https://teddit.adminforge.de/r/BotDefense/comments/14riw76/botdefense_is_wrapping_up_operations/
145,000 banned bot accounts…over 10,000 banned in January alone.
Going to guess you were cruising BBS, FTP, and Telnet sites? I was just an ignorant preteen coding Qbasic garbage trying to learn programming on my Dad’s PC that year. When I read back on Internet history I was a little surprised it was already so active when most people weren’t even aware of it yet.
At least now I know how Dad got all them free DOS games.
I did interact with a BBS site or two, but then got caught up in the AOL wave. I used their platform, Geocities, and a few other chat sites. Once ditching AOL around 1999 I ended up on a local forum we used for electronic music, and then in 2003 made my way to a Star Wars fansite forum called BlueHarvest (I moderated there the last couple of years before the admin shut it down in 2008 or 2009). A couple friends and I then communicated via a forum we made for ourselves. Then Facebook, then Reddit…now here.
EDIT
I also had accounts with MySpace and Friendster too…Twitter for a few years around Arab Spring, but I didn’t like it. Even back then The Bird was a toxic mess with rare moments of humanity. I think my avatar is still shaded green…if my account still exists.
Shit, I used to run a WWIV 4.23 BBS back in the day. First modem was 9600 baud. Then 14.4k, 28.8k, and lastly 56k - screaming fast! Nothing like watching boobie pics loading one line at a time…
Edit: I remember signing up with Prodigy and participating in my very first AMA, with Quark and Dax from DS9. Good times.
Man, the nostalgia is real. It was Gopher and Usenet via CIX and Compuserve for me from around '88, and eventually “proper” dial-up via Demon Internet (in the UK) in '92. 9600 baud, 14k4, 28k8, 56k and eventually dual ISDN. I still have a 28k8 modem in a drawer in my PC parts graveyard.
Lol I remember trying to get my parents to get an ISDN line installed back in ‘95 or ‘96 - the price was ridiculous. I was stuck on 56k until 2001 when I went to work for an ISP and was able to get a 1.5M SDSL line and was fucking ecstatic. Used it to run a CS1.6 server from my closet.
Edit: actually I did have a 1.5/128 ADSL line somewhere in there for a little bit.