1. Connecting to a dial-up modem meant listening to a barrage of screeches
And you couldn’t get on the internet if someone was using the phone, and vice versa. How did we cope? How did civilisation ever get this far?
Mind you, if you’ve ever listened to dubstep, you’ve kind of got the idea of the dial-up tone.
2. Getting broadband internet was a revelation, like flying through the internet on silver cyber wings
Photo: David Monniaux
That ethernet cable held such promise, such possibility.
3. Before Wikipedia, Microsoft Encarta was the fountain of all knowledge
4. Google wasn’t the only search engine – you had Lycos, AltaVista, Ask Jeeves
Bing? What’s Bing?
5. MS Paint was mainly used for mindless doodling and not much else
6. Theme Hospital, Age of Empires and Rollercoaster Tycoon occupied a lot of your time
7. And if you wanted to do online multiplayer shooting, Counter-Strike was the one
8. If you had the internet but no games, you had to head to Miniclip or Newgrounds
9. If you had no games AND no internet, you were stuck with Minesweeper or Pinball
Yes, there was a time when you could have a computer without the internet. But who are we kidding? Pinball was awesome.
10. If your parents said you were wasting your life playing computer games, it’s a good job they didn’t see how much time you spent on The Sims
Look mum, I’m wasting my life by managing someone else’s virtual life!
11. If you wanted to chat to someone, you had to wait for them to come on MSN
Can you imagine Facebook allowing such anarchy on Messenger? End of an era, folks.
12. If you wanted to be a proper dickhead, you could nudge your friends to piss them off
Or repeatedly block and unblock them so you’d fill their screen with notifications.
13. Knowing how to turn people’s screens upside down was valuable information in school IT lessons
Photo: @ihaveshorthair
14. The mice all had balls in them, which obviously you would constantly take out and play with
Photo: @RossJohnson90
15. You could play some games with a joystick, but even back then no one bothered
Photo: @gamer_at_rc
What a relic. If you showed this to a kid today they’d probably try to hit you with it.
16. Webcams were actual cameras that sat on top of your computer, staring at you like an evil Big Brother, watching you all the time
Photo: Simon.zfn
“I see what you’re doing, young man, and I think it’s DISGUSTING” – your very judgy webcam.
17. You couldn’t just turn off your computer, it had to be safe to turn it off
18. The only way to transport your files was on a floppy disk
Photo: Free Stock Photos
Most floppy disks had 1.44MB of available storage on them. To put that in context, you’d need 711 floppy disks to have 1GB of space. To put that in context, to match a 64GB iPhone, you’d need 45,504 floppy disks.
19. If you wanted to access music online, you had to jump onto LimeWire and ‘acquire’ it
20. Which you’d then use to express your unique feelings on your MySpace profile
In case you’re wondering, this is What’s Up Fatlip? by Flatlip. It’s… okay. A very strong okay.
21. And then, when you finally got some time to yourself, you could sit back and watch some por-
“What’s going on in here?” GET OUT GET OUT GET OUT
Actually, that probably hasn’t changed.
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