I'm sitting here at about 3am on a Saturday morning in late 2013 sipping on a glass of bourbon thinking where the last 10 years have gone. I'm looking at a high-resolution LCD screen that is connected to a powerhouse quad-core processor with ungodly amounts of RAM and hard drive space. I have an Android tablet and Windows Phone sitting next to me. It's 2013, and that's just the way things are.
About 3,654 days ago I joined this forum for reasons that I can't even recall now. I was just a big Winamp fan.
2003 was a turning point for me in some ways; I was just entering high school and I had just gotten high-speed internet installed, so I was spending tons of time in front of a 15" CRT still running Windows 98 SE, downloading as much stuff as I could fit onto a 600 MHz Pentium III with 64 MB RAM and a 30 GB hard drive. I had discovered the wonders of the internet in it's fullest pre-web 2.0 glory.
I was spending much of my time in 2003 downloading the software and browsing the forums that I couldn't easily do in the past with dial-up, but one piece of software that I had always used, even prior to 2003 was Winamp. I remember my sister showing it to me the late 90s as a way to play the MP3s that she had downloaded through Napster. I even remember at one point downloading Winamp 2.x Lite and copying the installer onto a floppy to run on an older Pentium MMX, Windows 95-based PC that wasn't connected to the internet. Winamp was always my go-to audio player, and one of the first things I'd always install on a new PC or after reformatting.
As time has gone on, I've still installed Winamp on all my PCs and made it the default music player, but I've moved on to other players for playing my entire and ever-growing music library. I still keep Winamp around if I just want to play a single music file without disrupting playback of my library in foobar2000. I'll continue to keep Winamp installed for the foreseeable future just for this. It's a solid piece of software, plus it burns music CDs better than Windows Media Player. Heck, I even pin it as a tile on my Windows 8.x Start screen to this day.
Why am I posting this? To celebrate the fact I've made 2000 non-bin posts here in ten years? Yes, but also to reminisce about a simpler past. A past where you were lucky to have a reliable internet connection to download skins and plugins and a decent computer to run Winamp3 or the new Winamp 5 (or wasabi.player if you were a rebel or just weird.) A lot has changed in ten years, but one thing will always stay the same, at least for me, and that's my love for Winamp. I can't imagine not having Winamp installed on any PC that I use everyday.
It's been a good ride, but I guess it has to end eventually. I'd like to thank everyone here on the forums, especially. You've been great. Thanks for the memories over the years, especially in the earlier days!
Now, is there anyone around that's willing to update my CT, or is that asking too much?
P.S., fuck you, Bizz! #*******!