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?
14 Responses to “Being Internet-savvy in the early 90s”
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Hahah i felt so young reading that! You’ll have to explain ‘figuring’ to me in more detail…
fingering = looking up someone’s profile; except that it’s all text-based if you can imagine it. And you probably can’t.
you forgot about BBC
anonymous: you mean BBS?
I never used those myself.
Mooi… Gimme a few days, I’ll send you a trackback… Busy now… This is fun! Hi fella geek!
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
vandice: hahaha. cool! will see if you got anything to add to this.
starry: i used to have a problem of continually refreshing my Hotmail page. Hahaaahha…..but not to worry, your empty inboxes can be replaced by the comments on your blog.
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!
starry: hahhaa….you know what you can do. I’m sure you’ve set your blog to send you an email whenever someone leaves a comment right? You don’t have to check – MSN or Gmail will prompt you if you’ve got new comments. But as for checking other blogs – yeah I do that too especially when I’ve left a comment.
actually, I haven’t configured that. It kinda kills the suspense in a way… hee
starry: oh you like the suspense. Ok then.
But if you ever want to change that, it’s under “Comments” in your settings page.
oh I know finger all right..
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