Forums » Smalltalk » AMA- I started to Text Roleplay in 1995.

hehe the drunken smile still gets to me!

I was born '97, I am curious what the internet was like pre-2001? How did you like find the places to RP at?

I remember any time I wanted something online I just went to mom and tugged her dress hem til she had the time to find the thing I wanted which usually was how to find some Pokemon. Did you just google "roleplay forums" and it returned a query like it would today?

sorry, this sounds a little like a history lesson, but I feel like if I just answer it, is not going to make any sense without context.

The Internet was in its baby stages at the time. the concept of the internet has been around since the 50s,the 80 some should use it who were in the know. it looked more like the movie WarGames (1983) without the killer AI. Ugly apple computers were in most schools by then.

the only way to get to the internet threw the phone line, so unless you had two phone lines your normal landline phone that everyone used and the internet would need the same line. (insert mad parents who didn't get a call cause their teen was on the web)

Google was not born until 1997
Internet became available to the masses in 1993
Netscape and yahoo were popular browsers that became available in 1994

I wasn't into boards. I knew they were there, but searching the web in the 90s took time. now google would just spit out these beautiful searches. it would take time to load, then you would have to go threw each result and there weren't a lot of choices back then.

AOL has been around a lot longer than one would think (1950 when it was founded), but I am not sure of the full context of that this is what it did:

back then, the internet to most people was a large ocean filled with scary sea monsters and Aol was the kiddie pool.

All packed the internet web in a nice little easy-to-use launcher that would give you access to web pages and chatrooms. They had games (they would charge you a fortune) and you could use their web browser in 1995 for the $9.95 base fee; you got 5 hours of online access, and after that, it was $2.95 an hour.


You didn't search so much as browse on AOL. In the entertainment section, there was a room called Red Dragon inn. it was an rp room I watched and observed and started to join in. Later I went to a player-made room. All the RP rooms were in a World of RhyDin an interdimensional melting post where you could have an orc and an alien hang out together. It was as if everyone got stuck in some interdimensional fly trap and that was how it was approached. There were also guilds that ran through emails. What was weird though was there were all their worlds and terms and I have NO idea where they came from lol.

somewhere down the line, people realized they didn't have to pay for the web, then AOL changed and went a flat rate than even free at some point then it just disappeared into the background.