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Reminiscing the Past
This was in the late 90's. Our town had just have its very first internet cafe. All the clients were adults as rent was around $4/hour (which was exorbitantly expensive at the time). It was dial-up service and ran at 56 kbps using a long-distance call to a city about 200 miles away. There were no IT people then from the town I was from, the person that ran in then was a civil engineer. The smell of computers inside that room was glorious. I was always left alone at home because my guardian at the time (mother) loved partying with friends all the time so she often left me money to do everything I wanted. Obviously, I spent it all on that internet cafe. I was the only kid there, all the other customers were working people. If I had known better, if I saved all of the money I spent there, I could've become rich after a couple of years (relative to the value of money to where I was located), LOL.
Unlike other kids, I preferred to stay online than going out with friends. Like everyone else my age though, I loved watching MTV, reading Goosebumps and Archie Comics.
I remember destroying my very first computer. Seeing that I had a lot of interest online and in computers, my aunt gave me a desktop computer. It was very expensive to buy one at the time and my aunt was the only one with the means to buy one. It ran on a CLI-based operating system (forgot which it was) but I remember opening it one time and cleaning it with a wet towel, reassembled it, turned it on and smoke came out. My very first lesson as a very ignorant kid. The 2nd computer I had several years later I paid with my own saved money and learned how hard it is to assemble one by yourself (I bought everything separately and with gaps with what little money I had), I learned what drivers were and how to install apps and operating system. I thought Windows ME was the finest OS at that time even if it gave me BSOD all the time, LOL. I finally successfully had setup a desktop computer with an Athlon 800 processor, I had to take a deep breath before turning it on the first time because of the thought that maybe I fried something along the way.
I was obsessed with IRC. I wanted to be a channel operator on a channel with many people. I wanted that @ sign so bad. I wasn't interested in gaining power offline but online, it was a different story. I wanted to have the power to kickban people, instead I was the one being kickbanned from #Teen/#Teens in DALNet/Undernet for Op Begging. I was so delusional I created my own channel and filled it with bots to feel "powerful." I ran invite bots to other channels to invite users to my own channel. Later, I made my own IRC network to realize this.
First Registrar: Registerfly. In the late 90's, when I badly wanted to have a .com address, I wasn't able to even if I had money. It was very expensive ($36/year) but I couldn't acquire one even if I had the money because debit/credit cards were non-existent from where I was, the internet was the only technological marvel my hometown had then. There was a Network Solutions subsidiary which I forgot the name of that offered free domain registration when you applied but I always failed the application. When I finally moved to the city years later and acquired my first debit card (not able to apply for credit card because of my age), I immediately registered my first .com with Registerfly. I remembered that you were able to register free .be domains with them then, if I only knew, I would've registered a lot of short and valuable .be domains with them. They faced an ICANN lawsuit a year after I bought my very first domain with them and everything declined after that until they were no more. I managed to transfer my first ever domain with them before everything went down and I am still using it today, 22 years later.
First Host: HostNDezign. Ran by a kid probably younger than me. She was a girl who loved web design. Everything ran on CPanel and service worked without a hitch. The service ran for years.
First Major Community: WebHostingTalk. This is where I was "awakened" on what's what on the cyberspace. Though I was always self-taught, reading discussions in this space led me to where I am in right now. I am no longer active there for a long time but this community probably influenced me more than IRC.
First Exclusive Community: Belonging to these communities came with bragging rights then. If you were a part of something super exclusive, it felt that you were special. At the time, becoming a member of oink.cd made me discover a lot more than what I already knew. PTP was unknown then and I wish I secured an invite then because I didn't know that I would like to find a movie years later that could only be found on PTP which unfortunately I don't have an account on.
First Dedicated Server: There were very expensive to lease at the time (for me, at least). The very first I had was from VolumeDrive. It was a steal at the time because it was $10/month compared to my $12/month VPS.
I probably have more to write but I'm just reminiscing here. Sorry to waste your time, LOL. Share yours too, I'm interested! 
Comments
Similar memories
Too many
Nostalgia kicking in
Windows 3.1 for the win
I know, right? I remembered downloading my very first MP3, Last Resort by Papa Roach. I waited for 4 hours for that download to finish and it was only around 3.2MB. It was a top song from the Rolling Stones/Billboard website and I bought the cassette tape shortly after. Memories came flooding, like using Limewire and having my parents blow up for amassing $172 in our residential ISP subscription (very expensive considering this was in the year 2000, bandwidth wasn't free and unlimited/unmetered data subscription didn't exist then).
Add to that struggle to backup data on 5.4inch floppy disks, 3.1 inch disks, (something else too), cd rom, dvd, flash drives and all
Yesss, haha. I had a lot of 3.5 floppy disks (and later on CDs) with me because I loved hoarding data. I remembered the sound floppy disks made when you write/read data with it (along with the sound of the alien like dial-up tone when connecting to the internet, still vividly remember that US Robotics 56k dial-up modem). When Creative Labs released USB drives that also served as MP3 players, I was ecstatic and thought we were reaching the pinnacle of technology.
We had so many cool options then, walkman, MD, etc. It was hard to keep data as CDs were prone to scratches and it was very susceptible to data loss even if you were being careful.
i remember the stress of swapping floppy disks. and OMG a bad sector. Skkkkrrrrrt skkkkrrrrt that sound.
Ah, the glorious days of 1.44 MB max size storage media.
I got the original (non pirated) windows 3.1 setup spread across 8 floppy disks in the cold storage somewhere.
Now I gotta find out where to get a floppy drive and setup windows 3.1
DOS 5.0 was my first real modern computer.
But I earlier had a donated 286, when it was old tech already.
Then Windows 3.1, DOS 6.0, OS/2, Windows 95, etc.
BBS', CompuServe, Prodigy, AOL, GEnie, Delphi.
2400 kbps, 9600kbps, 14.4k, 56k.
Mosaic, Netscape.
My first experience with computers was with Windows 95 OSR2, on a Pentium II MMX (233) I was offered around 1997/98. But my oldest experience on Windows was 2 years later, with a computer running Windows 3.11 for Workgroups in an after-school care running a 486 and a CGA monitor. Made a noise that sticks with me to this day.
sound of the future when first dot matrix printer succesfully connected to ibm 386.
wolfenstein 3d on 5.25 floppy disk
BRING BACK THE TURBO BUTTON
I still remember playing these games with my very first PC
Anyone still playing nowadays?
My first PC was a 486SX/25 with 4mb of ram and an 80mb hd. We added a cdrom drive and sound blaster combo maybe 6 months after we got it. Anyone else remember writing batch files that would load only the bare minimum into ram so that you could run the game you wanted to play? That PC was Windows 3.1. I don't remember the DOS version. Maybe 5.1?
I also ran NT 4.0 instead of Windows 95 for a good long time.
A few years later, I was one of the few people who could write an Mp3 disc and play 500 songs from one CD in his car instead of the normal 20 tracks. I still have a stack of CD-Rs that I can't bring myself to throw away.
5.25" and 3.5"
The something else might have been ZIP discs, available in 100MB and 250MB. I used to use them for storing CVS repositories of my private projects to sync between home PC and work PC. They were pretty slow, but faster than floppies, and obviously significantly more capacity.
Internet cafe coffee and energy drinks (I loved battery brand) was something magical. Coffee from powdered milk and coffee dust, energy drinks with unregulated dosages of cafeine. And cranking all nighters on D2, cs1.6, warcraft 3 tft, starcraft bw, ra2 and generals.
Now, my friends (all of them) emigrated to other countries and there is no more e-cafes, only so called “game rooms” where wankers masturbate to German underground porn.
O yeah
Zip disks
Barely used it b4 transition to cds
Thnx fir correcting the dimensions
Not even close.
This is a truly awesome post and I sincerely enjoyed reading it among all the "I sold my kidney for 32 GB RAM", "oh my, sivir diskownts for sirius costumers", and japanese plush dolls blah-blah.
I have a sense that all this is kind of unique. Not because it's yours and not someone else's, but because today's youth have access to numerous things we could have hardly imagined.
Everything is plenty, rather cheap, and widely available. Hence... quite boring.
Everything is at your fingertips, nothing to be ignited with, and very little to be surprised at ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Max size was 1.6 MB if you format a diskette in DOS Navigator
IIRC, there also was a
800.comfile (not a SAAS website) capable to do the same.My 1st VPS was from Burst.net - $5.95/mo iirc
Gaming like a pro back then
Not sure I had it in colour though.
Reminiscing: m I had my best coding skills on mIRC..Peace and Protection by pai Full Script. Good days.
FRAK!
One of the bestest evah
Wow, definitely cool things being shared in the thread. I had no idea about most here so it's very interesting (or maybe had an idea they existed but your experiences definitely make it easier to picture).
My first OS was windows 7 or XP on computer of my parents (I didn't have my own PC for a long time). I quite liked those, especially Windows 7. Very clean, light and usable OS looking back at it.
First Linux I ever used - Ubuntu 16.04. Couple years later (in 2019) switched to Linux full time and I have no regrets since.
There was a time i had obsession with running weird/old operating systems (like OS/2, windows 95, etc) in a VM. Hard to imagine people used those daily back in the day.
I had never used a (physical) floppy drive, but had to burn some CDs with OS images for a few computers that didn't support USB booting and I had them laying around.
First web host - 000webhost (now shut down), first VPS was from a local Hetzner reseller and first domain from OVH, bought around 2021 or so.
MSN Explorer, because I liked the butterfly design, haha. Now, I still have my @msn.com address which is like a novelty nowadays (at microsoft network), pretty cool.
I would love to have bought one of these but no one dared to sell zip disks in our hometown because it would be a losing business as they were significantly much more expensive than floppy drives, it would be a losing business.
I was so good at bunny hopping on CS 1.6. And I wondered if all those parameters I typed in console like cl_sidespeed 32000 and cl_movespeed 32000 were doing anything, LOL.
It was thrilling. You could assemble a system unit with an "open" socket pin motherboard which could fit CPUs that would fry if it was incompatible even if it did fit. Information for that was not that readily available online so sometimes it's a hit or miss. Even lacking/wrong application of thermal paste would cause the board to fry. As a poor college student, I started with buying the system chassis, after a few months, the mainboard, followed by a few months again, the storage, the RAM, GPU, and for every other component (storage, other PCI cards). It took me about a year and a half to finally buy and assemble everything. There was no anti-static foam included on any of those parts so I had to be careful when I finally built it. There was a combination of anticipation, excitement, and horror when I turned on my first PC assembly. When it ran so smoothly after I first turned it on, I felt so relieved and accomplished - it felt so great to finally have my own PC which I worked so hard for (I couldn't afford to buy a pre-built one then).
Yeah I remembered many times that a single file couldn't fit into a 1.44MB floppy disk and I had to get around it by using a file splitting software (can't remember the exact name, I think it was hjsplit or something) to span it across several floppy disks.
This thread is revealing our real age. 🙃
Not sure if my memory serves me correct
I remember picking up a local PC magazine by chance that included a CD containing netbus/back orifice. Then, i tried to install them at my friend's computer so that I could eject his CD rom all of a sudden or change his wallpaper setting
yeah we are obsolete hardware.
That depends. Our replacement (currently in K-12) are "cooked". So, we're going to retire at 70, perhaps 80 or more. And that's under assumption that AI hadn't replace >90% of the existing jobs.