It was so sad you could not watch a 30 seconds ad to revive back then. No cosmetics to buy, nothing. Just an ugly snake running around.
/s
What are you talking about? Ringtones were the original paid cosmetics!
Could you get ringtones on Nokia 3210/3310 ?
Yes. You could pay some geek to type it in during recess.
Oh, I had forgotten about about that feature. I was like 4yo back then.
Excellent point about ads. Yes I still remember when every internet site DID NOT have advertising
Back then, websites didn’t need to show ads. They just distributed adware. Those days are long gone…
That shows a picture of a browser with a million search bars installed. This feels like it was more of a thing between 1998 and 2002. I’d say that wasn’t early Internet, it was when it started to become mainstream.
There was a time when websites had hours.
I started on the internet in 1995 (demon Internet in the UK TAM account using slip) and the Web then was actually a very small part of what I did online. Yep the websites that were around rarely had ads. If they did they were part of a garish geocities page most likely.
But I was more often on usenet (yes kids before it was used for paid piracy we did actually use it for it’s original intent) and IRC (remembering the efnet/ircnet split). The Internet browser was just another app you used online.
If you want free games with minimal functionality there is always f-droid.
Ad break
This is what they took from us.
How dare they!
You were also able to type out a message and send it using a single hand, you only needed to recharge the phone once a week, and it didn’t shatter like an icicle if you so much as sneezed at it, it was cheap and it didn’t spy on you. Smart phones is the dumbest thing that happened to humanity.
Once a week? Those things could go pretty much forever on a single charge so long as you weren’t making calls, even with batteries that had a tiny fraction of modern capacity due to their simple hardware.
Nowadays even a completely idle smartphone on extreme power saving mode is lucky to last a couple of days, especially if you don’t/can’t disable the vendor-mandated bloatware that periodically wakes it up to phone home. When used regularly, it’s not uncommon for a phone to drain within a single day.
Sometimes I miss the simple, rugged designs - right up until I remember how much better smartphones are at literally everything else. Still wish companies would get the memo and focus on bigger batteries rather than smaller phones, though.
Same era, I used to playing games on my calculator. I suppose you still can, but I used to do it. I remember I had RISK on my TI-89, but the games on my TI-82 were on par with the version of snake shown in the post. We would even trade the games around with the kids that didn’t have a computer and/or Internet at home. We’d connect them with funky little cables that looked like audio jacks.
Aye, it be true. It done been like the man say’th!
Mistakes were made along the way.
I remember paying 3$ for a ringtone
I remember ringback tones. When you wanted to inflict your music tastes on literally anyone who called you.
I remember reading sketchy guides on how to add custom ringtones without needing to pay for the privilege. Arbitrary restrictions on user folder access predate Android.
I remember putting .jar (I think) games on my flip phone, when I discovered that it was like a whole new world. Sd card loaded with as many games I could find haha
Bring-ding-ding-ding
Bring-ding-ding-ding
Baaa-ba-ba-Bowaaaaar
I remember making my own ringtone on the Nokia
Now cell phone games play you.
Snake > Snake 2
I used to code ringtones into peoples phones in exchange for cigarettes.
Last Resort by Papa Roach was most popular followed by Better Off Alone by DJ Sammy, because they both sounded killer in twangy Nokia synth.
Better Off Alone was by Alice Deejay.
Shit why am I thinking DJ Sammy? Old man moment
The fucking battery is almost empty after just three days! Just because I played Snake every break.
I still have one of these somewhere. It didn’t break but the charger did
Everyone Nokia user knows that Space Impact was a better game than Snake
Later on I got a phone with Bounce, now that was the tits
Snake > Space Impact > Bounce
There were at least two different versions of it. The one where the second and third level are in the space ship (not on some sort of a bouncy rover thing) is the jam
And you could use the IR blaster to play multiplayer games.
Still have a core memory of sitting in the toilet, a long time after having finished my business, still playing snake and beating my highest score by a lot!
I’m tired of the smart phones and their addictive games and whistles, just give me a phone that only does call not that “texting” BS and only one ring you cannot change !
