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What is your earliest memory of using the Internet?

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We had this Sympatico (was that a thing other places?) dial up internet in '93 or '94. I was the first one of my friends to have it. All of my friends came over and we found this one Newsgroup site where we posted some slurs about my one friend who was sitting there with us...Really immature stuff. I remember getting a call from his parents the next day...or a talking to from my parents about the call...saying "You know that's going to be on the internet forever". I doubt very much anyone would ever be able to find that post today. (Now I want to search for it!)

After that, I looked for naked ladies.
 
A sea of AOL install discs and shoddy looking Angelfire websites as far as the eye could see.

Floppies and Netscape Navigator for life though.
 
The Rolling Stones website.

I think it was 94 because there were no search engines yet (not famous enough anyway) so my uncle and I started typing names on the address bar hoping to land on something.
 
i put an aol floppy disk into my 386 and dialed up on my 2400 baud modem and went looking for pictures of naked women.
 
I used to think that this was the entirety of the internet:

QgS9C.png
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Oh how wrong I was...
 
My dad left me in his office for a bit and let me fuck around on Netscape while he went to a meeting or something. I think he left up yahoo for me to click around on, but I got bored + didn't understand what was cool about it, so I think I ended up staring at a screensaver and taking a nap lol.

That was like 95. My dad is a professor, so he got the internet at his job before we got it at home.
 
Ekai said:
Nick games on netscape. I think some Disney games on their site too. I was probs like 6 or 7.
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Since my Ayrton Senna memory isn't the happiest one, another of my earlier memories was blowing the monthly minutes on Disney games, and in particular I remember it being something for Muppet Treasure Island.

But, now that I'm thinking of this stuff, I do recall going to a friend's house and doing something where we had to attach the phone receiver to a modem attached to the computer (the kind you see in the movie War-games where the physical phone receiver sat in something). I have no idea when that was, but it had to have been 92 at the absolute latest.

When did those types of modems start to die off?
 
Going to the public library and trying to figure out how to get to gamepro's website. Ended up Lanka on their page for like, doom 64 or such.
 
I was in the IT team very early on in my career (1995). Our entire investment floor had one shared internet PC running dialup using Netscape. You couldn't get away with that now :)
 
Maybe around 2004? (Yeah my parents were old, so I did not know what was internet back then) I was 11 at that time and me and my sisters were glued to the screen and I remember one of my sisters saying:

This is live, this is not like a saved picture, it could change infront of your eyes.

And we watched slowly msn? website loading.

Ahh Good times.
 
1995 tried to search porn and game sites on school computer after school with friends. Didn't get internet at home till 1998.

First site was probably altavista.com and searched for playboy...
 
In the traditional sense of the internet, probably using Q-Link on the C64. It eventually went on to become AOL. Otherwise BBSes.

If we're talking "the Internet" then in the early 1990s when the web was first starting and it was largely just blinking graphics and cat pics. I was at AppState and we were using Mosaic to network with the other campuses in NC. Logging onto the VAX and reading USENET, playing MUDs, etc.
 
I remember looking up "Super Mario Bros." on Spider or Google or something, and I think I actually went through most of the pages that came up. That, or I just stopped. Either way, the first site I actually spent a lot of time on from that search was an old sprite comic called "Neglected Mario Characters." It was minimal effort, and pretty dada-ist in retrospect, but Li'l Zubz loved it.
 
kwFX9y0.png
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I remember going on the Nintendo website in the late 90s. This is the best pic I can find but I remember a sort of off-white/yellow home page at some point with early N64 era renders of Mario and stuff on it.

I made my first website in Notepad in 1997/1998 which was hosted on geocities :)
 
1993 via Uni: mainly telnet, gopher, mail, nttp ... in a bash terminal. My first webbrower was Mosaic on a Sun SPARCstation, http was only just becoming a thing.

EDIT: might as well post a pic how things looked back then

xiL2T5s.png
 
My mom was a master's student in 95/96 (I was around 8) and I remember going to fun.com on the computer in her office and a bunch of porn popping up. I also got my hotmail account around 96 or 97 (which I still have to this day).
 
I was upstairs on our newly constructed computer. I believe it was like 1991/1992. My dad fired up compuserve and we were suddenly in a chat room with a bunch of other random users.

This BLEW MY MIND that we could talk to random people through the keyboard. I started talking to someone who ended up being an Austrailian Body building woman (I don't recall how that info came up), and I said something stupid to the effect of "how the hell are you" as my first ever internet message. My dad rolled his eyes and was like "ok, time to wrap it up..."

I will never forget you random internet bodybuilding lady.
 
shattyboombatty said:
I was upstairs on our newly constructed computer. I believe it was like 1991/1992. My dad fired up compuserve and we were suddenly in a chat room with a bunch of other random users.

This BLEW MY MIND that we could talk to random people through the keyboard. I started talking to someone who ended up being an Austrailian Body building woman (I don't recall how that info came up), and I said something stupid to the effect of "how the hell are you" as my first ever internet message. My dad rolled his eyes and was like "ok, time to wrap it up..."

I will never forget you random internet bodybuilding lady.
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it was a man
 
Having experience with BBS's and Viditel (a Dutch only system which was like an online encyclopedia but of course, porn was present too) in the 80's (does anyone remember the annoying way of setting up the connection to a BBS by phoning in and put the horn to the side just to have a connection? It sounds so bizarre nowadays...), internet was a revelation to me. Especially when cable internet was introduced and huge as phone bills were a thing of the past haha!

From the start I experienced it, contacting bands for setting up shows as well as finding out information about music I was into back then (Digital Hardcore Recordings-stuff, hardcore punk etc).

I have been living in squats mainly during the internet's infancy so I experienced it mostly through other peoples connections and stuff, but I was hooked from the start. I love technology and internet was not any different.
 
tumblr_mj1teo8Vp71qbc6b5o1_540.png


In elementary school our computer lab computers got Prodigy and we that's how we learned to internet. Probaby about 92 or 93.
 
Goldenroad said:
We had this Sympatico (was that a thing other places?) dial up internet in '93 or '94.
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I remember having Sympatico. I'm in Saskatchewan, Canada.

Anyhow, I remember when we first got it, we stumbled across Yahoo via hyperlinks and thought it was the coolest page ever. We memorized the path we used from whatever the default homepage was before realizing we could just go directly there.

Otherwise, just memories of things like askjeeves, Lycos, MSN Messenger, etc
 
I also remember using Copernicus right before Google took off. I thought it was the most clever software bacht then to search what I was looking for. I am kinda interested in a same kind of application, which uses multiple search engines to search for whatever it is that you are looking for. Is there such a thing nowadays?
 
Using dial up around late 96. I would have been 11. It wasn't something I spent very much time on because pages took so long to load.
 
Getting a book from the library in the 90s about Google and "how to use the Internet", also being excited after 7 PM because IIRC we had either free or very cheap dial up costs after that time, which I'd use to exclusively play Diablo online with.
 
Mainly newsgroups and email. I had already been using modems for pvp networks or direct play with frieds for years same for ipx hacks that would let you network locally the same way.
 
I remember logging into AOL around 94/95. No recollection of what was on the internet though.

I do remember probably about 98 looking up cheat codes for the sims and PS1 games on IGN.
 
1996 or 1997 and I was a teenager, I went to my school's computer room with guys from my grade, we had a period off. Usually we didn't hang out but it was them or spending time alone.

So we went into the room, they started the computer for me, went online and started a search engine and I sat in front of a screen while they started surfing.

It went something like this:

Me: What now?
Them: You search for something!
Me: Like what?
Them: whatever you want
Me: Okay ... I searched, what do I do now?
Them: Click a link
Me: Which one? There are so many ...
Them: JUST TRY ONE!
Me: Okay ...

After 10 minutes of searching random stuff and clicking random links and seeing that one of the guys was typing all the time.

Me: Can I do something else? What are you doing?
Guy: I'm chatting
Me: ... uuuh
Guy: I'm talking to someone!
Me: Who?
Guy: Someone in america.
Me: how do you know him?
Guy: I don't know him, he's just someone in the chat.
Me: Then why are you talking to him?

This went on for a few more minutes and ended with me being bored to death and leaving to soend time alone after all, I told them to have fun but what I thought was "NEEEEERDS!!!".
I was convinced the internet was the dumbest and most useless thing ever and no one except some boring nerds who were unable to talk to strangers in person would ever have a need for it.

Boy was I wrong.
 
Would have been in elementary school, remember going with my dad to his office on a Saturday to download game demos and shareware from Happy Puppy Games since we didn't have a connection at home.
 
uhm. I think it's playing my dad's NES when I was two-ish. Magic Kingdom game, Duck Hunt, and Super Mario... I think I only remember it because it is my longest hobby.



Edit: Oh man I stopped reading halfway through the title like a twit. Then that would be surfing Ebay at my mothers office and her telling me if I didn't spell things correctly I wouldn't be able to find it. The word was Gyarados. So I must have been 8 or 9.
 
Friend showed me AOL gif chat rooms to get porn e-mailed to us probably along with viruses.

MattyG said:
Right after I got Pokemon Gold when I was 8 or 9, I'd ask my dad to use his laptop to look up stuff about the game. I wasted hours chasing bullshit theories about catching Celebi and Mew and getting more Masterballs and stuff.
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This too.
 
If BBSes count it would be about '87 or '88 when I'd spend summers at my dad's house. Aside from that I first checked out AOL at a friend's house when he was showing me this cool new game called Wing Commander, I think 1990 or 91.

We were poors, never had a PC in the house growing up so my exposure was a bit limited.
 
First memory of being online was QuantumLink (eventually Q-Link and then AOL) from home from a C-128 with a 1200 baud modem around '86-'87 or so. I murdered our phone bill, my poor mom.

The actual Internet was surfing various Gopher sites and ISCABBS from college from that same computer in the early '90s. IIRC, had my first big internet argument about whether I could have riden my bike down a big hill on campus at ~40mph.

And the web was on a buddy's computer using Mosaic, spring of '95.
 
I remember around '95 or '96 the community centre got the internet so I would use WebCrawler or Altavista to search 'anime' for hours and then print tons of tiny thumbnails of stuff like Sailor Moon out for 25¢ a piece so I could practice drawing them later. I was about 12 years old.
 
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