A throwback to old technology
Hi5 was bizarre, friends had to write each other “testimonials” which were basically just a big show-off for others to witness
The popular carton "The Flintstones" showed a family co-existing with dinosaurs during the Stone Age. They had technology like televisions and printers, alongside stones, twigs and of course, pet dinosaurs.
The Gen-Z will never understand the trouble internet users had to go through in the 1990s and 2000s. This period was somewhat like the one showed in Flintstones.
There were no pet dinosaurs, but there were large computers and extremely slow internet connections. The iMac G3 computers had a range of colourful, translucent monitors which had taken the market by storm. It was essentially playing dress-up with monitors.
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These days, we complain about the internet speed when a movie does not download within minutes, but once upon a time, a colour image used to take minutes to download. This is why many students had to make do with black and white pictures for school projects.
On good days, one could connect to MSN Messenger (a thing of the past, but it paved the way for Facebook Messenger) within an hour and on bad days, never.
Broadband internet connections would keep landlines busy and would make weird, squeaking noises while being connected.
Before Facebook, there was Hi5, Orkut and Myspace.
Hi5 was bizarre, friends had to write each other "testimonials" which were basically just a big show-off for others to witness. "Anika is my bestest friend in the whole wide world." Fast forward five years, Anika who?
Orkut was not that popular among Bangladeshi teens but some would use it. It was quite purposeless, just like Hi5. Myspace was, as the name suggests, your very own virtual space which others could see. As is evident, security and privacy breach were not big deals back then.
People would use Hotmail accounts to exchange e-mails and it was just like Gmail, there was nothing weird about it other than the name. There was LimeWire, a file sharing system which was quite popular back then but in 2012 it was shut down.
There were quite a few search engines such as Ask.com, AltaVista, and AOL Search, not all of them were available in Bangladesh. Internet in the old days was expensive and biased.
Before smartphones, there were Nokia phones which cost an arm and a leg and not many youngsters could afford. Using internet on them was scary because every minute probably cost 20-30 taka. There were even different versions of Facebook and MSN Messenger for slow internet.
