Internet Flashback: Do you remember when?

[Tofu]

I didn't spend much time in the chat rooms aside from finding progs, LOL. I spent most of my time building sites and talking with other webmasters.

Nerd for life.

Okay, Got ya. At that time, I was just focused on getting some ass.
I was a teenager, after all. Everything I did on AOL was either to
cause trouble or get laid.

[BlackCrayon]

what was the casino program called that promised so much per click and didn't pay? cyber something..

[Sly]

what was the casino program called that promised so much per click and didn't pay? cyber something..

CyberThrill.

[SilentKnight]

Remember the Yahoo Clubs to Groups migration?

What a clusterfuck that was. We had one Yahell club with 30k members and a million views...and they royally fucked up the msg. bases in the transition.

[kane]

I went through a period in high school when I was obsessed with Trade Wars.

I had a friend that ran that on his BBS. To this day we give him shit about it because we grew up in a small town out in the middle of nowhere. He would use computer to connect to other BBS sites to get new software and updates and all kinds of stuff. We loved it and played Trade Wars daily, but a month after he started this he got the phone bill and it was $640 because every call outside of our little town was long distance. He just about shit himself and his parents were not very happy.

[kane]

i fondly remember in no particular order:

Sub 7
First version of A0HELL
Back Orifice

Buying Vivoactive the day it came out - no need for a video server. I streamed the Decline of Western Civilization at my first site ever.

http://web.archive.org/web/199612210....punkrock.com/

Photoshop 2
Liking Ken Nesbitts WebEdit
Hating Adobe Pagemill
Netscape Navigator early betas

Pagemill was the first real HTML editor I bought. I liked it, but I remember that it added all kinds of garbage code that screwed up any other HTML editors so if you worked with someone on a project it caused all kinds of havoc.

[Sarah_Jayne]

I had a friend that ran that on his BBS. To this day we give him shit about it because we grew up in a small town out in the middle of nowhere. He would use computer to connect to other BBS sites to get new software and updates and all kinds of stuff. We loved it and played Trade Wars daily, but a month after he started this he got the phone bill and it was $640 because every call outside of our little town was long distance. He just about shit himself and his parents were not very happy.

When I first discovered modems and BBSes, I lived in a small suburb of Philly and there weren't really any local BBSes then. More importantly to this story, there weren't any local AOL numbers. Instead, you had to call the Philly number which was long distance. Well, the AOL free 20 hours or whatever it was then disk had arrived and I was off school early due to finals week. I decided to try it and I pretty much did all 20 hours in two afternoons connected long distance the whole time.

When the phone bill came in an envelope three times as thick as usual, my mother went into banshee mode. The cost was in the many hundreds. Though, I will say that I think I know where I get my hustle from because she called the phone company and essentially told them her daughter was an idiot without the mental capacity to understand long distance numbers. I think they halved the bill or something.

Given enough time, she will still bring that up on every visit home.

[Minte]

CyberThrill.

I was one of the lucky ones that actually got paid.

After that there were some other more quasi-legit online casinos that I did very well with. It was a sad day when it all went illegal in the US.

[See Cig]

jesusdialer.exe

hotpics.exe

aol private chats whywork, vb, warez, selectfew

AOL OVER HEAD ACCOUNTS lol

[PornMD]

On the contrary, remember when Google released Gmail and early invites were being sold for at least several dollars?

[SilentKnight]

I went through a period in high school when I was obsessed with Trade Wars.

I recall a lot of folk playing LORD - Legends of the Red Dragon back in the BBS days. Used to drive the rest of us crazy when they constantly tied up the nodes for hours.

[Rochard]

Remember when the VP of Paypal came to Phoenix Forum and courted us all? And none of us had ever even heard of Paypal?

[gabe100]

exactly... Adobe at first didn't get the web. Macromedia was where it was it. They were strong with programs like Director and when the web burst open, they just got it. I remember when they bought Flash. They used to have these internet shows at the Coliseum in LA in like 95,96,97 and the first time Macromedia previewed Flash it blew me away.

Pagemill was the first real HTML editor I bought. I liked it, but I remember that it added all kinds of garbage code that screwed up any other HTML editors so if you worked with someone on a project it caused all kinds of havoc.

[pornmasta]

Paul markham sold content on the web with his magic join links

[BaldBastard]

Paul markham sold content on the web with his magic join links

I can remember buying some of Pauls pic's, putting a shitty gallery on The Hun and deciding the pic's were way too high in quality and cutting them all back under 20k each, that gallery pulled 36 joins on the first day @ 25 each. My hosting at the time charged me $5 per MEG and I can tell ya for every 5 meg my site had in traffic.. I made $100

[Pineapplez]

Four dot com's that changed the internet history.

1. AltaVista.com
2. Wouj.com
3. Yahoo.com
4. Google.com

[Icy]

Remember when the VP of Paypal came to Phoenix Forum and courted us all? And none of us had ever even heard of Paypal?

Yeah funny how paypal basically started in adult and now they are so "clean" and banned porn.

[OY]

X25 - the cloud, that later turned out to be the internet.

[TrafficTitan]

I remember in college the professor talking about a new website called Amazon. What a dumb domain name. Books. Sounds dumb.

[lezinterracial]

I remember people talking about file sharing and saying "If somebody downloads a song and likes it, They will buy the album to support the artist".

Tower records.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gAVez5B0vo8

Mudders.

Black Crawling Systems Archive on L0PHT

Anarchist Cookbook Online

[Konda]

I remember emailing Persian Kitty asking if she could put a link to my site and the next day Angelfire deleted my site because I got like 30K visitors from the small text link she added to her friends list.

I remember annoying audio banners "Gold Key Casino, Click on Our Banner to Win".

I remember switching from free hosting account to free hosting account only to be kicked again and again, but it only took a few days every time to get all the traffic back.

I also remember I figured out how to be #1 on infoseek for keywords, but lots of others knew as well, so you constantly had to re-submit a new page and if you were lucky you were the #1 right before the weekend (when they stopped updating the rankings). I think it made about $250 a day for the #1 ranking for sex

I remember combining 2 ISDN lines to get a whopping 128kbit/s (paying twice the phone minutes to stay online).

I remember the biggest search engine was altavista, but they didn't have altavista.com but something like altavista.subdomain.com and if you went to altavista.com it said that they were not the search engine and they had a small text link to the altavista search engine.

I remember some guy emailing me that he could host my site for free on a real domain, all I had to do was add a popup to his site. He probably made a fortune of it, while I had no clue I could make money of it.

I remember some other guy emailing me I should add banners to my site and I could make money with my site. Best advice I ever had lol

I remember getting my first check (xpics?) and I went to the bank to cash it, only to find out I had to wait a month for my money (in EU).

I remember you could register .com domains and not pay and use them for like 2 months.
You could also just change/steal other people's domains by just changing the sender address in your outlook.

I remember you could pay Yahoo $200 to get a site listed and making several $100 a day from it. It was alphabetically sorted so everyone used like 1111somedomainname.com. They later changed it to $600.

[kane]

I remember emailing Persian Kitty asking if she could put a link to my site and the next day Angelfire deleted my site because I got like 30K visitors from the small text link she added to her friends list.

I remember annoying audio banners "Gold Key Casino, Click on Our Banner to Win".

I remember switching from free hosting account to free hosting account only to be kicked again and again, but it only took a few days every time to get all the traffic back.

I also remember I figured out how to be #1 on infoseek for keywords, but lots of others knew as well, so you constantly had to re-submit a new page and if you were lucky you were the #1 right before the weekend (when they stopped updating the rankings). I think it made about $250 a day for the #1 ranking for sex

I remember combining 2 ISDN lines to get a whopping 128kbit/s (paying twice the phone minutes to stay online).

I remember the biggest search engine was altavista, but they didn't have altavista.com but something like altavista.subdomain.com and if you went to altavista.com it said that they were not the search engine and they had a small text link to the altavista search engine.

I remember some guy emailing me that he could host my site for free on a real domain, all I had to do was add a popup to his site. He probably made a fortune of it, while I had no clue I could make money of it.

I remember some other guy emailing me I should add banners to my site and I could make money with my site. Best advice I ever had lol

I remember getting my first check (xpics?) and I went to the bank to cash it, only to find out I had to wait a month for my money (in EU).

I remember when I figured out how get good listings in Altavista. I could get most of my sites in the Top 10 for just about any keyword, but they only lasted a few days so I always had to make new sites.

[Konda]

I remember when I figured out how get good listings in Altavista. I could get most of my sites in the Top 10 for just about any keyword, but they only lasted a few days so I always had to make new sites.

Yeah good search engine listings were easy back then, but they never lasted long.
But it was so easy because they all had a manual page submit system so once you figured it out you could just re-submit a new page right away after you lost your position.

I remember I searched for a keyword like sheep, took the #1 result, bulk replaced sheep with sex, submitted the page, and it was #1 for sex in no time lol.

[lonerunner]

When gmail required invitation to be able to register email address :D

[Diomed]

Cracking internal, guide, and overhead accounts on AOL.

Programming the sickest scrollers ever made.. Holocaust, and Second Style.

Then one day a friend of mine named Mach taught me about making money with AOL spamming progs. From there, evolving, earning legit money through gallery submissions.

I owe it all to AOL.

[kane]

Yeah good search engine listings were easy back then, but they never lasted long.
But it was so easy because they all had a manual page submit system so once you figured it out you could just re-submit a new page right away after you lost your position.

I remember I searched for a keyword like sheep, took the #1 result, bulk replaced sheep with sex, submitted the page, and it was #1 for sex in no time lol.

LOL. I loved when Altavista would allow you to submit up to 5 urls per day. I would submit 5 and within 48 hours would often have 3-4 of them in the Top 10 for their keywords. Of course, two days later they had dropped to #589, but I would just submit five new sites every day so I kept it going.

I also loved back when you get listed in the DMOZ project and it would often end up getting you good positions on the AOL search engine.

I also remember when link sites and TGPs would not list you if you gave away too much free stuff.

Oh the glory days. LOL

[jimmycastor]

i was making thousands selling amiga 3,5" floppys with explicit content to older man

[BlackCrayon]

I remember emailing Persian Kitty asking if she could put a link to my site and the next day Angelfire deleted my site because I got like 30K visitors from the small text link she added to her friends list.

I remember annoying audio banners "Gold Key Casino, Click on Our Banner to Win".

I remember switching from free hosting account to free hosting account only to be kicked again and again, but it only took a few days every time to get all the traffic back.

I also remember I figured out how to be #1 on infoseek for keywords, but lots of others knew as well, so you constantly had to re-submit a new page and if you were lucky you were the #1 right before the weekend (when they stopped updating the rankings). I think it made about $250 a day for the #1 ranking for sex

I remember combining 2 ISDN lines to get a whopping 128kbit/s (paying twice the phone minutes to stay online).

I remember the biggest search engine was altavista, but they didn't have altavista.com but something like altavista.subdomain.com and if you went to altavista.com it said that they were not the search engine and they had a small text link to the altavista search engine.

I remember some guy emailing me that he could host my site for free on a real domain, all I had to do was add a popup to his site. He probably made a fortune of it, while I had no clue I could make money of it.

I remember some other guy emailing me I should add banners to my site and I could make money with my site. Best advice I ever had lol

I remember getting my first check (xpics?) and I went to the bank to cash it, only to find out I had to wait a month for my money (in EU).

I remember you could register .com domains and not pay and use them for like 2 months.
You could also just change/steal other people's domains by just changing the sender address in your outlook.

I remember you could pay Yahoo $200 to get a site listed and making several $100 a day from it. It was alphabetically sorted so everyone used like 1111somedomainname.com. They later changed it to $600.

i found the best free hosting in 98, psybercore. the guy who ran it only required a regular sized banner at the bottom of every page. it was pretty sweet while it lasted. eventually i outgrew it and got paid hosting with janey's.

i actually owe my start in adult and making money online to the guy (drewstar) at psybercore. i was using his free hosting for my realaudio site when i got an email from him about how much he was making with adultcheck sites. i hated my job at the time and thought it was worth giving a try.

i used to have my entry pages set up so when someone clicked enter a new browser window would open and then the entry page would forward to call-girls.net which made some good coin as it was pay per click.

it was so easy to get the number one spots on aol just by using keyword stuffing but stupid me, instead of sending this traffic direct to sponsors i was more interested in building traffic on my sites.

i got my main site listed with yahoo for free and that brought in so much good traffic, i didn't have to work for months after that. the money just kept coming in.

and of course you can't forget about dialers. i made over 10k from one small link at the bottom of my main page after only a month before it got shut down.

[bronco67]

When I had an Atari 400 (maybe it was an 800) I played the game Lode Runner which stored the data on a cassette tape. When I died, I had to load the data again for 20 minutes -- and it was the coolest thing ever.

[Elli]

I remember when I first posted video clips on my site. They had to be under 2MB or my members would complain that they took too long to download!

[Sarah_Jayne]

The first time I downloaded Netscape, it took all night and then the line dropped right before the end and I had to start all over again.

[Diomed]

I had Prodigy first.. it was like the only way to connect to the internet?

Then AOL.

I remember immediately getting on prodigy.. and typing in Playboy's domain name.. Those guys were up quick!

[epitome]

I just remembered when my friends sent me a porn pic in .gif I had to run it through a converter/compiler before actually being able to view it.

[epitome]

I had Prodigy first.. it was like the only way to connect to the internet?

Then AOL.

I remember immediately getting on prodigy.. and typing in Playboy's domain name.. Those guys were up quick!

Then after those, if you didn't want a service like that, I seem to recall Netcom being the only real viable option to have pure internet.