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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
Still have my college email address. But none of the clients can login until I physically go in and reset the password at helpdesk, 4HELP.
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.
> 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).
My `pobox.com` account was created in the mid-1990s. Active the whole time.
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.
I was sifting through old email recently and rediscovered my neopets account from early 2000s. I had to contact then to unlock it as it had been soft deactivated in the interim but they were friendly about it and I answered some questions and got access.
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.
German website hoster in ’99. They changed their name 3 times in the meantime and I still got unlimited webspace there – any ideas what to do with it? (oh and i see, unlimited sql databases as well…)
My steam account is pretty old, too. 2003 (Got the 20 years of service badge lol)
Define “online”?
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?
I suppose that’d be my Amazon account (mid to end nineties). Other than that, my Microsoft account, which used to be my Skype account from 2003 (IIRC).
I have been using E*Trade (stock brokerage) continuously since late 1990s. I’m sure I have a few others from the mid-90s, but no easy way to confirm earliest use date without pawing through thousands of old emails for account setup confirmations.
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.
Interesting question.
I think my oldest account that still works would be my Slashdot account in the 70k User ID range.
Possibly my Amazon account.
It is going to be close between my gmail (I was invited during the beta in 2004) and my bank which would have been 2002/2003 timeframe but I can’t remember for sure.
I can remember earlier accounts like deadjournal, Hotmail, something awful, but I don’t use those anymore.
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.
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.
A warez forum I signed up for in 2011
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.
Amazon, absolutely. EBay is number two, though I haven’t actually used it in years. (I still get a reverse invoice for a credit they owe from the 90’s. Hilarious.)
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.
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…
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 MySapce. 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.
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…
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…
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.
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.
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