I took for granted that the internet only existed in libraries and wealthy friends' houses
this post was submitted on 02 Feb 2026
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I threw house parties every other week for years when I was just post college. There ended up being three rooms almost every time: People watching weird movies in the living room, people cooking and drinking in the kitchen, and people group surfing the internet in the computer room. It was amazing.
This is just the Millennial version of reaction video Tiktoks.
I remember being 10 and we'd head over to the one kid who had a computer's house, ask their mom if it was okay to use the internet (her phone would be unavailable during this time), and somehow we'd manage to find Newgrounds. We'd spend hours watching videos of stickfigures killing each other to the LET THE BODIES HIT THE FLOOR song.
Or videos where Pokemon violently killed one another.
Bruh, i still do it. Just get pizza and go to my friend and we eat while searching funny/interesting stuff.
I remember being 10, and the closest thing to the Internet we had was when we got a VCR.
I'm from the UK and the closest thing to the Internet to me was teletext. I loved it. My parents were baffled as to what I was doing.
I miss the old internet so much.
Remember when you were ten and went to a friend’s place who had a Commodore 64 and they just got a new game on a floppy from his uncle’s friend. And the game was just an animation of a pixelated naked cartoon lady who took a piss on to the ground. And you’d laugh your ass off for the rest of the day. Remember? No?
Yes, but it was a cassette. Loading programs took ages, but we watched TNG on broadcast tv in the meantime.
How young are you people?
Aight im in my 20s and even I did this growing up, is that person just a fucking teenager or something?
I don't know what end of 20's you're at, but I'm in my late 20's. I have 3 younger siblings. The oldest of my siblings also did this, but the younger two did not. The third sibling would watch Youtube and stuff with friends on like a XBox, but not just browsing the web or playing flash games. By the time my youngest sibling was about that age, all of her friends had some form of internet connected device on their own. Whenever their friends would come over, they'd watch movies or play board games or other "in person activities", but not browse the web together.
I remember when my mum used to say "Don't bother your dad, he's on the internet" like it was this big important thing. Not "He's checking his email", or anything more specific, the simple act of being on the internet was actually of note.
That's because he was looking at porn and jerking off.
"Surfing the web" is one of my favourite phrases in that it's completely meaningless now despite there being far more of it happening than when the phrase was created
"Are you surfing the web, son?"
No, just Lemmy.
Also, don't pick up the phone because we only have one line
I was following it just fine until the "experience the information superhighway" part.
My mate's ZX Spectrums had no "information superhighway" connection.
My mate's ZX Spectrums had no "information superhighway" connection.
Used a 086 Amstrad to connect to BBS's
That was the proto-internet that I miss even now.
BBS were cute. However the costs and connection speeds were pretty brutal.
Best we could manage was failing to get anywhere in a Dizzy game.
Information back alley trickle
I remember looking for porn for the first time at a buddies house and we couldn't even figure it out. It never dawned on us to type "porn" into the search engine. Just two 13 year olds going "type in girls, damn, ok, try babes. Nothing? What about chicks?"
Old internet was the shit. Netscape navigator on a crappy 56k or DSL line, AIM, Runescape Classic. What a time to be alive.
Lineage was my intro to MMOs.
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Used to be a plugin called StumbleUpon.
People who used it could submit websites to it, tag them. Then htting the button on the plugin would take you to a random website from your selected interests. Like/dislike/report as needed.
The internet used to be magnificent.
Lemmy is the same thing, but with scrolling, and comments.
I used to love that so much
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Internet was good when it was shackled to computers and wasn't spread everywhere via smartphones.
Commenting this from smartphone.
Yeah, the ubiquity of it made it even more attractive to advertisers. Even more attractive when everything went from being individual forums to Facebook groups or subreddits.
When I was ten I'd go over to my friend's place to watch The Banana Splits or go jump my BMX of dirt ramps, or steal slightly out of date chocolate milk from the back of the local milk factory. I was in my mid-twenties and second marriage before the internet came around. Now that's old.
Mid twenties.....
Second marriage....
Damn.
In the early '80s we used to hang out at my one friend's house and play games on his TRS-80 which we affectionately called the "Trash 80". We were all in high school except Monty who was 23 and enormously obese. Monty had a real job as a programmer somewhere and one afternoon he sat down at the Trash 80 and wrote a very plausible hi-res version of Space Invaders from scratch in about half an hour. At the time it meant nothing to me, but now after a 30 year career as a programmer myself I understand just how impressive that actually was.
Monty wired up his car's alternator to the ignition switch and he would leave his keys in the switch, hoping that somebody would attempt to steal his car and die. Not knowing about this, one of our friends ran out to his car after a D&D session, started it up and drove around the parking lot. Monty was so disappointed that nothing happened. I kinda miss the '80s.
We used to go to arcades even when we had no money just to watch other people play over their shoulders.
It was like Twitch, but sweaty and with more mullets.
I can smell this comment.
I can remember when texting came out. Y'all remember how the phone companies charged per minute and per text back in the day ?
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