I am certain I will be the last person to point out that you may feel you are the last one to know what it was like before the public internet, but that your feeling is completely off base and not based on anything from reality.
this post was submitted on 25 Feb 2025
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Asklemmy
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I am quite possibly the only distribitor of a christian cartoon movie collection in HD with most debate
I'm probably one of the last people who still uses Paint Tool Sai 1 to draw. Every other artist I know who used to use it has since either moved on to Clip Studio Paint, Procreate, or Paint Tool Sai 2 haha.
I donβt understandβyou think youβre one of the last people left who started using the internet in the 90s?
There's dozens of us!
No hundreds
whole nations
I think what OP is trying to say is that people in their age range will end up being the last of those people, ie. the internet was one of their earliest memories and that happened to be right as it took off. A similar example from my age range, we will probably be the last to remember the WTC attacks as they happened. It's one of the earliest memories I have. Not me specifically, unless I am graced with an incredibly long life, but someone around my age who is.
Family line. I did want kids for a while, but lacking a willing partner, and seeing the state of the world, that isn't happening.
I think my wife and I might be one of the last couples to be embarrassed enough about meeting on the Internet to lie about it. When we talk about how we met around our niblings, we always have to explain that "we met on the Internet back when that was something you lied to your friends about"
Niblings. There's a word I've never heard before. I'm guessing it means niece or nephew. I like it.
Yeah, my wife found it somewhere online a while back. Not having kids ourselves, we end up talking about our niblings a lot but we always felt like the phrase "nieces and nephews" was a bit cumbersome in conversion so, it filled a need for us. I keep hearing it from people that have no connection to us so it seems like we're not the only ones who've latched onto in recent years.
As of now (4.45pm GMT on 25th Feb 2025) I'm the last to comment on this post of a person who (erroneously) believes they are the last of the early adopters of the internet (I'd say there are millions of us).
My familial line. Sorry nerds, the buck stops here. I'm not gonna force anyone else into this hellscape against their will. If I ever adopt, they can keep their familial names.
Same here! Only child of my adopted parents and only kid my birth parents had together so, I'm ending a couple of lines. I'm the god parent of a few niblings but if (God forbid) they should ever become my responsibility, they're not getting a name change.
Posted the same thing and saw your answer. Great minds, eh?
I think Iβm one of the only long distance runners that still smokes. I donβt think Iβve ever met someone who runs as much as I do and smokes cigarettes every day.
Do you smoke while running?
Not generally, but I did a couple half marathons where I smoked one or two smokes during the run just because it was funny. Even came in top ten percent one run when I did that.
That is pretty funny.
I also used to bring a micci of rye with me on these runs. I generally run with my running backpack, and Iβd pull out the rye and take a shot and pull out a smoke and light it, all as im running, and keep going. It always got at least one laugh and one βwtfβ from the other runners.
How much do you smoke and how much do you run?
Eh I only smoke about 4-5 a day usually and at my heaviest running I did 5k plus for 8 months every day. Now I do about 15k a week.
i'm not sure i understand the question. if it is meant to ask what experience i've had that no other living person has or ever will experience again, then i'm probably not old enough in my mid 30s to lay any such claim. this doesn't seem likely to be what you mean though, since it should be obvious to you that you aren't the only surviving person who used the internet in the 90s.
my second interpretation of the question would be that you want to know what experience i am the most recent person to have experienced, which would work with your example, if you consider the 'early' internet to have ended and become the regular internet, right after you first got online. for that, a couple hours ago, i walked atop a particular out of the way concrete block wall on my way home. probably nobody has done that since then.
I remember when the Gestapo was real, and when the wall came down.
add to this that the internet forced so many of us to become technically & technologically proficient because it was a necessary step to get us online.
that further spurred on knowledge of things that laymen wouldn't have cared about otherwise like cpu architectures or clock frequencies; operating systems internals with things like linux or bsd; knowledge of basic networking fundamentals; html/css/javascript for geocities & myspace pages; etc.
as the enshitification turns the internet into walled gardens and people continue to use smart phones that "just work"; they are no longer able to repair their own devices like we had to do, which spares them from having to learn the nuts and bolts of the technology that enables our lives.
I can still rattle out the right tones you'd hear if you connected at 56k, that extra pshhhhh hhhshhhhh
When USRobotics first brought the 56k modem to market, they had an online contest to give away 100 of them. I won one. My ISP couldn't even serve me 56k for about another year.
Also, I miss silly fun winnable online contests and freebies.
i used to have dreams about that handshake. lol
And donβt even get me started on βAIβ.
As the family technical person, I can say after years of attempting to teach people to understand and solve their own problems, my support calls are down in the past year! Is it because they got smarter? No! They started using ChatGPT, CoPilot, etc and following it blindly. Do they understand the concepts of what they are changing and doing? No, but as long as the original problem is fixed, who cares if a dozen more are created, as long as they(the problems) keep quiet.
I am cursed to be in the middle, couldnβt just be given a well paying technical job like my forebears, but nobody thinks they need my technical skills anymore, so I have talents now viewed as outdated and of limited use.
i occupy a different sort of middle ground in that i'm at the right generation to get those well paying technical jobs simply because i had to monkey around with off-the-shelf hardware and linux when they were both new to most people; but i also don't get as many requests for technical help as i once did from family.
however, in my case, it's been because the entire younger generations of my family have gone with iphones along with apple's walled garden so they've never had to struggle with something like getting winsock working on windows 3.11 just to get internet porn. lol
somehow, it's only the other older & leftist in my family that insist on diy implementations with linux and foss hardware, including de-googled androids; while the moderates and conservatives alike just buy iphones and never learn because of it.
like in your case; they see that technical skillset as mildly useful at best even though it underpins their own technology choices. worst of it all to me is that i get to witness them struggling to afford another iphone or its fees simply because they refuse to go with "poor people androids" or they don't want to deal with the frustration of getting things to work without apple's walled garden; some prioritize it over food or rent simply due to the exorbitant costs.
Its sorta a wierd way to say it. Im not the last. There is still a whole host of folks alive my age and older. I have thought of it as sorta what defines the experiences of folks who are born around my time. For me its knowing an all analog world. I mean the integrated circuit was invented before my birth but most folks were not interacting with anything digital really. What stands out is space invaders showing up at the pinball arcade. I was very young. Like my first memories. None of my older siblings had been into pinball but for some reason we stopped in. I think my brother saw one of his friends. Anwyay there was a huge crowd around this space invaders game that im pretty sure was the first time the people had seen an electronic game. Slowly from there you saw other games, the pong at home thing, digital clocks. Arcades became things with mostly digital games and pinball became a smaller and smaller part of the arcade and home systems became better. odyseey, atari, vectrex, collegovision. digital watches and calculators became a thing. Word processors showed up before computers took the typewriters place. photocopiers took over for mimeograph machines. It was only a glimpse in my youngest years but I experienced an all analogue existence for a short span of my life.
My paternal family name. No one else carries my last name and I'm almost 40, been single for a decade now so kids are out of the question.
God knows how many generations of this name existed only to die out because I'm pathetic lol
"Points at adoption/fostering (assuming you want children)"
I appreciate the suggestion, but I'm single and live in a garage "apartment." It wouldn't be a good life for them.
Lol, you think 1996 is early internet?
They're probably confusing the World Wide Web for the Internet as whole.
The usage of those terms became blurred immediately, as far as general public awareness goes.
If you use enough brain cells to be above "lol, I like that clip clicks like lolol", then you're labeled a nerd.
If you're familiar with any acronyms that have to do with tech, then you're a super nerd.
As they stated it became accessible to the average person in 1996. Prior to that you would be lucky if there was a local ISP offering access to the internet. I worked at several engineering companies in 1991 onward, and even though we had high end systems and tech back then we didn't get Internet and email until 1996. And initially it was useless because your clients didn't all have email yet.
peers very confusedly from fredmail
Oh lol, you tried sounding smart there.
You've only sourced what is essentially a step of development for the internet. Do you even read?
I just can't imagine bragging about being unique for having been middle/upper middle class in the 90s.
It is depressing to think that this is what you feel makes you unique.. any 45+ person is in the same boat as you my friend...
You are special though, but this is not what makes you special.
Day of Defeat source players:
https://steamcharts.com/app/300#All
Its like being on an island that is slowly sinking into the sea.
I really liked the game something like 15 years ago. But it seems like a bad idea to get back into it now with only a few very dedicated players left.
I will be last person to take the last hit from my very nearly empty lemonade raspberry dispo at some point later today.