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?
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.
irc chatting ~1988, lynx via a BBS was my first browsing
Cool! May I ask, what was the vibe like back then?
very academic. it was largely only nerds/computer geeks that could cobble the hardware together to get online, or were maybe interfacing with the local college. i used kermit to upload my homework.
that said, first porn downloads were from these BBSs which were like little mini local AOLs… provided ‘email’, chat and some gaming
Best porn was IRC DCC bots with no ratio 😇
This was probably 1997ish. My godparents had a computer with AOL, and I remember being blown away by chat rooms and being able to instantly communicate with people from all over the world. A year later, my family joined got our first internet connection.
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.
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?
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.
One of my earliest memories of the internet is Yahoo games and playing Lenny Loosejocks.
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
If I remember correctly, I was using it to download a virtual pet.
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.
Geocities, yahoo chat, 28k modem loading pictures one line at a time, Windows 3.1 running on DOS.
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.
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
Learning how to find flash games, then memes, then real games, then it all went down hill when I found my way to 4chan as a kid.
