It’s a distant memory, computers before the Internet…

Some of us were alive to see the days, though not old enough to remember very much. For others, pre-Internet computers are likely what got us so fascinated with tech to begin with.

Just for fun, I polled our office to find out what we used computers for before the Internet came around and changed everything. Here’s what we came up with!

Minesweeper: Captivating in 1996, it’s likely to bore kids to death today.

Tetris: Always relevant.

The Oregon Trail: Where you likely get dysentery and die.

Number Munchers: Learn math, munch some numbers.

Solitaire: How we killed time before Facebook.

When MS Paint looked like this:

And it was used to make Pixel Art by the pros:

Who were also making ASCII art:

That they likely printed on the Dot Matrix.

(Let’s pause for a shiver while we all remember that sound.)

MS Encarta: Wikipedia of the 90s.

And let’s not forget Mindmaze, more games that make you smarter.

It’s likely that if you remember any of these games or that version of Paint, you had a plastic storage box full of these, too:

The 8-inch, 5 ¹⁄₄-inch, and 3 ¹⁄₂-inch floppy disks

a.k.a. The Floppy, The Hard Floppy, and The Hard Disc (at least to my computer teacher ;)

What did you use computers for before the Internet came along? Share your favorites/additions in the comments!

With all the impending doom outside, we know there are better things to do than sit and contemplate hurricanes, which is why we completed our storm preparations first! Now that business is taken care of, we’ve decided to embrace our hurricane-brain and compare hackers to hurricanes. They have more in common than you think!

1. They have unique names that are hard to forget. There can only be one Andrew or Anonymous, whose names we remember long after their damage is done. Much like the tropical cyclone naming system that forecasters use to give hurricanes their names, hacker groups also have a method for choosing their names, although it’s more clever than it is scientific.
2. They both brute force attack. Whether it’s a hacker using the knowledge in his or her head to crack code, build a virus, or lift information from servers, or a hurricane exerting her raw power on the Earth, they both define brute force attack.
3. They move quickly. Sandy is headed up the east coast at 25 mph with winds at a high of 90 mph. Melissa, a computer virus created by David Smith in 1999 took out 300 company computers and 100,000 email users within hours of her release.
4. They sometimes travel in groups. It’s not uncommon to turn on The Weather Channel and see a cluster of tropical storms with hurricane potential out in the middle of the ocean. Nor is it uncommon for hackers to form a group to make themselves more effective and powerful in a strike.
5. They have the ability to produce massive physical damage. Hurricanes take the cake when it comes to producing massive physical damage, which is often life threatening. Sandy is expected to be catastrophic and has already taken 65 lives. While hackers take more interest in your money, not your life, they also have the ability to produce massive physical damage, as proven by “Stuxnet”, the bug that destroyed the Iranian centrifuges.
6. The best defense is to be prepared. With both hackers and hurricanes, the best-case scenario is to simply heed warnings and prepare as best as you can. Often by the time the storm gets here, or the hacker has attacked, it’s too late to do anything else. To make sure you’re fully prepared for Sandy, click here.

Here at Dashlane, our mission is to fix the Internet and make all of the annoying but necessary, repetitive online processes as seamless as possible. Yeah, it’s a rather hefty goal, but we’re up for the task.

The Dashlane app challenges the conventional wisdom that the Internet is the best way to get anything done. Generally, yes, this is true. The web has made a lot of tasks much more efficient — but it’s also introduced a lot of new infuriating inefficiencies we all put up with every day.

For instance, when your shopping cart times out* and you have to start all over, doesn’t it kind of make you feel like this?:

Or when you can’t remember your password* because you have a bajillion of them, and you’re about to be locked out of your account, at which point you seriously consider throwing your computer out your fifth-floor window:

Which brings me to the point of this whole post, which is that we need to #fixtheinternet. The Internet can be awesome, but it can also be really frustrating, and also, totally hilarious.

#fixtheinternet is our new Tumblr where we will unleash all our feelings about the best/worst about the internet in meme-y glory: gifs, pie charts, videos, Venn diagrams, and generally and kind of cheeky content helps us poke fun and bring to light the mess that is the internet. Lovingly, of course.

Join us and submit your own ideas! We can all relate to the frustrations of the web, so let’s go have a laugh about it, and let’s #fixtheinternet!

* Need we say Dashlane solves all these problems? :-)

When the Mountain Lion operating system (OS) came out, I was really surprised by how many Mac users downloaded it right off the bat. Apple reported 3 million downloads in the first four days of its release! Maybe I’m still stuck in my PC-using days, but there’s never been anything about a new OS that made me do the “I want it, gotta have it, let’s go get it” dance. Plus, a new OS can be a bit tricky since not everything is optimized for it at the time of release.

Sure enough, there were changes to Mountain Lion that made even Dashlane stumble, despite our efforts to make the two play nice. (Luckily, we quickly got it up and running again.) But, a comment by one of our Board of User members, Brian, who was also surprised by all the early-OS- adopting, got me thinking about the old saying, “It pays to wait.”

Sometimes, it surely does. While Brian is the kind of person who likes to be on the bleeding edge of new technology, he recommends waiting a month after the release of a new OS before jumping on the bandwagon. “That way, all the major kinks are worked out and you know what kind of surprises you’re in for.” After listening to his story about how one of his coworkers upgraded his PC to the latest Windows version–which caused said coworker lose compatibility with a program that they use daily–I’m convinced that a month is worth the wait.

But there are certain products that depend on people taking a leap of faith right off the bat–Dashlane being one of them. Brian, who’s an early adopter of Dashlane and several other software, says that there a lot of benefits to adopting early, like access to new releases. “It’s worth it to get new releases, test them, and play a bigger part in developing the product. It adds to the fun and sense of community. But, one of the pitfalls is that I often get used to living with bugs. Bugs become the norm, and you come to expect them when–as with a seasoned product–you shouldn’t.”

So, where do you draw the line? When do you adopt early and when do you wait? I did a little office/Dashlane user poll to see what others thought, and here’s what we came up with:

When to adopt early:

• New apps that sound promising and require little risk or expense to try out
• Pets, since our very own Rudy is an adopted pup
• New mobile phone plans — sometimes the promotion is as good as it sounds

When it pays to wait:

• Devices like computers, phones, tablets, e-readers, etc. There’s always a newer one around the corner, which makes it worth the wait
• New operating systems
• New software packages, like the new Office Suite
• Cars, which sometimes get recalled
• New technologies that require a lot to gain traction, like 3D TVs — not everyone is on that bandwagon and it’s more expensive initially

Do you have any examples where it pays to adopt early? Or, do you have a story about a product that you wish you’d waited before getting? Let’s hear your stories :)

Also, if you would like to join our Board of Users and play a bigger part in the development of Dashlane, please email community@dashlane.com.

I was traveling out of the city for a few days the other week, and it occurred to me that it was one of the first times I’ve traveled without a laptop.  I had to think it over before leaving, of course — to travel without a laptop is not a spontaneous decision. But I realized for the weekend, I could probably make do with just an iPad and didn’t want to cart around a laptop.  It worked out fine, but it made me wonder about how many other people are traveling without their computers.

This isn’t Rudy, but this is what he looks like on the beach.

For the most part, there’s not really much of a reason to carry around a laptop for travel anymore. I can do just about everything I need from a mobile device. Access to maps being the primary tool, but I also use a notes application to write things I’ll want to move over later to actual documents kept on my laptop.  Web browsing works the same. Naturally, I’m not doing anything too intensive in my browser during a trip other than unsubscribing to email newsletters and updating Twitter with news about what my dog found on the beach and decided was “good enough to eat.”

The only real pain points previously were that my laptop had all my data, like saved passwords, stored in the browser or keychain and that the mobile keyboard is still not quite so charming to use for more than two or three lines of text. Luckily now there’s this app called Dashlane (maybe you’ve heard of it mentioned here before) that solves that.  I no longer have to say “I’ll just update my Tumblr blog of animated cat gifs when I get home” because I can’t remember my password. If I need to order some Seamless delivery, Dashlane can take away the frustration of using the iPhone’s keyboard too much.

Actually, for some trips the pain points of a laptop are just as much as any that a mobile device would carry. I’m going to visit my elderly grandfather next month and can already imagine that I’m not going to find a wireless network in his house. “Does this thing have Wi-Fi?” I’ll ask, gesturing towards his iron lung.

I’m sure I’m not the only one these days. I wonder how many people are leaving their laptops behind when they travel, and what are the remaining hurdles that need to be jumped to make the transition between laptop and mobile seem seamless?