Internet Things of the 1990s

Welcome to the Solid Verbal.

I'll that for me.

I'm a man, I'm forty.

I've heard so many players say, well, I want to be happy.

You want to be happy for Dake Edith State.

Is that?

Whoo whoom? And now Dan and Tie, welcome, you've got mail.

Welcome back to the Solid Verbal. Boys and girls. My name is Ty hilden Brand joining me seated directly to my left. Another show. We're in the same room.

Dan, It's true. Well, this is the most important show of the This is why I'm here do this show remotely.

I am here for this show. It's true, Dan Rubinstein, how are you?

Life is good?

I am giddy excitement over today's show because it is the third annual one off topic show with our poll Bill barn Well, and this year's topic is arguably the most personal and most important.

Topic we've ever discussed.

If you've already downloaded the show, which I assume you have, if you're listening, you know that we are talking basically our experiences with the nineties internet and computer every see.

I am disappointed in you, yeah, because you are usually the guy when we're doing our college football show that has something cued up on Spotify. How do you not have Phil Collins in the air tonight for this show?

Well, I was doing this show for real. In that spirit, I would either bring up a Metallica song, yeah because shout out Lars Ulrich, the best and worst person of the nineties as it relates to music and the Internet, or maybe the buddy Holly Weezer Windows ninety five.

I think that might have been the move.

You need to play it on Winning, which really still does whip the lama's as.

It very much does. And if you heard a very faint laugh right there, that's our pal from ESPN.

Seen your NFL writer.

Sure, yeah, I don't know what my title is, Bill Barnwell, Hey, well back Bill, Thanks guys. I gotta admit when I actually sparked a memory for me when I I believe I somehow downloaded a clip of some Metallic a song maybe nothing else matters. I had a three second clip on AOL that replaced that you've got mail clip whenever I got an e mail with that is nothing else matters.

So great because I had totally forgotten, in deep diving my own nineties internet experience in my brain, totally forgot that you could replace all the waves. You know that you've got mail to welcome goodbye everything with you. There's custom Seinfeld or terminator two, and.

Early of the early AOL modding was the thing that you could do for sure. So, okay, the title of this show, I don't know if we've necessarily agreed on that, but it's nineteen nineties internet things. Dan and I discussed this bill before you came over a little bit of of a loose restriction there on the Yeah, nineteen nineties. You know, it doesn't have to be up until nineteen ninety nine, but in the.

Spirit of the late nineties essentially, But yeah, we're gonna try to stick us as much as we can to the nineties. And before we get fully into the things that we're going to discuss, I think it's good to set a baseline, Ty, what year.

Did you graduate from high school?

Two thousand?

You graduated from two thousand, So this pushes right up against So this is like high school and the Internet are basically one in the same.

Baby.

This is the popularity.

This is when we're growing up right here.

I'm o one, Bill, you are I'm also one.

You're also one, So we are just right smack dab like as we are going through these life changes. Yeah, the world this thing is also this is essentially the world's puberty.

Yeah right, you're you're making like the sign for pubes.

Yeah, that's true, the International Pube sign is what's happening at this table. No, what I'm saying is this is like, you know, coming of age, like you know, whether it's video games, whether it's you know, talking to people from high school or talking to total strangers on the internet, or you know, playing games or what.

Well, it's here's what's interesting about this, And especially since this is the same crew as the Emo Show we did two years ago and then last year the ninety sports video games, this is sort of the tie that binds. Oh for sure, absolutely does all of those things. This was like the the the one thing that held it

Oh, I mean I was running a I was one of the people running a video game website for from paid sports Football Pro that's in the mid nineteen Like, you know that that does not happen if there's no Internet.

So right, exactly, I mean, and the majority of your income since then is in some way directly or indirectly tied to the Internet.

I saw that website and it's just been it's.

Straight cash front page sport. It's still loaded. No, But like, obviously you've been at ESPN for a while. You were at IGN doing things, Yes, you were, I mean ESPN slash grant Lands before that, before fully ESPN. So this is one of my miss you were football Outsiders, a contributor, so we collectively even tie on your day job, you're connected to the internet.

Connect. Yeah, we're all. We're all connected to the interwebs.

And I have, yes, my my salaries have all been tied essentially to the Internet.

So here's what we should do to establish another baseline before we really dive in. Let's talk about our our our general like foundation with how we use the internet. What was our computer situation, what we're rig what did we connect to How did we connect to the internet in the nineties.

Bill, what was your mid nineties rig?

A few different ways I was connecting to the internet I had AOL before you could use AOL to access.

The World Wide Web. Okay, so there were just those topics.

Yeah, it was there was no outgoing thing. It was just you were in that AOL space and there was no way to escape it. They were right, we'll start there. There was Prodigy.

I don't know if you guys remember, I still remember that my handle was j C m U eight five A.

Name, Oh God, my AOL screen name was. I believe I could be wrong. I want to say it was NFL Wiland, which was a combination of Oh and Scott Weiland, the Start Temple pilots, my two favorite things combined into one.

So I think, so when people come across you, they're like, oh, this guy is for real, this.

Guy two things, this guy super And I mean, like, you know, like you had a profile. You could search for an AOL, but you could search for anyone's profiles by typing in a name, So like I remember, I would go and look for Steve or Bill or Bob, and I'd be like, Wow, this guy was early doctor.

If only I had.

Bill on AOL would be golden. So had AOL had Prodigy, I think I preferred Prodigy to AOL especially. It just felt like it was more immersive because it was like it was a DOS program, so it was like your entire screen as opposed to a window.

And then we had.

Imagination, which I'm not sure how familiar with. Imagination was a little different from the other one, so you could only access it between seven pm and seven am, like if you you dial if you dialed into it, it was like before that you had to pay like some exorbitant feel like it was fifteen dollars an hour to access it before seven pms. You had to be really addicted to it. Yes, they had it was like its own little program. It had a bunch of different games.

So as soon as you got a taste, you were like, all in.

A man, this is my thing, absolutely so AOL prodigy and if I got lucky sometimes imagination.

Wow, no copy serve on there though.

You know I could never deal with compuser because the email addresses and the US names are.

Just a bunch of numbers.

Yeah.

True, I couldn't deal with that.

I was not into that. I don't think I've ever used compuster. Did you guys use computer?

No?

And surely who you could not find NFL Island No?

So Dan what was your rig?

So I have a unique situation in that the first computer we had was probably in nineteen ninety two, and it was we got the computer because I won it on a game show. It was a Mac or an Apple.

Yeah, the game show. We have posted our YouTube in that is that's the winning computer.

I would love it if it was a different game show. You did not know about it.

Well, I've been on four Yeah, so no. So we won that computer and we didn't have the Internet, and it was just a lot of like Oregon Trail math blaster, you know that kind of stuff.

Love the blessing math.

My parents went out to dinner once and I wrote a memoir as like a ten year old on there because I discovered a word processing whatever it was like text edit. I wrote my memoir there. And then we got AOL and I was net Ace seven two five, and it was that double meaning of both the Internet and I was a tennis player.

What I'm July twenty fifth, my birthday.

You were a birthday so net A seven two five. Although my first aim screename we get an aim as like different Animal was originally net A seven two five changed it, I believe to Jackal to bo, don't know what that means, no idea, and then later became this bridge is the gap between this and the EMO show. I want to say laid high school became something corp for like something corporate but said in a different way.

It was a new event back then.

It was such an event, of course, so we were so we were as the Rubenstein's were an AOL family, and it went from the Mac, I went into PC's.

I had a gateway.

Oh everyone had Did you have a gateway? I did not have a gateway? Oh, spots box.

Yeah.

I bought my computers from Tiger.

Yeah, Tiger Direct, Tiger Direct, very nice.

I did not get that. I'm sure I looked at them.

So did you build any Did you build a tower at a certain.

Point in late high school?

In college? Yes, I was I could build a tower, but usually I was not building that. That was not out of a lack of interest or ability, just they did not have the funds to purchase a tower, right.

Yeah, well I so my earliest memory of having a computer was Mama h bringing one home from school over summer.

Nice.

Nice, And I believe that was an old Apple LG two. Oh boy, it had something like five hundred and twelve kilobytes, which you know, you couldn't you couldn't you couldn't run a toaster on that nowadays. But that was my earliest memory. And then we kind of progressed into Dell. There was at some point a Gateway two thousands, and then probably more Dell's after it, but we we sort of dabbled in the Prodigy stuff early JC NU eight five A long live yeah, but then beyond that it was mostly

Nothing but catfishing if that was the cat fishing rig.

But that was more of the AOL. That was more of My screen name was of course wow. So and you kept that to this day? Yeah, yeah, I think I may still have that to this day.

May, I asked before we transit is sort of bracketing.

This is an early bracketing of So when you went away to college, laptop or desktop desktop.

I was given a desktop as a graduation gift that I was giving them money to build a desktop. Desktop brought it with me.

Ty I had a desktop, as it did. I.

You went to college within driving distance. You went to college within driving distance. I did not, and shipped a god dang desktop eight hundred miles away to school, back from school, back to school back.

There were a lot of big cow spotted boxes, yes, footing around college campus.

Let me tell you, I would have possibly considered going to a different school as I went to Northeastern University rap in New York, went to school in Boston. I probably would have gone to Arizona State University. And this is related to the show. Were it not for the fact that in two thousand, when I was looking at schools, most of their dorms did not have Ethernet connections. You had to except up to the internet in two thousand. That was eighteen years ago.

That's crazy.

I visited Arizona State in two thousand and I too many garlic fries at Gordon Beerson threw up. Was not partying. Was with my dad and our friend Dave and just puped everywhere. Did not end up at Arizona State.

So we were all on AOL. We all were part of the do we want to call it like the aim economy whatever?

Yeah, sure, you know at AIM.

If we're going to talk about this era of the Internet, it was the thing. It was. It was the social media. Before social media even came into existence, everyone had a screen name. My daily regimen was you wake up, you go to school, you come home, you do whatever you gotta do, and then from like seven pm until it's time to go to bed, you hop on AOL burning

We had a different experience. We had a different experience. Anyway, we need to go deep into AIM. But what bod are we talking baud your connection?

Oh god, well, I mean at first it was fourteen four.

You were you went all the way back to fourteen Yeah.

At first it was fourteen four. It was fourteen to four for me.

But like they would be, AL was so popular and so difficult to access at the beginning that one of the ways people would connect would be to try a slower bods like I got down to four digit bods.

Oh no, at my, at my worst, and it was bad. It was pretty sight I mean bad then was real bad.

Yeah, Oh, it's not even it's not even a question. Like you compare that to I remember like AOL being super excited about oh, we now support fifty six six K mode.

That was insane madness. Nothing could be fast.

It was like the four K of nineteen ninety eight. I remember we jumped from fourteen four to thirty three six, a mode of big jamb and everybody was just slumming it in twenty eight eight. But the Rubinsteins were got dang in on thirty three six and it felt like we were zooming. And then we got to fifty six K.

Please please, my internet at home right now might be about fifty six because it is no but it you know, the question that I jotted down in our little notes she here, did anyone have a separate phone line? Because we're in that era now where you know you're tying up the phones a lot, especially at night, and to really be a true power user of the interwebs, can't be interrupted, can't be interrupted. Did you have the separate phone lines?

Which oh I would have loved, it would have been the dream, but did not have not happen, though we did.

We had two lines in our house before even the internet, and the second line was mostly became for like facts internets. And then in high school, I mean old chatty Dan over here. You know, well, you guys couldn't help it, the ladies.

You guys may have had an experience than me, right with just sharing the computer.

Yeah, because I'm an only child. Oh yeah, I have two little brothers. Bill has two siblings. So how did that work at night where you got nightmare? The one phone line and you didn't have more than one computer? No, No one had more than one computer? No, how did that? Eventually we did, but it took a long time.

Yea, yeah, it's awful. It's just it was a terrible mess. You get about ninety minutes, so it would be like, you know, you're in at five thirty, you're out at seven. You know you have that much time to work. You got to get a lot of everything.

Yeah.

And so then when after I graduated high school, my parents said, you can get a computer by a desktop. We'll pay for it. Just put it together, be reasonable.

And I did.

And that was like the biggest luxury was not only number one, I have my own computer, I don't have to share it. But number two we had a cable on them at that point, so I could just stay online all day yep, as opposed to like having to structure my time. That was like, I could not imagine life being better than that. Those are the days.

Yeah, you know, you think back fondly. But also that was a nightmare. That was a full on nightmare. Two little brothers also wanting to use the Internet and everything. And it's not like those ninety minutes were used in a constructive or like in an efficient way. No, you're talking fifty six K thirty three six. That's a slow experience, so you're getting a tenth of what you can do in ninety minutes.

Yeah. And the other thing too is now when we go online, we know what we want to of course get done. We know what sites are out there, we know what's available to us. But back to the new planet, it was a totally new planet. New things are popping up all the time, so you couldn't be efficient because the entire experience was exploration. Yeah, you're just seeing what was out there as opposed to searching and destroying.

Also, the idea of loading a picture. I'm not even talking. I'm not talking about porn. I'm not talking about anything like I mean, I could be, but I'm not talking about anything at all inappropriate. I'm talking if you're loading a picture of I don't know who, like Kobe Bryant in nineteen ninety eight New Laker or something like that, it is like making bad.

You're like, what's gonna happen next? What are the next pixels going to be?

Like?

Is this going to be in focus? Is it, you know, a high quality is it a low quality image? And everything is You're just on the edge of your seat waiting for a picture?

Can it? Can I tell you his story? Please?

About how naive I was Once upon a time I was downloading a picture of an athlete I don't remember who hockey play.

That's a thing, mind, you just downloaded athlete pictures, just collect because you could.

Yeah, Like, I'm just gonna get this Joe Sackic photo, of course, why not? I gotta hoard it? And like I wanted to see something on the other side of the photo, and like I think, like maybe his back was facing the camera and I wanted to see what was going on the front. So I downloaded a image editing software and hit the rotate button trying to get the photo to Rota, not realizing that it would just rotate the actual pixel. Yes, very upsetting to find out if.

An hour and a half of work you thought you could you had three dimension access to all of life in perpetuity.

As it turns out. Oh man, yeah, that was insane. It was incredible. And then of course we graduated up into college and you know, same deal where you get to college, it's talk about a new planet.

Yes, oh it's not even necessarily, but it's it's steroids, it's.

Everything is up. It's it's basically going from a covered wagon to a Ferrari right with nothing in between.

The moment for me was really Napster, where it was like you know, in the past, like you could find files and you can download them and it wouldn't be super fast, but you could like get in your fifty six K speed download a five megabyte.

Files Simpsons Waves or something like Copter.

You know, you can get that stuff.

But then like Napster coming along, and there were other sides when Napster's I think was the most prominent one. From first, like I got a iPod rider ad the same time. Okay, and that, yeah, I think it was right before I went to schools like two thousand hours. It doesn't one and you're like getting like a sixty four maybe a fifty gig twenty five gig iPod and having cable modem and unlimited access to songs was like it just was like, this is this is the absolute feature nothing can possibly time.

Did you have like the the shared iTunes like in your dorm situation, we had direct connect? Oh yeah, so you could you could download any movie in a matter of seconds, any like every person's shared music libraries, or like if I wanted to, like I was a big email fan at that point, if I wanted to download a Jimmy World album, I had access to every gimm eight World album, a bunch of live bootlegs, like any

That's sports dot. Yeah, new Dash York Dash Islander. Yes, I think I did it for like a week.

Okay.

Then I was like, I can't.

I found albums like people would post like actual downloadable interesting. I mean it was very much a thing I just know I could never get into.

Really, Yeah, I r C.

It was intense O I r.

C for sure.

I that was more two thousand, two thousand slapping people with a fish on I r C. That's right. I I r C was another means of getting files.

Of course, you know shout out video pimp absolutely if you were were you a video pimp, his name was video pimp out.

If if you were looking for something that wasn't on Napster, you could always find it out.

Yeah, and then you had the naps not clones, but like there were a bunch of you know, Kazah and Audio.

More Tower, dot Net, bear Share, which all had virus.

That's like wire I want to go back to Napster because one I loved win Amp so so much win skins near skin.

I got admit I was a music match jukebox guy.

Really.

Oh it came with the first iPod Nobody's perfect. I'm sorry, I I.

Used the hell out of wind Amp, the visualizer for wind Amp.

I never understood that. I still don't.

Yeah, I don't get it either.

But I had like a pioneer your pioneer audio like somewhat higher ends like sub Monster.

Yes, I had.

I had a pioneer skin, and I felt like I was souping up my wind Am, like I was getting extra good audio quality because somebody decided to slap a pioneer.

Logo and nail the levels on this one.

Yes, ooh the mix is just a little bit better. Yeah, But Napster wise, I had a huge library. I'm sorry, recording industry and artists of America.

I I actually have an interesting story in this because one of my good good friends from high school was actually on the early, early, early Napster beta. Okay, okay, so we're talking about the people who had Napster before the world had Napster, where he is communicat with the creators of Mew like.

Sean Fanning is on the other side.

Oh, there is an email or was an email on his machine from Sean Fanning inviting him to be part of a broader beta. And I believe many of the individuals who were on that beta were later in some sort of legal peril, of course, because of the copyright infringement situation that came about from Napster. But Naster changed the world. It changed the world.

Napster changed the world, but it didn't really We weren't arrested as far as I know, for downloading songs. My question is, though Napster's one thing, Napster plus a CD burner. Oh, how early were you in having a tower with CDR capabilities?

I was pretty early, was pretty early on the show. I was not either, Yeah, I was pretty early.

I remember Andrew Einhorn, who was also responsible for my pinky being short by the way, he was in a very early.

He's in the Yakuza.

He's in the Yakuza. People don't know that about him. No, I'm almost positive as him. Maybe Matt Levan. I know these names mean a lot too. But they had CD burners and would bring CDs to school and it was their writing and a sharpie on the CDs, not the actual printing from like a press of a CD, and I felt like they were living in the future. Somehow their dad's robbed like a shipping container that came over from Japan, Like how were they allowed to have this technology?

I mean that that was a legitimate thing.

And so when I moved to Long Island, one of the first ways I made friends was that I knew how to edit auto exec dot bat and can figure that and so like when people's computers were like my friend's computer was like not morning super Bowl, and I'm like, oh, I do this, this and this, and I showed them.

And they were like, wow, this is you know how to fix this?

And then I became friends with people because like we were the ones who had AOL, right, and we would use AOL and so it was like, this is the thing you do with your friend.

It's a big deal.

And then I remember in high school, like when that mapster was around my final year, my senior year of high school, and showing people Napster for the first time.

Mind blowing.

Mind blowing, just like because like people, you know, I found out about it like slowly, like I heard about it and then I was like.

Well, how can it be? And I used it and I was like wow, but like just showing someone who had no idea it even existed. H Absolutely. There were three distinct levels of Napster usage for me. The first was when you used it care free, sure, and downloaded at will stuff you didn't even want, but just because you could.

This is now the seventh version of Every Morning by Sugar Ray. I have on this computer, but why not? True exactly.

The second I would status level would be, I know this is probably breaking some sort of lawkay, therefore I'm gonna use it, but sparingly right, I'm.

Gonna pick my spot.

I'm only going to download like the Impossibles, see right, I'm only going to download like Nelly.

I don't know, I don't know if they're watching me, but just in case. Wow, Okay. Yeah. Then there was the third level where it was like, you know, I'm like twenty six, maybe.

I should just afford it's time.

You should just go out and buy something, right, you know, because really if you think about it, Napster, whether it's Napster, Cozah Bearish, all these file transfer services, they were the early pilot for the iTunes store.

Yeah, and what's strange if and I know you were into it somewhat, but Bill and I were probably a little bit deeper into that, like emo pump punk. Around here, you couldn't get a lot of these records that like your local Sam Goodie and so Napster was in a lot of ways super good for a lot of exposure for these bands they'd become popular, it was just untrackable,

We could probably do fifteen shows on the master for sure. But that was the one thing that all the higher ups in the music industry overlooked. The discovery element. Yeah, for sure. The discovery element of it is really what still drives it today. Not the fact that you can buy it online. But the fact that you can find new stuff and.

Neither one of you got in trouble. Am I correct?

I in trouble?

Did you get a warning notice?

I didn't get any trouble from the DMCA, but my high school uh like study hall teacher yelled at.

Me for oh and it was specifically he knew he or she knew it.

Oh yeah, I got paid. I got pegged a couple times for seeding bandwidth from my I okay, in college, I.

Actually I read I got even more trouble. I had a great after school job high school senior year where I would just watch the computer lab and the library and like two people would come in every week and that would be it. So it's great, said, they do nothing. And but the internet was like filtered, and I found a way to get past the filter and showed my friend Brian, how.

Did you get past the film?

I don't remember how I got so some of those early filtering mechanisms superre there. It was a lot of duct tape and shink.

I just I just came into a proxy server and that got past it, and so I should my friend he did it, and then a teacher saw him accessing something that was not appropriate for the Internet course, and he's like, oh, how did you find that? And he said, he just sold me out basically, And so then he got the summer job at the library, which was the freem job, and the job I hadn't promised to also work with him did not ever show up, Oh Bill, heartbreaking.

Yeah.

I don't think we ever got notices. I don't think. I don't know if maybe we got banned with ones, but never d M c A anything. So now you're talking about connecting the proxy server. So this this strikes me as a gentleman who knows his way around. What else were you doing at that? So you mentioned programming, sure, auto exec dot bat files. Sure, what other kinds of stuff were you were you experimenting with? This is gonna this, This is not where I'm trying to go. But what

It sounds way more illicit than actually, yeah, of course, I mean like I was teaching myself to program, like I was learning Q basic, you know, I was basically trying to modify simple things, just trying to figure out, like how I can get the most out of the computer.

I was, you know, doing tiny things. Who were there?

Like I was running dots and high umb as opposed to lo dos. I don't know what that actually means.

Where are we going with that show?

But like, like you know, I went to school as a computer science managers like that was like, oh, this is my thing like this, And then I got there and I was there for a year and a half and I was like, this is actually not my hell. And from that point forward, I have not been a programmer. I have not learned anything more in my computers, and I am now just a total army in terms of my computer. So up to that point, I was great, But now.

I know nothing were you into? And I know Ti, I'm setting this up because I know Tie has a lot to say on the topic. So there were certain tools that people made for even just AOL.

Oh sure, so I'm gonna get more water yeah, get more water tight.

This is Ties.

When we were chatting about this show beforehand, he was like, I'm so happy for this show. This is my like twenty seven year, I'm my year twenty seven, age twenty seven. I'm rounding into my prime for this show. Well, a popular one was Aohel Sure of course TI mentioned I think it was was Fate Fate And basically it was a series of tools which you could mail mass mail people. You could punt people from AOL. You could put in weird or dirty, ASKI things into chat rooms, and you

I loved it.

It made me feel like I knew what I was doing. But I was just an ass. That's all it was, was me being an idiot dick. But I felt so much power coursing through my veins using all the proggies or progus.

You weren't You weren't a dirty Warez boy, were you?

That actually sounds familiar. I don't know what that is, but I know I know Warez is a city, but like what is dirty Warres? I'm just oh, you're.

Saying, He's say where? I was gonna say, yeah, Warrez? And wherees is the Yanni and Laurel where? Because I was always under the parents was like Softwares.

I've gone, I've gone both.

I used to be Warez and then I had a computer science friend telling me that it was actually wares I I switched. I am the dirtiest of Where's Boys. Well, I used the hell out of What's funny about those programs is, by modern standards, they were just like sophisticated macros. You know, they didn't really do anything. They were all they're always like talking about all the all the cool stuff that you can do that they don't. They don't want to tell you about it.

And I used it to Like, the very important thing I used it for was downloading leisure Suit Larry six, right, of course, yeah, that sense, that's yeah, of course.

But my favorite was the I was a fate guy fate X. I don't know fate X I remember pretty vividly. And the two things I remember about it is that when you started it up, there was a wave or m P three file of pd P diddies I'll be missing you that one, of course, and that would play for about thirty five seconds, very long, was not well held. Wait out Diddy to start, had to wait out Diddy. And then there was an I am bomb instant message down utility where you could just pick buddy and send

Right?

Because it was it just seemed like it was marketing. It's like this is this is like the keys to the Hidden City. But then you would try to use it and you can never really modify the software the way you'd think. Right, that was disappointing to me. I'm just starting to hear that I was disappointed by that.

Bill mentioned running building front page sports football stuff. Oh sure, I don't.

Off the top of my head.

I remember making sites, but it was more to just make and see what I could do with gifts and rolling marquee blinking, yes, all of those things.

Oh god, bless the counter. Oh you take counter, Oh my god.

The counter going on.

Guestbook.

You got the guest boys. You're part of the web ring. You got that little Netscape navigators download that for optimization purposes until it's up.

You're under construction.

You're always construction. You got stuff blinking. You got that little pop up when you go to the pange asking for your name, so you insert that into the page you go to. Was it Matt's script archive downloads?

So I messed around with that, but not for any sort of purpose there was. I never had like a pulp fiction fan site.

You know.

It was never like purpose to what I was building other than just like, hey, I'm Dan and this is my website. I made a website probably two thousand in Microsoft Publisher. Sure, yeah, always fun. But I didn't have like a thing that I didn't have, like an early version of a blog. I didn't have a fan site for something. What did you guys build aside from Bill's front page sports that you if you built anything whether it's Geo City's angel Fire or whatever that like you had a parked identity online.

I appreciate the setup here, Yeah, because you know exactly where this is going to go.

Well, no, I know one of the answers. I don't know how many there are so.

Well, the first and most notable was that I started playing fantasy football among friends entirely manually based on the box scores in the paper. We would manually keep track with our Byzantine scoring system with who was winning and who was losing.

In between all.

Of the dates that you guys were all going on.

This is as of like nineteen ninety five, before anything is you know, really out there online. And my initial test run with creating things on the internet was creating just a site where we could look to see who we had on our teams and what scores were some standings. Yeah, right, So that that was actually a very practical way to use it. And in between you kind of mess around and figure out other things that you can do.

That's like crew into yahoo dot com.

What's that? That's like grew into Yahoo dot Yah dot com sold for several billions, yes, But the most notable was the article I sent you where my junior year playing varsity baseball. I did not play a lot of varsity baseball on that team. You were baseball adjacent, that's right, That's right.

I was.

I was a participant on that team and my junior year anyway, was the designated scorekeeper and or Signs Steeler along with a really good friend of mine. And so again kind of building on this idea we can use the Internet to keep track of stuff. We built a website for our varsity baseball team that made the local paper.

In case you haven't heard, the world is going online.

Reading the art. This is the article I sent it to you.

I'm gonna skip a little bit thus far. However, there are relatively few websites that contain extensive information on local high school sports teams that are constantly updated. That makes Steve Hinkle and Tyler Hildenbrandt's pioneer. This is from the Allentown Morning Call. Yeah, so Tie is on a baseball team and he's being written up as a webmaster.

That's right. Yeah, And I remember the author of that article asking our coaches about it, like have they have they filled you in on this, and it was as if they had seen a ghost, where as if the author had two heads of course, you know, because back then it was like it's this like you know, it's just something something the kids are.

How old are you at this point, you're like fourteen, fifteen, sixteen?

Yeah?

Yeah, okay, so this is this is the time when I mean, did you make anything else other than front page? Like did you devote your time?

What's it?

Two things?

Number One, I played fantasy sports at this time too. Yeah, but we played in my neighborhood in Queens and it was always it was fantasy baseball through the mail, so you would get like you would get updates every week with like a like a I got print out that the commissioner would get and then like make copies of it give to you and you saw you on the street. So it would be like a fifteen page like you know dot matrix print out of the numbers every week,

But I did not.

I'm sure I did, but I don't remember what it was. All I remember is that it was on the Geocity site in the Colisseum neighborhood.

That was your hood, that was I was also a coliseum.

I thought about Times Square. I was open to Times Square. There are other ones I was considering, but Colisseum sports related. You figure it's got to be the way to.

Think to you, Okay, So this is this is though an important time because we mentioned aim or aim, I don't. I think I always called it aim to be honest, I called it Juarez Warez Yanny. It's the no matter what you're doing with websites, no matter what you're doing with fantasy sports. And I do have a really bad, shameful fantasy sports story to tell. But AM was the center of the universe, sure, because and I don't think

So I AI AM did actually work.

Out well for me eventually late nights, you know, chatting into well into the night. But that the idea of signing online seeing her also then sign on and then have her I am you, it's your heart is like soaring through your ribs. I cannot overstress the extremes that that feeling gave me.

I could do this for a half hour. Yes, the stories about that, I can say that the most satisfaction I've ever felt about anything I've ever written.

Whoa, whoa, Yeah, no, this is totally true.

Is that like I put some like pithy emo ish thing in my ame profile and my crush took it and put it in her profilesble quoted me.

Was I saw that with attribute? Yes, it was like Bill Barnwell, so it was like you miss all the shots you can't take, Wayne Gretzky, Bill barn But.

But this was not I was not quitting a band.

I write myself.

So it was like that was the So was it something like poetic and deep that you.

Like eighteen year old me?

Of course?

But sure that was I think.

There is no bigger and better feeling.

No, it was incredible that like the affirmation on aim through chatting through a way messaging through Oh this is my screen name. You should we should chat online whatever that is. I don't know if it's like just fake endorphins send like screwing your brain up, But that to me is like if I'm thinking of one like lasting emotion from like the high school digital experience, it is that.

And I don't know that there's a second place.

So I mean like not only in high school, but that in college there was that thing for sure. Like I remember there'd be like a Friday night where I wouldn't.

Go out, and I'd be like, oh, I'm a loser.

I'm not going out, and like I would didn't touch AIM because I wouldn't want my name to go from grade out.

You don't want to be actor on Friday, so black to act in course.

But then of course, if I saw that the girl I liked was signing on, then suddenly I'm like I'm back, baby, I'm like, let's talk. And I remember my friend on the other hand, who developed several AIM hacking things and warning who we can get to as well. He started talking to this girl at school online, and the way that she showed him that she liked him was that when he put in this way message and went to sleep. When he came back, she had sent him no fewer

How many of a cent and seven hundreds that's numerous messages.

You're not going to believe this. That relationship did not work out. Wow, it was not a sustainable pace.

It seems so good together too, Yeah, I know.

She really seemed like what were.

Your strategies for away messages? Because you know there were the most obvious was of course like lyric the song lyrics or something to you, But then there were other quotables that you could pull from Michael Jordan, Wayne Gretzky or whoever.

Yeah, well you could actually like write where you were, You're like I'm going out with my parents, like hit me, hit the cell, hit the cell, which, of course if you had a cell in like nineteen ninety nine after you come out. But no, if it would be like, oh, give me a call on this line, or send me an email here, or leave where, leave where you guys are going to get burgers or whatever. That's that's the more innocent of the away.

Message, because I bring that up because you guys are talking about strategies, you know, the the heart beating out of the chest. I'm getting worked up just thinking about it. I can see, go get some water for yourself. But there was also the strategy of like I'm just gonna play cool. Yeah, yeah, I'm gonna put up the away message that's meaningful to me and maybe maybe somewhere out there meaningful to someone else too.

I would say no.

So then it turns into a bit of a phishing exercise where it's like, maybe if I get the message to this hook, you know, maybe may we're talking about your friends in high school time so many.

But then there's the other side, which just of course the original subweet, which was the I'm going to leave this vaguely oh my message. Yes, I'm not going to point out who it's for what it is, but they know what it means.

I think basically you could tell my emotional states ups and downs essentially ninety one percent. If you just looked at my away message from nineteen ninety nine through like two thousand and two, of course, absolutely, and it would be like happy weird quotes from emo bands when things were good, and it would just be down, down, down, what's wrong with Dan?

When things were going to.

Going super well.

You could fully gauge if you really want to know where my head was at. You didn't have to think any harder than looking at my away message.

So you listed those three different kinds of away messages. Yeah, when I first got to college and I could use AIM every day for the first time, really, one of the things that I found really exciting was I could just do all those things in my own message. So I would have like Emo song lyrics, I'd have like update on what's going on in my life, and.

I like this is where I am right now.

You blogged your away message pretty.

Much, Yeah, so like other people had like one line, mine was like three paragraphs. I don't remember that being a huge limit on what you could do, so it was kind of ridiculous, maybe not appropriate.

I remember aol AIM member profiles because early blog all there was the AOL profile, which was like a ton of real estate. There's a lot differ pitch. Yeah, But then the aim profile as well. You could sort of like expand upon your world to a little bit there and put yourself out in a more visible way.

You could put your important emo poetry in your email poetry.

Did you ever have?

And I wrote this down in our notes and I didn't, but I knew somebody who did. That sounds like it's made, but I trust me, it is not me. I would I have a friend. So the only idea of an online girlfriend, boy, this is like the pre lineykukua.

I'm not talking about catfishing.

I'm like, actually, just like, oh, this is a person I met online and we've never met in person. We don't necessarily have an intention to, but it's just somebody I like talking to.

When you're running a website for your high school baseball team, you don't have tax You just don't have time for an internet girlfriends.

Good buddy of mine in high school I ran Dubinstein Don Roberts. No good friend of mine in high school did and told me about her, and I remember talking to what I presume but cannot guarantee was a girl my own age, and I remember like having a conversation with her and like it would get like personal, just like asking about each other's lives, but it was it never got to any sort of like actual relationship wearing.

It never no, it was. It was never creepy.

And at this point I would tell you, because I married, my wife is not divorcing me because of this shout out Jody with an eye. But I remember talking to somebody like that. I was like, Oh, it's very easy to meet these supposed new people. But he, this buddy of mine, had what he considered to be like more than just like a chat buddy, and they made plans to meet in person, and they like they planned to

That was a thing where like when he was telling me this, I was like, I don't know fully how the internet works.

This sounds like it could be a thing. I don't know. I'm a very stupid fifteen or sixteen year old. And then when he told me she didn't shaw, I was like, yeah, well.

Those are the breaks.

I don't know, chicks, man.

But yes, that was that was a thing that happened to him, And that was like, looking back, like that's super e f and weird.

Of course it is.

But when you're that age and the internet is, you know, it's nineteen ninety nine, the AOL has been around for six years, five years, whatever, you have no idea what like protocol is with meeting people online.

Oh, I mean like my friend was when we were eighteen, and this is not this is not me honestly my friend I was there, but like he started talking to this girl on like a nine inch nails message board. Yeah, and then like we were there talking and he's talking to her a bunch and I'm like, okay, guess I'll just go play middle gear salad while you talked to this.

Guy wake three.

Yeah, this all checks out, and then you know, a few hours passed and it's like midnight and like so much probably like I didn't have a car and he had a car, and he's like, probably go home, and he's like, I'm gonna.

Go meet this girl in New Jersey.

And this is not close to New Jersey.

This is like Long Island. This is like it's a two hour drive and you your parents are home, like you have to kind of get out without your parents. And so he drove to New Jersey and hung out with this girl all night.

So I mean she was real.

She was as far as I know, unless he's been lying about it ever since, which is not I don't think.

No, it's not at all. If I were, It's two hours.

He got to the Vistlambardi rest stop and then called in a night and it's Nathan's while this girl did not respond, but I guess they met up and like that that was impossible to believe could happen.

Did any of you guys dabble in the AOL chat rooms?

Of course?

Online hosting me were good friends. I was rolling dice. I was rolling dice in the AOL chatrooms all the time I was part of. I'm sure it was a It must have been like an e wrestling fed where you like roll dice. In term of what happened with the moves, I would guess wow, I would wow. I don't remember the specifics, but that does sound like something I did in the past.

The AOL chat rooms were like really wild wild less. It was. It was the early Twitter.

Yeah, yeah, is what it amount. You'd hop in and then people would be like press nine if you like boys to Men, and it's like, okay, well we're chatting.

This is great.

God, that would be such a good memoir.

Name press nine if you like boys to men for the nineties episode, maybe that's the name of our episode. And it doesn't make any sense if you're scrolling you see PAC twelve preview, acc.

I think just call it nine.

So what what did you guys do on the internet beyond chatting with friends? So I'm not trying to take this to an affairs, but seriously, what what did you do? Because as we got older, you get to college, you get a faster internet connection. All of a sudden, you can play games a little bit more easily online. Not that you couldn't before, but now you've got faster, you've got the inction, you know, quake three, quake whatever.

Online a lot of high school counter strike for this guy.

Yeah. I mean, there's there's a lot that you can play all of a sudden, But when you're not playing games, when you're not chatting with friends, it's sort of like a new place.

Oh, there's a lot of sports.

What are you doing. I was reading a lot of sports, playing fantasy sports, especially when it like moved online in a yeah, oh yahoo, Yeah, when was Kurt You would know this because football is what you do. When was Kurt Warner's first year with the Rams where he exploded? After it was ninety nine? I was the first year I played fantasy football, and you had Kurt Warner after week one when he threw for a Bajillian passes. I had Kurt Warner and like Isaac Burgs and I just

I'm not at all.

And like we would hang out, and the more we would hang out, the more I got antsy about not knowing what was going on with.

My fantasy.

And mind you, this is Stanford. Even though it's Stanford, this is nineteen ninety eight or so, there's not we don't have nobody brought laptops and there's no obviously iPads, iPhones, nothing like that. And there's only one place to check my fantasy team, and that's the Stanford Bookstore, because like the downstairs basement had computers that were connected to the Internet at like a pretty fast rate. And I remember specifically, like near the end of this week, because it's a

This brings up three different story.

Bobby Lopez is going off, Jeff Blauser is having a.

Great yea baby baby, baby, baby baby.

This makes up three different So that lets you know how my creepiness level.

Okay, as like a fourteen years old clarifying, yeah, fourteen year old me as a nineteen year old in college, stop talking, like ended a conversation with a very attractive girl I would like to be friends with because I wanted to go home and read the Bill Simmons column, which I know going up at any particular time at particular what year is this? This is two thousand and two. Okay, So like I knew, Tuesday four pm. I got to get there see you later. Very nice lady was talking

Number two.

I remember going to Disney when I was a junior in high school and going to like the five dollars for ten minutes internet thing in Disney to check out a pro wrestling newsport to see what happened in ECW that week.

So has that happened?

My big thing was I played that football game front PA Sports Football Pro, and you would like exchange playbooks every week. You would exchange games every week. And so there was one week where I was in the finals of a league for the first time. I was playing this guy and you could see what they plays there week before, and you could do custom plays. You could take plays from the game. And this guy had a punt block play that blocked like three punts in the

Right, And so there was a guy that's like the Joe Montana football thing.

Yeah yeah, And so I assumed, well, basically, I'm assuming they're gonna run the same fit pump block play this week, So why not run the fake punk fake punt every time? And I could tell my team. I had to like code it in. I could tell my team every time run a fake punt, whether it's a once, it's four and thirty. And there was this guy who was doing a friend of mine who was doing commentary on this game on real audio, okay, of course, and so they released the real audio file of the game. That's how

Comes the punt. Oh it's a fake.

And I won the game like fifty seven to three because I ran a fake punt every single time. And this guy was so upset. I was like, you can't do that, but of course it.

Was You're what's the word I'm looking for? You're like, if you're playing a video game and you were always using the same like drilling Street Fighter you were like cheap essentially, sure you were.

Oh my god, I'm trying to in.

The back of my mind as I'm hearing word what warez.

As I'm as I'm hearing Bill tell the story about programming in fake puns in sports? The only the gears that are turning in my brain are basically telling me, how do we top this depth of nerdiness next year? How do we go deeper into our disgustingly nerdy digital souls to top this?

I don't know, fake punt? May do you have take the cake?

And I think I tried to stress that I was keeping the Tennis Academy story pges like you said, g G excuse me? Do you have a PG thirteen story you'd like to share from out the internet at usage?

I'm not talking.

I don't care. Like everybody's looked at poorn, it doesn't matter.

That's boring.

But do you have a story involving anything with like library accidental? Like is there anything like embarrassing that either happened to you or anybody you knew?

I have a story?

Okay, so I dude, try to uh groom me on the internet and I read about it for broom You yeah, like you know, like try like a clearly an adult man like found my profile and tried to like come on to you. Yeah, okay, and like it was like, hey, let's talk on the phone. My grandma was watching me, and it's like I don't know, sure, nice. Yeah, And so like he called like said some creepy stuff, and I honestly did not know what he was talking about, and so I kind of was just like I don't.

Know, like that's weird.

I wrote about it for this recording, which is an intertro website that I worked on with Molly Lambert years and years ago, so it's on there the full story. It's not super it's a little creepy, but it's not I'm not the creepy and I'm like the naive, like I don't know what do you want me to do, sir in this scenario.

So he kind of like realized I did not know what he was talking about and kind of.

Like this speared and was like don't tell anybody. But yeah, so I was almost the victim of some some real creepy stuff.

Wow, I got nothing. I got nothing like that.

The only thing that I can point to that is I think it just speaks to. It's so specific for this time, and I'm going to tell you this is me.

Yes, sorry, sorry, I forgot I apologize. I remember his screen name? Oh really yeah, his screen name was hot Umbros.

If you were really a comedic mind football, right, I know. No, the only like real story that's just like of this time, that is just it's super embarrassing, but I'm just gonna roll with it because this is of this shows.

It's a show about honesty.

Is I remember coming across on AOL or probably in a browser that like, oh there are websites with women not wearing clothing, and I came across a shot of I probably couldn't even remember the name if I thought about it, but somebody in Playboy, a playmate of some kind human most likely, and I remember coming across its like, my friends are never going to believe me that I found this, But I'm not going to send it to them because then they'll get in trouble. So I don't

Was at the Internet.

And my mom looked at the picture and I will it is etched into my brain, scarred into my brain, something like these look like rice bowls. This is not what women look like. And I was like, I need to implode onto myself right now, Mom, please leave forever. As my mom was discussing fake books with fourteen year old Dan, Yeah, I did not point quite like that.

I can tell an embarrassing ri not not that love love embarrassing. But when I was g seventeen or eighteen, I was an Emo fan. Obviously I had friends who were Emo kids. They were like, hey, you should sign up for Makeout Club, which is aren't familiar with. They got club. It is a yeah, it is a as you can probably figure out a punkin Emo themed. I guess online dating slash friend thing like me with friends here, it's cool. And so I was back in New York.

There's no coming through my account.

I just also bleeded my account and everyone back on the side.

Again faked your own death. Yeah, that'll makes sense at the end of this.

So one thing that we did not mention not to take too hard of a turney AOL forty hour free CDs. Yes, the whole idea of CDs is madness in twenty total madness. But we can't talk about this era of the internet without talking about the forty three hours that you get from AOL. Of course, how people would hoard those CDs. I had friends who would have eight ten different screen names because they were somehow able to acquire that many.

At some point? Yeah?

I use those, I eventually know. But we we had an AOL account we you know, I don't know if it was unlimited at that point. There's certain number of hours you get, I think.

To the point where it went from being like an hourly thing, so you can get this unlimited limited Prodigy Actually, remember when we got our first computer, Prodigy gave us like a year for free. Like they were like, we have this incredibly long period of time.

Where that zero was always for free.

Yeah, like you couldn't use it for like, you know more than a certain number of hours a week, but it was free for like an extended period of time.

Was anyone to hear on Juno, Yeah, a little bit.

I dabbled.

I was aware of Juno, but I never used it. Was it also did like aol or Prodigy buy Juno at something.

I think prod I want to say Prodigy bought merged something I know somebody did, but I was aware of it. It was it was an interesting concept. It wasn't It wasn't a bad concept. It was it would dial up, pull down your email, disconnect all did just an email service.

That would dial up get it just kind of like Crimson tie like they would just that's right, just trying to forget the message.

And then that was.

That was all once.

So earlier today, I asked Twitter, what do you remember most fondly about the late nineties Internet?

And you may it is so different talking about this era of my life that I'm so fond of in the past. Yeah, and thinking about Twitter now, that is this awful thing that's so bad. It just disappeared from the Internet. At least this thread of the fans of solid verbal are great. Yes, of course, the people who are in my mentions.

Right, they are bad, They're probably bad, but they might have some similarly good memories. Yes, so I asked people, what do they what do they remember most fondly. I'm not going to go through all of these, but stop me when any of these jump out to that we haven't mentioned. First of all, multi CD installation, please insert disc four of seven madness.

I remember using like playing like hard Ball three for the people and having like this like weird like copy protection, like go to page seventy three of the manuals sentence for a line two or.

In the middle of a game where you come to a critical stage, please insert disc three for sure, you know it couldn't all fit on once, one CD, two CDs.

A lot of people mentioning the AOL dial up sound, which, by the way, if you weren't supposed to be online, would totally blow up your spots to your parents because all of a sudden you're like, yeah, I know my homework that that was the word, but also kind of great. A lot of people talking about different games. We have a snowd reference in here.

I would I would play a student like the snude characters would haunt me in my sleep. Yeah, they could see them.

You can't play a little bit of snuode. No, a lot of bit of snuod. I've got some ASL references, which, yeah.

Did you ever actually ASL someone?

Absolutely? Absolutely.

I don't think I felt like that's what you were supposed to do. Yeah, that's why I did it, because it just seemed like it was the thing.

It was.

That's right.

It was a salutation people remembering aspect ratio jump, not aspect ratio, but resolution jumps and their monitors very oh.

Sure, I remember going from EGA to VGA.

Of course, somebody is very so Seth is like going from ten twenty four to seven six by seven sixty eight after eight hundred by six hundred, big, Just it is not Seth Throsenthal. Unfortunately, a lot of Napster references, a lot of uh oh, we got dancing baby, Yeah, sure, one of the original.

Flying toaster, Yeah, screensaver.

What I played yesterday? Was you mentioned the Buddy Holly video. I played the Ski game, the Windows Ski game that yeah, oh yeah, the Bear that h Yeah.

We've got a couple in Karta references. Yeah, the pre I mean, so some of this was a good one. Discovering Cliff's Notes like summaries of most books I had to read in English. I think it was Baron's Notes or pink Monkey something like that I definitely utilized or.

Pink Monkey like gues are not like two relatively similar things.

Not at all, but good for pink Monkey for differential.

Yeah.

So we got with some win ampso I s Q references. If aim was to mainstream.

I had a seven digit ICQ number that was, I believe, reasonably rare. Okay, I feel like I, like, you know, most people had like an eight eight digit number, Like it was like it was an order of when you subscribe, when you downloaded it. I'd use it like once every year and a half and I'd be like, oh, remember all these people. I have an ICQ and then I never use it again. I had a Microsoft Messenger as well.

Yeah, you guys are.

I don't know if I ever used us that.

I did.

Yeah, let's see just a lot of a lot of CDs. This is so great, a lot of modem references. We got a couple of under construction gifts. Oh this one spoke to me getting the newest versions of Coral draw and missed at Costco.

Are you missed, guys.

I was not a miss I was. I played a lot of triple play baseball.

Does that to play a lot of hardball? A lot of fun paved sports baseball.

There were some early versions of the n C Double a video game series that you could play in the oh yeah, yeah, I definitely did that were a lot of fun. You could get the controller, the gravest game pad.

I was knee deep into Gravis and I remember a buddy of mine got a cable card his tower Holpite I believe, I don't know how that company is pronounced Help whatever. It's in New York, and he put in a card in his tower and he could watch TV on his computer.

Yeah. That was That was sort of the white whale of the late nineties and early two thousands being able to do that.

He would have one window of aim and another window of like Roy Firestone, you know whatever he was watching, and it was it was mind blowing. Yeah, I I did in college because I saved room my college gateway.

I got that.

That was a big deal to me to have that TV and computer in one Yeah. Anything else tie that strikes you that that's personal to you about whether it's computers, you used, it's people you spoke to, any weird emails.

Yeah, I mean it was. It was just such a formative time.

I got to college and I was on Morpheus, like our one, like American Pie two. Please, we're talking hundreds of kpps.

I would like to go back in time and just take a good look at like the transaction logs of all the weird things I downloaded, basically because I could, you know, a lot of Limp biscuit on that list. I saw a biscuit, baseball jersey, a couple of it for you, thank you.

Gotta haven't.

I haven't downloaded LILYMP biscuit in a while, but yeah, just the ability to connect instantaneously with your closest friends was like a huge jump forward. And I'm always kind of amazed thinking back how quickly it took hold of our generation, because it really did just come on very quickly.

Like it just was not. It's unfathomable.

One of my lasting and pro I don't want to go to a dark place with this. But nine to eleven happened when you're in college.

Yeah, it happened two weeks or like two days before.

I was supposed to go to Capolic. I drove up from New York to Boston. Four days after nine to eleven.

For I drove La to Eugene.

So this was my sophomore year of college, started my sophomore year at college. And my lasting memory of that day, aside of everything else is horrible that went on that day, was looking on September the eleventh, two thousand and one, that night after it all happened, at everyone's away message, because the world, the world was glued to the TV right, yeah, and everyone had the same kind of a way message up, surreal awful, like no one knew what to say, but

It was seventeen years ago.

It's not all a different from Twitter.

No it's not.

It's not really hum all that far from away messages. That's the actual problem.

No, of course, but that's my that among many other joyful things, that's one thing that is just burned into my brain as like, wow, this is this is this was this really was a bell curve of an emotional show. We're running the gamut here.

Let me try and take it back to a friendler note when it comes to him, let me tell you a story about a con but I was I narrowly avoided.

So there's this notre dame middle lineback. Yeah right, really good, yeah, super super good. Anyway I start, we gets to talk him.

Yeah, so I was in college and it was like two in the morning, and I was programming stuff for my computer science class with my friend and we were like hour hungry, let's go to seven eleven. So he walked to seven eleven and me see this guy and he tells us, Hey, you know, like I'm stuck in Boston for the night, Like I'm trying to get back to Providence and I have one hundred dollars bill and

Thought this out too clear, right, Yeah, So you know we'd.

Like, sorry, buddy, can't help you. Go to seven eleven. Get you know, our our pepsi ones and our our Mountain Dude code reds and go back and program, go to sleep. Wake up at ten am. The first thing you do every morning is check everyone's at a way mess what's going on? And I checked my my other friend Brendan's away message and it says, I can't believe I just got conned out of a no and pieced it together. He gave the guy, went to the ATM,

I'll come my back out.

And oh so he didn't even I was thinking he had like a totally fake hundred dollars bill.

No, he just was like, I'm gonna go in this house, get one hundred dollars bill. I'll be her back out. And Brandon waited for like a half hour. I don't think this guy's coming back out unless oh wow, so you could find out about a lot of things on am my front. That same guy, uh punched the other guy who I was talking about and broke his nose. And I came back to a our shared apartment and there was blood all over the wall, and I checked my friend's away message and he was like, yeah, just

Detective burn Well two and two together the scene. So yeah, I mean it was.

It was the primary mode of communication until people really had cell phones.

I miss it, I do.

I just sunset it not too well.

Yeah, I think at the end of last year, AOL shut it down.

Man.

It just like it feels like another universe, and it does in a good way in a bad way. Like, I do appreciate being able to talk to people I care about more frequently and not being emotionally dependent upon someone messaging me on AIM when they their icon turns black. But I I do think that it was simpler in a way that I found.

Yeah, it one percent made it easier for me to socialize and nice well for sure, Like I would talk to people on AIM and then suddenly seeing them at school, You're like, oh, yeah, remember we were talking about whatever, missus, whoever, the English class, blah blah blah, and all of a sudden, it's just like it broke down walls.

There were online friends of mine, people who I went to high school with who I didn't interact with it all in person. So I did, but I'll let me be clear. There are people that I went to high school with with whom I communicated solely through a shadow friend essentially essentially, Yeah, I didn't really have any relationship with these people outside of just hey, what's up online? So yeah, I mean it was definitely a different time.

I am even though it has rewired our brains. I am so much happier that I grew up, like my formative years were late nineties instead of now. It's so much better totally.

So that's all I have.

Anything else?

Still looking for that girl who No, I'm very very happily dating someone and now we talk like we have an entire relationship where she lives in DC like here, like we most of our conversations are on.

G chat or yeah Skype and you openly now know STD. I know you talk STD with your girl friend.

Yeah all the time. Yeah, we practice safe listening to save today.

Yeah, safe listening to save the day.

Why don't we leave it at that. Yeah, together, this has been very fun. We we have to up the ante again next year. I don't know how. We don't know what next year. I really I don't know how we do that. But we have a full year to think.

Body stuff, just everything that's right and wrong with our bodies.

Yeah, it's always has to be nineties body stuff.

Nineties body stuff.

Okay, all change is like for you walk me through year to years again. You're making the pubes and but again which I don't appreciate listening. That's how I communicate Bill Barnwell, thank you always stopping all by Dan Rumerstein. I'll see you soon. Yes, sir, my name's Ty Hildebrand. Thanks again for tuning into the solid verbal. Write us at soliverble dot gmail dot com. Write us at solidverbal at gmail dot com. Let us know what you think, what's on your mind, what happened to you in the