Hacker News Reader

AOL. In the late 90s, I was in the chat rooms, by the early 00s me and my friends would swap between AIM and text messaging depending when texts were free. Kids definitely had an online presence, but it wasn't like the mid-00s and after when social media rose up.

View on HN

I wasn't in instant messaging until I was an analyst in the 2000s. Never had an AOL account outside of being IM I used for some subset of mostly journalists. So, yeah, didn't really communicate with social contacts with email/IM until the 2000s for the most part.

I guess it might be an age thing. My teens were the start of proto-social media. Forums and IMs were big. Neopets and livejournal was a core memory of my youth. These were social spaces even if they were be nothing like when Facebook rose up in the late 00s and changed everything

There were various sea changes over fairly short time horizons. When I went to grad school in the mid-80s, few people had their own PCs and mine wasn't a portable much less a laptop. At my job afterwards, we still used terminals and were ahead of the curve in that we made heavy use of internal-only email.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com