Back in the day when we ran random exes, good times

Our parents, 10 years ago "Don't trust anything you read online!"

Parents, today: "I do my own research online!"

I remember downloading what I thought was a no-CD crack for some game from Kazaa.

It was an app that locked my screen, opened a window, and systematically deleted every folder in my main C: drive before crashing. Then the screen went black and a message popped up that said "Thank god it's only a game."

The exe was an ad for some indie Doomclone FPS game where the levels were your computer's file structure and the walls of the rooms would be decorated with the images stored in your folders. I shut down my machine after that. I was shaking for the next hour.

If anyone knows the game, I'd love to learn what it was all about.

Internet absolutely was better 15 years ago. Everything is paywalled now and there's constant disinformation. Algorithms feed you bullshit and people all post outrage bait to get attention. Not saying that stuff didn't exist 15 years ago, but it's absolutely become the dominant experience online.

Hardware has gotten better though!

When you see "Account created: 1997".

"These are the sacred scrolls of the ancient ones."

When I first started my career I was in tier 3 tech support and to troll a colleague we put an mp3 in the startup folder on Windows. Every time he booted the computer to troubleshoot he lost his s*** trying to figure out why the music was playing. The dude ended up formatting C:

Precious memories.

I used to wonder why my mom mistrusted online banking so much but looking back at the free programs I downloaded plus limewire it makes sense

I like how you would download a totally random executable and run it. Not suspicious at all!

Fun fact, the forum post is now 17 years old.

When I was a teenager, a bunch of my friends online were tossing that around. I found a trojan and started sending it around as cupholder.exe but making it look like I wasn't the one who sent it... and just immediately logged in and opened their CD tray. Then started fucking with their system in silly ways.

Ahh the good old days when even malware wasn't that bad. Or maybe I was just a really stupid kid. At least I password-locked the trojan and removed it when I left.

Forums aren't gone. They just were never really big to begin with. Reddit eclipsed all of them to the point that most forums were irrelevant unless they were highly specific (not like, a gaming or show community) or couldn't be on reddit (straight piracy with linking, other stuff we won't talk about)

They're not even gone, just the communities that want them are fewer and far between.

I view forums as the middle era of the internet.

Th early era was chatrooms, the middle era was forums, and the late era, which we are in now, is all social media.

I miss the middle era of the internet. Forums were a blast. You could really build a community with those things.

I am still active in several forums. They are great and have even more of a sense of community them they used to. People talk about the subject and even meet in person around the world.

I also host a forum for a different group. No ads either cause fuck that shit.

More like 20 years ago

Haha I remember this one, it was Coca Cola themed. It'd eject your CDROM tray 😂

A random EXE that does exactly as it says? That was rare even during the frontier fort days of the internet.

Good luck finding a cd-rom drive these days

Forums are still around. If you really missed them, you can go find them. I don't think it's forums you miss.

25 years ago. I remember.

They're still around! Discourse, phpbb, etc make it super easy to set up and administer. You don't even need coding knowledge. I'm part of a forum that's been going since the early oughts myself. Old Ocremix forums diaspora.

Think of it like a bookclub. You've just got to find some folks and get cracking