For me, my Dad brought home a laptop from work and we looked up pictures of pokemon and went to the Simpsons website, circa around 1999. How about you?
Fidonet all the way initially (At the time it was faster to write your terminal program than to load it off tape every time you started the computer. Was only like 5 lines.)
But the with the “Internet” I was the first (I think, never saw any others) to write and release a Windows 3.1 program for Finger
My friend’s dad had a computer with the internet and we used it to look at pictures of girls tits when he went out. Didn’t seem like much of a big deal at the time.
Later on, downloading Beavis and Butthead audio clips on Napster or something: “Time for a little probation”
If I remember correctly, I was using it to download a virtual pet.
Prodigy was my first experience, then we (parents) switched to AOL. Fondest memories are learning about AOL and IRC chat bots and getting into Linux
Geocities, yahoo chat, 28k modem loading pictures one line at a time, Windows 3.1 running on DOS.
If Gopher counts, 1993, downloading Wayne’s World and Ren & Stimpy clips at the university’s biochemistry lab on a Mac IIsi. Otherwise 1996, looking up Green Day lyrics on Webcrawler.com and posting on Usenet from a Sun SPARCstation in the computer lab.
It was around 1991 in the university computer lab. Just a green screen dumb terminal for email and newsgroups. Played too much Nettrek after hours on the Spark workstations later on.
Compuserve and BBS in the '80s -> AOL in the '90s with some Prodigy sprinkled in. Aside from their curated content, a lot of NNTP. WWW starting whenever AOL got that (v 2.5 IIRC? Not sure) and IRC as well in the late '90s.
My parents bought a Tandy hooked it up real early, without understanding what the internet was. I was given access to it at maybe age 9 and I got my first dick pic sent to me VIA SCANNER. Pre-digital camera era. Someone literally put their hardon in a scanner, closed the lid, and sat there while it scanned. Just to send it to 16, f, California.
Dick pic via a scanner is wild. Like, even if there was consent involved, there is no way that captures a flattering representation. Not to mention, it probably hurt.
I wish you the best of luck on dodging creeps like that, in the future.
Can’t remember the exact year but I imagine it was sometime in the mid-90s?
I used to play MUDs on a community BBS and one day the admins said they were testing out an Internet portal. Before long, they became the first ISP in town. It was weird because until they eventually upgraded to DSL, they had this quirky dialup script you had to use that navigated past the BBS part to get you on the Internet. For all I know, the BBS may still lurking around somewhere to this day?
Enrolled in a summer course at the local college, the summer before starting junior high, so… 1996? The instructors showed us how to format an http query (you had to do it by hand back then) and a few different sites with games and information. They explained hyperlinks for those of us who weren’t lucky enough to be familiar with HyperCard (RIP) and, IIRC, webrings and search engines. Then they let us loose.
Most of those first sites I visited were student websites from the Berkeley CS department, and few of them remain. I remember playing Hunt the Wumpus, Colossal Cave Adventure, and the Barney Fun Page. I also remember lots of LotR fanpages, discovering anime, and stumbling on child pornography for the first time (though I didn’t think of it in those terms until recently — at the time the model was older than I was!).
After the course ended I bugged my parents until we got a 10hr/mo plan at home that I was allowed to use for 2hr/wk.
One of my earliest memories of the internet is Yahoo games and playing Lenny Loosejocks.
I was obsessed with LEGO as a kid and any time we went somewhere where a computer had internet access, I would go to www.lego.com and visit the site, especially the LEGO backlot they had there. I remember that name but don’t remember exactly what it did or what was there.
This was around 1999 too.
When we got our own internet access at home, not just my mom and dad having dial up on their personal laptops, but having a DSL router and we could all plug in (no WiFi just yet, plus I was on a IBM ThinkPad with no WiFi capabilities and only have a USB Ethernet adapter) around 2004/2005, I began getting into MySpace heavily.
The flash games on the Lego website were dope. That’s probably my earliest internet memory as well. I still have certain scenes from the Mata Nui point and click adventure game burned into my brain.
When we got our first IBM compatible PC (a 486) my father wanted to have a modem in it. His friend who sold it to him couldn’t fathom why he would want a modem. But of course he got it anyways.
In the beginning my father used it for online banking over BTX. And when my brother got his own PC a few years later we played Doom with the modems over our house’s internal telephone lines.
My actual first internet experience was reading and writing to newsgroups on Usenet. (that worked more or less the same as Lemmy) My posts can probably still be found in archives. I mostly hung out in de.rec.sf.starwars. That’s actually how I found my first girlfriend.
Besides that I also surfed the web for different stuff. I still remember how Google became popular because it wasn’t so weighed down by ads and clutter and it actually gave you much better results than Alta Vista or Yahoo.
It was around the mid/late 90s. Maybe around 96 or 97, so I would’ve been 9 or 10. We had a computer at home, and my brother and I played games on it, but we didn’t have Internet. One day, my dad who works in IT, installed AOL and on our computer and paid for it. And he set up an account for me and showed me how to use it. And I was blown away. Eventually. even though I was a kid, I’d hang out in Star Trek chatrooms, created mailing lists for like a kids writers club, and ofc started playing online games. Eventually even had my own website on like GeoCities, handcrafted in HTML.
