I bought a gmail invite from a message board. If this sequence of words makes sense to you, you’re old too.
TIL G-Mail was invite only back then. I am too GenZ to undersand this shit.
A pattern they repeated with Google Wave and Google+, neither of which took off, partly because there weren’t enough people using them.
I genuinely thought G+ could have been a FB killer, if they hadn’t made it hard to join.
I got an invite to Gmail when I was in university. Sadly I was at inbox zero for quite some time so I don’t have the Welcome to Gmail email anymore. It’s more than likely my oldest active account. I do have a Neowin account that still works from 2002 but I don’t frequent anymore. Macrumors is my most active old forum account, that’s from 2005. I had an ancient AIM and ICQ account but there’s no way I could remember the account details.
Ditto for the AIM and ICQ.
I think I read recently that ICQ was shutting down.
I still remember when AIM shutdown for good. That was a sad day.
I mean you could always make a new account to get the welcome email and photoshop the dates and times to make it look like it’s older. I imagine the look of the email now is different from 2003, tho.
Shiiit, actually that does make sense. I remember when Gmail gave you 10 invites for new accounts and you didn’t even get them right away. You had to earn them over time. So yeah, invites were regularly sold on the message boards I used to frequent.
Possibly my Hotmail, although I’m not 100% sure when I opened it, and I converted it to an Outlook email when that became an option.
Most of the sites I used to use have shut down or migrated to new systems, so my oldest account is most likely my ModTheSims account opened in 2008. I do still use it whenever I’m in the mood for some Sims 2 retail therapy.
My hotmail account.
Signed up for it in the closed beta way before Microsoft bought it, was fucking pissed when they did.
It’s my 2fa for most of my games and the emergency email for my other emails.
I opened my first Gmail account during the private beta (2004). It’s not my daily driver account, but I still use it for government stuff like taxes and healthcare. It kinda blows my mind that it’s 20 years old.
Same, it just hit me that it’s been 20 years
I made my email account 28 years ago, and still use it daily.
Probably my yahoo mail account. I’ve mostly transitioned off it, but a few things still come to it and it predates even my gmail account (which I barely ever use either). Apple ID’s Hide My Email ability has basically rendered all the other ones pointless though since I can just generate a new fake email address whenever I want to register for something fishy. I wish phone numbers worked the same way.
My Hotmail account, which I’ve had since high school. Oldest email in there is from 2002, but I think I opened it up in 2000.
same, but yahoo.
All my friends and I used to have Yahoo! email addresses. But for some reason around 2010 almost everyone’s accounts seemed to be getting compromised and sending weird messages around to their contacts… and now I don’t know anyone with a Yahoo!
I never figured out what was going on and why Yahoo in particular seemed so affected by it.
Probably my 2004 Gmail account, but that’s pushing the definition of “still use somewhat frequently”. I do still have my email forwarded to my current address, but most senders have been updated with my current address.
I lost control of my Hotmail, AIM, ICQ accounts years ago.
I still have my ICQ. That’s one number burned into my brain.
deleted by creator
I think my AIM account is still technically active even though they shut it down. Don’t know what they did with all the accounts.
Uh-oh! Mine was long forgotten.
Didn’t ICQ recently shut the service down? Thought I saw a headline along those lines recently.
Did they? I only log in like every six months or so. :(
Edit: yep. June 24, 2024. RIP 8833052
Oh… RIP 170538332 (I forgot the password for my first one and had to create a second one, and for some reason that’s the number that stuck with me)
My AOL email. I didn’t actually make it, my Dad did and I was so young I literally don’t remember a time without it. I still check it despite migrating most of my accounts away.
I joined a forum about 30 years ago, and I am still a regular. I can’t say the exact date I joined, nor can the forum admins, as things like that were not tracked back then. Even them having my email was a way later add-on.
A four letter .com domain name I registered in 2003. Supposedly worth $5000-6000 presently.
Or my eBay account I’ve had since 2001.
A word in the dictionary?
(Don’t click that)
Pretty sure that’d be worth much, much more than mine :)
Soemthingawful forum membership. Joined in 2k2.
Usenet account from 1987. And no, I’m not going to post what it is.
What’s “on” there? What can it be compared to at this time?
Usenet was the golden age of Reddit for its time. Before the binary newsgroups drowned everything out and web 1.0 captured everyone’s attention.
In a way, it was a lot like Lemmy. Federated servers all inter-exchanged posts to a giant, global message board of newsgroups (roughly analogous to a subreddit or Lemmy community). Anyone could create a newsgroup and there were a lot of them.
When it was good, it fostered the same kind of genuine conversation that Reddit and Lemmy do when they’re at their best. It was full of memes, too, although that word didn’t exist then.
Usenet? Most new media can be found there. The most copyright-contentious files are not on there for long so most folks use automated downloaders.
Gmail since 2002 or something. Steam account if emails don’t count.
Edit: Wow account could be older than steam account. I honestly can’t remember.
Edit2: Yep, wow account is a 4 years older than my steam. Turns out I lost my first steam account that did not really have any games on it and instead of recovering it I just registered a new one. Doing this research of my own history was a questionable use of my evening but apparently necessary to get it out of my head.
My original Gmail account. I’ve had it since Gmail was in closed beta.
My Steam account is older though. Fucking thing is old enough to drink now (2003; from when I first had to use it for Counter-Strike when they took down the WON servers).
Any other 21 year old Steam accounts wanna play some Ragdoll Kung-Fu?
Damn, I have almost the exact same answer. Switched to Steam once WON got taken down (held out as long as I could), and had a friend send me a Gmail invite a few months later.
Only differences are that I mostly used mine for TFC, and my account won’t technically hit drinking age until early next month.
I kinda wish I could say I had like a bottle of liquor I’ve been saving for the occasion, but the idea of a “21-year-old Steam account” genuinely never occurred to me until one day I woke up and realized it was about to turn 18. Made me realize how fast shit moves, and this is just driving the point home…
