CS 1.6
I was going to say AIM (AOL), but really it was Yahoo! Games. Specifically Towers with a little bit of Pool mixed in.
Started with online BBS’s in the 1980s where you could get kicked off for being a dick (and your phone number banned) but Larry Wall’s “rn” for Usenet used to say before every post:
This program posts news to thousands of machines throughout the entire civilized world. Your message will cost the net hundreds if not thousands of dollars to send everywhere. Please be sure you know what you are doing.
Napster chatrooms
Making as many mistakes, missteps, misunderstandings, misconceptions and misses as possible.
Nexopia and NinjaVideo forums.
Yes, I am Unc and chopped.
The NME (popular British music paper) had a website with a chat room/board that I was active on in the late 90s. I was about 17.
They also gave you free webmail with a @nme.com address, so you felt like a music journalist. Unfortunately, they shut it all down out of the blue in the 00s, with little warning, so I lost my primary email address. Would love to recover all those messages, but they are gone forever.
Oh man, I am not the primary demographic of lemmy am I?
AOL 3.0
AOL 2.1 because I was on Mac at the time. Good ol’ #macwarez!
Oh the warez rooms were amazing! That’s how I finally got to play C&C: Red Alert lol
Haha damn! I remember seeing that on the daily mailers. I was busy getting the Adobe stuff like Photoshop and Illustrator, also QuarkXpress for page layout because fuck MS Word. Good times!
Online.
Alt.flame. iykyk
As many others have said IRC and usenet in the 90’s
4chan taught me that, in a highly uncivilised world, the best thing to do is be kind and keep your dignity. It’ll either calm people’s spirits or infuriate others, and I enjoy both, lol. Also, words don’t have to hurt, especially those from online strangers!
in the 80s ‘online’ was often very local . you learned not to say things you wouldnt say to that persons face because there was every chance you would run into them at some local gathering of users.
Sounds quite similar to CB radio.
Indeed and this very thing happened to me as I was a teenager talking shit to a user on our local MajorBBS system, which was a popular multi line BBS system that had chat, games, forums, fidonet, etc. and he showed up to the next meetup at the park (he did warn me he was going to be there, to kick my ass). Everything turned out fine but lesson learned.
It wasn’t just one place. It wasn’t even all online.
