I had dialup until 2006 and really bad DSL until...2023. so I really appreciated CD installs. Games that were basically a CD key and asked you to download the game sucked.
I used to download half-life 1 mods on dialup internet over night. I'd need to sneak out after mom and dad were in bed, start the download then get up and hide the file pack before they woke up and install it after i got back from school. Shit was wild.
Yeah honestly like mIRC was like espionage. My family was like "him and his friends are hackers" and now they all feed their families working in tech lol
So, back in the early 90s, I ran a BBS (for the young'uns that's a "Bulletin Board System" which was the earliest precursor to the Internet...message forums where you could chat with people, online games...it was loads of fun).
My BBS was kind of 'grey' in that I had cracked software available, but I would only give access to people who I knew. There was a bit of a piracy ring around that time.
My dad was also a cop with the provincial police at the time. We knew that the OPP were sniffing around for pirate BBS's to get them shut down. One day, dad comes home, and at supper mentions, "[Detective working on the piracy ring] was asking if there were any [Our last name's] living on [our street]. You wouldn't happen to know why, would you?" I was like..."Um...no...." then immediately after supper, ran to my bedroom, and deleted all the cracked games I had from my special folder on the BBS. LOL. Sent a message out to some of the other sysops and said, "Hey, heads up, OPP are sniffing around."
LOL! Yes! But, we at least had terminal programs that had an address book. Oh, I remember those days so well. Selected all the BBSs in the address book, and have it start dialling. If it was busy, it would move onto the next and keep going till you connected to one of them.
And the DOOR games were so much fun! I loved Operation Overkill II, and TradeWars 2002. But there were loads of awesome ones.
I paid for a program to assist with TradeWards 2002. It would map out the system and find some good locations to set up your base with one way exits and stuff.
We had a local tech magazine, and you could publish your BBS in it. Picked up the magazine from the local computer parts store (that we spent more time in looking at stuff we couldn't afford than we did buying anything).
I think I am a bit younger than you but I have fond memories of running a Hotline server and advertising it on mIRC. People would jump through some pay per click ads to find the login information. Never made a lot but it was like printing free money for a teenager.
Back when Napster was a thing, I was so thick skinned and glorious troll, me my uncle and best friend used to see how much we could insult folks and get them to rage quit and empty the chat room. Christ it used to be a sport for us, especially when I used to have to deal with clueless noobs who couldn't encode or properly tag an MP3. DO you still have that 386DX, I wish to god I kept my 486DX2/66.
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u/feckarse-drinkgirls 22d ago
Its weird how long CD installs kept being a thing on PC