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1990's and 2000's Nostalgia

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Fellow Time Traveler 02/02/2020 (Sun) 17:53:36 No.360 [Reply]
You're invited, TO THE MOST EXCLUSIVE IMAGEBOARD PARTY OF THE YEAR! THE SUPERB OWL Come on over for drinks, snaxxs, and shitposting See you there!

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AIM Fellow Time Traveler 01/26/2020 (Sun) 01:32:39 No.342 [Reply]
Just a reminder that there's (mostly) working AIM revival project right now. http://iwarg.ddns.net/aim/ There's also one for Yahoo Messenger but it's pretty barebones right now, very few users and doesn't even have Chatrooms. http://iwarg.ddns.net/ymsg/index.php
Didn't know about the Yahoo Messenger one, thanks. There's one for MSN Messenger which currently works with MSN 1-8: https://escargot.log1p.xyz/ Anyone know if there's one for classic ICQ?
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>>342 Interesting, thanks for sharing. I wonder how secure/private will this be? >>344 I could see myself using this just to see Winks again.
>>344 I use escargot, even if it's just to keep it opening automatically with windows (msn is very light) and the icon in the taskbar. I tested with friends and works pretty fine, but have some major issues: offline messages don't work and, if I'm right, messages aren't saved in the history.
Post your screennames dudes. We could start a /retro/ chatroom later VibriVibRibbon
>>349 BillSaysHi I've never used AIM before, was mostly an MSN dude...

Y2K was 20 years ago Fellow Time Traveler 12/31/2019 (Tue) 17:16:06 No.258 [Reply]
With a new decade upon us and the 2000's being officially "retro" in the eyes of mainstream pop culture, I'm wondering what 2000's nostalgia will be like in the 2020's? 80's nostalgia got big in the 2000's and is still going strong with all that weird "vaporwave" art that appeared in the early 2010's and stuff like Stranger Things in the late 2010's. More relevant to this board, 1990's nostalgia first became a big thing this decade but it was more prominent on the internet than TV or movies. Now we're seeing 2000's nostalgia start to take root in the very late 2010's. I've noticed a lot of Zoomers posting 2000's nostalgia compilations on YouTube in 2018-2019 and it kind of reminds me of the first big wave of 90's nostalgia that got big online in 2010-2012 or so. Hell, /retro/ itself is simply a newer version of /y2k/ over on the old board, but expanded to also include the 90's. I'm wondering if we'll see more 2000's nostalgia and whether or not the media will start pandering to it. Pic unrelated
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>>267 >There's much more but i think the point was made, i can't wait to see if all that stuff is reminded again in the current climate or if it's going to be caricaturized/satirized again. Honestly, it depends on whether or not we see a major backlash against the 2010's SJW culture in the early-to-mid 2020's. If SJW culture winds up dying out in the 2020's like disco and hippies did when the 1970's gave way to the 1980's or like how the Religious Right burned itself out a few years into the 2000's (the early Bush years were like a "last hurrah" for them) then we could probably see a genuine appreciation for the late 90's and 2000's in the regular media, as opposed to shallow caricatures and cheap nostalgia pandering It's anyone guess how the 2020's will turn out after the election is over and done with, and how that will affect the culture's perspective on the 1990's and 2000's
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>>268 >we could probably see a genuine appreciation for the late 90's and 2000's in the regular media, as opposed to shallow caricatures and cheap nostalgia pandering I'm not very optimistic about that given how much a lot of that neo-'80s stuff that's been so popular in recent years turned out. You have all these teenagers who think anything with subtractive synthesizer sounds, drum machines, and neon imagery is "so 80's xDD," even when it completely fails to capture the spirit of the decade (not to say that the music itself is necessarily bad). I can understand if someone is just trying to use certain aspects of the '80s as a starting point and taking things in a different, more modern direction (even if it's not necessarily my cup of tea), but there are a lot of people who can't differentiate between a revisionist Flanderization of a certain period and what the real thing was actually like. Having said that, I think '90s revivalism could be really interesting. As much as I love analog synthesizers, I think the current craze over them is really overblown and would really like to hear people making original music with cheesy ROMplers again. Far Side Virtual is kind of similar to that idea, but it seems that James Ferraro was trying to make a critique of consumerism more than trying to focus on the wondrous feeling of possibilities that the new technologies of the '90s seemed to inspire.
>>284 >Having said that, I think '90s revivalism could be really interesting. As much as I love analog synthesizers, I think the current craze over them is really overblown and would really like to hear people making original music with cheesy ROMplers again. I just want decent electronic dance music again. The 90s had by far some of the most experimental music even by today's standards, that still managed to be danceable and exciting. Everything nowadays sounds too minimal and washed out, even to a degree including the 80s revival music. >Far Side Virtual I thought that was more of a late 00s / early 10s record? Celebrating modern technology while also critiquing or even outright mocking it for being too controlling of human life. Just my 2 cents on it anyway... Do you listen to vaporwave?
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>>287 >I just want decent electronic dance music again. The 90s had by far some of the most experimental music even by today's standards, that still managed to be danceable and exciting. Everything nowadays sounds too minimal and washed out, even to a degree including the 80s revival music. Most of the stuff made past the '90s feels extremely sterile or like inferior retreads of older styles to me. Music doesn't have to be original to be good, but it should at least bring something of merit to the table to be able to compete with what's come before it. Even with the problems I have with a lot of it, the '80s revival/memewave music is some of the only music coming out nowadays I've heard that I even like. Even then I'm really just into the more melodic-leaning music rather than the more aggressive stuff like Perturbator and Carpenter Brut. I remember the former coming to 8chan's /mu/ for a Q&A, though, and he seemed like a nice enough guy even if I'm not really a fan of his. >I thought that was more of a late 00s / early 10s record? Celebrating modern technology while also critiquing or even outright mocking it for being too controlling of human life. Just my 2 cents on it anyway... It was, but it evokes a '90s background music/corporate muzak feeling despite being more of a message about technology today. I think I even heard the Roland JV-1080 steel guitar preset on "Dubai Dream Tone." That whole track makes me think of an old Microsoft commercial or something. >Do you listen to vaporwave? Not really. As much as I like the kind of aesthetic it goes for, I dislike music that relies that heavily on re-appropriating samples. I'd rather just listen to the stuff it's drawing from, like Dancing Fantasy.
If you haven't already had a gander, The Register has been publicizing actual Y2K stories and sequels to BOFH for decades now. Tales of incompetence never grow old.

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Paleo /retro/ Fellow Time Traveler 09/07/2019 (Sat) 21:15:18 No.13 [Reply]
Is it just me or was anything related to dinosaurs really fucking huge back in the 90's and very early 2000's? You had the original Jurassic Park trilogy, Walking With Dinosaurs, Dino Crisis, Land Before Time, the Dinosaurs TV show, Disney's Dinosaur movie from 2000, even PBS kiddie shit like Barney. Even the shitty 1998 Godzilla movie with Matthew Broderick tried to ape Jurassic Park. Like, this was most obvious with children's media like Land Before Time and Barney, but you even saw it elsewhere in the 90's, like the Toronto Raptors I guess the first Jurassic Park was where it all kicked off, considering how huge that movie was in the early 90's and a lot of the craze fittingly died down with Jurassic Park III, which was the worst of the original films in a lot of people's opinions (including my own)
Edited last time by CaesarDude on 01/05/2020 (Sun) 21:05:43.
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>>285 Don't know that game but I do recall stumbling upon it on the internet archive, might download it and give it a try... I've recently developed a soft spot for vintage CGI and old games / interactive programs with pre-rendered 3D backgrounds, which is what I presume 3DDA to be. You could tell the developers tried their best to make the interfaces as interesting and appealing as possible, always tempting the user to interact and explore, not like today's sterile-looking interfaces that are predicable at best and minimalistic to the point of unusability at worst.
>>302 You should. I got to experience a bunch of old DOS games in the same manner as you described. I just wish I still had my 3D glasses from the game they ended up tearing by the end of the '90s. I wore them for various other 3D games I played throughout the decade. lol As I'm sure you're aware it's a bit dated and may come off as cheesy but still enjoyable especially if you're "developing a soft spot" for the genre. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8LaJIczoYHE There's a video displaying most if not all of the aspects from it. The music from the game is a treat as well.
The Lost World was written in 1912, but there was a big resurgence in the 80s. The 90s were definitely the height of it.
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>>304 So I downloaded the anniversary edition and played it a bit. There's not much in the way of 3D renders save for a few animation clips, but the dino illustrations are simply sublime. Pics related are my favorites. There's not much in the way of gameplay either, but it's understandable for a purely educational game.
>>324 Very nice, I'm glad that you got the chance to experience it. Yeah, it's more of just educational software in the end with a small bit of 3D being a part of it for an attempt to draw kids in and make it "cool". Still nonetheless an interesting piece of DOS history. I had all of the Knowledge Adventure DOS "games".

AI Internet v. Old Internet 09/16/2019 (Mon) 12:01:25 No.81 [Reply]
This is copied and pasted from another forum, but, I'd like to start off with it.

Here's a timeline of the beginning of the death of retro internet until now:
2004: DARPA's Lifelog project was "cancelled." Facebook came into being soon after.
2004-2012: NSA picked up DARPA's project under the "Total Informational Awareness" project. https://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/23/opinion/whos-watching-the-nsa-watchers.html
2012: Smith-Mundt Modernization Act gives the U.S. government full legal authority to use propaganda against its own populace. Undoing rules put into place after Operation Mockingbird's discovery and the Church Committee. https://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/23/opinion/whos-watching-the-nsa-watchers.html
2012-2016: Shittons of DARPA/NSA contracts were given to Google, Facebook, Amazon, etc..
2016: Leaked memos dating back to 2016 (found in 2018) of Google's Selfish Ledger project. https://invidio.us/watch?v=LUSZfEBTwRc
2016: Google released a bunch of neural-linguistic machine learning programs in 2016 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Neural_Machine_Translation
2017: deepfake leaks start to become released.
2018: confirmed that for decades now, Reddit/Youtube/etc. vote and view counts are fake and completely manipulated. http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/12/how-much-of-the-internet-is-fake.html

In short, the U.S. government is engaging in an artificial intelligence powered gaslighting of the entire world population.

/end copypasta

I want to fight back against this, and I think the perfect way to do so is to find and collate old retro internet. Make a hand-made giant directory of webrings each with a simple list of sites. No search engines. That way the common user can actually search through their information the way they want and not the way AI wants you to. Just, in general, it feels like retro internet is the perfect way to combat this, maybe.
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>>307 No need for the full /tech/ autism experience. A user can learn general security and privacy measures without migrating to linux if he chooses not to, and remember that a truly knowledgeable user can operate any OS without compromises. Using windows is fine as long as you disable telemetry and other spyware by following any of the guides online, and try to avoid using windows 10, any earlier version would be miles better. Install a good firewall and antivirus, buy or pirate a sandbox program like Sandboxie for running suspicious programs in isolation, and opt for using open source programs whenever you can. A good alternative to a sandbox program is a virtualization program such as VirtualBox, you can install a separate Windows version in it, disconnect it from the internet, and use it for running programs. Avoid using Google or any of its services (Gmail, Drive, Youtube...etc), at least not directly. There are multiple good alternatives to Drive such as MEGA and the Pomf clones, as for Youtube you can access it in a privacy-respecting manner using a service like invidio.us, which delivers Youtube videos but without tracking or ads. You can also use Google search in a similar method through startpage.com. Use temporary email addresses to register on websites that require registration, such as temp-mail.org and 10minutemail.com. Disable cookies in your browser or at least set them to "clear on exit", and if you wanna take it a step further disable Javascript. In case you want to start building your own webpages, learn languages like HTML and CSS. You might also want to learn Javascript but keep in mind that it can be exploited and a good portion of security-aware users disable it on their browsers. For dynamic webpages (i.e. pages that use databases and regularly pull information from a server) you'll need to learn other appropriate languages such as PHP and SQL. That should be enough for starters.
>>248 I moved the site to an onion address, gave it an upgrade, incorporated all the other webrings I was running, etc.: lwur3kl63omajev4tnwu52razltyvsfvlsaxtd35g2t23rgkd4oybvid.onion/ Clearnet, simpler version of just the directory over here: https://websitereview.neocities.org/
>>310 >neocities Well done anon, would have appreciated a more accessible design though... A light theme and visible scrollbar would be real nice and maybe a way to disable the custom cursor
>>310 Very nice, I instantly bookmarked this.
>>310 Thank you Anon for reminding me that the mod archive still exist.

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90s/2000s Cars and Rice Fellow Time Traveler 10/18/2019 (Fri) 05:13:25 No.145 [Reply]
RIDERS ON THE STORM
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1990 Chevrolet Camaro IROC-Z Irish Redneck Out Cruisin' Growing up in bumfuck Appalachia, you saw a lot of these on the road back in the 90's and 2000's
Edited last time by CaesarDude on 01/02/2020 (Thu) 18:58:53.
>>147
There's somebody around here that DDs a third gen IROC-Z
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long live Max Power
Glorious factory rice comign through

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Fellow Time Traveler 12/13/2019 (Fri) 22:50:50 No.233 [Reply]
What were BBSs like outside the West? I'm talking Japan, the USSR, etc. Japan had NEC PC-88s and 98s, what BBS software did they have? I imagine getting kanji to work on them must have been difficult. And the USSR had ZX Spectrum clones. Did these ever manage to get "online" at all?

t. Zoomer, thanks for any info
Japanese software still uses SJIS nowadays like it did in the 90s.
Look it up if you don't know what it is.
Also the current imageboard interface we use in the west derives from Japanese BBSs.
The west was more focused on Usenet and forums rather than BBSs.
>>234
>Japanese software still uses SJIS nowadays like it did in the 90s.
>Look it up if you don't know what it is.
I know, I mean about how I imagine the lines of text early Japanese computers could display for kanji were probably not a lot and made things difficult.
>Also the current imageboard interface we use in the west derives from Japanese BBSs.
You mean textboards, I'm talking about traditional BBSs.
>The west was more focused on Usenet and forums rather than BBSs.
Asking about the 80s and early 90s though.
Japanese computers were specifically made to handle kanji and had higher resolutions than contemporary western computers, so there wasn't really any issue with kanji support. The higher resolution and larger color counts led to something known as CG (computer graphics) back then (now just called イラスト / illustrations since CG now usually refers to 3D graphics). It ranged from 8 color CG in the late 80s, to 16 and 256 color CG in the 90s and near the turn of the century 16 million colors were introduced.

Sharing CG on BBSs was really popular during the 90s and a lot of prominent BBSs even had their own custom advertisement CG. 16 color art dominated since the PC-98 was the most popular system in Japan during that era and it lend itself well to the anime art style. They also shared FM and midi music on BBSs, but CG was more popular. Other than that they used BBSs similarly to the west and shared files and talked about various things.

With the advent of the Internet, many CG artists created their own websites for their CG and a forum called NiftyServe gained a lot of popularity and BBSs started to lose their significance. A lot of CG artists had a really hard time to transition from 16 colors to 16 million colors and quit, but some artists like Wakachan and Goto-P are still active to this day.

As for what software they used, I can't give much information as it doesn't interest me much, but they did use their own software specific to Japanese computers. Some of it might be available in the vector.co.jp software library. The source of my information is visiting some BBS archives, a lot of CG artist and FM/midi music creator sites, plus other old Japanese sites and reading the tidbits of information they shared.

PS: Japanese BBSs had their version of newfags that wanted to get spoonfed called CG beggars.
>>238
Thank you for the info.

Now, for anyone else who might know, what about ZX Spectrum clones in the USSR?

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90's and 00's Halloween/Spooky General Fellow Time Traveler 10/30/2019 (Wed) 21:26:47 No.165 [Reply]
Figured since it's that time of year, we might as well have a thread.

Discuss your favorite spooky things from the 1990's and 2000's. Can be horror movies, music, games, or Halloween stuff like costumes that were popular at the time or personal nostalgia.
I don't remember horror films that well, but horror games especially late 90s to the mid 00s were fantastic. Resident Evil, Silent Hill were the two big ones, with a bunch of smaller titles like Haunting Ground, Forbidden Siren, and Eternal Darkness. Even the late 00s had a few worthwhile spooks like Deadly Premonition, Dead Space, or even STALKER.

It seems back then horror games remembered to have gameplay. I liked Penumbra when it first came out, but Frictional then made Amnesia which is barely a game. And then Outlast came and people just did it to chase the streamer bandwagon.

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Old-School Fanfiction Fellow Time Traveler 09/27/2019 (Fri) 20:20:16 No.120 [Reply]
Anybody want to talk about the fanfiction scene of the 1990's and 2000's? That whole era was a big deal for us fanfic spergs. Before the internet, fanfic was very obscure even for nerd stuff. The rise of the internet in the latter half of the 90's is when fanfiction started to take off and diversify. The 2000's was a golden age of fanfiction in my opinion, with the heyday of FFN and things like Deviant Art being seen more as a novelty than a punchline. Even 2000's badfic was sort of legendary. My Immortal and Christian Humber Reloaded are both mid-2000's time capsules in many ways. Anyone from /fanfic/ is more than welcome to head on over here if they want.
Edited last time by CaesarDude on 01/05/2020 (Sun) 21:23:56.
...I still cruise fanfiction.net and feel like not a whole lot has really changed there in the past twenty years.
>>123 True, but that's because all the new fanfic writers moved over to Archive of Our Own
Edited last time by CaesarDude on 01/05/2020 (Sun) 21:24:06.

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