Chronically Online Since the ’90s
Posted by jibegirl@reddit | Xennials | View on Reddit | 85 comments
Back in 8th grade, my mom was a teacher, so once a week I’d hop onto her school computer to surf all the Angelfire fan sites. Man, I learned everything from The Lizard King to Leo.
It got really bad when I hit grade 9. My grandpa bought me a PC right around the time my family got high speed internet and my parents thought it was totally fine for lil ol me to keep a computer with internet access in my room 24/7.
What a COLOSSAL mistake. My brain received it like a caveman discovering fire. Hooked was an understatement. Also, RIP innocence thanks to rotten.com.
From then on, every job I took kept me tethered to a screen. It felt like I could never detox because being online became a requirement for advancement and making money. I do lament that I chose this path, but part of me still loves the incredible possibilities of the web.
I always hear that Gen Z and Alpha are uniquely “chronically online.” But honestly I’ve been living in that reality since the dial up days. It feels like I never truly logged off and I’m sure many of you can relate.
Darkpriest667@reddit
Been chronically online since about 1991, that being said I've coped and handled it better than a lot of people. Sure I used it for games, looking up adult content (when I was younger) etc etc, but now I use it almost completely for information and a little social media (reddit is about the worst of it at this point) Most of the games I play are single player. I run marathons and ultra marathons, work out in my home gym, and eat pretty healthy. I'm going on a cruise with my running group in 2 weeks and I have 0 intentions of checking anything online while I'm out there.
dc1999@reddit
I was an IRC addict from like...1992? That was fun and community building. Social Media is awful.
CariniFluff@reddit
Yeah I was on IRC starting at about 13 years old, back when a 28.8 modern was the fastest available. I spent hours every day/night on IRC when I wasn't in school or riding bikes with my friends.
I had so many close friends that I never even knew their real name but I spoke to every single day for years (we were deep in the warez scene so anonymity was a must). I sometimes miss the camaraderie we had but once I turned 18 and could go to "Federal pound me in the ass Prison" I decided to just ghost the scene one day and never looked back. Stayed on IRC for another few years and met a good friend in college through it but it's been years since I hopped back on.
It's also funny because I purposely didn't go into Computer Science because I spent so much of my youth on IRC and didn't want to be sitting behind a computer my whole career. Well turns out I spend my entire work day in front of a computer, just not going coding or tech support.
PersianCatLover419@reddit
I went to #phish on effnet. I was not on IRC as much as you were just on weekends usually in the winter for an hour or two.
CariniFluff@reddit
Yeah it was mostly at night. I'd usually log in around 8pm and pretend to go to bed at 10 but sneak back down to the computer for another few hours. My mom had a built in alarm clock where she'd sleep walk down at 2am and get me to go to bed. I stayed off US based file servers for legal reasons but the Korean and EU sites were busy at that time of night for me.
I was in #phenethylamines a lot and a few other obscure channels but strangely never went to #Phish (my first show was 2000 right before the break)
jibegirl@reddit (OP)
IRC! You’re a real OG 🙌
dc1999@reddit
dial in bulletin boards and per min AOL too!
EricHill78@reddit
My friends and I would use a credit card number generator to make free AOL accounts. The dial-in BBSs were fun. We would have local meetups. I was a teen hanging around a bunch of adults which is scary now but it was normal to me back then. I also spent a lot of time on telnet talkers. I took a couple greyhounds to meet with girls in other states. It was a crazy time.
kahmeal@reddit
My people :)
PersianCatLover419@reddit
I used IRC in 1996 or 1997 to chat with people about phish.
techieveteran@reddit
I write a popular website for IRC
euclidity@reddit
IRC was almost like a game, I spent so much time on there in the 90s. Using PhoEniX, LiCe, writing my own scripts, warring with other channels, messing with ops, trading warez, playing d&d, tons of fun.
stuffedmutt@reddit
Oh, man. Unlocking some forgotten memories here. Now I'm going to have to reinstall mIRC and see who is still out there.
EricHill78@reddit
According to r/irc it’s pretty dead now. I haven’t tried myself in years though.
_TheWolfOfWalmart_@reddit
The IRC world is a lot smaller than it used to be, but it's still alive. Unfortunately, Discord has largely taken over IRC's territory though.
_TheWolfOfWalmart_@reddit
Same! Started IRC in the mid 90's. I run a server that's home to a small group of misfit nerds that's being going strong since 2005.
saltyhashbrowns@reddit
My husband and I met on irc. We just celebrated 26 years married on Halloween 🥲 people are not surprised these days when we say we met online. But when we told people in the 90s how we met we got a lot of raised eyebrows 😀
Stop_Already@reddit
Yeah I met my husband playing a video game and we’ve been married since 2010. Back then, it was more of an anomaly and surprised people. Now? No one blinks.
neckbeardsghost@reddit
I started IRC chats as a freshman in college. Before that though, in high school, my friend and I would go to my friends dad’s shop and tie up the phone line with AOL dial up for ridiculous chat rooms 😂
Tuxflux@reddit
Same man
jackfaire@reddit
Cue the obligatory "Did I write this?" I actually flunked out of college because I found it more interesting sitting in chatrooms than attending classes. Burnt a lot of money in Cybercafes when I didn't have my own set up too.
HappyKadaver666@reddit
Not at all - I just never got really into computers or bring online and it was super easy to avoid all that for the first half of my life.
RoyalZeal@reddit
We got our first PC in the home when I was a freshman in high school and I ran into the same thing lol. I miss the late 90s/early '00s internet, we had a good decade where it was the wild west and it was glorious.
AcanthisittaOver1968@reddit
I can relate! Born in '81 with a '79 older brother who was good with computers. We had a Commodore 64 with a dot matrix printer FFS! In the early 90's before AOL took off, there were chat rooms called "Bulletin Boards" or BBSes. I spent hours and hours and HOURS on there as a 13-15 year old chatting it up with other kids, teens and of course sketchy adults. I even met up with people for "get togethers" and my mom brain cannot fathom how I was able to arrange for a 20 year old man with a Fiero to pick my 14 year old ass up and drive me unsupervised to a gathering of misfit young people! But it was fine. I had a whole separate social world in my screen and it helped me as an introvert. I think we are unique because we know what it was like BEFORE screens, so we have perspective the younger gens don't.
Bridgezilla@reddit
I hella relate to your story
AcanthisittaOver1968@reddit
which part? hope you're ok. cuz I know your parents never asked
EricHill78@reddit
I would go to bbs meet ups in South Florida with a bunch of adults as well. Nothing bad ever happened thank god.
jibegirl@reddit (OP)
Wow glad nothing unfortunate happened when you got picked up!
Yes, I agree, the awareness of life before screens is helpful.
NoContextCarl@reddit
And now all of that is available in the palm of your hand. 😉
I think the difference is, it used to be fun. You used sit and stare at a bulky PC screen, log off when you're done and back to the real world. Now the same and more is right there in your pocket at all times, brimming with ads, designed to keep you engaged and looking...it's a similar plight, but tech is engineered to keep you hooked now and it's easier to consume more than ever. With the younger generation it seems more like a mouse in a wheel type scenario and there's no contentment or feeling of completion...you just keep scrolling away.
EricHill78@reddit
Definitely look into ad blockers for your devices.
exqvisitely@reddit
Yep. Plenty of people our age and older are addicted to their phones and doomscrolling, but I know several people in our age bracket (myself included) that overwhelmingly prefer to do our internetting on a laptop or desktop computer. I think the browsing experience is much better on a larger screen, plus as you mentioned it's easier to disconnect and step away. (I have a smartphone out of necessity and try to avoid using it.)
jibegirl@reddit (OP)
Damn this black mirror
drawgs@reddit
I was online in high school more than anyone else I knew in 95-97. I made an angel fire website. I was in chat rooms daily. I logged on as soon as I got home. I remember going to the local college library so we could print off you know what without anyone knowing. I had a few years of reprieve when I didn’t have a connected computer. Still, my grown kids spend like 6 hours a day on their phones. I spend most of my time on a computer and then on my phone a lot too. Sometimes I wish or whole society could just unplug. Lose all access to anything electronic. I think we’d actually be better off.
PersianCatLover419@reddit
I take breaks often.
PersianCatLover419@reddit
I have been online on and off since 1994 or 1995. I WFH remotely, so unfortunately I cannot escape it. I take breaks and I will go a day or more when I can not going online, not replying to texts or emails, etc.
73-68-70-78-62-73-73@reddit
Same. Very similar story. The only reason I left the house after 16 was to hang out with my girlfriend, get smokes, drink, and stay out late with my friends. Any time I wasn't doing that, I was probably playing UT99/Escape Velocity/Marathon/Baldur's Gate, or online seeing what interesting things I could find, and hanging out in BeSeen HTML chat rooms. Ended up going into systems administration, and eventually SRE/Infrastructure Eng. I wouldn't have a career if I hadn't spent so much time online.
_TheWolfOfWalmart_@reddit
Oh hell yes!
73-68-70-78-62-73-73@reddit
UT99 is the best arena FPS of all time.
_TheWolfOfWalmart_@reddit
I've been chronically online since the late 80's.
I was such a young nerd that I wrote my own BBS software around 1994. It was janky in retrospect, but it worked and I had several regulars dialing in!
Of course that's right when BBSes were on their last leg, so it didn't last long.
graveybrains@reddit
I used to download porn from Usenet and AOL chat rooms, rotten.com was like eyebleach when it came along.
mottledmussel@reddit
The usenet porn brings back memories. Weren't they binaries and needed to be compiled, or something like that? I remember it being a slow, tedious process. It really required commitment.
graveybrains@reddit
Yup, that's how it worked. Although the fundamental problem with anything back then was not being able to tell what you were going to get until you had it.
jibegirl@reddit (OP)
Yikes!
gesis@reddit
I have been "online" since before the "world wide web" was really a thing, via shell accounts, email, IRC, BBSes, Usenet, and Gopher.
I've grown to hate the internet. It feels like we traded our trusty cows for magic beans that make us sad and angry, and there's no beanstalk to make up for it.
jibegirl@reddit (OP)
I miss Bessie.
bravosierrapolitics@reddit
I was just thinking of this the other day. I forgot to charge my phone. I decided to put it in the other room and charge it. I sat there in the living room, staring at my bookcase. I started to read some of my old books. Almost forgot what that was like, and it was nice! Got to disconnect more often. Alas, here I am again...
Moxie_Stardust@reddit
Yeah, I've been online for the better part of 32 years now. Some interruptions, like when I was homeless or my first while in the military before I had a permanent assignment. I did intentionally alter my habits in the early 2010s so I wasn't on a laptop doing internet stuff after work too. That's softened a bit in the last few years, sort of, in that I'll scroll Reddit a bit here and there in between other activities, but that's a lesser level of involvement.
mottledmussel@reddit
I went through serious internet withdrawal when I was in the Army.
jojomecoco@reddit
I feel this! During the summer before 7th grade, Prodigy did a site-wide update/redesign. My parents put me in charge of the upload since I was home all day. It took the better part of the day to complete and I swear I was checking on it every 15 minutes because the anticipation was killing me! I miss those days when I was actually excited about the internet, now it's just a part of everyday life.
mottledmussel@reddit
Wow, Prodigy. We got that free for a few months with our fancy Packard Bell 486 from Sears. I can remember or whole Prodigy --> CompuServ --> ISP progression.
prebisch78@reddit
The internet was a mistake
Bridgezilla@reddit
I say this all the time too
xRVAx@reddit
I miss phpbb2 forums from 2006.
TheBr0fessor@reddit
BBS since 93
The day my stepdad came home from the OG Fry's Electronics with a 14.4K modem to upgrade my 2400 baud was the day I knew he actually liked me.
GuanoLoopy@reddit
I have a reddit addiction, but long before that I had plenty of other news aggregation site addictions, like digg, slashdot, fark. Even in the early 2000s, I distinctly remember always running out of resources on my computer cuz I would scroll thru fark and open any interesting links in a new tab/window and so I'd have dozens of tabs even back then. Such a pain when they eventually crashed and I'd forever miss out on seeing those articles I opened.
lambdarina@reddit
Oh man I miss Slashdot back when it was cool! I haven’t thought of that site in years!
Him_8@reddit
Prodigy user, checking in.
TheJRKoff@reddit
just like jacking off, its addicition from day 1
beeurd@reddit
I first used the internet in about 1996, and was regularly using it at school in my break times, but it was when I got my first part time job with decent pay in 2000 that I bought my own PC and paid for dial up internet at home that I really became chronically online. I don't regret it though - I've learnt and done things that I never would have done without it, including my career as a web designer.
ZipperJJ@reddit
I was a BBSer starting at about the age of 13. I got so addicted, and got into trouble online. I remembered I was groomed by a guy in a chat room. My mom had to take my modem away. There was a lot of sneaking around. And since this was all BBSes, it was all with kids and adults in my area code.
When I went to college I didn't have a computer in my dorm room but I spent 100% of my free time at the computer labs, loading up AIM, talking to my friends who were at other colleges. Reading Usenet. Working on my Geocities web sites.
I've only ever met guys online, in 30 years of dating. I remember when it used to be just us nerds online, meeting each other. People were appalled at the thought. Now all of the normies are online lookin' for love every day!
I try not to be down on kids being addicted to being online and getting into trouble. I was doing it myself. All I can do is tell them how to be careful.
The best thing I got out of all of it, other than my boyfriend and a few lifelong friends, is my career in Web development.
theshub@reddit
It’s now like a dreadful treadmill that you can’t get off of.
jibegirl@reddit (OP)
Truly
nocapnonerf@reddit
Doom scrolling for hours. What the F are we doing? Lol
krissym99@reddit
I was on Prodigy in 1990. I used to frequent the Macaulay Culkin Fan Club boards. But I got really addicted around 1996. I'd log on as soon as I got home from school and I'd get anxious if my ISP wouldn't connect or if we got a phone call! I wished I could use instant messenger on the go. I imagined a pager-like device where you could IM. Little did I know!!!
JeffTS@reddit
I’ve been online since the mid to late 90s. Spent long, long nights on AOL making friends and still in contact with a few today.
GladosPrime@reddit
I deleted facebook. I feel better.
nici132@reddit
In '96 I did a CompuKids summer class. I still remember all the angelfire and tripod websites and trying to find the local amusement park but Kennywoods website had the little construction man lol. It progressed the chat rooms and the UHOH sounds of ICQ. Eventually playing Ultima Online and StarCraft, downloading shit with kazaa and lime wire and running a VPN dump site lolol and here I am on Reddit. Feel Le our generation really rode that tidal wave and it's hard to stop lol
sweetbirthdaybaby333@reddit
It's me. Prodigy, BBS, Usenet, building my own websites, forums, Livejournal, more forums, Google Reader days, Twitter, Reddit. And now I'm in my 40s and trying but not succeeding to curb my screen time.
Justasillyliltoaster@reddit
Dial up BBS got me in the early 1990s
jojomecoco@reddit
Chat rooms were my kryptonite as a kid. AOL, Prodigy, I was on all of them!
Money_Magnet24@reddit
It all started with Commodore and Basic Language
I would program my own version of Max Headroom using Basic, it was clunky but I was only 11 years old then we had computer classes at my Junior High School using Apple II computers but I don’t remember if our teacher brought up the inter webs because this was back in 1988.
So I’m not sure if being online was even discussed. If it was, flew over our heads as to what the internet or a network of computers or LAN or servers were.
Impressive-Cod-7103@reddit
Damn, you had your own computer AND high speed internet circa ‘92?? No wonder you got hooked, I would have too!
jibegirl@reddit (OP)
I got the pc and high speed in ‘97 (I was in grade 9).
Impressive-Cod-7103@reddit
🤣 oh god, I read “age 9” instead of “grade 9” lol.
burf@reddit
As a lifelong computer nerd I do think there’s a difference between the 90s/early 00s version where being online required you to be at a computer (most often in a dedicated computer space) vs what the kids are growing up with where you have constant access via mobile devices.
These days you can’t just leave the area. You have to intentionally separate yourself from your phone, etc.
cbih@reddit
Yep. I'm practically a cyborg.
throwawayfromPA1701@reddit
My old usenet posts are still out there somewhere. rec.arts.marchingband lol
TurtleSandwich0@reddit
You are a trail blazer. Now everyone is always online, people of every age. With phones you never get a break. You can be on social media while you are working and even while operating a motor vehicle.
Maybe if you make a special trip to a place without signal for long enough that you're device batteries can die that you can finally unplug in nature. (Until someone starts hiking with a speaker.)
Seven22am@reddit
Sometimes I'm shake my head at my Reddit usage. Then I remember that I used to scroll Twitter constantly, and the Dish before that, and Wikipedia rabbit holes before that, and Instant Messenger before that, and chat rooms before that.
jibegirl@reddit (OP)
Old habits die hard
mustachiomegazord@reddit
More like a lifestyle at this point
AQUAmomma777@reddit
Rotten.com, sheesh, i haven't thought about that site in years.
jibegirl@reddit (OP)
I’m envious you were able to forget and I’m sorry I made you remember.
unlovelyladybartleby@reddit
Damn. I didn't use the internet until my 20s and didn't get my own email address until my 30s. I just wasn't interested.
In 2006, I got permission from my university to hand in all my assignments handwritten because I didn't have computer access and didn't want it.
I use it now, obviously, but mostly just Reddit, recipes, and apps for banking. I treat Reddit like an ever changing book of short stories (Chicken Soup for the bored soul who likes trashy drama). Since the boycott started, I mostly watch DVDs, so I'm not even using streaming services much.
de_propjoe@reddit
Very similar for me. My mom was a librarian and I first got online at the library, probably around '92, using Usenet, Gopher, etc. A little while later through my dad's job we got a terminal connected to a mainframe downtown, and then I could do all that stuff at home. Soon we got a PC and dial-up connection, later a separate phone line, eventually high-speed internet though I think I was away at college by then. Started college in '96 and there was full, free internet access in dorms. Went into computer science and tech of course. Barely been separated from a screen and the internet for 35 years or more.