24 in 1994: the "lost pilot"

How did Jack Bauer ever get by without his magical Treo? We figure it must've involved a whole lot more eyeball threatening than he usually manages to cram into a season of 24. Also, according to CollegeHumor's "unaired 1994 pilot" episode, it involved a pager and some really bad early 90's hair. Consider yourself warned, video is after the break.

[lnx8 @ Nov 9th 2007 6:55PM]

Old school AOL..... ahhh.... the bad memories!

[Ant @ Nov 9th 2007 7:08PM]

what aol was great i had free internet for months!nothings more fun than collecting those disk and renewing it monthly.
god im glad those days are gone

[w00fy @ Nov 9th 2007 7:31PM]

"Hello, I am AOL Customer Service Rep #873645. Due to a recent system failure, we need to verify your username and password. Please provide this information as soon as possible to ensure uninterrupted service. We thank you for your cooperation and thank you for choosing AOL."

Still, it sucked to download a 12 part UUEncoded file only to realize you wasted your time.

[Baluki @ Nov 9th 2007 7:44PM]

Man, I remember seeing that screen a LOT.

Not because I went on all the time, but because I got disconnected all the frickin' time.

[finnith @ Nov 9th 2007 10:10PM]

Wait

AOL sucks.
AOL owns Engadget.

What does that make Engadget?

[Alex M @ Nov 9th 2007 10:37PM]

almost 3 years with window xp and cable internet....can't believe i went without it.

[jamma @ Nov 10th 2007 8:01AM]

just think of how the internet (and computers) have changed.....

No social networking
No youtube
No such thing as mp3, and therefore no mp3 players.
No blogs (If you said "blog" to anyone back in 1994 what would they think)
EVERYTHING managed to fit on a 1.44MB floppy
Apple products didn't have an i before them

The list goes on...

[Chuckles McGee @ Nov 10th 2007 12:47PM]

Man, pay phones. Pagers, floppy, dialup, faxes . Hah. Remember when you'd always start your phone conversations with "Hello, this is...", to identify yourself to the caller and wait for the caller to identify himself before we've assumed that everyone has caller ID. Travel agents? Stock brokers? Haha. Reading TV listings in the paper. Video game arcades. Back in my day, games came on cartridges the size of poptarts (heck, bigger)...and we liked it that way. Cassette tapes. Man, such great stories for the kids.

[Erik @ Nov 9th 2007 7:02PM]

You sure you're not still in 6th grade, bjrcboy?

[Homeboy @ Nov 9th 2007 7:07PM]

He's more like in an institute for retards.

[bjrcboy @ Nov 9th 2007 7:29PM]

I was sitting on the toliet constipated.. haha. Always wanted to do that though! and I'm a sophmore in college fyi lol.

[derek @ Nov 9th 2007 7:53PM]

@bjrcboy

Get a job. Or maybe a laxative.

[Billy @ Nov 9th 2007 7:06PM]

That's pretty damn funny :D

[Adam @ Nov 9th 2007 7:30PM]

Yeah... I really didn't know what bjrcboy was going to post.... Oh...the video. Yeah, that was great!

[St. Stephen @ Nov 9th 2007 7:15PM]

"goodbye" that used to drive me eff'n nuts!! AOL.. the good old days! Hell I remember starting out with Compuserve which was even worse. lol. that was a nice trip down memory lane

[Cory @ Nov 9th 2007 7:46PM]

Prodigy was worse than both of them.

[bondsbw @ Nov 9th 2007 8:38PM]

Ah, but remember Prodigy Internet? That was great, none of the bloat... just you, a 14.4Kbps modem, and Netscape (back when it was good). Does AOL offer anything similar even now?

[therpham @ Nov 9th 2007 7:20PM]

Brilliance.

[Eduardo @ Nov 9th 2007 7:43PM]

Anyone else remember NetZero popping up at the same time with free internets as long as you had the ad window open?

Jack's acting was a little too corny though

[Cory @ Nov 9th 2007 7:47PM]

Wasn't that in 96 or 97?

[anthone @ Nov 9th 2007 7:52PM]

i actually tried that bullshit. hahaha BUt this Video is funny as hell because every shit they put about AOL were true.

[Fraggle.Rock @ Nov 10th 2007 12:50AM]

Ah yes, NetZero. My brother and I used to use that when we were away from our T1 lines... there was a hack that would keep the advertisements minimized while you surfed :-)

[vuph @ Nov 9th 2007 7:54PM]

ahh, AOL sucked back then, and it still sucks now.

[Captain Obvious @ Nov 9th 2007 7:56PM]

I thought the most brilliant part of the whole clip was when he tried to call back and it was busy. How did we get along without call waiting?

[Ryan Beesley @ Nov 9th 2007 8:04PM]

You hade to disable call waiting (usually 70# or *70 depending on your phone system) otherwise the incoming call waiting beep would drop your modem connection. ATDT*70,5551212

[Oskin @ Nov 12th 2007 3:29AM]

Believe it or not, i still know people with neither call waiting nor voice mail... For some reason I go berserk whenever I try to call them and I get a busy tone! What do they expect? That I love them so much that i'll spend half an hour calling back until they hang up the phone! Wait why am I friend with them again...?

[Jeff @ Nov 9th 2007 7:58PM]

I dunno, I didn't think it was that funny. I think first, it's a little too soon to make fun of the 90's - it just wasn't that long ago. People don't look much different, AOL still exists and still makes most of those sounds. A lot of the references they did use seemed really forced.

And anyway, I thought it was more like a "what if CTU used consumer-level technology" than a "what if 24 was set in the 1990's". They obviously wouldn't have been using dialup AOL in the 1990's or talking on unencrypted pay phones, for just a couple examples. (The IBM Simon, the world's first smartphone, was even available in 1994: http://cdecas.free.fr/computers/pocket/simon.php) Again, it seemed really forced, which automatically makes any joke unfunny.

Not to be a killjoy or anything.

[Paul @ Nov 10th 2007 10:05PM]

It's not too soon, because things are SO radically different from then, it's seriously like comparing the 1800s to now in just about every other area. Tech moves faster than normal shit.

Oh, and I think he had my old pager.

OH and I remember the days of disk spanning...having to use 10+ disks to save a shitload, or even just one, file. Oh the happiness that was had when zip drives came along with a whole 100 megabytes for like $30.

[Grant @ Nov 9th 2007 11:11PM]

i would have to disagree with you.
Anytime you watch some shit(stand-up, real sex, etc) on HBO and you snicker cause you think it's from like 1988, and then you see the copyright is like '93 it kind make you feel old and realize how long ago the early 90's really were.
anyone who's been frustrated by technology like this would probably get a good laugh out of this, i know i did. The sad part is i know people who still have dial-up, but the last person i knew with a pager finally retired it 2 years ago.

to think i used floppy disks and dial-up only 5 or 6 years ago kinda blows my mind.

[Grant @ Nov 9th 2007 11:17PM]

p.s.
You seem like the type of person that goes into action movies just to nitpick at how unrealistic the nitty gritties are.

p.p.s. No one likes those people.
I'll admit that happens when things get too technical ("hacking" for example) or weapons effects/details, but when i see it, i keep it to myself.

[Super S @ Nov 10th 2007 9:14PM]

@ Grant

I know someone who still uses a pager. He has a cell and everything, but he spends a lot of time in low or no reception areas. But the pager, being only one-way communication, works just fine.

[Cesar Cardoso @ Nov 9th 2007 8:04PM]

College Humor FTW! :P

[Andrew @ Nov 9th 2007 8:12PM]

"Augh, its 950 kilobytes"
And now we are in an era of 1 TB hard drives. My, how times have changed.

[Luis @ Nov 9th 2007 8:17PM]

I love the damnits he says

[skyward03 @ Nov 9th 2007 8:33PM]

AH... Old school AOL... Free internet.. Free Music Free Software.. That was the days. The great wild west of the internet.

[Bryan @ Nov 9th 2007 8:34PM]

Haha! Freakin hilarious!
Loved when he was downloading the disarm code...the classic AOL "File's Done!"

[John Castle @ Nov 10th 2007 7:34AM]

What amazes me, is I forgot how much that sound reminds me of my youth and downloading porn.

[Reader @ Nov 9th 2007 8:35PM]

Mom didn't hug you enough growing up and this is your only way to get attention, bjrcboy?

[JAmerican @ Nov 9th 2007 8:51PM]

Windows 3.1 LOLz. I used that when I was 7.

Were using Windows 3.1, there's no way.

Files to big. Its three floppies.

[Austin @ Nov 9th 2007 9:15PM]

Aim was bad, Juno was worse.
you get 10 free internet hours a month, used up in 4 days by your 10 year old sister on yahooligans or a kids chatroom.

but still, I remember trying to use aol public chatrooms, where there'd be a limit of 25 people so you'd spend hours trying to get in.


asl? rotflol! brb rsn. good times.

[Duo @ Nov 9th 2007 10:34PM]

Juno's internet sucked, but at least the email was free and you didn't have to tie up the phone line any longer then it took to download your mail.

Some of the references were forced granted, but it was still moderately funny none the less.

[Sean @ Nov 9th 2007 9:19PM]

@woofy: Ah, the days of downloading porn in UUEncoded chunks from newsgroups and then finding out that someone deleted part 6 of 18. Good times, good times...

[Michael Moncur @ Nov 9th 2007 9:54PM]

Hah! Geocities didn't exist (at least under that name) until late 1995! Bogus!

I'm so pathetic.

[KnightmareCS @ Nov 10th 2007 2:48AM]

lol and when did they have 02 Honda Oddessys(1:25) in 94?

[billy bob thorton @ Nov 9th 2007 10:26PM]

that spoof sucked. the concept was funny, just poorly executed and over the top. What I did find funny was that it actually did look like it was shot in the 90s but I don't think that was on purpose.

[Drew @ Nov 9th 2007 10:38PM]

Jeff, I must commend you on sucking all the funny out of that video.

[BobbyW @ Nov 9th 2007 10:39PM]

What's funny about this is that Jack's life should be like this on the show today. But instead all the computer stuff just works on 24. No problems with wifi or cell phones - just like real life.

[Joshua York @ Nov 11th 2007 10:26PM]

Actually, there was an episode when Jack was in an apartment building, and told CTU to wait, while he went outside to get better reception.

[Anton @ Nov 9th 2007 11:39PM]

Holy Crap! How the hell did people pirated music back then?!

[Trevor @ Nov 9th 2007 11:46PM]

LMAO.