The Brain Dump

8-9-24

Internet Nostalgia

This certainly didn't take long for me to jump into. As I work on this site, I start to have little memories of the way the internet used to be. I thought I would at least have a few more posts before jumping onto the "I remember when..." bandwagon. These were just a few things that came to mind.

Heat.net

Heat.net was one of the number of platforms used for networking for online video games. Blizzard was the odd one with Battle.net and was ahead of its time back then. The rest of gaming used services like Heat.net to play multiplayer games online. I used to play craptons of Duke 3D and Quake. It was my first introduction to the eventually famous Quake Map "Ziggurat Vertigo". I don't really remember a whole lot more than that. It was just mindblowing to be able to play games that could usually only be played on LAN over the internet. The writing was on the wall for LAN parties. I was in a town in the middle of nowhere, USA, so having Heat.net really opened up the world in terms of multiplayer gaming.

ICQ

ICQ was like an internet pager system with text. Back in the day, there were installable chat apps that you'd use to socialize with other people. ICQ was one of the most popular ones, if not the most. I guess there isn't really a lot to mention about it. It was skinnable and you could add custom sounds, which was cool. Otherwise, it was just a chat app.