What does “boundaries” mean here? Did you mean “binaries”? Apologies if this is obvious to most people, I never used BBS myself and only saw my father use them. I know he used BBS to find shareware games for me, I’m not sure if he actually downloaded them through usenet.

The cookie popups (you mean the cookie consent ones, right?) weren’t really common until like ~2016 or so, were they? (I found this post that claims May 2018) And I thought there were actual pop up ads before then, though yeah not as bad as modern internet browsing without an ad blocker, in some ways.

But there were other usability quirks… I remember always downloading Firefox on a new computer, because Internet Explorer 5 or whatever didn’t have tabs (and Firefox did). Then Chrome was faster and seemed to quickly take over. I remember that javascript alert popups were somewhat common, and would force their window or tab to the top, so a site could easily kind of hijack your whole desktop session, since I think you couldn’t resize the window or even close it until dismissing the popup. In fact at some point the major browsers added a checkbox “prevent this site from showing this dialog” (or something like that) as a mitigation. Before that you could do like while (true) { alert('hello world'); } and I think the only workaround was to force-close the browser? Other random tidbit: you could also execute arbitrary javascript by putting it in the address bar, javascript:alert('hello world') would show the popup. And ha, I remember when the address bar didn’t default to search, it would only accept URLs.

In 1996 I was quite young, but I remember my father connecting to bulletin boards to download free shareware games for me, and it would use up the home phone line. (For anyone who doesn’t know, bulletin boards were text based, like a terminal… and he’d have to call a number, we’d look up some in our area code to avoid long distance fees, I think. When visiting my grandmother’s house in another province, we used a different set of bulletin boards, I think. I remember seeing something like a phone book that would list a bunch of servers that could be called for different things. I remember seeing something like this on Reddit a long time ago:

Its like this area of tall building that has little to no safety. No elevators, a staircase that ran from ground floor to like idk 7 or 8 floors? And the stairs were exposed to outside the building, meaning you could accidentally fall and die. It took a half an hour to get to the main road where you can actually take a bus and where the malls are at.

Could you share a picture of this? I tried to find one myself on the internet but couldn’t. That sounds really interesting… were there handrails?

I think I first started regularly using the internet in the early 2000s, when I was a little older than 10.

I mostly remember looking up N64 game walkthroughs on “GameFAQs”, reading some big text file with occasional ASCII diagrams. I think I’d sometimes print them. I also used MSN Messenger to talk to some friends. Not many people had microphones so often I’d still use the house phone to call a friend if we were chatting over MSN but wanted to say a lot over voice.

But for most of my PC gaming time before that, I would just ignore the (network) multiplayer option in games, since I never had a LAN party and mostly only had dial up, where you would tie up the home phone line, and I assume actually call the person you want to game with, or maybe call some specific server (and I was too young to do that on my own anyway).

But I remember one day playing StarCraft (the original), realizing that I finally had a dedicated and decent internet connection, and that I’d be ignoring the multiplayer button unnecessarily. I joined a random multiplayer game, a 7 vs 1 “comp[uter player] stomp”. It was quite novel for me to get to play a computer game and chat with random people, I remember showing my parents. Later I played “James Bond: Nightfire” on PC a lot with randoms, and joined clans and all that. Later I played Runescape and most of the rest of my friends and classmates eventually played too.

It’s kind of sad now that everyone is on the internet, and that we’re “always” on. You don’t really say “brb” anymore. I kind of liked when the internet was something that you’d only get to see when using the shared family computer, not something that’s constantly accessible to us at all times. I even wrote this when I meant to just relax in the sun, not scroll on my phone.

I also liked Doom 2016 and it worked well on Linux. I’m sad to hear that the later ones weren’t as good.

Do you know of any games similar to Doom 2016 that you’d recommend? I liked how it didn’t waste time trying to tell a story, usually I’d watch a movie or read a book if I want a good story. Doom had enjoyable steady action and I felt like I could enjoy it for half an hour at a time without needing much time to get into it.