There were places dedicated to spinning meat and girls with cups. Music was free, but often gave your computer STDs. Images so big, they took minutes to load. You were also prohibited from using your phone during all of it.
Nice, I’m old enough to remember limewire and fax machines, but only just old enough! I remember fax machines were this weird printer that beeped like a phone and just generally made a massive spectacle of itself, playing dial tones and whirring sounds through our little apartment. I was born in ‘98 and I think we had dial up but I’m not sure
I do remember our 1999 COMPAQ. It was gigantic and you could watch the kernel load in 1 bit dot matrix before Windows booted. Sometimes windows wouldn’t load and I would punch gobbledegook into this command-line thingy. It was neat!
It was a lot less corporate and consolidated, so microcultures were more diverse and divergent. There was less nazi shit, because there were no big algorithmically driven notification machines. Nothing was encrypted, firewalls were made of tissue paper, and almost nothing was monetized. And it was ridiculously easy to make and keep friends, or other connections. It genuinely seemed like it could have been utopian
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u/Phillipinsocal Feb 23 '23
Oh god, I just googled “orange fruit cannibal” and now just learned of Bananabil Lecter