Being Internet-savvy in the early 90s
I’m a geek, I might as well just embrace it.
You know you are the first generation of Internet-savvy kids in the early 90s if:
- Your first web-browser was Mosaic.
- Your first email client was Pine.
- You know the commands: finger, talk and ytalk.
- You had a “plan” - quirky ASCII art and gibberish that ppl see when they finger you.
- When you first found porn on the Web, you thought: “This is free?! How cool is that?”
- You downloaded said porn from a newsgroup, eg. “alt.binaries.pictures.sex.kinky”
- You participated in online discussions on other newsgroups, much like you do now on blogs.
- You write your name on a timesheet to use the library terminal to “talk”.
- You get frustrated when ppl before you overstay their allocated time-slot so you hover behind them trying to make them feel uncomfortable.
- You get a high as soon as you log in.
- You get an even bigger high when you see that you’ve got new email messages.
- You then become practically orgasmic when you get a “talk” request.
- You only pick female-sounding (or male) usernames to talk to.
- You would “talk” to a friend even though he or she is just right next to you.
- When you got no one to talk to or email to, you instinctively type in “finger” every 5 seconds - hoping that someone that you know would magically appear.
- If fingering your local university network doesn’t show any names, you obsessively finger any other universities that you know the network name to.
- You get depressed when you log on and you have no emails and no one to talk to.
- Even then, you would remain logged in staring at the screen ever so wishfully.
- When you first discovered IRC, you immediately went to #sex.
- You also checked out #hottub and #netsex.
- You know and overuse the command “/me”, eg. “/me slaps Alicia with a cold trout.” WTF?!
- You helped spread the use of net-lingo: ttyl, afk, bbl, brb, lol, lmao, rofl, roflmao, a/s/l?
- You have done IRC sex and at the time you thought that it was hella cool.
- You’ve had IRC gatherings.
- You’ve snail-mailed your photo to an online friend.
- When you discovered blogs, your first thought was: if they have had this back then …
and I shall end with …
How did you remember it? ![]()
Trackbacks/Pings
14 Responses to “Being Internet-savvy in the early 90s”
-
Jul 28 2005 / 1:16 pm
Hahah i felt so young reading that! You’ll have to explain ‘figuring’ to me in more detail…
-
Jul 28 2005 / 1:19 pm
-
Jul 28 2005 / 5:46 pm
you forgot about BBC
-
Jul 28 2005 / 6:46 pm
-
Jul 29 2005 / 12:42 am
Mooi… Gimme a few days, I’ll send you a trackback… Busy now… This is fun! Hi fella geek!
-
Jul 29 2005 / 2:04 am
I STILL get depressed when I see that there’s no new mail in my inbox. Problem is, it’s worse now because I have more empty inboxes now! lol
-
Jul 29 2005 / 7:33 am
-
Jul 29 2005 / 10:55 am
yea, only now I refresh my blog every so often to look for non-existent comments…
And then I go to other blogs to look for the most minute updates or comments. Bah!
-
Jul 29 2005 / 11:33 am
-
Jul 29 2005 / 3:20 pm
actually, I haven’t configured that. It kinda kills the suspense in a way… hee
-
Jul 29 2005 / 3:30 pm
-
Jul 30 2005 / 8:56 pm
oh I know finger all right..
Leave a Reply
You might also be interested in these
- That one about me growing up
- Home pages, how quiant
- Newbies running an Internet business
- Those dial-up modem days
- Hangout Hotel at Mount Emily

[...] Back before I blogged, I home-paged. Oh yes I was Internet-savvy back in the 90s. I created my first home page towards the end of 1997. And back then, there weren’t any fancy blogging software to use. It was all lovingly hand-coded in HTML. CSS hadn’t even come into the picture yet. And for the more tech savvy among my readers, some parts don’t render well in Firefox. Not my fault, Firefox was not available then and I wasn’t using Netscape at all. So I was coding for IE and all its quirks. [...]
[...] stuck on dial-up speeds at the moment reminds me of using the Internet in the early 90s. The Internet then was a brand new thing, my computer was a Pentium 100, it was running Windows [...]