Ask HN: What are your oldest "online" accounts still in use? I logged into GameFAQs the other day, and noticed I'd created my account in 1999. After some poking around my password manager, the only other account I could find still "in use" was an eBay account that I also created in 1999. I felt a small sense of wonder at having still-functional accounts that are 25 years old. What are your oldest accounts? What do they still do for you? |
but if you count data migration errors setting creation dates back to unix timestamp 0, then my RocketMail account takes the cake! apparently every RM account had its creation date set to 0, according to others i’ve spoken to about the issue.
I think my oldest account that still works would be my Slashdot account in the 70k User ID range.
Possibly my Amazon account.
Everything else, AIM and MSN, my Geocities and Angelfire and Tripod pages, all the various forums, all lost to time. Good riddance to most of that, honestly.
And a mousemat with a Groucho Marx quote: "Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside of a dog, it's too dark to read".
it my Yahoo mail acc.
only had proper access to internet in 2011 - when I entered Uni and then created my Yahoo mail. what a trip.
being from a developing economy and all, Id like to clarify that we did have internet but it was hella expensive and my family personally could not afford it.
Sure, I have that ebay account that I created when ebay started in 1995, but if we just say "any online service", well, I have run my own e-mail server since 1994, so I guess that predates it. I do not even want to admit this, but my Yahoo account is still valid, I see emails from 1994 also.
If we go with email, I was a sysadmin at a university, and at least two professors in our department had emails from the 1980s. Their account was the same, and still worked, of course, does that count?
There's not much going on with neopets if you're curious.. it's basically a zombie IP at this point in terms of features / game play.
I'm sure I have logins for older accounts stored in 1Password, but none of them would be anything actively used.
Sadly, my Compu-Serve account no longer works. :|
I did have someone try to take it over about a decade ago, but the email it was linked to was still active, so GL!
Apparently, a 6digit address is worth about $50 on Ebay, or was the last time I checked.
I stopped using it when it became pretty much just a dating service.
I also like keeping ancient accounts. I've been on some form of the internet since 300bps modems, so I have a number of ancient accounts that I'll pile up, and when I die, they'll be given to my partner, so they can hang on to them, until they pass. Some day, 371 years down the road, a small child will hold a sheet of paper with these accounts on them and wonder what in the hell was wrong with people 400 years prior. lol
edit: That compuserve line wasn't a joke. I still know my username/password from those days.
As an aside, I was reading a review of a book about Richard Nixon on Amazon recently, and noticed that the review was from 1998.
My first Amazon purchase was in 1999. eBay doesn't save purchases that far back but it must be a similar age.
Also have a super early HN account that I no longer remember the password to. So...
Yahoo! account established July 17, 1996. I know the exact date because I remember a hyperlink blue headline across the top of the gray Yahoo! home page, "TWA Plane Explodes Off Long Island"
I was recently able to recover an old Ultima Online account from 1997, but that feels like cheating here.
The UI has only changed notably 2-3 times in that time period too, although at this point 99% of the time I use my smartphone app to access.
I can remember earlier accounts like deadjournal, Hotmail, something awful, but I don’t use those anymore.
A soccer messageboard I signed up for 2012
My old Reddit accounts that just had a username/pw login (no email) were wiped out during the whole 3rd paty API shift of summer 2023.
I either didn't have mine linked to a recovery email or lost access to that email account. Tried to get back into the account somewhere in the aughts but no longer knew the password, and thus was out of luck. But then I discovered some years later that someone else had taken it over, as it was associated with some Russian thing. Oh well.
Mine started with 333, so it was also pretty easy to remember.
My favorite account I used to have was username@ibm.net, back when they dabbled in consumer ISPs (unlimited dialup!). Sadly, they discontinued that service after a while.
I used to have really old Steam, Amazon, Slashdot, Facebook, and reddit accounts too, but deleted them all for various reasons.
Which forum?
https://boards.straightdope.com/ is the forum... it's not tech-focused, but it has a bunch of smart, passionate people discussing everything from airplanes to history to pop culture to video games and more. Usually pretty high quality discussions, although admittedly I've been a lot less active there than I used to be.
My college email addresses were created three decades ago and are active today. I could switch back to using one as my primary email address everywhere, and do use it in some places, but the pobox address became the primary one after graduation, before the college address was reenabled.
My Amazon account was also created in the mid-1990s. I applaud the company for making complete purchase histories still available.
I am not sure when my `yahoo.com` account was created but it was in the late 1990s. I have never ever used the address anywhere. It gets lots of spam.
My eBay account was created in the late 1990s. Active the whole time.
I have a low single-digit Slashdot account.
I also have a valid ICQ account from the 1990s, I think, but never used it.
Mine has been around since October of 1996. It, too, gets lots of spam.
> I have a low single-digit Slashdot account.
A friend of mine has slashdot uid of 6. He must have known the original crew.
It is a bit funny since the "Dyn (company)" Wikipedia page[1] says the company was founded in 2001, but I'm pretty sure I had this account already when years started with 19.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyn_(company)
EDIT: Not an online account, but I only had a single mobile phone number my entire life.
(Unless I’m pointing out the obvious unsaid joke)
Other than that, probably my Gmail account from the beta days.
The other one that people seem to be impressed with is my Netflix account is from 2003. I was ordering DVDs in college and it blew people's minds that I was renting DVDs through the mail at that time. I tried to buy their stock back when they tried splitting the company into two entities. I think the stock was like $5 at the time. Unfortunately it was a lot harder to buy stock back then.
Think of all the database upgrades over the years to move that data forward...
When Amazon got really big and dabbled in the ad business I deleted it, so I don't have it anymore. Only created a new one when the pandemic hit.
By the late 2000s I had migrated to Gmail and was only using my AOL account for AIM. One day a friend texted me to ask if I might have been hacked. It turns out my mom's account--and thus those of mine and my siblings--had been compromised. We'd not been subscribed for a very long time, and AOL customer support for account recovery was basically non-existent for non-subscribers.
My brother happened to know Adrian Lamo[1]. Adrian still knew people on AOL's security team from when he was a thorn in their side. He was able get our accounts restored and enable additional protections for our accounts. I did a short phone call with him after it was done and thanked him for being so much more helpful than AOL. His response was, "I try to provide better customer support than the people I hack."
I haven't used that account for anything other than recovering other ancient accounts of mine since AIM was shutdown, although I wasn't using it very frequently by then anyway. Friends had long since migrated to other platforms.
[1] This was probably 1-2 years before he turned in Chelsea Manning https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adrian_Lamo
Character created: Tue Oct 3 09:43:00 1995
Yahoo acquired it and it became Yahoo mail.
So 27 or 28 years
I think I may have created my Amazon account in 1998, but my first order was placed in January 1999.
I had a very low 7 digit number and the earliest I would have created the account was late summer 1997. My recollection is it was hockey sticking at the time, so that boundary between 97/98 seems spot on.
I actively use the eBay account I created in 1998.
And my Slashdot burner account has become my main account because my primary account is tied to my old ISP email address. Learned to never do that again.
4 digit account #s forever :) (in practice, hadn't logged in for forever till now).
Close in there would be online commerce. I don't have detailed records, but probably started using Dell and Amazon quite early in the original dot-com era. Probably also B&H Photo Video and Crutchfield, since these were businesses I already knew from the mail-based catalog era.
I think I also had an online account with my bank by around the same time I started my job, though it took me a couple more years to wean myself off writing paper checks and primarily using bill pay.
- the site has been hacked probably dozens of time since I created the account, and my credentials are sold for peanuts these days.
- the password I used wasn't very strong at all, and it has been cracked and shared in plain text for years
- the original domain now probably is in hands of some domain parking bullshit company, selling ads.
In all likelihood, my oldest working account must be the NickServ registration on some IRC network. Though I started with IRCNet and I don't think they had a registration service.
I made a rare (for me) mistake early on, using the same password for Facebook that I was already using on MySpace. Fortunately, I did not use the same email address, so that password was of limited use to anyone else. These passwords have since been changed, of course.
But yeah, that email is basically trash and I never use it. I last logged into it maybe 3 years ago.
Amazon since April 2001.
Gmail since invite-only days (03-04?)
Urgo..................Jun 23 1995
Can't think of anything else that would still be around from before about 2001.
For a while, pre dial-up Internet, it was my gateway to Usenet.
My steam account is pretty old, too. 2003 (Got the 20 years of service badge lol)
eBay, 1998. Used regularly.
SSH login at my Alma Mater's Computer Club, 1997. Daily. Primary E-mail.
Also had a Hotmail account which MS eventually canned as I failed to login sufficiently often. Must have been created in 1996, I was still in high school.
My first order from Amazon was in 2001, not sure what date they started in the UK, but I seem to remember that was fairly typical for my friendship group. I knew some of the UK guys at EBay who I used to work with from around 1998, but I never use my account there and I don't think it's quite that old. I feel like I joined HN around 2006.
I do have some PHPBB site logins from the late 90s as well I guess, which I can probably still connect to!
I remember that ICQ was the "hot new thing" on Christmas and New Year in the phreaking scene back then. I signed up pretty early, dunno if it was late November or early December though.