Way Back When

I’m not one to yearn for the past. What we have today is an unimaginable leap in capability and features when it comes to development. Instead, I thought it would be fun to catalogue a few things that were normal back then. It might be funny. I couldn’t recall everything anyway. My mind probably won’t let me. For safety reasons. #Unfettered Internet Access My first memory of contributing to the web was in the early 2000s, on phpBB forums. There were these short codes, or BBCodes as they were officially called. They were mostly used for formatting, like [i]italic[/i], but there might have been custom ones for different functions as well. I can’t remember exactly. Maybe my mind is telling me something there. I made “signatures” for myself and others: little 300x150 pixel graphics, emblazoned with a username. I’d boot up a cracked version of Photoshop, create clouds, layer brushes, warp lens flares, and slap on a “render” (a cutout) of a video game character. You’d bang out a few of…