RealPlayer hit the scene in 1995 as one of the first ways to stream audio and video over the internet, back when most of us were still on dial-up. It started as RealAudio, then evolved fast—RealPlayer 5.0 in 1997 added video playback, and by the early 2000s, versions like RealPlayer 8 and 10 were everywhere, letting you play MP3s, stream music, and even download videos before YouTube was a thing. It was clunky, loaded with pop-ups, and always begging you to upgrade to RealPlayer Plus, but it was the gateway to catching online radio, the first music streams, and those grainy .rm files we all downloaded. If you ever waited five minutes for a 30-second video to buffer, you remember the RealPlayer era.