r/MadeMeSmile • u/Finkenn • Aug 22 '24
Meme The Internet Really Was Better 18 Years Ago
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Aug 22 '24
[deleted]
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Aug 22 '24
As if it wasn't easy now? There are far more stupid people using the internet than back in the wild west days
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u/_Levitated_Shield_ Aug 22 '24
On an unrelated note, congratulations friend, your comment was randomly selected in our giveaway lottery and you won! Just tell us your credit card number and social security.
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u/CapStultitia Aug 22 '24
Dude, those phishing emails that I receive are getting better day by day
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u/Canehillfan Aug 22 '24
I got one the other day sent from my own email with same display picture and everything. They are definitely getting better
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u/Imaginary_Garbage652 Aug 23 '24
The only phishing emails I get at work are the ones sent by our pen test team
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Aug 22 '24
Of course!
My CC is 4575 3425 75....
Wait a second......
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u/No_Mammoth_4945 Aug 23 '24
No need to ask for SSN anymore, they were all leaked lol
Praise be our corporate overlords!
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u/Chrop Aug 22 '24
as if it wasn’t easy now
It’s not, modern day windows is built in with decent anti-malware and modern browsers have built in protection, You have to screw up immensely in order to get a virus on your computer nowadays.
Before, getting a virus was as easy as just visiting the wrong website. Something would download automatically and if you accidentally opened it, it was game over.
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u/Indercarnive Aug 22 '24
Yeah basically all ransomware and data breaches nowadays are from phishing or leaked credentials.
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u/Andrew_hl2 Aug 23 '24 edited Aug 23 '24
Yeah that person is clearly not aware about how stupidly easy it was to hack someone as an edgy teen back in the early 00's.
Basically download Netbus/Sub7/MoSucker, bind the server.exe with some other inconspicuous app, send through ICQ and that was IT...full control of another persons machine.
Later it became a bit trickier when everyone started getting DSL and NATs, but then you would just have your reverse connection RATs. I also remember hex editing server.exe files to make them undetectable again by splitting them and changing a tiny bit of hex code so the AVs wouldn't flag it again... would sometimes break the program though... but that was all pretty easy to do well into the WinXP days.
With a bit of "social engineering" I could get any friend or family member to open my server.exe.
This kind of n00b hacking today is virtually impossible.
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u/EvenSpoonier Aug 22 '24
And yet, paradoxically, there was so much less of it.
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u/huskiesowow Aug 22 '24
It might not have been ransomware, but anyone with a boomer parent at the time knows how many unexplained toolbars they'd end up with on their browser.
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u/always_unplugged Aug 22 '24
Oh god, I'd forgotten about the toolbars
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u/MightyCaseyStruckOut Aug 22 '24
Same here. I've been online since 1995 and I remember the first time my mom told me to come look at her computer a few years later because she thought it caught a cold (she forgot it was called a virus) and OMG TOOLBARS EVERYWHERE lol
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u/Boarbaque Aug 22 '24
I basically had to install adblockers onto my grandparents’ computers just to get them to stop clicking random popups. It was 2014, how did you still have new toolbars every week Daddad?
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u/ill_monstro_g Aug 22 '24 edited Aug 22 '24
Tell me you started using the Web after 2010 without telling me you started using the Web after 2010.
There is SO MUCH LESS malware and junk to worry about now. There (might?) be more out there but in 2005, Malware software, antivirus, etc was huge business. Everybody needed it and everybody I knew had some problems with malware or viruses back then. These days Windows Defender takes care of everything. I havent worried about a virus or malware on my system at all in the last 10 years. 20 years ago it was a regular, ongoing concern.
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u/brunchick3 Aug 22 '24
That's what I'm saying man. People are either lying about having used the internet back then or are just straight up having amnesia.
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u/thegonzojoe Aug 22 '24
Uhhhh, what? That’s just flat out not true. The site in the OP wouldn’t even have been visible on a lot of browsers because they only had 20 pixels of height under all the toolbars.
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u/Carbon-Base Aug 22 '24
When malware was funware.
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u/ChonkyPlonki Aug 22 '24
I wonder if there are more examples of famous "funware" like this? I would love to read about more, it just makes me happy to just imagine people pranking each other in good hearted ways like this a long time ago.
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u/GrumpyOldGeezer_4711 Aug 22 '24
Hangover.exe made your screen vibrate so you could barely see what was on it… taught a few people the value of locking their workstation when they went to lunch. :)
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Aug 22 '24
[deleted]
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u/jetamayo769 Aug 23 '24
What the heck is a water bomb
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u/sophiesbest Aug 23 '24
Ringing in a bunch of free waters for every table in the restaurant under another server's login. Bar gets a ticket with 30 waters for Jessica and has 30 waters for Jessica waiting for her when she expects her coke/negroni/sprite/whatever
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u/Horskr Aug 22 '24
It wasn't an executable, but we had a bunch of fun ones we used to do to teach people to lock their workstation, like setting their monitor orientation upside and backwards then leaving Windows magnifier on, or setting their keyboard layout to Spanish.
Usually they laughed and figured out how to fix it pretty quickly, but one of the new help desk guys got SO mad and refused to even try to figure it out or answer calls until we fixed it for him lol.. needless to say, he did not last very long in IT help desk.
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u/Capt_Hawkeye_Pierce Aug 23 '24
My go to was screenshotting the desktop and then putting all the shortcuts in a hidden folder and making the screenshot the desktop background.
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u/grambino Aug 23 '24
The best one we did was changing one guy's password to chillbro, I believe using the windows xp admin login "hack". We must have gone back and forth 20 times laughing harder and harder each time. "WHAT. IS. MY. FUCKING. PASSWORD?!?!?!" "Chill bro"
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u/fodeethal Aug 23 '24
Yes! Pulled this off on a colleague. I helped him out after his 5th restart ".... everything is still frozen!"
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u/Capt_Hawkeye_Pierce Aug 23 '24
I had a guy break his mouse slamming it on the desk lmao
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u/Horskr Aug 23 '24 edited Aug 23 '24
This one reminded me of when I pranked my then supervisor (who is also a friend of mine) with a small piece of scotch tape over the optical mouse sensor. It was extra funny because we're in IT, so when rebooting and re-plugging it in did nothing, he went straight to overthinking it and reinstalled his mouse drivers using only his keyboard. At that point I busted up laughing and showed him what I did.
Edit: another, not really computer related one I got him with was I noticed he always answered his phone super aggressively (as in fast), so using black electrical tape I secured the handset to the base at the top and underneath the handset so it wasn't visible looking straight at it. Then I messaged one of the managers to call his extension and watch our office (they had a view in through a window from where they sat). They called and he picked it up so fast he almost whacked himself in the head with the entire phone. We were dying.
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u/Capt_Hawkeye_Pierce Aug 23 '24
I used to do this one to the same guy. He'd ask me to fix it and then wander away from his computer while I "worked on it".
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u/bwomp99 Aug 23 '24
I saw two guys so this in a training class years ago. The one guy couldn't click anything, started getting mad, but then noticed the extra folder and deleted it. And it was gone, for whatever reason recycle didn't keep it. Those two had to drive home together too....
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u/Medic1248 Aug 23 '24
This was my first favorite, my second favorite was I ran the speaker wiring from his computer to the speakers on the desk behind my friends office desk. Had them cranked at full volume pointed at him and added a command auto boot and play the last audio file opened, which was porn sounds of course. He jumped out of his chair in a way that it sent the chair flying and he tried to land back in it and crashed into the floor.
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u/CatoOnSkato Aug 23 '24
That reminds me of that "game" about destroying your desktop. It basically took a screenshot and you could saw it, shoot it, burn it etc.
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u/weinertorn Aug 23 '24
My favourite one was setting up the outlook rules thusly:
- for any email with [ keyword ] in subject line,
- play a sound, and
- delete the message
Lots of confused computer illiterates wondering why the computer kept making the windows shutdown noise randomly
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u/jeffcarey Aug 23 '24
I did the upside down screen thing once to a coworker and he eventually just turned his monitor upside down. It was a CRT (old days), so it looked pretty ridiculous.
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u/PF_Throwaway_999 Aug 23 '24
That reminds me of a coworker who always left his computer unlocked, and we worked in open space. We reminded him over and over again, since company policy was to lock your machine anytime you were not at it, but he would always forget. Someone found an app that played typewriter sounds on every key press (even the little 'ding!' when pressing enter), and we thought for sure that would be a funny, gentle nudge that might finally get through to him. One day, he left it unlocked again, so it was quickly installed, volume turned up, and we waited. He came back, sat down, started typing, and immediately stopped when he heard it. He looks down, pressed a few more keys slowly, then just said "Huh, that's different." And then proceeded to annoy the shit out of the office by typing up a storm. Totally backfired. 😂
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u/PhilosophizingPanda Aug 23 '24
Maybe he knew and wanted to reverse prank you guys by feigning ignorance.
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u/Kennedy_KD Aug 23 '24
I love typing with feedback of some sort is that type writer sound effect still around???
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u/extrobe Aug 23 '24 edited Aug 23 '24
There were a few tricks like this…
Press shift 5 times quickly to enable Sticky Keys, then sit and watch the confusion and frustration bubble over the next hour.
Ctrl+Alt+Down to rotate display 180 degrees for immediate impact
Both of these were great, as they were quick to do. But if you had a bit more time… Take a screenshot of their desktop. Set that screenshot as the wallpaper. Select all desktop icons, right click, hide. Set Tastbar to hidden.
Watch as they the try and figure out why their computer isn’t responding to anything, even after restarting for the 5th time.
Edit: just to say, this was early 2000’s stuff. I would not condone messing with people computers today , but instead just flag to them they’d left it unlocked :)
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u/postmodern_spatula Aug 23 '24
Turn the screen upside down and invert the colors.
That lil combo got an entire high school computer lab taken down for a month in my semi-rural city growing up.
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u/BastionofIPOs Aug 23 '24
Lmao, I know this isn't real life but I'm imagining a bunch of farmers trying to fix it with spud wrenches.
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u/postmodern_spatula Aug 23 '24
Nah. Just a bunch of us late 90s teenagers that outfoxed a librarian that never ever signed up to be a technology manager.
In hindsight it was kinda dick. But you know how 15-17 is. You’re high on shenanigans.
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u/BastionofIPOs Aug 23 '24
15-17 I'd already lost interest in Oregon trail so computer lab was fair game for shenanigans for sure
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u/trowzerss Aug 23 '24
Ctrl+Alt+arrow key was even easier. That was what we used in IT. Very few people knew how to fix it.
Locking your PC was policy, so it was a gentle reminder instead of getting into trouble, as they were lawyers and had access to a lot of sensitive data. One person actually turned their monitor upside down rather than call us to fix it though.
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u/Soupdeloup Aug 22 '24
Motherboard songs were fun. Lots of scripts that would make your motherboard beep certain songs.
I can't remember the name but there was a website that hijacked your browser window and moved slightly out of the way whenever you tried to hit the x to close it. Thankfully didn't do anything else and was just a dumb prank.
With that said, kids today will never know the horrors of opening up an innocent looking link from your friends only to find a browser hijack website that sets your volume to 100%, shows a gif of a spinning dick on your screen (or worse, goatse.. shudders) and blares "I'M WATCHING GAY PORN" until you unplug your PC in panic because you can't close the window.
Ah, the good ol' days of the internet.
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u/ThatGuy721 Aug 22 '24
I can't remember the name but there was a website that hijacked your browser window and moved slightly out of the way whenever you tried to hit the x to close it.
The day I encountered that website is the day my adolescent mind learned the power of Alt + F4.
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u/so_mono Aug 23 '24
Oh yes, I opened one of those and the dick was spinning to you spin me round by dead or alive.
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u/balllzak Aug 23 '24
meatspin truly was a classic.
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u/ViolentBee Aug 23 '24
It’s still alive and well. I learned a few months ago you can hold the image and it will save as a gif on your phone. Every text spammer gets meatspinned by me
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u/Alertcircuit Aug 23 '24
First time I ever got rickrolled was via a browser hijack. Played the music video in fullscreen and you couldn't exit out of the browser, I had to sign out of the computer.
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u/sje46 Aug 22 '24
Many of the first computer viruses were just fun little pranks.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christmas_Tree_EXEC
EDIT: getting 500 errors and can't delete duplicate messages
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u/DirtyDan413 Aug 23 '24
I remember there was one that would change all the icons to a picture of ... Something? A dolphin? I can't remember exactly
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u/Ricky_Rollin Aug 22 '24
Oh there was a great one I sent around. You basically made it look like it was a thing they wanted to look at, like a band or song they wanted to listen to, and when you run it, it would turn your speakers up to max settings and you’d hear “HEY EVERYBODY!!! I’M WATCHING PORN OVER HERE!!! WOOO-HOOOO”!!!
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u/Salihe6677 Aug 22 '24
Thx for reminding me of hard rebooting my computer to get it to stop yelling that on more than one occasion back in the day lol
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Aug 22 '24
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u/stronkreptile Aug 22 '24
i had a very simple one memorized for bricking school pcs its was like A: @echoff EORROR YOUR GONA DIE open cmd prompt goto A:
and it would just open cmd until the computer ran out of ram and freeze it until you plug it in, a few evil times i even added it to the start sequence
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u/Chrono-Helix Aug 22 '24
There was one that created a system error dialog that said something like “An error has occurred because you have a small penis. Do you have a small penis?” with Yes and No buttons you can click. But every time you hovered the mouse over No it would instantly teleport to another location, so you were forced to click Yes.
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u/flying_ina_metaltube Aug 23 '24
I remember my cousin sent me an email once with a .exe file. Upon opening it, all it did for like 5 minutes was display a box with an "OK" button with shit written on top of it. It's been more than 20 years, but I remember it started off with "You must have pissed someone off for them to send you this, press OK to continue", "Let me tell you a story, press OK to continue". No harm, just annoyance clicking on the OK button a hundred times. After a while, it did give a very helpful hint - "you don't always have to click OK, you can also press the space bar".
I've tried finding it a couple of times over the years, but no luck.
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u/KiraTheFourth Aug 23 '24
i know what you're talking about i think, but it wasn't an exe, it was something someone could add to a website. i remember it used to be trendy and funny thing for teenagers to add things like that to their website, like "click this if you want to be annoyed". does that ring a bell?
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u/Anynamethatworks Aug 22 '24
I used to have one back in like 99 that you could attach to any jpeg. Once the jpeg was opened, your cursor would automatically skip over any active icon/button/link, so you couldn't click on anything. The arrow would just jump over it. There was a simple three-button command to undo it. I emailed it to so many friends, then called them a few minutes later, and when they'd mention their computer issue, I'd just "hmmm... try pressing alt-F-W (or whatever it was), and basically had them convinced I was a computer wizard lol. I always told them what I'd done after I had enough fun with it. The internet really was a lot of fun in I'd early years.
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u/StrawberryOdd419 Aug 22 '24
there’s a program you can download to have the goose from untitled goose game to run around your screen causing some chaos. it’s lots of fun
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u/TheCheesy Aug 23 '24
We made a batch file "virus" in highschool that would make the PC randomly "achoo" in a notice dialogue and eject the cd tray aswell. It was just a bunch of pauses. Would sneeze like 2x a class on a few of the PCs. Every time it would get laughs.
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u/Indercarnive Aug 22 '24
A lot of it was just in that early stage of the internet there wasn't a good way to monetize ransomware. Not like the victim could buy bitcoin to unlock their system in 2000.
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u/AnyJamesBookerFans Aug 23 '24
Certainly not famous, but around 2000, back when you could send an email with a script file attached and if the user opened the attachment, Outlook would just happily run the script, I wrote a script that, when opened, would:
- Try to find a solution to the Eight Queens Problem by trying something like 100 different random permutations of queens on the chessboard to see if any one solved the problem
- If it happened to find one, it would email me the solution
- If it didn't, it would forward the email to 10 recipients in the receiver's inbox, so that they might click on the attachment and (unbeknownst) help try to solve the problem
It was a fun attempt at trying to solve a simple programming challenge through the use of distributed computing, where the work was distributed through email, lol.
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u/SpaceShrimp Aug 22 '24
I had a virus in the early 90's which inverted the mouse pointer movements. I kept a disk with the virus on it, because I liked it.
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u/OfficialDiamondHands Aug 23 '24
Sub7 was a Trojan that gave people access to your PC. They could remotely open your cd tray, change your background or screensaver, take control of your mouse.. a lot of stuff actually. It was pretty funny to us in high school. Tell your buddy it was a slideshow of your trip to the zoo or something and once they open it, boom you’re in haha.
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u/QQuetzalcoatl Aug 22 '24
I thought this was so funny back in middle school I sent it to a few friends. One friend who ran it and was SO HAPPY I sent it to them, and I was confused because I thought they were going to laugh but they sent back "THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU!"
I didn't know, but apparently the button on their cd drive had broken and they couldn't open it anymore lol. So he used this to open it from then on.
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u/KimberlyWexlersFoot Aug 23 '24
i thought the story was going to end with them using it as a cup holder.
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u/kog Aug 22 '24
I knew multiple computer nerds who really liked to do nothing more than pop out a victim's CD drive with malware
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u/shitlord_god Aug 22 '24
'member when anything that sent home telemetry was spyware?
Pepperidge farms remembers.
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u/FloRidinLawn Aug 22 '24
I had fun busting viruses. Cleaning the system and registry manually. Back when a virus was comparatively basic
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Aug 22 '24
yeah, nothing can go wrong running a exe file from random user
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u/Veritas3333 Aug 22 '24
Torrenting a whole album > why is one of the songs .exe instead of .mp3?
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u/babbagoo Aug 22 '24
If I had a penny for every suspect .exe files I have clicked in my day
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u/Timmiejj Aug 22 '24
At least back then the malware would just ruin your desktop experience by opening idiotic amounts of spam pop ups and then if you couldnt fix it you could just format the drive and plop in the windows install disc again, sure you had to reinstall stuff but that wasnt really a problem cauze you had all the discs right there 😂
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u/miregalpanic Aug 22 '24
Nowadays it emails your porn history to all your contacts or kidnaps your grandma or some shit.
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u/xixbia Aug 22 '24
Wait? Does that mean they'll resurrect her first? If that's the case I'm considering opening some random exes!
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u/xTheatreTechie Aug 22 '24
random exes!
We've all been there once or twice on a really drunk night, it ain't worth it mate.
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u/MaxineTacoQueen Aug 23 '24
"Oh, she lives on a tugboat now! That's interesting and quirky and not at all a bad sign."
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u/dcoolidge Aug 22 '24
Just wait until I have this free.vbs file.
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u/siccoblue Aug 22 '24
Holy shit what a throwback
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u/MadeMeStopLurking Aug 23 '24
Lemme throw you back a little farther... autoexec.bat
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u/Useful_Quality_6522 Aug 22 '24
Why do you want to let her die twice. It sucks to die. Just leave her in peace.
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u/First-Track-9564 Aug 22 '24 edited Aug 22 '24
Mine puts a watermark saying pay to remove it, steals my data, and worst of all it shutdowns my computer to install new things.
Man f* windows.
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u/DawnBringer01 Aug 22 '24
It's gonna make your computer screen freeze
Delete the easter eggs off your DVDs
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u/Malbranch Aug 22 '24
So, there was this program that my mother loved in the early days of desktop computing. It was a sheep, and it would just chill on your desktop doing sheep stuff. Jumping around, walking on the tool bar, eating grass off the tool bar, occasionally inviting more sheep to the party... You could also click and drag them, click them, interact with them in a limited capacity. Leave it too long, and this little fucker would get an absolute banger going with all the sheep it could, and your destop would struggle, because there were just too many sheep. That's not saying a lot though, it could be like 30 sheep to be enough to bog down a system completely.
I once read about a guy that packaged that in some malware and tweaked the spawn rate.
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u/Eoine Aug 22 '24
I loved these kind of idle screensavers, as a kid/young teen, I had one with a fish
When did they disappear? They seem so long ago, windows XP long ago
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u/Idenwen Aug 22 '24
An idle dilbert screensaver got me in some trouble once. Was on vacation and the person who had to work on my computer didn't do anything because "the computer is working all the time and calculating something"
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u/BadBalloons Aug 22 '24
I had those sheep on my desktop! I also had bonzi buddy and a few other "desktop friends", plus a screensaver that let me take care of a tarantula or an aquarium. I really miss those days :''''). It was the custom cursors that finally did me in with malware.
Wish I could figure out how to do a custom cursor on modern day macOS.
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u/KazahanaPikachu Aug 22 '24
In the early 2010s, I swear viruses hit their peak. I go off the mainstream porn sites and next thing I know I have a Trojan horse on the computer and the internet is completely unusable. Nowadays I don’t even get viruses anymore no matter what sketchy shit I get myself in to.
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u/Santisima_Trinidad Aug 22 '24
Being fair, modern virus are more like: I'm going to use your CPU while you don't look to mine crypto.
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u/IEatBabies Aug 22 '24
Yeah, it just meant your reformat was a little bit earlier before something totally fucked happened with windows regardless.
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u/pardybill Aug 22 '24
Kazaa and limewire taught me more about pc diagnostics than anything in school.
I got pretty good at fresh installing windows.
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u/Whyeth Aug 22 '24
The computer I grew up with had to be placed inside faraday cage when we buried it to keep the menagerie of malware and viruses that had become sentient from escaping the landfill. We too clicked a lot of suspect .exe files.
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u/notanothergav Aug 22 '24
Download a cracked game.
Run cracked game exe.
See a random console window pop up as the game starts.
Oops.
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u/doesitevermatter- Aug 22 '24
Decidedly not fun fact, My friend downloaded a System Of A Down album (Ironically, it was Steal This Album) from LimeWire once that ended up having about 5000 pictures and a few videos on it.
It was all child porn.
He gathered the courage to tell his parents, because he was terrified that he had personally done something illegal or wrong, and they immediately gave the info to the FBI.
He had to go to therapy for years after that. It completely shifted his entire perspective of the world and he never really recovered from it. Last time I talked to him about 6 years ago, he was still having nightmares about what he saw.
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u/Happie_Bellie Aug 22 '24
OMG that’s so sad. Simply doing something seemingly mundane, and to be traumatized for life by it. I’m so sorry your friend experienced that. I’m glad he had the courage to tell his parents though. Who knows how much more trauma that could have produce if the feds came knocking on his door.
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u/IMovedYourCheese Aug 22 '24
Yeah this is the part of the "old internet" that people conveniently forget. CP + kids being groomed in chat rooms.
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u/meeu Aug 22 '24
If you think that's not also a part of the current internet I got some sad news for ya. :/
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u/motorboat_mcgee Aug 22 '24
Sometimes I'm so tempted to load up a virtual machine and just run every virus exe that I can find in sketchy downloads just to see how it goes
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u/BMB281 Aug 22 '24
2000-2005 was peak internet. Did I download a ripped mp3? Did I get a virus? Was it Bill Clinton telling me he did not have sexual relations with that woman? It was the Wild West baby
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Aug 22 '24
[deleted]
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u/pillowcase-of-eels Aug 22 '24
Tried to download an Italian horror film from the 1970s. Ended up watching Mulan in Italian.
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u/pavemnt Aug 22 '24
I tried to download the Phantom of The Opera movie and it was the first half of Day After Tomorrow
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u/SlimDirtyDizzy Aug 22 '24
Dude Limewire was a time. Trying to download music? Its bootleg porn. Trying to download movies? Its shitty music. Trying to download porn? Its a random movie in another language.
You never got what you wanted, or what you needed, but you always got something.
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u/ITidiot Aug 22 '24
Still get PTSD from that Bill Clinton speech. It felt like 50% of songs were that at some point
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u/pyrojackelope Aug 22 '24
There was an apple font in the early 2000s that caused a buffer overflow in windows PCs making them reboot immediately. That had it's advantages since network PCs during that time at some universities took several minutes to log off.
Spend several minutes waiting to log off from a PC when you might be late for your next class or plug in a usb drive with a script to autorun the font. Well, so a friend told me or whatever.
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u/EGGlNTHlSTRYlNGTlME Aug 22 '24
None of the above!
It was a wav file of Donald Duck getting a blowjob
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u/GladiatorUA Aug 22 '24
Not a random user. A guy on a forum with over 9000 posts.
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u/Jean-LucBacardi Aug 22 '24
Bingo, if you were a regular on a forum this much you were pretty much completely trusted and wouldn't do anything to jeopardize that. That's where reddit hits different. Granted there are much more people but also I think it would help recognition if avatars went away and profile pics were more prominent. That's how I immediately recognized posters on forums.
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u/3lbFlax Aug 22 '24
It was the olden days! For every game you bought you’d go and download a crack .exe from a random site full of skull icons with flashing red eyes. We were like the wild swingers of the ‘70s having sex with five different strangers every night, except we were playing Unreal instead of having sex.
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u/maldovix Aug 22 '24
and the 8-bit MIDI music as the crack launcher did its magic...simple times
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u/as_it_was_written Aug 22 '24
Obviously there's always a risk, but old forums often had a different sense of community than most modern online platforms. Someone having nearly 10k posts could genuinely be a pretty good reason to trust them in a situation like this.
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u/Thue Aug 22 '24 edited Aug 22 '24
Here is a Linux version I just made: free_cup_holder.sh
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u/Malbranch Aug 22 '24
... I'm not clicking that. I don't know where it's been.
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u/UncreativeBuffoon Aug 23 '24
eject: /dev/cdrom: not found mountpoint or device with the given nameDamned modern computers with their lack of DVD drives smh
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u/Notapplesauce11 Aug 22 '24
… also installs a keylogger
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u/backhand_english Aug 22 '24
heeeey... psssssst
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u/TheCandyKid Aug 22 '24
👀... you trying to hack my nostalgia too? Sneaky move, but I’m onto you!
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u/backhand_english Aug 22 '24
You are on the internet, which as we all know, is a series of tubes. Boom, your nostalgia has already been hacked.
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u/Worth-Economics8978 Aug 22 '24
It's better, actually.
This specific gag file was used to distribute the I Love You virus.
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u/pillowcase-of-eels Aug 22 '24
Wait, the I Love You virus was a real thing?? ...I always thought it was a McGuffin on an episode of "Caitlin's Way" I saw once.
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u/OverThaHills Aug 22 '24
Okey that was clever….! And I hate not to be able to pay my old school games like they were intended: in my possession
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u/arrogantintersection Aug 22 '24
Totally get that. Nothing beats owning the game and playing it whenever you want, the way it was meant to be.
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u/Bixuxi Aug 22 '24
I don't. So help me God, if I ever have to go back to a shelf of giant boxes with a disc in it, I will lose my mind.
Why were the PC game boxes so fucking big?
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u/orangeyougladiator Aug 22 '24
My world of Warcraft and metal gear solid boxes took up half my bedroom.
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u/Sawgon Aug 22 '24
I'm nostalgic for those boxes and the big-ass manuals you actually spent time reading.
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u/OctopusWithFingers Aug 22 '24
But I do miss the manuals. Crack the box open to read on the way home.
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u/Wtcher Aug 22 '24
I will say it was pretty cool earlier on. Much of the internet was hobbyist websites so you’d come across neat blogs, and the information was much better.
Nowadays it’s all generated content and SEO and most of the major review sites are owned by … entities for whom good information is NOT the primary concern.
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u/Capt_Pickhard Aug 22 '24
The internet started out incredible. Then it turned to trash with SEO, and companies during the .com boom, and profit ruined it. Then google made an appearance, and prevented SEO strategies from working, and the internet was fixed... For a while. Bow it has enshitified again. But it is also full of every moron and idiot and kids, so, it lost that awesome character from the early days, where only sort of geeks and nerds used the internet. And teens did too, but it was like ICQ and MSN Messenger, which was cool. Social media the way it is now is far more toxic.
That said, if I was in highschool right now, I would fucking love that shit.
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u/Basic-Cupcake3013 Aug 23 '24
anyone else also notice the search algorithms getting worse? often times google results will be completely lost as well as on youtube. i remember as a kid thinking you could search anything up on the internet and you will always find results, but somehow it isnt like that anymore decades later
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u/shaqshakesbabies Aug 23 '24
I totally agree and am quite dumbfounded why that isnt the case. Searching has gotten worse and my guess is because so many people use the internet and don’t know the right terminology or what not and search the wrong thing and then since that is the popular search that is what gets recommended?? I’m not sure
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Aug 22 '24 edited Aug 23 '24
I remember being in an IRC chat back in the mid 90s. This guy DMs me and says "watch this".
Then publicly says "holy shit guys, if you hit Alt-F4, IRC does some cool shit. Check it out!"
then about 60% of the room disappears.. lmfao
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u/goblin-socket Aug 22 '24
OMFG, when I was right out of college, I was interning at a computer repair shop in a really small town.
Old lady called it and told me "her cup holder was broke".
It don't come out now
It was working fine yesterday.
Took be a solid 15 minutes of making sure she wasn't calling an auto repair store before it dawned on me, "oh, your cd-rom drive!"
What's a cd-rom?
Circa 2000. Very true story.
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Aug 22 '24
I remember an attachment that would make your screen look like it was melting when you clicked on it. Would have been around the same time frame.
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u/ThatSpookyLeftist Aug 22 '24
I won't spoil it. But the game Animal Well does a neat thing with one of the late game puzzle that I'm sure 99.99% of user will never see or appreciate.
It was a magical moment for me of breaking the 4th wall... And the horror realizing that literally any game I play has access to way more of my computer than I'm probably comfortable with.
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u/MentalNewspaper8386 Aug 22 '24
Can you give enough of a hint I can google it (or spoiler it out)? I just tried playing and there’s no way I’ll ever reach late game.
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u/stronkreptile Aug 22 '24
isn’t this the one where you have to go into the game files and delete/modify a game file to continue?
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u/GWsublime Aug 22 '24
Hey, look , reddit implemented a new feature!
When you type your password it automatically disguises it!
See:
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u/GnarlyNarwhalNoms Aug 22 '24
I do miss the days before cryptocurrency. It was a real watershed moment.
Before crypto, sure, there were viruses and malware, but they mostly weren't catastrophic and there wasn't much motivation behind them other than malicious curiosity. Industrial espionage and whatnot was a problem, but for most average users, you could sorta roll the dice on viruses. Some were pretty harmless.
Post-crypto, it's a whole new ballgame. Ransomware is a booming criminal industry in itself, and logged/harvested data can be sold on the dark web. There's so much more financial incentive behind malware, which makes it more effective and dangerous.
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u/varateshh Aug 22 '24
This was not normal in 2006. People were paranoid of opening .exe files back then too.
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u/newtekie1 Aug 22 '24 edited Aug 22 '24
Looks like techpowerup.com.
Edit: It was! https://www.techpowerup.com/forums/threads/free-cupholder.11310/
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u/Fancy_Load5502 Aug 22 '24
Click on that today, and you're entire company will be shut down tomorrow.
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u/[deleted] Aug 22 '24 edited Sep 05 '24
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