I wouldn't go that far.

It's just... well you know how some guys really like cars, and they spend every bit of disposable income on their cars when they can get away with it? Meaning even poor-ass motherfuckers that can barely afford food still have spinning rims and shit? Or some dudes really like guns, and spend all kinds of money they don't actually have on those.

Yeah, I wasn't super poor or anything, but I also wouldn't consider myself any more privileged than any other white boy not living in a trailer park (though I did actually live in a trailer on a plot of land owned by my grandparents twice in my life, and was on welfare more than once).

It's just that for my dad the internet/computers were his car/guns/whatever else.

I'd call it more lucky than anything else.

The first computer I convinced him to get was actually, in the mid 1990s, a dos box, no windows, not even a 3.5 floppy drive (just a 5 incher). I got lucky enough that he got hooked on that, and from then on we were going to computer fairs and every damn thing.

Speaking of which, as per thread topic: Going to a computer fair right after the 56k modems were released and thinking it was the MOST AWESOME THING EVER. Also, going home with one, 'cause dad.

Fun fact: We didn't even have any flight sims and he bought a huge flight yoke. We bought flight sims (including TIE Fighter) after the fact.

Re: The Dialup Noise: Now in musical form!

-When a sound card was not a standard part of a computer.

-When games took up a mere 32MB of hard drive space or less

-When hitting the power button at all while the computer was on would instantly shut off the computer, and how doing something like that could seriously damage the computer or so I heard.

I remember downloading the trailer for Star Wars Episode 1.

I had to do it while no one else was home, because it took over an hour to download, because the file was over a megabyte long.

And it really sucked because everytime my connection would hiccup, it would stop the stream.

Also, forget AOL. My experience of the internet was Prodigy. I don't remember much about it, other than I wasn't allowed to do much on it because everything cost extra.

ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh my god

...the correlation between this and Dragonrealms was not incidental.

EDIT: You know what I miss about MUDs? Having to figure out where the ass you were going / had been by making your own maps in MSPaint.

My HP. Man I had some good teenage years on that machine.
http://i88.photobucket.com/albums/k1.../desktop95.jpg
Screencap is from last year. Yes, it's still working. However, it will only accept IE 5.5 :(

Oh, and also paying for internet by the "hour". Haha.

Oh my god wow. That takes me back!

I remember when I discovered how ridiculously angry and homophobic people would get when I jokingly responded as though they'd been hitting on me and not Angelgirl16. That's around the same time I decided that anyone who let themselves be worked up that easily existed purely for my personal amusement.

Back when;
- the only computers I knew were school property and had Windows 3.1
- that weird submarine game that was the first game I remember playing on a PC
- We got our first "real" computer and I played C&C and Broken Sword on it
- Windows 98 was the hottest new thing
- getting to use the ISDN connection at a friends house and it seemed super fast
- I didn't know shit about AOL
- I started chatting on IRC (this was pretty late actually, like 2003 or something)

Operation Neptune! I used to play that all the time, along with Gizmos and Gadgets. Oh, and Midnight Rescue.

There was some game where you wander around the school at night, doing math or something like that to figure out which robot is really the bad guy trying to destroy the school. I looked it up and realized I was describing the Midnight Rescue game Bob mentioned. I played a lot of that game.

And another that I can't remember the name of. Had two robots (two players?) competing to reach the aliens in a space station first. They were cleaning robots and the bad guys were somehow defeating with a spray for your water gun, if I remember right.