231–240 of 279 posts
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Those numbers have to be very low now that we are post 2020.
Really? I've been in the tech world for over a decade but think I've personally scanned only a single QR code in the wild. For people outside our bubble they basically don't exist, though I'll admit this is probably quite location dependant.
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AOL gave me my love of programming. I learned how to program in Visual Basic because I wanted to write my own "aol prog". I can still remember the "server" in the Warez room listed VB3.0 as the "the software that is used to make progs". Luckily there were people sharing their code so I could study and figure out how to do it myself. Me and my cousin created a yo momma joke spammer. I was a shit head back then, but it…
Hah! I remember running decompilers (of questionable utility) on various VB-created progs so I could attempt to reverse engineer them. It definitely got me interested in programming and the early-ish days of being apart of an internet community. An embarrassing aside: my parents used to give me birthday and Christmas presents that was an allowance of AOL minutes.
And he worked in IT his whole career.
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I have an email that is firstname@lastname.tld when I tell it to people, or tech support they always first assume I’m an idiot and really meant to say firstlast@gmail.com The tld isn’t com there’s no g in the entire address, but people have a hard time understanding that such a thing is a real email address. I do happen to have that gmail address also, but my name is uncommon and not the easiest to spell, so as long…
I have a catchall for my domain set up, and whenever I give a contact email to any organization, I offer theirdomain.com@mydomain.com. The amount of regular pushback I get from that (or people thinking I work at theirdomain.com, or that I am some kind of idiot) is insane.
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Yep, playing too much Quake online I hit a record 500 EUR phone bill once (1000 deutsche Mark back then). My parents weren't amused. :D
Accidently dialing an non-local number for AOL ended up getting me banned from the family PC for a month. Long distance charges were expensive. (US) Then we were in Germany in the late 90s and even local calls cost money so one had to be wary of how many hours you were online. Eventually we got flat-rate and ISDN 64k and then 128k but it wasn't long after that we moved back to the US.
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I have an email that is firstname@lastname.tld when I tell it to people, or tech support they always first assume I’m an idiot and really meant to say firstlast@gmail.com The tld isn’t com there’s no g in the entire address, but people have a hard time understanding that such a thing is a real email address. I do happen to have that gmail address also, but my name is uncommon and not the easiest to spell, so as long…
My email is first @ la.st (with the TLD being the last three letters of my last name). People really struggle with this. Websites sometimes reject it on principle that the TLD obviously can't exist.
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Do you remember the people who thought the CD ROM drive of a computer was actually a cup holder?
I wouldn’t have thought that there were many people using computers who weren’t already familiar with audio CDs. While most portable players were top-loading, I remember the majority of home stereos having the slide-out tray. I would have thought anyone using computers at the time would also have been familiar with home stereo/hi-fi systems (even if they didn’t own one).
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Why is Apple included in that list? What service do they have that pretends to be "the Internet"?
The AppStore? :-) The AppStore and the PlayStore are slowly choking off the internet.
Apple is not a gatekeeper to the Internet the way Google, Meta, and Amazon are. Lumping Apple in with them reveals ignorance of their core businesses.
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Why is Apple included in that list? What service do they have that pretends to be "the Internet"?
Don't focus too much on the word "internet" - it didn't mean to people what it does today. Imagine if AOL had existed in an "always online" world and built an OS instead of an application. In fact, just imagine a computer that booted directly into AOL, where you could download and manage apps but never delete the "AOL" part. Isn't Apple's iOS just an abstraction of the environment AOL sought to build - a portal they…