> my young children continually wobbling my screen during chats.
Nudging! I loved this so much as a kid! I'd spam my dad constantly. I miss this so much, thank you for bringing back the memory. I wish I could travel back in time and experience that time again, I miss it so much. I had so much fun, everything was new and fresh.
> Yahoo chat room "Down the pub". pure fun.
Yahoo also had a bunch of games, some of which had chat rooms. It was always fun to hang out, play some games, and chat with random people. The only experience that comes close today for me are the free-to-play worlds in old school runescape where a lot of people are goofing off in chat.
I didn't experience this, but have a related anecdote. I'd learned the default user and password to a variety of different routers so that whenever I went to a friend's house I could quickly get into the admin panel and port forward so we could let outside players join our game servers.
MS messenger, my young children continually wobbling my screen during chats.
The dial-up connection sounds.
provided default Wifi password: surname + postcode.