NYG95GA wrote: What's with all the AOL hate? I still use it, and don't have many problems. What should I be using?

many problems?

take off the training wheels..... get firefox. don't look back....