Remembering the good old days of eSheep.exe and my dad freaking out that "It's a virus!" because he saw "a black sheep come running up to the other one and hit it! It started bleeding!"

Dad, that's a ram... The other sheep's not bleeding. It's blushing!

I remember I used to be subscribed to a mailing list for a programming language. A friend of the lead developer set the mailing list up for them at his university, and then went off and did his own thing. It was completely unmoderated. Some kid sent a "neat little proggy" his friend Dieter wrote. If the extent of my Internet usage wasn't limited to free email through Juno, my entire hard drive probably would have gotten deleted that day lol

There used to be this thing going around on pre-smartphone phones (via Bluetooth, I assume) that showed a pocket watch closing and when it was fully closed, the phone shut down. We all thought it was hilarious to send it to as many people as possible and watch them panic. I don't even know what format it was to look like a normal gif or video and do that. I certainly didn't even care back then.

Back in the day it was innocent fun. I miss those days.

We were not prepared, as a species, for a device that let us come up with any opinion at all and find validation for it.

It used to be that when you had an opinion that was wrong, you’d say it out loud a number of times, and you’d notice that everyone around you would call you an imbecile and ridicule you. It would make you reassess yourself and grow as a person.

Now that societal failsafe is gone. Now people just aren’t challenged for holding the wrong opinion.

That was an integral part of growing up and maturing. We don’t have a solution for it.

Here's a video of that .exe running:

https://www.youtube.com/...

Fuck. I've been looking for that for so long. Had the same experience. It fucked me up.

The game it was advertising is called "Virus: The Game" pretty sure danooct1 made a video on the advert & game.

I think that was called "We're All Going to the World's Fair" or something.

I vaguely remember seeing a news article about something like that. I think it was a game where killing enemies caused files to be deleted from your computer. It was portrayed as some kind of artistic statement about digital possessions or something.

Someone in the forum where it was being discussed sarcastically said they developed a live action version called "playing baseball inside."

The game's called "Virus The Game", if I'm not mistaken

That sounds awesome

Did it actually delete everything

This reminds me of Operation: Inner Space

Hardware has gotten better though!

Can't even tell cause software has gotten so much worse

You can't even Google shit anymore, it's all AI written articles. I used to use Reddit for that with site:reddit.com but I wonder how long we will be able to.

You forgot clickbait

I fucking hate the Internet outside Lemmy, Mastodon, and select discords.

And you can get rid of anything you hate, meanwhile porn loads in seconds.

I wouldn't go back

When you see "Account created: 1997".

"These are the sacred scrolls of the ancient ones."

I have boots older than some people that are posting on Lemmy today...

I went to an internet café once. I opened regedit and went to Win98 colour settings. I swapped top and left border colours with bottom and right ones to make all windows and buttons look debossed. I left. That PC was "out of order" for two weeks afterwards.

Oh we still do, we still do.

Only time I ever got a virus that crashed my PC was from an old-school forum that apparently was hacked to include a drive-by download of some type that infected my PC just from loading the webpage. The shit wouldn't even boot and I didn't try to recover it, because I had just imaged the hard drive a week before luckily.

🤯

We're on a forum right now!

One thing that happened since I joined the feddieverse is that I've spend more time on the underbelly of the internet. Like, the other day I found someones blog. Not their tumblr or anything, their own personal blog.

It looked like shit and was filled with pointless entries but it was the internet in it's rawest form

Yeah, specific forums for games or apps are still here, they're just pretty empty unless there's a big community for them. Some companies intentionally make forums their first and best place to get info, honestly.

"What colleges have you applied to?"

My wife called them invisible friends, even after we all met lol

BBS predate chatrooms and are proto-forums.

Agree to all. How would you define the format of what you're reading right now, some derivitive of a forum?

Nah, man, 2000 was like 10 years ago.

Yeah, I definitely wasn't downloading and running random exes to see what they did 10 years ago. But I probably would have 20 or 25 years ago.

This image itself is almost 10 years old at this point.

I'm pretty sure we had this joke app in the mid 90s. I vaguely recall the joke would reference coke or similar.

I look back to how many "fake virus" exes I used to download and wonder how I never actually got one.

I had to buy an external one recently to get some expensive MRI data off a CD-ROM, as none of my computers or laptops have optical drives these days.

Now I can be introspective by looking inside my head.

I still have my first computer in the attic.

6MHz/12MHz turbo, 40MB internal drive, 5.25'' floppy drive. Not sure about RAM, I think it had 64KB.

Wait I have an .exe file to fix that for you right here somewhere!

What's a CD-Rom drive?

I just replaced my wife's desktop. Pulled the optical drive out of the 6 year old box I was replacing.

Connected it up and it works seamless. She'll use it once or twice in the next 5 or 6 years.

Had to scroll pretty far to find this comment...

Just mount the iso/dmg file as a virtual drive

They have one, though it's still incomplete and experimental.

technically yes, copied interface the like of vbulletin, xenforo, phpbb and such

by someone that much more proficient in creating them, of course

Hah, Happypuppy. That was cool site for a while.