What was the best part of computing in the 90s and early 2000s?

Same cd-key for everyone in the group. If it had cdkey.
no-cd crack.
it was offline, LAN only.
no Facebook, Twitter. People actually played and didnt update their fb page.
No weed. Your friends spent more time at the game than smoking.

never-ending september

Media wasn't pushing STEM or tech stuff as much compared to today.

- Windows 2000
- no fucking laws against anything fun
- the Internet was new
- it felt like the mankind made it
- everything was possible

Now we are doomed with the big four, restricting us to full consumerism while the government spies us non-stop and the world does completely shit.

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Other than the internet not being centralized by global megabotnets, Usenet is the single thing I miss the most from pre """Web 2.0""" times. I know it's not _technically_ dead, but really, it is.

Web forums (including Jow Forums) are such an inferior way of discussing, compared to a comfily configured newsreader that allows you to browse, grep, thread, filter and score posts instantaneously, as well fetch/send in bulk and read/reply offline.

Lack of normies on the internet

Everything wasn't so politically charged wherever you went.

It was finally put it into words.

Less porn.
No social media.
Higher IQ of users.
Felt warmer.
CRT monitors were better and also warmed the soul.
True feeling the internet was for knowledge and not frivolous entertainment.

I miss it immensely.

sounds like hell to me

Is there a way to search Usenet posts from the 90s? Google used to have a way, but they managed to break the search functionality and never fixed it.

I was one of those normal days from AOL that they bombarded with beastiality porn.
Fuck man everywhere I went outside of aol I would be bombarded by beastiality porn.
Thanks to them though I learned how to hate, and I had enough pictures of people fucking animals to trade for anything I ever needed online.

>less porn
I don't believe this at all.

Prank related:
youtube.com/watch?v=dTapP1yylY8

>hosting a website and your email domain in your home was entirely normal
>and you wouldn't end up unable to get past spam filters

It was out there if you looked for it but it was more difficult to find by accident. Internet in general was less sexualized then.

IRC, and newsgroups were fucking wild times man.
Imagine being a kid used to filtered aol chat, and stumbling on to IRC channels.
You grow up very quickly.

It was mostly in IRC. People traded porn for everything. It was like crypto.

>and stumbling on to IRC channels.
And the channel OP was a dribbling idiot that thought everyone that had a different opinion was a troll. Even worse when the guy was allowed to be a server OP, and threatened to k-line anyone that "misbehaved". I love IRC and I still use it, but fuck that guy.

Getting a cellphone with unlimited local calling and using it for dial-up so I could play DoD with 500 ping. Desperate men do desperate things.

m.youtube.com/watch?v=tOUKX89R_ZE

Lel. That one user who would talk his way into getting the hammer, and then ban the owner from the channel.
(That was me)

freedom. police was clueless about computer crime, ISPs were barely able to run the service, let alone keep logs. those were the golden days user

going to lans and being like the 20% that had a good computer and playing battlefield 1942 while most of the other 800 people in the room where playing Counter Strike.

looking back thou I actually wish I was playing counter strike and getting good at it thou rather than fucking around with the physics and lagy foot combat in bf1942.

No NSA

Zoomers didn't use it yet

knowledge barrier kept normies, roasties, and darkies out

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The eye discomfort and headaches from non-persistent monitors. Even at 85 hertz it happened.

>- Windows 2000
He said best, not worst.

You're the guy that thinks Win2k means WinMe, right? What even is so bad about WinMe when compared to the different versions of 95 and 98 anyways? It was never really that much less stable in my experience, dropped MSDOS mode, but if you really cared, you could get it back with a custom autoexec.bat. It also came with a lot of nice features like support for usb drives out of the box. No need to bring a floppy with you to use USB drives if you knew the school computers used Me. I'm convinced people just fell for the "Me is bad" meme, and just parroting what their friends at the time said.

Me wasn't that bad (not worse than any other 9x at least), and 2000 was great. Simple and easy to use, stable. You could do everything you could with XP on 2000. The most annoying part was around 2005-2006 when software started to make XP the minimum requirement, even tho the application ran perfectly fine on XP once you patched the installer to allow 2000 anyways.

Optimism.

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>You're the guy that thinks Win2k means WinMe, right?
No.
>What even is so bad about WinMe when compared to the different versions of 95 and 98 anyways?
I believe that all software that is designed to restrict the user is bad.
>It was never really that much less stable in my experience
Its stability is of no concern to me.
>dropped MSDOS mode, but if you really cared, you could get it back with a custom autoexec.bat. It also came with a lot of nice features like support for usb drives out of the box. No need to bring a floppy with you to use USB drives if you knew the school computers used Me. I'm convinced people just fell for the "Me is bad" meme, and just parroting what their friends at the time said.
This is irrelevant, so I won't actually bother responding.
> You could do everything you could with XP on 2000. The most annoying part was around 2005-2006 when software started to make XP the minimum requirement, even tho the application ran perfectly fine on XP once you patched the installer to allow 2000 anyways.
This would not have been an issue had the software been free. If it had been free one could easily have modified the source to run on any operating system and/or distribution. But because the software came with mandatory shackles you could not do that without violating Microsoft's EULA. Though there is nothing ethically wrong with this, it is legally wrong.

Having control over updates and such, even if Windows was more vulnerable and unstable

Wow, what a memeworthy post. 10/10, user, I can practically taste the autism

BBS's and wardialing

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You deserve to be banned for this post.

Cringe.

>reeeeeeeeee

We don't all get what we want. For example, I wanted to be choked and smothered by the milf I got drunk with over the weekend, and I may even deserve treatment like that, but she wouldn't do it.

So if you're a little sad, don't worry, you're not alone.

Since when did this board become so inundated with normalfags?

vulns didnt get patched so quick

you could dos people who were on dialup if you had adsl pretty easy no botnet needed.

was fun to be a skid.

also linux came on multi cd sets and you just had to deal with the rpms you had because your modem probably wasn't compatible

was a massive fuck around trying to get shit working.

If you could build a PC you were seen as a savant and were offered a job at any company you want.

You could start a business reparing (yes repairing) PCs and charge hundreds to thousands to remove dust and re apply thermal paste LOL

you could overcharge the fuck out of boomers who want a PC.

If it was trash spec in a black case instead of beige you could charge whatever u want

CRT monitors were great. Especially for gaming.

comfortable aesthetic

Money spend on developing mice and keyboards to be the best were at their peak. Hence nothing better has come out since the IBM keyboards and Microsoft mice.

Pre-911 joy

Being young and looking forward to the future.

thats about it really.

Grandpa here.

Usenet for me.

>implying I'm new here
>implying I'm a normalfag

I get that it's an easy cop out for you to do that, but it's also an idiot's trap that you should avoid. Also, RMS is in the sticky because he's a meme, not because he's a good representative of what Jow Forums thinks.

Bad things.
>Slackware was a HUGE pain in the ass.
>Dial-up connection.
>13 inch monitor.
>A lot of proprietary hardware.
>Normies always wanted you to "fix" their computer.
>Mac OS not on a *nix kernel.
>Windows still being Windows.

>no captcha
>username: admin password: admin on porn sites
>no targeted advertising

the thrill

it was also not as paranoiaridden as it is nowadays, in our post-snowden era

Well you do seem to be new here since not only are you a normalfag, but you use that stupid /b/ "greentext" meme. So I should not take you seriously at all. You also use reddit spacing.
>RMS is in the sticky because he's a meme, not because he's a good representative of what Jow Forums thinks.
He used to be, before people like you came here. If your kind stopped trying to turn this board into /v/-lite we would immediately go back to being primarily about free software.

>calling me new
>taking the reddit spacing meme seriously
>still thinking RMS represents Jow Forums

Lmao dude, you're kidding yourself. Rose coloured glasses and all that. I don't think Jow Forums will ever be what you want it to be and I don't think it ever was. You might be more comfortable on IRC

The reddit spacing meme is true. Traditionally we have never spaced out our posts the way you do. But that is how they have done it on reddit, supposedly because of the way posts format there. So you show your true colours when you do that.
>dude
Another dead giveaway.
> I don't think Jow Forums will ever be what you want it to be and I don't think it ever was
You wouldn't know. Before your kind arrived here there could be discussion of actual issues, especially pertaining to free software. Now every newfag has to make new threads about every "smart"phone or Wangblows release. It is disgusting.

How about you just ignore the fucking sperglord and move on with your life. Kid wants to play internet gatekeeper? Hide his shit and move on.

>best part
The massive leaps in technical advancement and the games. Throughout that period PC gaming was always two generations ahead of consoles. It was doing realtime 3D while consoles were stuck on sprites. There was functional multiplayer before Sega even sent the Dreamcast out to die. Developers were aggressive in pushing the limits of hardware and engines themselves.

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>games

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Everything wasn't about putting technology into every living being's hand in order to milk money from them. There was a learning curve/knowledge barrier to weed people out. When people saw money in it the culture was elevated from hobbyist/enthusiast to full blown consumer market. It became more about how easily a person could use said technology to "make their lives easier" (read: help them use an application that would allow someone to make money off of them). I mean, the only upside is that an over reliance on shoddy and shit tier copy+paste "coding" is going to inevitably lead to a cyberpunk dystopia where the very technology we rely on is easily broken into and exploited for fun and profit.

Also usenet was cool.

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>Bifrost RAT + free crypter
>I was able to get access to nearly every computer within 3 hours of reading tutorials on a hacking board as a fourteen year old kid
>used ResHacker to manipulate the exe file, gave it the standard JPG icon on WinXP
>send IMG7022.JPG.exe via ICQ to schoolmates
>ICQ only shows the JPG icon and the name "IMG7022.JPG"
>People open it, are instantely infected
>write a script that autoexecutes my RAT server from an USB Stick (Autoexecute was enabled on Standard WinXP)

These were the days, bros...without going into details...I could control every computer I wanted to control, I felt like god. If only I wasnt a 14yo kid back then I could have used this power for more than just searching HDDs for nudes of qt girls

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>Traditionally we have never spaced out our posts the way you do
Yeah, nah. This has never been an issue before cunts like you started spreading their "reddit spacing" bullshit on this site. Nobody cared, some put a space between their quotes and response, some do not. I'm completely random if I do so or not. Usually I always put a space between the quote and my response in email replies, but that's different software and different rendering. With someone that is used to formalized plain text markup like markdown, one would always place a blank line between each and every single paragraph (this markup language is inspired by emails after all). It just looks cleaner and is easy to read. Has nothing to do with your imaginary reddit boogeyman.

>Yeah, nah.
You do not sound as cool as you think writing like this.
>This has never been an issue before cunts like you started spreading their "reddit spacing" bullshit on this site.
I wasn't aware of it until others pointed it out, as I don't use reddit. But the evidence is clear.
> I'm completely random if I do so or not.
You only stopped when I told you to.
> With someone that is used to formalized plain text markup like markdown, one would always place a blank line between each and every single paragraph
Nobody is so autistic that their writing habits are cross platform.
> It just looks cleaner and is easy to read.
I disagree.

The Sims.

Computing in the 90s-200s was real shit, but the best part was all the changes that were happening. Like a new computer components was actually something to get excited about -- oh shit my computer is so much faster! Getting a new CPU/modem/ram/sound card/et cetera was actually an event to look forward to.

Even the network standards were still changing. The first internet browser came out in 1993. It was an exciting time, the future was more open-ended -- it could literally be anything you imagined it could be. Now the future is whatever the people with deep pockets decide it should be. I wonder when that will inevitably change.

internethalloffame.org/internet-history/timeline

The introduction of tabbed browsers. You used to be able to open hundreds of tabs on less than a gigabyte of ram before modern javascript came along.

You know what

I think Stallman is more relevant than ever. He might have been a freetard icon 7 years ago, but these days? Seems like he's one of the few same ones. I'm sold on to the freetard ideals

>You do not sound as cool as you think writing like this.
You honestly think people try to look cool by posting anonymously?

>You only stopped when I told you to
The people who respond aren't all the same guy.

>Nobody is so autistic that their writing habits are cross platform.
It looks neat, it is often just a stylistic choice. Not even worth pointing out when people do it. This isn't like the old bbcode forums where people made pink and green comic sans posts. Most plain text communications have similar formating and rules, that someone happens to have made a stylistic choice that is somewhat similar to how the boogeyman reddit is most likely just a coincidence. You might as well call it email spacing, or usenet spacing. That kind of formating have been common for decades.

Dos games.

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Me constantly crashed.

98SE was very stable.

>You also use reddit spacing.

Anybody who likes to read stuff as not a jumbled mess uses spacing.

Idiot!

I had crashes with Me due to some shitty soundblaster live drivers. got better ones, then crashes stopped happening. Pretty much the same experience I had with 95 and 98 too.

If you had 98, there was no reason to bother with ME. The DOS mode in ME wasn't a true dos that you could use for games, making it useless to the average consumer; it was there for compatibility. It still had all the OS rot and other 9x problems.
The real issue was that XP existed and there was no reason to bother with ME when you can get XP pro and a bootleg key. Microsoft didn't fix the broken keys until 7 was almost out.

Newest version of MSDOS was shipped with WinMe, but you need an edit of your autoexec.bat to be able to boot into it. Not like the old versions of Win9x that had restart to dos mode options. XP didn't exist for another year, but when Me came out, 2000 had already been out for half a year, and for anyone that wasn't using MSDOS, 2000 was far superior.

Me was in a bad spot, but when compared to 98, it wasn't really that bad. But you're right when it came to upgrading. You had few reasons to upgrade to Me, but if you already bought a computer, and it came with Me, you might as well roll with it.

I miss the huge number of options displays came in. Flat panels were juuuust starting to hit the market, and CRTs came in every size, frequency, and resolution.

Then 1080p came and we've lived in that ghetto ever since. Reading text on a largish 1080p monitor is like having farsightedness that can't be corrected. 2K and 4K help, but we never recovered.

>Then 1080p came and we've lived in that ghetto ever since.
You mean 1280x768 in which Dell pushed on everyone for upwards of a decade. They still seem to have trouble letting it go.
>Reading text on a largish 1080p monitor is like having farsightedness that can't be corrected.
Not the hardware manufacturer's fault MS can't get text scaling right on their OS.

Fair points, if ME was your first taste of computing, you likely didn't care about DOS gaming at all.

Gaming is for children.

What do you think I was back then?
Go be a Peterson apologist somewhere else.

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A retard. Still are.

No botnet.

Except for Windows.

Back then: "Wow this internet thing is amazing! Can't wait to see what exciting things happen with it!"
These days: It's unbelievably shit.

I really don't mind 1080p, it's workable, considering most laptops displays are still stuck at 768 vertical pixels. I found an old Dell catalogue when I was cleaning my house the other day, and it was advertising shit with a standard 1024x768 display in the early 2000s. And I thought to myself about why we haven't managed to move beyond that in 15 years.

In the mid 1990s, there was a radio show from 10PM to midnight every weekday that used my hometown IRC channel to interact with the audience. The DJ would take requests and answer on air with people on chat. As kid, I loved that show. Music and camaraderie with fellow computer nerds of all ages from all over the city. Who cares if I was sleepy the next day in class.

What?

You don't have a 1600x900 display?

Retards like you wouldn't call browsing the web "computing"

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it was all white people

hell fucking no
internet was always sexualized. shit, it had straight up cp only sites at plain sight, it was easy peasy to just drop into any indexing site and grab a shitload of porn and all kinds of viruses and malwares to boot because nobody ever touched the fucking firewall settings and that shit didn't came activated on xp until service pack 3.

I miss running a program, getting all new posts (and posting my new ones), and not having to hang around and look for it all manually.

um, what exactly were you doing, user?

Pranking people with Swarzenegger soundboards was some of the most fun I ever had with friends.

>Higher IQ of users
Yeah, due to a virtually 100% white user base.

>it had straight up cp only sites at plain sight
It still does, although fewer.

Being young and still full of hope and enthusiasm.

Only enthusiastic nerds and upper middle class people used it

Now I have to share this space with retards and plebs