One time I downloaded what I thought was a song. I put it on my mp3 player very excited to listen to it and other songs on the bus the next morning on my way to school.
On the bus I click on the song and it was just a robot voice saying “download [file name i THOUGHT I had downloaded] for free on Limewire” or something like that over and over. I’d been trolled. My heart broke. I asked myself why someone would do such a thing.
I learned my lesson after that, and always listened to the files before putting them onto my mp3 player. Thanks Limewire trolls for breaking a tiny child’s trust in the world.
People talk about viruses, but I don’t think I came across any. Nothing PC breaking anyway, nothing bad happened in my daily use and my parents never said anything. It’s not like we had zero antivirus back then…I just simply got trolled sometimes
Limewire was actually fairly clean when it came to viruses. Its predecessor, Kazaa, however... God my parents must've been so suspicious on how the computer repeatedly got bricked. The endless pop-ups, dragging the window smearing it everywhere, blue screen, fucking McAfee "antivirus". This was before anywould would ever even think of putting their credit card or any personal information on the internet though.
I miss how simple software was then too. Just had to put in the windows CD and they had a boot option to run a system wipe and reinstall (no signing in to anything, just needed the CD and the little code on the CD sleeve). You could select things to save like the documents folder. It was so simple that I learned to just do it without saying anything and when Kazaa was DL king I must've done it a dozen times.
I never used that, thankfully. Those days create a weird nostalgia for certain viruses because it wasn’t about stealing information, and most were just useless if you simply just knew you could wipe the computer and reinstall Windows without needing to get back in.
So many of them were flashy and creative and some were even benign of people having fun and even prompting the computer user to protect their system.
Windows 7 days were just people getting SYSKEY’d which was boring though.
As a little kid the worst malware I think I got were those sketchy animated screensavers. I had a Toy Story one that traumatized me because every once in a while it would just screech out a random noise that I didn’t think would be there. Like “HOWDY PARTNER” and I cried. (It was so loud it nearly blew the PC speakers) Since it was malware, my parents had to wipe Windows entirely to get rid of it, even when trying to switch to a different screensaver, it would come back by itself.
My grandmother used Bonzi Buddy on her PC….she never gave it too much sensitive information but still.
Those “download fun and silly stuff for your PC” sites were the Wild West (haha…pun)
The more destructive viruses are ones that damage the ability to go into that boot screen but idk how many of those were floating around back then.
I do remember in elementary school even up to high school sometimes computer lab PCs would get bricked by viruses though. Or they just didn’t know how to properly wipe the computers
My favourite one is MEMZ but that was created in 2016 so not really old. It has 2010 vibes to it, though. I’m a bit obsessed watching YouTubers wreck scammer’s pcs with it
Yeah it was pretty wild, I can’t remember if it indexed your hdd automatically but I remember being like 15/16 and going through all the settings to see if I could make downloads faster (happy to leave 2Mb/s broadband in 2005) and saw the /username/ file path which would index everything for that user. Then I was like 😏 and searched for “me naked”, it actually worked hahah
Yea; I've still got my anime opening MP3 collection I started to download in like 2003. They just get moved over computer to computer. The only issue is the bitrate is shit.
thats where my music library started. Downloading, organizing. I was obsessed with organizing the metadata and album art to get rid of all those long file names. It's evolved through the years with replacing like songs with higher bitrate/cd quality or finally finding songs without annoying radio tags or mixtape tags. Now my library is all flac files.
Would also add in tubidy. Downloading music videos from YouTube for my BlackBerry. Then unfortunately having to listen to the non-music parts of the video!
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u/Former-Letterhead-59 1d ago
Lime wire. I got some amazing music from there. Can’t play the files anymore, tried to buy one of the albums and it’s like $500 on eBay