If you’ve used any of these programs before, you’re old AF

Last Updated on 2016-05-19 , 1:37 pm

If you read the news nowadays, there always seem to be a few pieces touching on the latest tech startup or new technology. It’s remarkable how far modern technology has come in the last few decades. If you’ve used any of the following programs before, congrats, you’re probably older than a quarter of the population.

Napster
This was how the death of CDs and cassette tapes all started. Napster allowed for P2P (peer-to-peer) music file sharing where users can download songs for free. It was shut down in 2001 due to legal issues. Today, it has been acquired by another company and is a music streaming site.

mIRC
Standing for “Internet Relay Chat”, this software was developed for Windows where users can chat and share files. It was an immensely popular messenger which had customisable skins. One of the most used command was “/slap -username-” which will prompt the chatroom to announce the text “John slaps David around a bit with a large trout” (presuming your name is John and the person getting slapped is called David).

ICQ
This was the first stand alone chat messenger that could be downloaded. You’ll remember the annoying pings of “uh-oh!” when a new message was received.

MSN Messenger
This was the place where many good memories were formed. You could play games with your friends, use custom emoticons, ‘nudge’ your friend so that their whole chat window shakes and most annoying of all, send winks (huge animated emoticons). Microsoft officially ended its 15 years run on October 2014.

Microsoft FrontPage
Before the days of WordPress and other website builders, there was  Microsoft FrontPage. It was a”WYSIWYG” (What You See Is What You Get) editor for anyone to build websites and webpages easily. This was discontinued in 2006 and superseded by Microsoft SharePoint Designer and Microsoft Expression Web.

3D Pinball Space Cadet
No internet connection and bored? No problem, just launch this preinstalled pinball game on Windows and you’ll have hours of fun trying to beat your previous high score.

Math Blaster
Teachers would organise trips to the computer labs and Math Blaster would be one of the games being played. It was a really fun educational game where you have to answer math questions in order to proceed to the next round and complete the mission.

RealPlayer
A universal multimedia player that automatically recognises any video and audio format. It even has its own video and audio formats called RealVideo and RealAudio respectively.

Winamp
If you wanted something fancier than Windows Media Player, Winamp was the go-to music player. It had many nice customisable skins for downloads and cool music visualisation.

Dial Up Internet
And finally, let’s not forget how noisy it was every time you had to dial up to the internet.  Or how frustrated you got when your mother accidentally cut your connection by picking up the phone.