As I was running ad-aware on my computer this morning it made me think of the early days of using my computer with a modem. I can remember going to different BBS based on friends recommendations that they gave me while on the telephone. If you had a computer at all of any type you were warmly embraced as "one of us". When working on a mainframe hacking was when you caused messages like "The Dean is a jerk" to be printed out whenever somebody downloaded anything. If you had a problem then people crawled out of the woodwork to help you.

Some of those good things are still with us. IW is a great place for friendly people to talk and give you help. At the same time it is now dangerous to search even innocent words on the internet. If you end up at the wrong site you will be embarrassed at the least and accused of being a child pornographer or terrorist at the worst. Even when I'm just visiting sites I trust I'm still using a computer that is "stealthed", behind firewalls, running anti-virus programs and using ad-aware and spybot.

The world and the net are different these days. :rolleyes:

huh!? What kind of words are you searching on? :eek:

Well, when I looked for the Busted video for "What I Go To School For" on WinMX (I guess the mistake was using Busted as the keyword) you wouldn't what results were displayed. Anything but the one I wanted, everything else just pornography. It's really sick.

[ 01-16-2003, 04:37 PM: Message edited by: slicer15 ]

Yeah, Porn is taking over the internet. Just now when i was searching for Metal Gear Solid pics, on Images for google, I found 2 naughty pictures that probably led to an even naughtier site. That and every website is virused, if you make i mistake typing in the address, it'll direct you to a porn site.

[ 01-21-2003, 03:59 PM: Message edited by: Ziroc ]

Things were much more simple years back. Do any of you remember the day when you surfed the first time?

It was at my summerwork, when the town hall got an internet connection. Everybody was talking about it, "oooh it´s an unbelievable, heavenly experience!" even though there was maybe 100 adresses that you could visit. We even had a small letter about the sites that were worth visiting, because there wasnt proper search engine at that time. Though, porn sites had already born..

Well, my fondest memories came from my BBS days, long before the Net became widely accessible outside of universities and government buildings. I remember spending an obscene amount of money for a 14.4k dual mode modem - an amount that would buy an entire machine today, and actually having the investment justified by a $200/month reduction in my long distance bills.

NANet, fidonet, and SmartNet were the going concerns, anybody remember Sparky Herring, inventor of QMail?

When I went to school, the big thing was mainframe access with a card reader, or timeshare. SPACE, Adventure, TradeWars - all fun things (illegally) played on school systems, and all the usual pranks. (Hacking the OS root to replace the logon message with "Requests for sex must be promptly fulfilled" was a memorable one....)

Ahhhh, the good ol' days, when 1000cps was a fantastic transfer rate, and the big debates were on Xmodem versus Ymodem - not Winblows versus everything else.

Well, I never learned to turn on a computer until 2 years ago, so the nostalgia is rather lost on me.

Rokenn, I don't think your link goes to the site, but I suggest you check TOS if it does - even though we all know you were joking.

Internet porn is great, IMO, BTW, as noted in the "grumpy old man" joke thread posted recently on GD. It's just there's so... damn.... much of it - and it's so buggy, greedy, grabby, linky, spamy, etc. - as intimated above. Such great pix aren't really even worth the hassle or embarrassment.

But, think of how far computers have come .... and not come. I mean pop-up screens aren't really that new an idea. There was a very similar game that I loved to play long ago: Whack-A-Mole. :D

(it's a porn site btw)</font>[/QUOTE]Yo, don't wanna get you in trouble, but i don't think your aload to have links to porn sites.

[ 01-21-2003, 04:00 PM: Message edited by: Ziroc ]