What did people used to be online on in 2001?

[VirusDumb]

Today I was listening this Blink 182 album and this song came up 

It mentions "I saw you online" but it didn't mention where, unfortunately I was born wayy after this came out and the oldest site I know is my space which also came out after this song

[Middcore]

Various instant messenger services.

[Ripred]

I miss the AOL chatroom and spamming the sound commands 

[Kid.Lazer]

8 minutes ago, Middcore said:

Various instant messenger services.

Ah, the golden years of IM. Trillian was my jam.

[Needfuldoer]

AOL Instant Messenger, MSN Messenger, Yahoo Messenger, ICQ, IRC...

[Gokul_P]

If you have time you should try it yourself https://theoldnet.com/ 

[Radium_Angel]

Depending on how far you want to go back, MainFrame dumb terminals had options to see who was using the MainFrame at the time, and you could send messages to them (not real-time like an IM, but more like an e.mail/IM hybrid)

[Andreas Lilja]

Message boards like this one were a way bigger thing. 

[RasmusDC]

mIRC, ICQ (ohhh somebody stole my icq number, was like a phone number, MUCH better than skype messenger or what so ever)

 

Data wise i think i was on dual ISDN dialup so 128Kbit, was on X2 US robotics modem before which actually was a different protocol than the 55.6k normal modems..

 

we had people that had high speed lines in at the time, in like dormitories universities and so on.. which was often 2mbit connections, i did get my first high speed line at some point back then i am not sure about the speed though. it was over cable, and my guess it is was around 2mbit.. the upload was 512kbit for a long time, then i went to study engineering, and we were on something called "forskernet" which was a fiber backbone 21 years ago. it was extremely high speed, but in reality most dorms got around 2mbit capped, those dorms at the technical university had 20+ 

[Arika]

Miniclip, runescape and getting viruses from kazaa

[TetraSky]

MSN, some file share software and games.

[dalekphalm]

4 hours ago, VirusDumb said:

Today I was listening this Blink 182 album and this song came up 

It mentions "I saw you online" but it didn't mention where, unfortunately I was born wayy after this came out and the oldest site I know is my space which also came out after this song

Depending on the exact year this song came out, most likely it was AIM (AOL Instant Messenger), Yahoo Instant Messenger, or MSN Messenger (basically "Hotmail"/Microsoft messenger). Then you had the more niche platforms, IRC and ICQ, plus actual BB Forums, etc.

 

That song came out 2001 or so? I'd say most people were using MSN Messenger by 2001.

[thrasher_565]

hmm games 4 all. waraz , msn, napster

[abit-sean]

I was studying IT in 2001, spent most of my time on message boards and yahoo/MSN messenger. Also spent lots of time on the SMS text sites as I was constantly running out of credit on my phone.

[Spindel]

Man I feel old...

 

I think it depends on what country you were in what was the prevailing platform. Where I'm at it was ICQ, MSN, IRC (mostly guys), a plethora of sites with browser based chat rooms and over here Lunarstorm (Basically Facebook before there was a Facebook) and various internet forums. 

[Anghammarad]

at first 56k dialup on a flatrate, later 768k ADSL flat...

[8tg]

2001 would’ve been a lot of very early social media but closer to how we see it today rather than it’s precursor of message boards.

Still a lot of that, personal websites and message boards, older messaging like irc being commonplace still. But by that point stuff like instant messenger applications were the norm, and they tended to link to lots of other sites to create a sort of single site ecosystem. Yahoo messenger involved yahoo avatars, being a vague precursor to social media profile pages, which then also linked to yahoo answers and your yahoo mail. Apply that same concept to several other services that all did the same thing. AOL had one for AIM with the messenger interacting with other software and features in the AOL space, and later (I think 2005/2006ish) introduced a social profile webpage for users.

 

What killed all that stuff was MySpace and Facebook took all of what everyone else was doing and consolidated it from the start. 
 

Now back into the very early 2000’s era, beyond that kind of segmented social networking and instant messengers, you also had conventional forums. Honestly not even that far away from modern forums like this one based on xenforo stuff. This is not a new concept, it’s just a bit more refined. Oldschool forums have nearly the same features as you see here just a little rough to handle. Forums were distinctly different from message boards in having dedicated sub boards, accounts and profiles. You also started to see the dawn of image hosting sites, Funnyjunk being one that started in 2001 and 4chan starting in 2003.

You can still see some ancient forums or repurposed forums, things like the VCF forum was originally sourced from another vintage pc groups website which goes back to 1997/1998, then fully adapted to the vintage computer forum in 2004 but generally it was the same as it was years prior, and even to this day looks like it’s from at least 2004.

2001 or that era in general isn’t too far away from what we have now.

Just for context, a full version of Habbo Hotel was launched in 2001 after its short beta test period.

The original RuneScape came out in 2001.

Online gaming for the Dreamcast and PS2 was a thing in 2001, for both mainstream titles and web browser functionality.

Most of the internet looked like this:

 

There is beauty in simplicity which leaves me looking back on this era fondly.

[8tg]

Here is a machine i own, a thinkpad S30 from 2001, browsing the internet 

in this case the thinkpad general thread on /g/

And this isn’t too different from how this would be 20+ years ago, it would pretty much look the same as it does there.

[mr moose]

9 minutes ago, 8tg said:

 

There is beauty in simplicity which leaves me looking back on this era fondly.

 

I don't know if this is just a poor memory thing, but I never seem to remember getting caught in a loop or not being able to go back a page on the older websites, it was like they were only a few pages deep and everything was within 3 clicks of the default.htm.   Nowadays people seem to place design above access and I often find my self doing donuts through the same three pages not being able to find the information I need.

[ToboRobot]

the golden age of gaming imo

Quake 3 was a great time to play video games.

[DeadnightWarrior]

Mostly good old MSN Messenger, and ICQ a few years earlier.

[airborne spoon]

damn kids making me feel old 

 

Anyway we would mostly chat on MSN or AOL messengers after school. also download songs that were usually a virus from limewire that would take about 8 hours to download 1 freaking song not even an album 1 damn song. oh the days of dialup and 56k modems lol

 

Also I'm super confused about what the internet says about myspace. because i graduated HS in 2003 and we used myspace for at least senior year and I'm pretty sure Jr year too but the internet claims it was founded in Aug of 2003 which is after i graduated so that cant be right

[dalekphalm]

2 minutes ago, airborne spoon said:

damn kids making me feel old 

 

Anyway we would mostly chat on MSN or AOL messengers after school. also download songs that were usually a virus from limewire that would take about 8 hours to download 1 freaking song not even an album 1 damn song. oh the days of dialup and 56k modems lol

I remember the old days of downloading individual songs.

 

Or, downloading pirated copies of Stargate SG-1, but since our internet was so garbage, I'd download a 20MB copy of the episode (Yes... that's 20MB for a friggin 45 minute long TV show... and yes, the quality was as bad as that implies... the title screen and the WOOSH was just a pixel blur mess).

2 minutes ago, airborne spoon said:

Also I'm super confused about what the internet says about myspace. because i graduated HS in 2003 and we used myspace for at least senior year and I'm pretty sure Jr year too but the internet claims it was founded in Aug of 2003 which is after i graduated so that cant be right

This might be an example of a false memory (Such as "Luke, I am your father" from TESB - many people swear they heard this line in the movie theatre and think it got changed in subsequent releases... nope, they just remember wrong).

 

More than likely you are thinking of a different time frame (maybe you went to College and used MySpace there?) or you're thinking of some other platform.

[airborne spoon]

20 minutes ago, dalekphalm said:

I remember the old days of downloading individual songs.

 

Or, downloading pirated copies of Stargate SG-1, but since our internet was so garbage, I'd download a 20MB copy of the episode (Yes... that's 20MB for a friggin 45 minute long TV show... and yes, the quality was as bad as that implies... the title screen and the WOOSH was just a pixel blur mess).

This might be an example of a false memory (Such as "Luke, I am your father" from TESB - many people swear they heard this line in the movie theatre and think it got changed in subsequent releases... nope, they just remember wrong).

 

More than likely you are thinking of a different time frame (maybe you went to College and used MySpace there?) or you're thinking of some other platform.

never went to college, and i distinctly remember using the school library computer to use myspace. but i don't recall any myspace type sites before that time.

[Bad5ector]

MSN Messenger, AIM, ICQ and mIRC. That's how I could tell if someone was online back then.