I’m new to the internet. Only got access to it 3 years ago. Didn’t own a smartphone until last year. I’m curious how it was for people who discovered it earlier.
First time I remember was a Nintendo forum, where someone accused me of masturbating in the shower and I had no comeback.
Space Jam website, I am quite sure this was the first thing my dad showed me. That or something else WB related.
May 1995. Started with Gopher to access other university sites. My e-mail client was through vi editor. Eventually, I got onto the WWW with the Mosaic browser. Back then, I didn’t know how to even use a URL. The browser defaulted to Yahoo, and I just kept clicking through categories and then on links that sounded interesting. Even later, I discovered Geocities, created my own page (learned HTML by exploring the code the WYSIWYG editor generated), and collected lots of swag sent to me by up-and-coming online stores and search engines for placing their button on my page. I miss those simpler times…
First time accessing the internet would probably be 1992 or 1993 from the local school library. Before then, I used local bulletin board systems via modem to play games, send messages, download warez, etc. as a young kid. The sense of freedom and liberation between those technologies was amazing. Around the same time, the school system transitioned to a digital card catalog system and some of the librarians were absolutely furious that the card catalog they knew and loved was going away.
April 1994. I was thirteen, at a sleepover with friends, playing Starfox on the SNES when my friend’s older brother told us he’d connected the home computer to the phone line.
No Prodigy or AOL, this was something different- more raw and BBS-ey. We started messing around and figured out how to join a local chat room- I have no idea now what they were called back then. There were maybe fifteen people in there, all with William-Gibson-ass usernames.
We were eating pizza and Sour Patch Kids, just fucking around, typing and watching the others. Then someone in the chat said, “Hey, turn on MTV. Kurt Cobain’s dead.” We flipped on the TV and sure enough, there was Kurt Loder breaking the news.
Very vivid 1994 moment.
Most memories are from my early 2000s childhood:
- playing Ultima Online (MMO)
- playing Gunbound (artillery game)
- playing games and hoarding items on Neopets
- browsing nonsense on sites like Ebaumsworld & Newgrounds
- “dj-ing” on coke music (online lounge) to make dBs to spend on furniture for upgrading my clubhouse
- chatting with schoolmates on MSN messenger
- learning html to make my page on Nexopia (similar to Myspace)
- making little fashion avatars on Dollz Mania (and putting them on my Nexopia)
- downloading all sorts of viruses through music on Limewire
In 1995, our class had to take a field trip to the library’s computer lab. The teacher had us open Netscape and go to http :// yahoo dot com. Then we printed off some kind of search query. That whole process took about 2 hours lol
I was like 9, which would make it like 2006, and I remember just typing ‘Star Wars’ into YouTube with my sibling every time we were on the PC unsupervised. The culture at the time in my area was very much that the internet wasn’t for kids.
Mid to late 90s in regional Australia. First terrible dialup and then a government subsidised asymmetric dialup/satellite hybrid. You’d click something and wait a bit while the request went out at 28.8k then the response would come back much faster than the 486dx could handle it.
Search mostly sucked but Lycos knew where all the porn was and Jeeves was ok for other things.
Lol I forgot about jeeves, the Internet butler! Oh how he buttled!!
Early '90’s. At first only the government and universities had access to the internet, before the www/world wide web existed. I went to a university before the general public had access via ISPs (which were just dial-up for a long time), so I could get onto it. At first there were just things like Archie and gopher, and a text email thing (pine, I think it was).
When dial-up became available to the general public, very few people used it at first. I used Compuserve for a while with a 300 baud modem where you could read the text as it slowly came across. But very quickly AOL started up and sent out millions of CDs so more and more people signed up on that–I never used AOL, though. Once I had dial-up at home I used IRC to chat online. That was in the mid 90’s. Good times.
This is my experience as well. I remember moving from a 28K to a 56K modem was a big deal! Then my dad upgraded us to cable and hoooooooooooly shit!
I was on in the 80’s! My first touch was using USENET through WWIVNET via local bulletin boards.
My relative was working for the government at the time and let me use their account to get my first direct access where i was able to use gopher.
I joined one of the first commercial ISPs to finally get that sweet PPP access for my slackware box and I was finally able to use IRC from my home computer. I spent so much of my time there making friends and learning and having fun.
Oh I love it, cause I actually remember: It was around 1998-1999. I was a child. A new mall opened and they had some kind of special. 1 hour surfing for 1 DM or 1 €. We had no internet at home yet only an old computer for fun. Nothing fancy. And I really wanted to go on the Diddl website. Imagine something like a german Mikey Mouse but as collectible like Beanie Baby’s. I was obsessed. Anyway I think each click took 5 min to load. There was lots to discover like the mid 2000 Gorillas website. My mom was annoyed. But I was hyped. 10/10.
Would have been 1998 at school. Can’t remember what the very first thing I accessed was, probably something educational we were instructed to. We got it at home the following year. I remember downloading my first MP3s from Slipknot’s website around then and spending time in its chatroom. Then I read about Napster in a magazine and gave it a go. We only had the internet at home for a year or two. I had to use it at school and later college or the library after that. But I did have my own website from 2002 - 2005. I remember switching between both Google video and YouTube when they first started. Didn’t get the internet at home again until 2006, first smartphone in 2010.
Back in my day we had to get our Internet at the village Internet well. I remember the dialup modem noises it made as you pulled the bucket up.
The heartbreak after spending hours downloading something and you hear “beepboopbeep beepboopboopbeep*…“ooops” clunk” through the modem.
I’ve been online since 1993.
Originally we just had CompuServe, which was kinda like AOL (or at least what I remember of AOL being shown off at the tech museum in San Jose). “Websites” didn’t exactly exist on it, though the WWW became publicly accessible that same year.
I really only remember two things from CompuServe: the chat rooms, and their MUD “Neverwinter Nights.” Not to be confused with the Bioware RPG, though it was based on the original PnP D&D module.
Not sure when we switched to the “real” internet, as it is now, but back in the early days it was pretty wild. Funky aesthetics, low res images, no video to speak of. It was super common to just type random words sandwiched between www. and .com to find interesting websites (search engines didn’t exist at first and then kinda sucked once they started being a thing).
It was a place almost exclusively populated by geeks and enthusiasts so it was extremely weird. But that’s what made it so fun.
