For me, it was that the Internet never forgets and that you should never enter your real name. In my opinion, both of these rules are now completely ignored.
The same people who warned us about the dangers of the internet and not to believe everything, are now the ones readily falling for and spreading conspiracies and lies from social media.
It’s tragic.
I suspect now it was never about “don’t believe everything”, it’s just been “believe what I believe”. Which I suppose follows Nietzsche’s thought on the transition from religion to ideology.
Don’t Feed the trolls
Stay anonymous
Don’t be a dick.
Don’t believe everything you see. Actually I was taught that about TV, but for some reason the old folks forgot about it being applicable everywhere in life, not just on TV. They also forget about it on TV too.
Don’t meet people from online.
Read -> Comprehend -> Post
Make sure you use the right type of search engine for the type of information you want.
Since when this was a tip?
Before Google dominated you had a different search engine for blogs, mp3s, warez, link pages etc. You also had directories where the content of the web was neatly organised by topic.
Never lived on this era but this feels life a fresh breath of peaceful life.
Bottom-posting eMails and Usenet posts.
Fuck you, Microsoft. Bottom-posting replies is the correct way to reply.
Is bottom-posting some kind of kink I’m not aware of?
Maybe it’s in the following example, or the inverse?
Citation
Reply to citation
German here, I remember teaching people email etiquette and reminding them: “No TOFU” (Text Oben, Full quote Unten).
Means sth like “text above, full quote below”
Quote above, reply below was the eMail and Usenet standard from the 70s until Microsoft introduced Outlook, and more importantly, bundled Outlook Express with Windows in the mid to late 90s. Those were the first products that automatically top-posted by default, and especially on Usenet, you could almost always correctly identify an Outlook Express n00b by virtue of them top-posting.
1.0 ratio is the low bar, leech
There always have been the nick picks. But now sometimes there is barely any connection between the post and the comments. Like two people with multiple strokes distributed between them having an angry teams call.
*nit picks
the rule should be that you don’t use your name until you’re like 35 and understand how to use it properly
The first rule of usenet.
Don’t pick up the phone if someone is online… I’m old
That, together with: I’m online, watch out for the ca… “No carrier”
I’m a millennial, I learned this, and now I just don’t pick up the phone.
It’s weird when someone calls me and it’s actually a live one.
I’m a gen z and I can’t put down the phone
Now try and call someone with it. I’ll wait
Feel free to call me whenever, it only costs you $69 a minute.
Don’t call them, it’s just them screaming " NOT THE BEES!" Over and over again for a minute, weirdest wank ever.
Hot damn! Where’s my wallet!?
I can’t remember. Did it make pterodactyl noises or is that just faxes?
oh yes it made the noise.
The modem made noises when connecting, but if someone picked up the phone, your internet would just stop working and they’d get their dial tone.
Now dot matrix printers, those were real pterodactyl sounds.
Modems also make noises when connected. However, the noise of them connecting is more distinctive because they go through a handshake where you can hear distinct tones, but then negotiate a higher baud rate involving modulation of many different frequencies, at which point to the human ear it is indistinguishable from white noise (a sort of loud hissing). If you pick up the phone while the modem is connected at a higher baud rate (post the handshake), you’ll hear the hissing, and then eventually you picking up the phone will have caused too many errors for the connection to be sustained (due to introducing noise on the line), causing both ends to hang up. You’ll then hear the normal tone you hear when the called party has hung up the line.
Decades ago, I saw a (one of many) "you might be a geek / nerd if … " list (referencing “you might be a redneck”). As of this moment, the only one I remember is “you leave the modem speaker on after connecting because you think it sounds like the ocean - the perfect sound for surfing the web!”
- Squeee
- Whale song
- Chunkachunks
- Teeth grinder
- Buckbuckbuck
- They’re here
Ah, another Poltergeist fan, I see. :p
Modems can still make noise. As recently as five years ago I still had to work with modems. A lot of them now have silent mode though
You come from a nice family. My family disconnected each other all the time
I used to get hella annoyed that my mom would be online all afternoon so I would pick up the phone and blow into it for a few seconds until I heard AOL man say “Goodbye.”
I’m not that old but was dealing with that in the mid-2000s before my parents finally switched.
Dont believe anyone on the internet.
I don’t believe you
I don’t believe you
I don’t believe that you don’t believe me
That’s my favorite Charlemagne quote