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Ask HN: What are your oldest "online" accounts still in use?

49 points by throwaway_08932 ↗ HN
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?

144 comments

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whatamidoingyo
Hm, I still have an AOL email address that my mom made for me when I was 9 years old (19 years ago). I remember signing up for spam ads (e.g. "YOU WON! Click here to claim reward"). I spent hours filling out forms to claim the prizes, but nothing ever came. Bummer.

But yeah, that email is basically trash and I never use it. I last logged into it maybe 3 years ago.

jghn
My main online banking account is from 1998. Have another cluster of accounts from 1999, things like eBay & Amazon. Have a domain name, and thus email, that also dates to 1999.

I was recently able to recover an old Ultima Online account from 1997, but that feels like cheating here.

throwaway_08932
Wow, I'm surprised at the banking account from 1998. That happened rather quickly given that the web wasn't really on anyone's radar until 95/96 or so.
jghn
It was brand new at the time. I remember thinking it was super cool that it existed at all. They also had a tele-banking service you could still use at the time.

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.

sph
Not sure which is it, but supposing it's a 20+ year old account, it is very likely that:

- 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.

PopAlongKid
I've created hundreds of accounts since the mid-1990s. The only two accounts I can think that fall under your description are MySpace and LinkedIn (the latter I joined shortly after it started, and I suppose my MySpace login still works but I haven't tried it in years).

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.

solardev
My Microsoft login is still a Hotmail account, and I still use my same eBay account from way back then too. There's also a forum I've been a part of since I was a kid, and I'm nearly 40 now.

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.

Spare_account
In case you're interested in finding out the exact age of your Microsoft account: A few years ago I opened a support ticket with Microsoft about how old my account was and they were able to tell me the date my account was created. In my case, it was 22nd June 1998.
gaws
> There's also a forum I've been a part of since I was a kid, and I'm nearly 40 now.

Which forum?

solardev
Sorry for the late reply, I was sick and on a HN break!

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.

SubGenius
I have a hotmail account from 2000. A wikipedia account from 2006! I don't remember when exactly Gmail was in early beta (2004?) but I did manage to register firstname@gmail.com and have used it since.

Also have a super early HN account that I no longer remember the password to. So...

atela
I’ve got a Yahoo! mail address from the 90s that’s still what I use for rando account signups
soco
Is there a way to check how old the Yahoo account is? Back in the days you only had some megs of storage available, so my older emails are all deleted...
surfsvammel
My first mail in my gmail account is 20 years old. Not sure if that is my oldest account though.
onychomys
My gamefaqs account has been used basically every day since April 11th, 2002.
cannolicannon
Same here. Created a Gfaqs account on August 30th, 2001 and have kept it active ever since.
bboreham
I’ve had my account on CIX since 1990. It’s a social network; I get to see people arguing, and occasionally helping each other.

For a while, pre dial-up Internet, it was my gateway to Usenet.

https://cix.uk/contact/about

arrty88
I have a DSLReports account that is still active from 1999 or so. Also my yahoo email from 1997.
grubbs
My DSLReports is my oldest! 1999.
pushcx
I've had a small, shared hosting plan for personal stuff since fall of 1999. I recently talked to an employee who was younger than my account.
msisk6
I've had my Amazon account since '98 or so. I still have items on my wishlist from the 90s.

Think of all the database upgrades over the years to move that data forward...

weinzierl
I created an Amazon account when Amazon was pretty new and just sold books. Ordered a few books and then forgot about it. A couple of years later, when Amazon got popular I tried to login again and it did not work, so I wrote them an e-mail and they said it had been deactivated because of inactivity but now they had restored it. Different times.

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.

eastern
My Yahoo mail account was created as a Rocketmail account, likely in 1996 or 97, when Rocketmail launched and became the biggest Hotmail rival.

Yahoo acquired it and it became Yahoo mail.

So 27 or 28 years

tmaly
Same, came here to say yahoo mail
beardyw
Me too. I now use it for "I don't care" accounts so it is literally full of spam.
tgv
I suppose it's Yahoo for me too. I thought it was a few years older than that, but it can't be, as it was launched in '97, indeed.
weinzierl
I still have a DynDNS (later Dyn and then acquired by Oracle) account.

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.

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gwbas1c
I attended a talk by the founders in early 2004. It was a non-profit hobby project, so it may have existed in some form before 2001.
walthamstow
I'm a bit younger than some here, but my teenage tumblr blog is still online, and my Gmail and Spotify accounts are still the same accounts from when those services were invite-only, so 2004 and 2010 respectively.

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.

MiguelVieira
My Amazon account order history starts in 1998.
thetimbanks
I also have an eBay account that I still use from 1999.

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.

jghn
I wouldn't have thought about Netflix as the service is so fundamentally different today than it was back then. I first signed up in 2003.
tkgally
My personal website [1] has been hosted by Hostway.com since 1999. I still edit the HTML files by hand in a text editor, and I upload them by dragging them between the windows of an FTP client.

[1] https://gally.net

severine
...and it's responsive, interesting, and up to date. Congratulations and thanks for the link!
tkgally
Thank you!
severine
And it has beautiful music, too. A real gem, folks, take a look!
abhinavk
Google/Gmail account from 2007. I was a tween back then.
Adverblessly
It is or used to be the case that as part of account recovery Google would ask you when you created your account as a sort of security question that applies to everyone, so I'd suggest discretion when you think about making such information public.
oneeyedpigeon
I really hope they've stopped doing that. Now that so many of the answers are going to be "about 20 years ago", no legitimate users are going to remember these specifics!
savrajsingh
my amazon acct has my first order from 1998...
sonicanatidae
ICQ - 6 digit address. It's 30+ years old at this point. I still use it once in awhile.

Sadly, my Compu-Serve account no longer works. :|

BjoernKW
To this day, I still remember my ICQ number from back in the nineties. However, unfortunately the same doesn't apply to the password and I can't seem to be able to reset it.
sonicanatidae
I still know my password. :)

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.

jghn
> I did have someone try to take it over about a decade ago

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.

eloisant
What do you use ICQ for?

I stopped using it when it became pretty much just a dating service.

sonicanatidae
I have a few friends from back in ICQs heyday that still use it. It's kind of a running joke. One of us will fire up a client and login, then email the others asking, "where in the hell is everyone" and we'll use it for a week, then it fades again, until a few years later, someone fires up a client, and emails the others asking, "where in the hell is everyone"... ;)

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.

eitally
I have a university account from 1995. I have a VWVortex (car forum) account from 1999. I used to have a sheet of paper with handwritten account information that I know I wrote in 1999-2000, but I've lost it.