I’ve been on the Internet since 1997. I was also on Fidonet since 1995, until I got high speed internet (2Mbit shared) in 2000.
I keep all my passwords in a text document on a (hopefully) secure place and I just went to a few very old accounts to see if they’re still active. Not surprisingly, of many of them even the domain-name doesn’t work anymore:
I browsed to the first page of my saved passwords. Here are a few services for which I had an account, but that no longer work:
- Ten – as a vaguely recall, a online gaming service. Ten.com no points to some porn site, so that’s certainly not right.
- Zone – also a gaming site. Could be that site has become MSN Gaming zone, but there I can just login using my hotmail account.
- Boo – some startup, no idea what they did.
- mijn.wereld.nl – some sort of hyves, facebook, etc. in the early zero’s. I knew one of the developers, I think he also worked for WorldOnline. Domain now points to something completely different.
- Big Brother – a show that got quite popular.
- filelibrary.com – Probably a site to download drivers. No longer active.
- Napster – hopefully book publishers don’t make the same mistake as the music industry did.
- www.workspot.net – some sort of primitive Google Docs/ Dropbox as I recall.
- nytimes.com – of course that site still exist, but my login isn’t recognized anymore. Probably pointing to my university mail account.
Well these were some accounts a browsed to, fun enough. Fortunately, not all accounts registered in that time were idle: my slashdot account is still active and Slashdot is of course very much alive. Same for Yahoo. ICQ also still works, but I don’t use that anymore. Actually, Slashdot I don’t read regularly anymore either.