• @mctoasterson@reddthat.com
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    5327 days ago

    It’s amazing Limewire didn’t destroy the entire western PC market.

    Documents that are actually malicious .exes.

    Hollywood movies that are actually scat/CP/gore.

    Game installers that are actually viruses.

    Popular bands .mp3 songs that are actually Wesley Willis.

    … on second thought. the last one was OK.

    • @niktemadur@lemmy.world
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      27 days ago

      I discovered file sharing in the early days of Napster. When that went away a lot of people flocked to Limewire, but after trying it for a night or two I said “no way, José” and never opened that crap application again, polluted with spam and fishy files.

      Right around this time, Audiogalaxy started growing, and that’s the first time I came across a game-changing feature: you could resume a download even after you had been accidentally booted from the dial-up connection! This was astounding to me at the time, like magic to my primitive mind.

    • @SkyezOpen@lemmy.world
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      126 days ago

      I was a dumb kid but even I recognized the 7kb zip files that showed up no matter what I searched for probably weren’t legit.

  • @comrade19@lemmy.world
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    2727 days ago

    I remember as a kid i downloaded something weird. It was porn, but possibly child porn so i deleted it, and then panicked like i might get swatted, but i didn’t want to reformat my computer so i hid my hard drive waiting for the police to search my house

    • @figjam
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      1026 days ago

      I kinda miss the days when the internet was all www.[thing that you want].com

      • @EnderMB@lemmy.world
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        326 days ago

        I remember getting in trouble when I was a kid because I had a friend around, and my dad found www.pokemonpornography.com in the browser history. A part of me was mortified, but another part was “wtf that’s all I need to do to find this shit?!”

        That sparked the curiosity that led me to study Computer Science and become a Software Engineer.

        • @ggtdbz@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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          927 days ago

          Can’t say I miss the toolbars or IE7 but I do miss the world they came from. I really wish I explored more of that internet instead of just the endless Dragon Ball Z fan sites and pages and pages of crappy HTML with photos of papercraft creations. Although I am glad I got to see those.

        • teft
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          927 days ago

          I was a help desk technician in the xp era and you just triggered my ptsd. Thanks for that.

  • @bquintb
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    27 days ago

    15min download on Netscape just to see some .jpg tiddies

  • @PlainSimpleGarak@lemm.ee
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    626 days ago

    Between Napster and Limewire I legit screwed up my families second computer. In my defense, they bought it with Windows ME so it wasn’t that great to begin with.

  • @FrostyCaveman@lemm.ee
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    327 days ago

    Ahh hey we had one of those printers!

    I can’t say it was very reliable, but printers haven’t changed on that front. At least it didn’t bitch and moan for internet access so it could constantly nag you with bs about setting up a subscription