Ah... The Evil Overlord List. A Classic of the internet. I looked up the list to do a post on it, and found that it was from a whole decade ago; back when 90% of the internet was AOL, operating on a 28.8 Kbps Modem.
When Coaxial Cable screwed into your TV, not your modem, when images were measured in pixels, not megapixels, and when 2 gigabytes was the amount of hard drive space your computer had, not the amount of RAM. An average PC had either a 133 MHz Pentium Chip, or if you were cutting edge, 233 MHz. And the standard medium of portable data storage was the 1.44 Mb Floppy disk.
Back when Yahoo was Google, and Lycos was Yahoo. When IRC chatting was IM'ing, When USENET groups were MySpace and Facebook, and when nothing was Skype.
When only the super-wealthy had cellular phones, and If you had a beeper (remember those buggy-whips?), people thought you were either an on-call doctor, or a drug dealer.
When HTML was XML/CSS/PHP/AJAX, and was something that a reasonably intelligent person could teach himself. And.. And this is Really Mind-Blowing... when people thought it was amazing that you could
When Apple was that company that made those cute little Macintoshes that were like the Vespas of the computer world. They were really cute, but you wouldn't want to go very far on one.
And when your Internet Service Provider (probably AOL, see above) charged you BY THE HOUR!
I will have a post on the actual overlord list coming up, but I ran out of time reminiscing.
What have I left out? Do you remember the internet circa 1996/1997? What are your favorite memories? Drop a comment to let me know!
5 comments:
Remember when Itunes was MP3 files on geocities webpages + Winamp?
And the RIAA didnt care because it was just some little harmless computer geek thing.
Also MP3.com and eMusic existed back then. And remember Angelfire webpages? My first webpage was an angelfire page.
I still like winamp though. It is so fast to load. iTunes takes 45 seconds or more to load on many computers I use. And yo have to update every two weeks, it seems.
Yeah Itunes on my PC sucked.
On the Mac it's pretty fast. I have a blazing fast Mac though.
I still don't like the interface that much.
Oh, and I randomly found this after talking on the phone with you about your balloon convention...
http://www.youtube.com/user/inflatableminute
I first started using email in '97 or '98, back when it was still kind of a novelty, and finding out whhich of your friends had email was the cool new thing to do.
I actually remember a lot of really early really old computer stuff, becuase my dad has had a computer in the house for his work since before I can remember (there is a picture of me sitting on his lap as a baby with the computer beind us). The first computer game I remember playing was this ghetto old thing called face maker in like 1985 or 86. You could create a face (with about 3 choices each for hair, eyes, nose, and mouth - none of them more than just green pixel outlines on the black screen) and then make it wink and stuff. At the time, it was the Most Awesome Thing In The World.
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