May 4, 2009, 
Tagged My first encounter with the Internet was in the 4th grade, at the age of 10. The dial-up connection we had at home was 
very weak since I could never go above 5Kb/sec and that was in the best nights in which the telephone network wasn’t so busy. I can’t really remember what I used to do while surfing but I do remember surfing on some teenager forums which don’t exist anymore. Oh, did I mention that google wasn’t that popular and everyone was using yahoo and altavista for searching on the internet?
I think I was 12 when I first used the IRC networks with the help of mIRC, the classical and well known chat client. As
everyone in Romania, I was using the Undernet network and it was my dream to register a channel lol. Come on, I was 12! The channels we mostly used however were #level , #limpbizkit and our proud registered channel: #Linkins . Man, those were the Golden Ages of the IRC networks in Romania. I remember that there were nights with 2000 (or more?) users on the main channels of Romania or Bucharest and that is pretty much judging by the small amount of internet connections available.
Around 8th grade, by some strange circumstances (I actually don’t remember how), I made an account on the forum
of the Romanian magazine “Cool Girl” and at some point I was 2 votes close to getting to be a moderator (I had around 400-500 votes). Now, that was really strange! Anyway, it is such a pitty that people tend to decrease the activity on most forums. It used to be one of the best places to spend time while being online but now most of them seem either dead or full of spam. The most used platforms for the forums used to be phpbb and invision power board and as far as I know they still have the supremacy in the domain.
In the summer of 2004 I managed to get a broadband connection at home. The main “protocol” used in Romania for file sharing was DC (mostly used with oDC or DC++). The most used DC hubs were the czone hub and the evolva hub. It’s funny how both of these belong(ed) to some internet service providers though 
At the moment, file sharing through DC is on a downward trend in Romania, getting more and more replaced by torrent trackers. The main advantages of the torrent trackers is that you know for sure that you won’t download some fake “How High 2″ or “The Butterfly Effect 4″ video files.
So, that was my short melancholic view on my personal history in the internet. I have chosen to ignore anything related to web development and web designing and place that history in a totally different post.
As a bonus, here is the nick list I used since 2000 to 2009: Sleepy, v0odo0, VictorV1, Victorv142 and finally Victorelu. I am curious to find out how you guys evolved/devolved throught your online history, no matter if it is related or not to the applications I have previously presented.
Man, I might have seen you on #level a couple of times during that period (was wasting a lot of time over there in my youth just after they moved on IRC from their online java based chat).
Also, altavista rocked because it didn’t filter gray areas such as warez and cracks so it definitely was better than Yahoo!. Now I’m a Google fanboy except for (Blogger/Blogspot)
DC is still good for getting that lonesome song instead of the whole archived album but I was mostly downloading via IRC in those early days.
I am sure we have met over there but we just don’t remember it
I was there almost each evening after 10ish (cheaper phone bill, you know the drill). However, I don’t remember any particular nicknames from undernet except the then-famous-now-anonymous Zmeul, the owner of #bucuresti.
And while in Denmark, I have stopped downloading solo songs and listen them on youtube while I download only discographies from (usually) mininova or some other foreign tracker.
Yep, YouTube does it for me as well and when I really want the song I convert it with Zamzar from flash/YouTube to mp3 and then download it.
The difficult part on Undernet was registering an user because it required a non-free e-mail address that was difficult to obtain then.
Old times tho, free dial-up like X-NET was precious but speed was low (3kB/s) for me.
IRC is still used but Yahoo Messenger is the main communication method.
in 2004 i also started to use dc++ and i was so happy when my speed got more than 100kb/s
) i thought that was high speed 
@Andrew C. That is a nice website but I am a big fan of VDownloader
@Serban, telling me about it? I was using my mother’s email for signing up
and remember the activity needed on the channel in the pending period? or the irc shells people used to buy just to keep their nicknames on some channels? 
@luna, you know, some of us would have been more than happy with 100 kb/s at some time
yes, it was really amazing
)
btw, i was op on a hub and vip on many others because i had more than 100 gb share
Oh, Serban (not Andrew C
), do I remember correctly that you used to be an op on #Lazar ?
Anyway, I could never consider the DC hubs as a good chat community since there are all kinds of limitations.
Luna, you were a God to some 12-year-old normal users
Does anyone remember how some people would struggle to get the voice (+v) on non-moderated (-m) channels? That was one of the silliest things.
I only passed through mIRC and DC (DC++/ODC), no forums at all, the yahoo messenger, then weblog, then torrents, does travian an AE counts?:)
I’m ‘sidryane’ since the 12th grade (2005), and this has been my only main id, before I had some variable combinations of my name and birth year I think…
what does sidryane mean, sidryane?
and are you saying that you used weblog before using torrents and travian? :-s