Nudge Me

I’ve been thinking about the early days of the internet - back when we had to literally initiate a phone call with the web. What a faff that was and all so we could enjoy the dizzying speeds of 56kbps (if that!). Oh how painfully slow it all was. I remember having enough time to make a cup of tea just waiting for a photo to load. Oh, and to top it all off we had to pay for every to minute we were online. Madness. Actually, maybe we need to bring that back - that would be a sure fire way to curb people’s obsession with the internet doing meaningless things like doomscrolling on Facebook or reading this blog.

One of my favourite haunts on the early internet was Geocities where I would spend a lot of time “surfing” between people’s gif-filled webpages. I loved the randomness of it all. Many a web site can be improved with a gif animation of a dancing baby.

What happened to AOL? I reckon they went bankrupt after making all those free trial CD-ROMs. Those things were freaking prolific! They fell out of just about every magazine at the time and I am sure one appeared most days in the post.

Around the time of dial-up internet I was at secondary school (or high school depending on where you are geographically located). After school I practically lived in MSN Messenger chatting with friends I had just spent all day with. Oh, and who remembers the “nudge” function it had which was the precursor to the Facebook poke? Initiating a nudge would shake the chat screen of whoever you nudged (a nudgee?) to get their attention. How bloody rude that was! I totally used it.

Before the advent of mp3 files, another one of my favourite things to do online was to download and listen to midi files. Why listen to real music when you can listen to voiceless, synthesised, versions that sound like they were produced on a toy keyboard? Good times.

Edit: oh well that joke would have been better if the gif worked. Your loss. Sorry ‘bout that.

Edit 2: It’s now-a-gyrating! Enjoy this blast from the past.