I feel old...

**The Evolution of the Internet: A Nostalgic Look Back**

In the early days of the internet, loading a web page took seconds to load and minutes to complete. Videos were hardly a thought, but that was the limitation of the technology back then. Things were way simpler, which set the focus for what people actually did online.

Communication was a huge selling point, especially thanks to the advent of chat rooms, email, and instant messaging. AOL Mail, AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) or AIM for short, was huge for simple text coms between friends and family. Beyond that, forums and IRC on the general internet helped cultivate communities of people with similar interests.

The world might have been huge, but the internet made it easy to connect with people from all over. This was a big deal considering international phone calls were expensive, and mail would take forever.

**The Mail**

Let's talk about the mail. Can we talk about the mail? Beyond that, just being able to have information on anything and everything right at your fingertips was nothing short of revolutionary.

However, what kids won't ever get is how it monopolized your phone line. Pick up the phone while a computer is online, and you'll hear that noise - "You haven't heard that noise?" You couldn't make calls; you couldn't receive them. This wouldn't be a problem if we didn't rely on our house phone so much back in the day.

My parents specifically had a routine of catching up with our relatives over the phone. Remember, at this point in time, cell phones were still out of reach for people. This is why the internet was more of a destination you planned to visit compared to how convenient and accessible everything is now in our current age of easy access and relatively affordable streaming services.

**Kids These Days**

Kids these days don't have to pirate as much as they used to. They'll certainly share a password here and Discord stream Netflix there, but things aren't as crazy as they once were. I certainly wouldn't condone piracy here on Dengue Channel subscribe, but also let's be real; we've all done it.

When I was in Middle School, Spotify and Apple Music didn't exist yet. iTunes was taking the world by storm alongside the mass popularity of the iPod and other MP3 players as a 90s kid that grew up with the internet without disposable income during Middle School, I needed to get my music and movies somehow.

Luckily, there were peer-to-peer file sharing programs that helped me build my collection of music that I could access on demand. One of the apps people used was Napster, which was a little after my time but I used the heck out of Kazaa and especially LimeWire.

**The Risks**

These apps popularized the idea of illegal downloads; actually, users would upload all sorts of copyrighted music and videos legally for people to enjoy for free. It's a simple thought, but I don't think kids these days can truly grasp the gamble involved in searching for this stuff.

Quality was often hit or miss, and you never really knew what you were getting. Sometimes a song would be high quality ripped right off a CD, and other times it would be a scuffed remix off the radio. Video was an even bigger gamble; our dial-up connections meant slow inconsistent download speeds that would take a few days for a video to finish.

**The Consequences**

One study found that 30% of media observed contained malware, which is probably why our family computers struggled every single week. It was awful but did it really stop us? At its peak, LimeWire attracted 50 million monthly users, which understandably the record companies hate.

Rather famously, the Recording Industry Association of America sued LimeWire for $72 trillion dollars (trillion with the T). That was more than the whole entire world's GDP back at the time of the lawsuit in 2010.

While today's streaming platforms are far from perfect, I'd say that we're in a much better place now. I don't want to go back to the stone ages of slow internet, virus-filled music files, and hot coffee mods. But I can certainly appreciate what we have today - a knowing how hard things were before.

Thanks for watching this video on Dengue Channel!

WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enthis sound defined my childhood growing up in the 90s it was a simpler time the world was barely scratching the surface of what's possible with tech compared to now where we rely on the internet for our news entertainment or even for our livelihoods in this video I want to talk about the things that I went through growing up as a budding Tech Enthusiast that kids these days won't get the 90s and 2000s were a fun time for video games I grew up playing gen 1 Pokemon Gran Turismo 3 on the PS2 and even had Vice City probably sooner than I should have these games entertained me for hundreds of hours but Imma Be Real more than playing them for what they were I also enjoyed dabbling in cheats and mods yes I can see kids these days being accustomed to modding especially on PC but if you were exclusively on Console like I was growing up going about altering your games was a bit of a process some of us learned about game exploits By Word of Mouth one kid at school that also played Pokemon told me a little trick involving going up and down Cinnabar Island until this thing called Missingno showed up to give me unlimited weird candies that you can use to level up your Pokemon and they catch Mew most importantly I didn't do that obviously it's well documented now but back in the day that was the hottest tip on the street and then I got the internet and things got more interesting from there when it came to GTA Vice City cheat codes actually made the game more enjoyable full health full weapons loadouts cars and even tanks if you got GTA to purely cause Mayhem if you wanted an easy way way to do that cheats were absolutely the move but how we got the cheats was a time looking things up online isn't particularly special now but remember we didn't have smartphones yet and the computer was pretty far from my living room so I would do what any kid would do in the 90s print them out on a sheet of paper usually from Cheat Code Central or gamefaqs.com both of which still exist by the way then after my mom yells at me for wasting paper and toner for the fifth time this week I walk into the living room with my keys to destruction in hand and proceed to blow up every car within a 10 mile radius with my tank I mean sometimes you gotta have some fun Austin just not in real life that's illegal this might be the Nostalgia goggles talking but hitting a cheat code was so much more satisfying than some mods are today though back in the day I'll say that I appreciated my time with this little thing called The Game Shark there's also action in replay but basically if you were exclusive on consoles like I was these modding kits allowed you to alter game data in comically fun ways how it did this depended on the console for the PS2 for example I would have basically another disk that you would put in before your game and you would kind of say what sheet you wanted to do and it would just apply it to the game magically I don't know how it works but it just did in Gran Turismo 3 I had a Dodge Viper that could hit 600 miles an hour was it drivable no did it leave a grid on my face slamming the wall so hard the car glitched off the map absolutely nowadays we have games like a set of Corsa on the PC with a third-party content manager and tons of user generated mods available with a simple Google search everything is so easy oftentimes I lose sight of how good some things actually are 10 year old me would go absolutely insane knowing how far we've come for example games look so good on smartphones nowadays like with the sponsor of today's video raid Shadow Legends we made it folks raid Shadow Legends is a tactical RPG with intricate Graphics a large collection of 700 unique Champions plus an endless amount of PVE and PVP action to keep you entertained I've been liking the regular cycle of content Arena where you can test your strength and skills against other players the immensely satisfying battle system and you can download it on a variety of devices including iOS Android and even on your PC to play whenever you need to scratch the itch best of all it's raid's fourth anniversary which means tons of bonuses for new and existing players if you haven't yet hopped on the train there's plenty of goodies to be had use the link in the description or scan the QR code on screen to get insane bonuses including the Epic Champion killing the right and also both new and existing players can enter the promo code four years raid in game to get four legendary skill tomes among other cool stuff so what are you waiting for get on raid Shadow Legends today using the link in the description huge thanks to raid for sponsoring today's video and now back to Tech that kids these days won't get this is my actual favorite part dial up one thing to talk about the internet in the 90s and early 2000s but to experience it for yourself is a whole other because it wasn't as seamless and straightforward as it is today back then we had 56k dialogue that would connect your computer to the internet through the landline phone connection in your house and it was slow do people even still have telephones in their house yeah but she's old I thought you were gonna say that was Asian I'm like I don't know about that one dude I I last time I checked kids won't ever get the struggle of images taking seconds to load minutes to complete a web page and videos were hardly a thought but that was the limitation of the tech back then things were way simpler which set the focus for what people actually did online communication was a huge selling point especially thanks to the Advent of chat rooms email and especially instant messaging which practically drove America online's business if that name doesn't sound familiar they were at a time the most popular brand name of internet service providers in the US AOL Mail AOL Instant Messenger or aim for short was huge for simple textcoms between friends and family beyond that forums and IRC on the general internet helped cultivate communities of people with similar interests the world might have been huge but the internet made it easy to connect with people from all over which was a big deal considering international phone calls were expensive and mail would take forever now let's talk about the mail can we talk about the mail please beyond that just being able to have information on anything and everything right at your fingertips was nothing short of revolutionary however what kids won't ever get is how it monopolized your phone line pick up the phone while a computer is online and you'll hear this you haven't heard that noise you couldn't make calls you couldn't receive them which wouldn't be a problem if we didn't rely on our house phone so much back in the day my parents specifically had a routine of catching up with our relatives over the phone remember at this point in time cell phones were still out of reach for people this is why the internet was more of a destination you plan to visit compared to how convenient and accessible everything is now in our current age of easy access and relatively affordable streaming services kids these days don't have to Pirate as much as they used to they'll certainly share a password here and Discord stream Netflix there but things aren't as crazy as they once were I certainly wouldn't condone piracy here on Dengue Channel subscribe but also let's be real we've all done it when I was in Middle School Spotify and apple music didn't exist yet iTunes was taking the World by storm alongside the mass popularity of the iPod and other MP3 players as a 90s kid that grew up with the internet without disposable income during Middle School I needed to get my music and movies somehow luckily there were peer-to-peer file sharing programs that helped me build my collection of music that I could access on demand one of the apps people used was Napster which was a little after my time but I used the heck out of Kaza and especially LimeWire and they all did the same thing they popularized the idea of illegal downloads actually users would upload all sorts of copyrighted music and videos legally for people to enjoy for free it's a simple thought but I don't think kids these days can truly grasp the gamble involved in searching for this stuff quality was often hit or miss and you never really knew what you were getting sometimes a song would be high quality ripped right off a CD and other times it would be a scuffed remix off the radio and video was an even bigger gamble our dial-up connections meant slow inconsistent download speeds that would take a few days for a video to finish that one episode of Family Guy you've been nursing to completion my helicopter's here could end up being something else what do you mean we'll just put danky Channel the absolute worst case scenario you say you got a virus one study found that 30 of media observed contained malware which is probably why our family computers struggled every single week it was awful but did it really stop us at its peak LimeWire attracted 50 million monthly users which understandably the record companies hate it rather famously the recording industry Association of America sued the actual living ship out of LimeWire for 72 trillion dollars trillion with the T that was more than the whole entire world's GDP back at the time of the lawsuit in 2010. while today's streaming platforms are far from perfect I'd say that we're in a much better place now I don't want to go back to the stone ages of slow internet virus spilled music files and hot coffee mods but I can certainly appreciate what we have today a knowing how hard things were before thanks very much for watching this video on denki channel and now oh no okay nothis sound defined my childhood growing up in the 90s it was a simpler time the world was barely scratching the surface of what's possible with tech compared to now where we rely on the internet for our news entertainment or even for our livelihoods in this video I want to talk about the things that I went through growing up as a budding Tech Enthusiast that kids these days won't get the 90s and 2000s were a fun time for video games I grew up playing gen 1 Pokemon Gran Turismo 3 on the PS2 and even had Vice City probably sooner than I should have these games entertained me for hundreds of hours but Imma Be Real more than playing them for what they were I also enjoyed dabbling in cheats and mods yes I can see kids these days being accustomed to modding especially on PC but if you were exclusively on Console like I was growing up going about altering your games was a bit of a process some of us learned about game exploits By Word of Mouth one kid at school that also played Pokemon told me a little trick involving going up and down Cinnabar Island until this thing called Missingno showed up to give me unlimited weird candies that you can use to level up your Pokemon and they catch Mew most importantly I didn't do that obviously it's well documented now but back in the day that was the hottest tip on the street and then I got the internet and things got more interesting from there when it came to GTA Vice City cheat codes actually made the game more enjoyable full health full weapons loadouts cars and even tanks if you got GTA to purely cause Mayhem if you wanted an easy way way to do that cheats were absolutely the move but how we got the cheats was a time looking things up online isn't particularly special now but remember we didn't have smartphones yet and the computer was pretty far from my living room so I would do what any kid would do in the 90s print them out on a sheet of paper usually from Cheat Code Central or gamefaqs.com both of which still exist by the way then after my mom yells at me for wasting paper and toner for the fifth time this week I walk into the living room with my keys to destruction in hand and proceed to blow up every car within a 10 mile radius with my tank I mean sometimes you gotta have some fun Austin just not in real life that's illegal this might be the Nostalgia goggles talking but hitting a cheat code was so much more satisfying than some mods are today though back in the day I'll say that I appreciated my time with this little thing called The Game Shark there's also action in replay but basically if you were exclusive on consoles like I was these modding kits allowed you to alter game data in comically fun ways how it did this depended on the console for the PS2 for example I would have basically another disk that you would put in before your game and you would kind of say what sheet you wanted to do and it would just apply it to the game magically I don't know how it works but it just did in Gran Turismo 3 I had a Dodge Viper that could hit 600 miles an hour was it drivable no did it leave a grid on my face slamming the wall so hard the car glitched off the map absolutely nowadays we have games like a set of Corsa on the PC with a third-party content manager and tons of user generated mods available with a simple Google search everything is so easy oftentimes I lose sight of how good some things actually are 10 year old me would go absolutely insane knowing how far we've come for example games look so good on smartphones nowadays like with the sponsor of today's video raid Shadow Legends we made it folks raid Shadow Legends is a tactical RPG with intricate Graphics a large collection of 700 unique Champions plus an endless amount of PVE and PVP action to keep you entertained I've been liking the regular cycle of content Arena where you can test your strength and skills against other players the immensely satisfying battle system and you can download it on a variety of devices including iOS Android and even on your PC to play whenever you need to scratch the itch best of all it's raid's fourth anniversary which means tons of bonuses for new and existing players if you haven't yet hopped on the train there's plenty of goodies to be had use the link in the description or scan the QR code on screen to get insane bonuses including the Epic Champion killing the right and also both new and existing players can enter the promo code four years raid in game to get four legendary skill tomes among other cool stuff so what are you waiting for get on raid Shadow Legends today using the link in the description huge thanks to raid for sponsoring today's video and now back to Tech that kids these days won't get this is my actual favorite part dial up one thing to talk about the internet in the 90s and early 2000s but to experience it for yourself is a whole other because it wasn't as seamless and straightforward as it is today back then we had 56k dialogue that would connect your computer to the internet through the landline phone connection in your house and it was slow do people even still have telephones in their house yeah but she's old I thought you were gonna say that was Asian I'm like I don't know about that one dude I I last time I checked kids won't ever get the struggle of images taking seconds to load minutes to complete a web page and videos were hardly a thought but that was the limitation of the tech back then things were way simpler which set the focus for what people actually did online communication was a huge selling point especially thanks to the Advent of chat rooms email and especially instant messaging which practically drove America online's business if that name doesn't sound familiar they were at a time the most popular brand name of internet service providers in the US AOL Mail AOL Instant Messenger or aim for short was huge for simple textcoms between friends and family beyond that forums and IRC on the general internet helped cultivate communities of people with similar interests the world might have been huge but the internet made it easy to connect with people from all over which was a big deal considering international phone calls were expensive and mail would take forever now let's talk about the mail can we talk about the mail please beyond that just being able to have information on anything and everything right at your fingertips was nothing short of revolutionary however what kids won't ever get is how it monopolized your phone line pick up the phone while a computer is online and you'll hear this you haven't heard that noise you couldn't make calls you couldn't receive them which wouldn't be a problem if we didn't rely on our house phone so much back in the day my parents specifically had a routine of catching up with our relatives over the phone remember at this point in time cell phones were still out of reach for people this is why the internet was more of a destination you plan to visit compared to how convenient and accessible everything is now in our current age of easy access and relatively affordable streaming services kids these days don't have to Pirate as much as they used to they'll certainly share a password here and Discord stream Netflix there but things aren't as crazy as they once were I certainly wouldn't condone piracy here on Dengue Channel subscribe but also let's be real we've all done it when I was in Middle School Spotify and apple music didn't exist yet iTunes was taking the World by storm alongside the mass popularity of the iPod and other MP3 players as a 90s kid that grew up with the internet without disposable income during Middle School I needed to get my music and movies somehow luckily there were peer-to-peer file sharing programs that helped me build my collection of music that I could access on demand one of the apps people used was Napster which was a little after my time but I used the heck out of Kaza and especially LimeWire and they all did the same thing they popularized the idea of illegal downloads actually users would upload all sorts of copyrighted music and videos legally for people to enjoy for free it's a simple thought but I don't think kids these days can truly grasp the gamble involved in searching for this stuff quality was often hit or miss and you never really knew what you were getting sometimes a song would be high quality ripped right off a CD and other times it would be a scuffed remix off the radio and video was an even bigger gamble our dial-up connections meant slow inconsistent download speeds that would take a few days for a video to finish that one episode of Family Guy you've been nursing to completion my helicopter's here could end up being something else what do you mean we'll just put danky Channel the absolute worst case scenario you say you got a virus one study found that 30 of media observed contained malware which is probably why our family computers struggled every single week it was awful but did it really stop us at its peak LimeWire attracted 50 million monthly users which understandably the record companies hate it rather famously the recording industry Association of America sued the actual living ship out of LimeWire for 72 trillion dollars trillion with the T that was more than the whole entire world's GDP back at the time of the lawsuit in 2010. while today's streaming platforms are far from perfect I'd say that we're in a much better place now I don't want to go back to the stone ages of slow internet virus spilled music files and hot coffee mods but I can certainly appreciate what we have today a knowing how hard things were before thanks very much for watching this video on denki channel and now oh no okay no