You didn't have a 300 baud modem? That was a glorious time. Before that was the phone you put in some holder...that was a bit before my time.
It started with BBS's for me, they looked like this forum but pure text and obviously far more simple. You hit hotkeys to change screens, no mouse. The connection was so slow, the text scrolled across the screen in real-time as it loaded.
I can remember a girl named JessicaRabbit, who was the girlfriend of the Sysop. And another infamous guy, the bmxer (bmx bikes I assume). You could change your text colors if you knew the codes, fancy stuff. Some of them were phreakers and hackers, and they ended up getting busted I believe in what was later known to be operation Sundevil. The story of what I remember was that they were in a dorm at LSU doing all of this stuff. When the cops (Secret Service I think was involved, no kidding), BMXer was off getting pizza, so when he comes back, he freaks out and is telling us on the BBS what went down. I was in middle school, they were in college, I was just a fly on the wall. That's the only handles I remember..I could probably recognize more if I saw them.
Two major things went on there. First, computer games were "cracked" (the copy protection removed with various utilities or by coders), and they would but their "groups" name, logo, and cracker songs, on as the game intro. They were very valuable if they were negative day warez, that was games cracked before they actually went on sale mass market. You got credits for uploading cracked games, based on their age, and you often got a multiplier on your uploads for downloads. So if you uploaded 1K credits worth, it's x10 and you get 10K download credits. Because they were all over the country, you needed to call long distance, so they hacked credit card numbers for that.
But shortly after that, my red-neck cajun neighbor who was also paradoxically an early adopted of tech, got some actual software called People Connection I believe. It was like an early AOL type thing. We'd go to chat rooms and talk to people from all over, set up our little profile.
Anyway, good times, the golden age for sure. And once web-pages were common, the idea that a company would allow you to make a little personal web-page on their site and they own all the data, sounded stupid to me. The tech was there since way back. The business model was new. And I'd personally never have imagined people would establish their PERSONAL "website" on some corporate server that gives that corporation full and complete access and ownership to everything the put on their, and all of their data. I was not a social media visionary that's for sure, just an early adopter of the tech.
