I had a hard time getting past that game's age verification, which consisted of trivia questions an 18-year-old American should know, because I was a 6-year-old German.

But I just systematically tried out all combinations (taking notes) until it launched. And I beat the game, learning the first basics of English that way.
So yeah, some of the first English words I learned were "preservative", "hooker" and "Spanish Fly".

That's how I learned about the great Scorched Earth and T.I.M.

I am exactly this old.

Old enough to know what RealPlayer was. And to use Netscape communicator.

Ahh. I used Kazaa was unaware of limewire pro. Thanks for the clarificatiion

All I could think of was having to execute it from DOS. It's been a long time. Now I play Worms, lol

Worms, in its various versions, are all way better of course.

After all, it was the fashion of the time.

I've got a portable b&w TV that I used until they shut down the analog transmitters. It has a really good tuner that would pick up lots of channels with the built in antenna. The digital transmitters are much weaker. I can't receive a single one with an indoor antenna.

I studied Film & TV in uni. We had a lecture that covered NewGrounds and YouTube. This was 2018 I think. I used to be an animator myself. Felt pretty good to see it get recognition. This was at University of the Arts London too, so not even a US uni. David Firth and Salad Fingers came up quite a bit, needless to say

I started playing Worms W.M.D. recently. I started on Worms World Party. I was like 7 when it came out. I played Worms 3D and Worms 4 Mayhem too. I still can't believe Worms 3 came out 2003...

Oh man, I remember downloading Netscape versions that were probably the sand thing with a different version number. But you're still on dial up so it didn't matter lol. Don't forget downloading more RAM lol

crouching tiger hidden dragon and gossip girl

Certainly an... Interesting pairing

Ok, I've been scrolling a while but I finally found a comment that sounds like gibberish to me

I'm '94

EDIT: Ah, I see. UK-specific. I have lots of old stuff around the house from my parents and grandparents. Won't stumble upon this one in Romania unfortunately lol

"Normal amount" is a bit over 40, no?

I think I listened to one of those at a party once

I have a tube TV, a tape recorder and a gramophone literally in my room. Living in grandparents' old house at the moment. Super cool

I remember spending a day and a half downloading the Halo 2 trailer to run on RealPlayer. Good times.

Typing in the original Goatse URL at somebody's house on their computer

Changing their browser homepage.

I'm the right age to be in that venn diagram of having had an ICQ account in 1996 and a Snapchat account in 2014.

Where one of my favorite things about the iPhone was that it finally put the nail in the coffin of Macromedia Adobe Flash.

Progressive JPGs slowly blurring into focus

I cannot for the life of me remember what our MUDD was, but I still remember our local BBS because it was called the Forbidden Playground. It was not some weird sex thing, just your normal early 90s BBS but that didn't stop my mother from losing her mind when she saw the ASCII title banner though.

The first picture I downloaded was a monochrome Batman logo bmp. A few years later someone found a 16 color one of Jenny McCarthy topless from Playboy and spent all night downloading it. We all had to stop by his house on the walk to school to check it out.

Edit It was MajorMud. I found a relatively recent article where a guy researched the BBS some.

You mean Kazaa Lite K++, right?

Do you mean Netscape navigator? Or was there another product called communicator?

I think this would describe people in their mid to late 30s, if they were 10 in the mid to late 90s. Any earlier than that and it would have been bulletin boards and not the web.

We ran a 2-node bbs out of our house.

For those too young to know what that means:

We had 2 computers networked to each other running the bulletin board - each with a separate dedicated phone line. Each line had call forwarding set up to the other, so users could dial either number, and if one of the nodes was available they could log in. And the real magic was that 2 users could actually live chat instead of just leaving messages. You haven't lived until you've played multiplayer TradeWars or LORD.

Same game with updated graphics and controls.

I remember when the iPhone was “doomed to fail” because it didn’t support flash

Sort of. There was a period where they rebranded navigator to come along with an email client also. I remember it being slower and crappier! But I think they stopped updating the original "Navigator" version, at least for a while.

Huh. I never heard that. I remember everyone being super stoked that Flash was going to probably die because of the iPhone, and everyone loving it. (I didn't at the time, but I get now why it was Flash that was itself doomed to fail eventually)

Netscape Communicator was the successor to Netscape Navigator.

Oh yeah -- I cannot remember what that program was called that everyone used for a while that "compressed" or "optimized" RAM usage but there was a feeling (placebo effect, maybe?) that it helped. It may have been something like RAM Optimizer Pro.

Did anyone seriously believe that though? Killing Flash is approximately the only good thing the existence of the iPhone brought to the world.

Making it their desktop wallpaper, screenshotting the desktop, setting the desktop to that screenshot, then "hide icons."

10 was the age I got my first own computer. Before that I always used my mother's, so could only use it when she wasn't doing so.

Nice. I loved ICQ. A friend of mine had this really cool online friend he made in Sweden (we're in the US) and it was such a feeling of connection then. I miss those days. Nowadays it's like a 50% chance of a snarky/negative interaction with random internet people. The internet used to feel friendlier.

putting scotch tape on their mouse so the ball wouldn't roll 😁 and then when they would look they didn't see the tape and think the mouse was broken 🤣

You think my buddy had internet? We would go over to his house to play DOS games.

Personal computers came out when I was middle school age. Internet was for my kid's generation? Millennials?

Computers weren't consumer grade when I was 10

It wasn't supposed to be like this.

I'm wondering if you have any reference resources on-hand for this. Like if we can identify where exactly it went wrong and how it was supposed to be, to point to in a somewhat scholarly sense.

As a 90's kid self-taught dabbler in comp-sci / FOSS advocate, my first thoughts for ultimately disasterous elements usually go to corporate disruption, like the iPhone. Maybe if we go further back, Internet Explorer?

I feel like this stuff is intentionally buried to be as if it had never been. General computer knowledge used to be more commonplace, now gen-pops are ignorant slaves to stupid black-box appliances and monolithic rent-seeking cloud services. It sucks.

We are the resistance though. The indie web is growing by the day. Gen-Z has been ditching social media. Open source stuff like Linux or Blender are exploding within niche circles like gaming and indie creator spaces. There's hope. :)

I remember a friend of a friend being the only one anyone knew that had a computer. It was their family computer, but he had games on it, like doom.

No one but him was allowed to touch the computer, but we would still gather around behind him and watch him play doom in absolute awe of it all.

You haven't lived until you've played multiplayer TradeWars or LORD.

Funny enough with how ridiculously busy everybody is anymore, I've been really interested in researching asynchronous multiplayer game concepts.

Like stuff that's engaging enough to leave you thinking about it between turns, but doesn't require your constant attention. Stuff to play at work, basically. Lol

It's basically cavemen huddling around the fire vs having a fireplace in your house.

I miss netscape.

I know firefox is basically its codebase successor.. but its not the same.

I just want to go back in time and re-live the magic of the early internet. before search engines. before advertising. before capitalist exploitation.

Edit It was MajorMud. I found a relatively recent article where a guy researched the BBS some.

That was my first one too! They only allowed so many commands per day (100?) unless you paid $15/mo

Later I found the PvP MUDs and ended up playing a custom Godwars variant (Chaosium/Static Chaos) for years. I still know some of the people that I met in that game.

Being able to text messages and pictures with my long distance GF-now-wife from anywhere was pretty rad, but I think I'd be pretty alright with un-inventing the smartphone.

The evolution of portable pocket computers would have been significantly cooler.

And I miss LAN parties...

Doom9.org

I remember when the AACS encryption key leaked and they started to DMCA everyone so people were printing merch with:

45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2

Printed on it.