For me, it was that the Internet never forgets and that you should never enter your real name. In my opinion, both of these rules are now completely ignored.
For me, it was that the Internet never forgets and that you should never enter your real name. In my opinion, both of these rules are now completely ignored.
Don’t pick up the phone if someone is online… I’m old
I’m not that old but was dealing with that in the mid-2000s before my parents finally switched.
You come from a nice family. My family disconnected each other all the time
I used to get hella annoyed that my mom would be online all afternoon so I would pick up the phone and blow into it for a few seconds until I heard AOL man say “Goodbye.”
I’m a millennial, I learned this, and now I just don’t pick up the phone.
I’m a gen z and I can’t put down the phone
Now try and call someone with it. I’ll wait
It’s weird when someone calls me and it’s actually a live one.
I can’t remember. Did it make pterodactyl noises or is that just faxes?
The modem made noises when connecting, but if someone picked up the phone, your internet would just stop working and they’d get their dial tone.
Now dot matrix printers, those were real pterodactyl sounds.
Modems can still make noise. As recently as five years ago I still had to work with modems. A lot of them now have silent mode though
Modems also make noises when connected. However, the noise of them connecting is more distinctive because they go through a handshake where you can hear distinct tones, but then negotiate a higher baud rate involving modulation of many different frequencies, at which point to the human ear it is indistinguishable from white noise (a sort of loud hissing). If you pick up the phone while the modem is connected at a higher baud rate (post the handshake), you’ll hear the hissing, and then eventually you picking up the phone will have caused too many errors for the connection to be sustained (due to introducing noise on the line), causing both ends to hang up. You’ll then hear the normal tone you hear when the called party has hung up the line.