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Three Scenes of the Early Internet (piefed.social)

submitted 1 week ago by Sergio@piefed.social to c/nowhereelsetoshare@sh.itjust.works

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SCENE: early 90s. I'm in the local college's computer room, where I snuck in to play games. The computers didn't need passwords and people stashed games on the local fileshares, so everything was golden as long as you didn't make too much noise. I was just leaving when I noticed my friend Pat was working at the consultant's desk. I went over and said what's up. Check this out, they said. It's this lab in Switzerland, they put up this "What's New" document about something called the "World Wide Web".

SCENE: mid 90s. I got a job at the college and had been using their email and local BBS system to chat with people about gaming and sci fi and stuff. All of us who used the BBS knew each other and had pseudonyms and would meet up IRL occasionally. I was walking through a library and noticed the person working the front desk was my age and was using email! I walked up to them and say "hi, I'm (pseudonym), who are you?" They looked at me like: wtf is this person talking about? That's when I realized that "others" were using the system too.

SCENE: late 90s. I'm at the movies, waiting in line with my cousin. I say: "Hey, you should hook me up with some more mp3s, that last CD you gave me was pretty good." Nearby, a couple of dorky-looking guys glance at each other knowingly.

---== T A L E S . F R O M . T H E . E A R L Y . N E T ==---

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[–] LesserAbe@lemmy.world 2 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I was at my neighbor's house and we were just poking around to see what there was to do online. We found a file (what we would now call a supercut but we didn't have that word then) with a hundred instances of Homer Simpson saying "D'oh".

We downloaded it, which took twenty minutes or something like that, and my recollection is when we went to play it there was no software on the computer that could. That doesn't seem like it could be true, maybe I'm mixing memories up. It wouldn't have been an mp3 file because it was too early for that, and I'd expect windows to at least be able to play .wav. maybe it was some weird format. So we had to do another search and found a freeware program called Goldwave which we downloaded and were able to listen then. I still used Goldwave for years and even paid for it.

[–] Sergio@piefed.social 1 points 1 week ago

OMG the days before VLC Media Player, yeah!