Restoring long-lost content on Paranormalis using the Chronovisor technique really brings me back to those days I’d spend, fooling around on the Internet, so many years ago. Basically, wasting my time, you know...
Here’s one of those threads: https://paranormalis.com/threads/manhattan-island-abduction.19078/
It feels like we’re back in 2005 all over again, right?
What was I doing on the Internet back in the day? Well, I wasn’t doing much, most of the time. Youtube wasn’t around yet. I don’t think we had high-speed Internet yet. You couldn’t plug yourself on Netflix and spend the whole day watching series after series.
MSN Messenger
Forget Facebook Messenger, Microsoft Teams. Forget Skype and Live Messenger. MSN was the shit! We’d spend our whole lives there, chatting with our friends. Remember all the folks who had ridiculously long nicknames, full of smileys and shit? It was awesome.
I remember chatting with my friends in college, we’d send each other all kinds of weird GIF images, ASCII arts. One of those arts we called the triangle of boredom. It was basically a series of dots, one more every line. When you had enough lines, it would look like a triangle. Here goes:
.
..
…
….
…..
……
…….
…….
………
……….
Wow, that took longer than I expected. We’d fill entire pages of MSN with those. Yep, we had a lot of time to kill.
Also, MSN was able to show the song you were listening to, instead of your status. It was a nice touch. Obviously, most songs came from P2P platforms such as…
WinMX, LimeWire, Kazaa
WinMX has always been the best spot to download music in those days. No ads, no lag, fast download. Well, as fast as your 56k connection would allow. I downloaded tons of music using WinMX, I still have some of these old MP3 files somewhere, even though I acquired better, higher quality versions of those songs over the years.
LimeWire kind of partly replaced WinMX at some point. I remember noticing it had movies, which felt novel to me. It was a fairly good platform that worked well. I don’t have much to say about it, as I didn’t use it long. I moved to something else. Something fooler.
Kazaa Media Desktop was such a piece of shit. It was spending way more power and bandwidth downloading malware than it was downloading songs. But almost all imaginable song was on there, so you didn’t have a choice. Pinch your nose and boot up Kazaa!
Still have many MP3s from those days. Many of them had abysmal sound quality. But when you’re in 2005, that doesn’t matter.
Ancient email providers
Remember Caramail? We used to send each other emails in high school. That was way before 2005. It was perhaps in 1999. I was 12 at the time and sending emails was cool. It felt all high-tech and shit. The primary activity during lunchtime was going to the computer lab and sending emails to your friends. Most of the time, those emails were short and reduced to stuff like “Hey you’re gay!” and “Yo I heard you like d*cks!”
Yep, basic male teenager stuff…
While Hotmail is still around, we don’t see as many of those addresses as before. It’s all on Outlook.com now. I still use my old Hotmail inbox, but it’s no longer my primary email address. Gotta confess I moved to Gmail a long time ago.
Old websites that looked like shit
Alright, the last one for now.
Again, let’s go back further than 2005. Let’s go back to the 90s. Check this site out: http://amasci.com/
It looks like absolute shit! That’s the 90s Internet for you folks. In a nutshell, most early websites used to look like that. A total mismatch of… stuff. Most of them were made with primitive and crude tools such as MS Frontpage, or… Notepad. Yup!
Alright, that’s enough for today.
–Num7
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