i have fond memories of a now long-gone time, perhaps what was seemingly a decade and a half ago back in 2011. i must've been prolly 11 or 12 at the time, and it was the summer, and the internet was just so different back then!!

at that time, i was working on an "input-behavior-accurate" metroid zero mission engine clone using gamemaker 8.1, but all the graphics were custom; i would pull up xfire to chat up my school friends, and we would decide every now and then to hop on somebody's dad's ventrilo server and talk about cool things we were doing in pokemon gold -- a read of some old electrical engineering textbooks and a rom hacking website taught me how to make a cheap pcb (thanks grandpa!!!), and i gave fake pokemon gold cartridges to my friends (armed with an AT27C080 eprom, 62C64 sram, a battery, and some 7400 series decoding logic)!! we all loved playing old video games, because most of my friends weren't exactly wealthy... and you could find an old gameboy color for like $15 at thrift stores then.

i don't think i ever finished that metroid game engine clone, but the files comprising it still sit on one of my file servers to this day

some of us had minecraft, and we would sometimes play on some smp server that (of all people) my elementary school best friend's cousin found over christmas break... i still remember the login message: "[mcadminplugin] welcome to the doridian furry server"; we played on it because the folks there were nice to us! eventually, that server came and went, and i think by that summer we were playing on one that we found on planetminecraft... so chosen because it had some sick pictures of builds people had made. by march 2012, we had all moved on from vanilla minecraft and played some tekkit server

back to summer, though. eventually, my dad would finish his kitchen magic and i would go have dinner... upon coming back upstairs to my room, i'd slide the graph paper sheets overlaid upon character art that i'd drawn (that was my weird "pixel-art-conversion process" and how i decided whether or not a sprite/bitmap looked good after conversion to a much lower resolution), hang up the ventrilo phone, and whip out that old lime-green gameboy color.

the light from the lamp on my desk warmly reflected off the screen, the simplistic "three lines of music" songs dinged from the speaker and just barely overcame the noise of five old same-model-but-bearings-going-bad hard drives in my desktop.

in the background, xchat would scroll by with all manner of random irc chats that i was on... i'd occasionally read what folks were saying, and sometimes answer a random question or two somebody had about ms-dos (i pretended to be an old guy then because i didn't want people to know i was like 12, but had been ms-dos'ing since i was 9 because i could read a book and fix up old pcs i found on the side of the road)!!

whenever i'm back home, my ham radio repeater's keyup/keydown sounds are the same ones that ventrilo uses; someone'll key up my repeater, say their callsign, "drrrrp" from ventrilo, then the quick burst of noise as the ham radio on my desk quickly silences its speaker output as the repeater's transmitted signal disappears from the airwaves.

i miss those old days when everything was so disparate and disconnected -- i mean, i had xchat, xfire, skype, ventrilo, and teamspeak open as long as my desktop was up and running!!

eventually, in 2012, i would read my mom's old cisco ios textbook, and with an ancient cisco 7200 i convinced my parents to buy me off of ebay for christmas, i replaced the house router with something that was infinitely more customizable and went crazy after realizing that i had a fixed ip address!!! i ran a minecraft server that half the kids in the school played on, linked it against its own irc server that folks pointed their talker clients at, and all sorts of other stuff! i ran across all sorts of interesting people on the internet, all (surprisingly) good people too!!!!

i miss those days, but i realize that if i just try hard enough, i can replicate them...

in front of me is an old beat-up terminal plugged up to an old ibm mainframe, and it's displaying a foraview session wherein a friend of a friend was asking the old-mainframe community my machine is a part of if anybody knows how to write an assembler program that writes colored text to the terminal screen!!!

i hit the right key to reply, and off my reply went, spooled to probably the oldest bbs software package that is runnable and usable today

just like that, the terminal beeps with excitement as the TOOLS bbs service tells me that my reply was received and everything worked!!!

i hop on fediverse on the same machine, and i see this post... and my mind is filled with the amazing memories of the past and the stunning realization that i haven't changed a bit!

i realize that this is what i always wanted, a real community that hasn't been consumed by the vacuum of enshittification

may pubvm.org live forever and never fade from our 3270 terminal screens