Any Late 90s or Early 2000s Chatroom Stories?

Minestrone101Minestrone101
in General

It was the time of AOL, AIM, Irc, ICQ, Yahoo chat rooms and other public forums.

Did you befriend anyone that was anonymous and far away? Did you fall in love ? Did you ever meet your online friends ?

I used to get along really well with people in Yahoo chats from Colorado and Alaska in 2000 for some reason. I used to stay up late, and although we all had the technology to exchange photos, we almost never did. We did ask asl a lot (age, sex, location - funny enough, it's something that's that's displayed in most social media profiles now).

At age 20 I took a liking to a 17 or 18 year old woman who turned out to be 15. lol She was supposedly psychic too. haha

I was on the first version of the dating app Okcupid in 99/2000 when it used to be one long page and everyone just had a 2x2 (5.08 cm) inch box that we could write a headline and a 2 line blurb. there were dozens of profiles (like a wanted or personal ad column in the newspaper) in each page . also no one posted pictures yet. Friendster was still new and Facebook and MySpace didn't exist.

Interesting times. I met someone on Okc - Nancy. She was a single mother in New Jersey. Technically Jersey is barely 2 hours away from me. It felt very far at the time. We chatted on AIM for 5 years, never met, and never exchanged photos. lol. Good times.

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Comments

  • oberonoberon

    I have one friend of 27 years that i made on AOL we have met in person about 5 times through the years but mostly just cheer each other on from the internet on whichever platform is hot at the time

  • craMcraM

    Late 90s Met someone in an AOL global chat room and they just hsppend to be one block away from me. Unfortunately I was too chicken to go meet them in person

  • CuddleDuncanCuddleDuncan

    Ah yes, the old 'asl'. (Age, Sex, Location)

    Exchanging photos was hard. You had to buy a scanner, make it work with your computer, scan in a photo, download a file transfer app, upload the photo, or rather fail to upload the photo, discover that your ISP had gone bust, write to somebody to send you a disk for a new ISP in the post, get that up and running, discover that the file management app had an update which was too big to download effectively without a file transfer app, spend about a week trying to download it, eventually succeed but you could no longer face your computer because it crashed all the time, came back to it a week or two later, and then tried to remember who the hell it was you were trying to send the photo to, and then when you did realising that you quite liked them and did you really want to put them through the same pain that you'd been through.
    Happy days.

  • DaveFromSussexDaveFromSussex

    I remember inadvisably meet someone older on a forgotten chat room back in the day. Was a bit obsessed really. Mercifully that account and the child I was is long gone.

    Did meet someone awesome on Neopets as well and I can't remember her name now 🤔

  • Minestrone101Minestrone101

    @DaveTheBrit What's neopets?

    @CuddleDuncan that's funny. old school. at least for me, by 2000 digital cameras were around and def by 2005 there was no excuse yet it persisted. lol asl? describe yourself to. I can be my real self in his chatroom. lol

  • Minestrone101Minestrone101
    edited October 2023

    @craM Any regrets? Was that person your age ? What a coincidence!

  • SunsetSnugglesSunsetSnuggles

    Oh sweet nostalgia, come to mama! 😄

    ~ Sunset Snuggles

    🦄 Enthusiast 🏞 Travel Fiend 🐘 Animal Lover

  • Jova114Jova114

    I talked to this one girl that said she was Cassie Steel.
    An actress.
    Never knew if it was true or not lol

  • [Deleted User]Hugginsworth (deleted user)

    At that time, I was having topical discussions on Usenet. Think of it as a decentralized, stuffy version of Reddit. Almost everyone went by their real full names, and there were no "profiles" or photos. Age, race, etc. was irrelevant. Good times indeed!

  • Mike403Mike403
    edited October 2023

    In the mid '90s, I talked to somebody who claimed to be Bill Nye the science guy. That was before I knew who he was. He said that online stuff was really fascinating and he wanted to do a show about it.

  • TheFunCartelTheFunCartel

    @Mike403 That wasn’t Bill Nye. Bill Nye had his first show in 1986 and his National one in 1993. The real Bill Nye was already successful doing shows.

  • Mike403Mike403

    @BoomerSpooner - That's how I first heard about the show. That's when I started watching. It was on PBS at the time.

  • Mike403Mike403

    @BoomerSpooner - It was in a chat room on a local Bulletin Board System(BBS). He claimed to be in Denver on a business trip. He mentioned that he wanted to talk to them about doing a show about BBSs and communicating with people online. I don't know if it was actually him, but it's a memory of how I discovered the show.

  • Minestrone101Minestrone101

    @SunsetSnuggles In the year 2000...

  • Minestrone101Minestrone101

    @Jova114 https://www.google.com/search?gs_ssp=eJzj4tTP1Tcwjk9LqjRg9OJNTiwuzkxVKC5JTc1JBQBqNAiE&q=cassie+steele&oq=cassie+steel&gs_lcrp=EgZjaHJvbWUqCggBEC4YsQMYgAQyDQgAEAAY4wIYsQMYgAQyCggBEC4YsQMYgAQyBggCEEUYOTIHCAMQABiABDIHCAQQABiABDIHCAUQABiABDIHCAYQABiABDIHCAcQABiABDIHCAgQABiABDIHCAkQABiABDIHCAoQABiABDIHCAsQABiABDIHCAwQLhiABDIHCA0QABiABDIHCA4QABiABNIBCDQzODBqMGo0qAIAsAIA&client=ms-android-motorola-rvo3&sourceid=chrome-mobile&ie=UTF-8

    Internet has advanced quite a bit since then. just ask Jeeves! :)

  • Jova114Jova114

    @Minestrone101
    Lol this was before Jeeves had the answers. She gave me all the real Cassie's facts and told me about an upcoming movie she was in.

  • stormydaycuddlestormydaycuddle
    edited October 2023

    I may have started my trolling career young when my parents (not knowing) let me hang out in the teen chat rooms on AOL. LOL. I found out quickly there were internet weirdos and when they inevitably messaged me I’d barrage them back with a bunch of religious propaganda. And by propaganda I’m not saying like when people calmly discuss it. Straight up dire warnings, and over the top doomsday repent now messages until they logged off. Not trying to start a covo about religion. Its just a funny story.

  • [Deleted User]Hugginsworth (deleted user)

    @stormydaycuddle So, wait, were you intentionally trying to throw them off the scent, as it were, and drive them off in disgust? or were you sincerely trying to make them repent?

  • Mike403Mike403

    @stormydaycuddle - I was at a U2 concert when the rapture was supposed to occur (May 21st, 2011). Good thing it didn't happen and I was allowed to enjoy the concert.

  • stormydaycuddlestormydaycuddle

    @Hugginsworth to annoy. Things don’t change much. Lol.

  • [Deleted User]Hugginsworth (deleted user)

    Hey, whatever works!

  • Mike403Mike403
    edited October 2023

    During the era when Bulletin Board Systems was still popular in the mid '90s, I was a system operator of one of them. I had a dedicated PC and phone line for it where users would call into. It had message forums and games. Tradewars 2002 was a popular text-based space game that was on it.

  • Minestrone101Minestrone101

    @Jova114 Was that the correct Cassie Steele?

  • Minestrone101Minestrone101

    @Mike403 So you were probably a bulletin board legend. :)

    Also, I thought the Mayans were full of crap. if they were so good at predicting then they wouldn't have met their fate. that was my reasoning. however, very reasonable and smart human beings were sure of the end of the world , bc humans in the end are emotional creatures. lol

  • Mike403Mike403

    BBSs predates the internet and they were popular from the '70s until the '90s when the internet started to take its placed. Everyone you met on a BBS was local to you unless they were making a long distance phone call to connect to it which wasn't very common for obvious reasons.

  • softsensitivesoftsensitive

    I met this "girl" on omegle video chat (it was a black screen she refused to show her face). She claimed she was Kayden Kross. This was in 2015 though.

  • TxTomTxTom

    Does Quest or LiveLinks count?

  • Minestrone101Minestrone101

    @TxTom why not

  • HelesalenHelesalen

    My experiences were so weird, by 1998 I imagined a horror story about a man so enthralled by a chatroom deception that even after proving the persona is fictitious he still devotes his life to find her.

  • TxTomTxTom

    @VidH Not dissimilar to Dateline where the subject of an episode had repeatedly fallen for online romance scams, losing tens of thousands of dollars.

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