Support NeoGAF

[Alabamaman]

In 1995, 4th grade after school on the school computer with buddies.

What did we search? Porn of course.

Didn't have internet at home till '99 i think.

 

[Liquidsnake]

IRC chat rooms, and AOL.

 

[Dicer]

BBS's in the C=64 day's, Howie's Palace, Nite Lite etc etc etc
Q-link (pre AOL) for a short time, think of an online system that looked like Zak McKraken lol
Then dialing up to the local Uni on "borrowed" accounts in the the later 80s into the early 90's

 

[lunarworks]

Sometime in '94, I think. Our computer teacher dialed into an "internet on-ramp" and showed us text-only stuff like newsgroups and gopher.

The next year we got internet on our LAN, but there were only 5 logins to use it. So people would sit in the computer labs and rapidly type one of the logins and its password over and over hoping to catch it just as someone else logged out. (This is when our school computers were all Win 3.1 launched from a DOS login prompt.)

 

[R2D4]

Probably when I finally bought my own computer the summer of 98. We had one computer with the internet when I was in high school from 93-97 but I never used it. Didn't really understand the concept. I was too busy thinking Sim City on a floppy disc was the greatest thing in the world.

 

[Something Wicked]

Must been have '94 or '95, but I remember at a family party, a bunch of my older cousins were crowded around in a computer room and one of them was IMing on AOL. I was young and wasn't familiar with the internet, so initially I just thought they were using some program, which would respond to certain typed phrases. But, when reading the messages, the responses appeared way too specific for a program at the time, and I remember asking, "wait, are these real people?" And then, becoming embarrassed when everyone laughed and one said "Umm... yeah. You didn't know that?"

I'd later convinced my parents to install a AOL trial that had come in the mail. I began searching for video game cheat codes and my mouth dropped when I saw under the Tomb Raider section: "Lara Croft nude code." Even though the code was fake, the section had a topless pixelated Miss Croft pic next to it. I quickly realized the internet had even better things to see than just video game codes.

 

[bill0527]

Got my first Intel PC in 1998.

AoHell, 28.8k dial-up.

 

[Maddocks]

late 90's. around 95-96 I believe. AOL, used to have a 1 hour time limit as I had 56k and would tie up the phone.

I remember rushing home from school to get online for a few minutes before my mom got home so i could download 1 song, as back in the day downloading at 30kb was like downloading at 10mb a second now of days.

 

[Windu]

I don't know, early 90s. Probably AOL.

As for the real Internet and not AOL, a few years after that. My brother got us kicked off of AOL because he spammed a chat room or something.

 

[Dishwalla]

The old Nick.com site, back in about 1996/1997, right around the time Hey Arnold was brand new. Those were the days.

 

[Escape Goat]

 

[ShadyMilkman]

I also use to think I was hot shit in 1996 in AOL using those warez programs like FadeX and shit to post those ascii images in chatrooms.

I could only do it once or twice though before I would be kicked for scrolling, lol

 

[mt1200]

I think it was in 1996-1997 with I.E. and Windows 95, through 56kbps modem.

Spoiler

Shit was slow as hell.

 

[Sobriquet]

I think it was in 1996-1997 with I.E. and Windows 95, through 56kbps modem.

Spoiler

Shit was slow as hell.

Blazing speeds for the time.

14.4 modem sucked.

 

[Arcteryx]

I want to say 90-91. The full concept of it didn't really sink in until a few years later when I had more free reign on the net.

That's just about the time I started clogging the phone line 24/7 downloading demos

 

[Autumn Wind]

It was in the fall of 1998 and my middle school had I guess it would be either a T1 or a T3 connection. I would get AOL dial-up over a year later.

 

[parrotbeak]

I'm trying to find a pic of the Hayes external 28.8 I had but none of the images are the right one. Mine was that off-white color and one solid piece all the way around; didn't have the black front.

 

[kswiston]

I was a big geek, so my parents bought me a Windows PC in grade 8 to replace my very old C64. I got the internet hooked up about a year later. This was probably 1996. Cruising geocities pages on my 14.4kbps modem was great. I was also smack dab in the middle of the Netscape/Internet Explorer browser war, and remember thinking that IE4 was amazing when I finally ditched Netscape.

I started making fan webpages in 1998 and made several over the following few years. Most of them were based on my jrpg addiction during high school. I am sure they are downright embarrassing to look at now, but I was proud of them at the time.

 

[bionic77]

Early 90s through one of those free AOL cd's on buddies computer. I forget if it was 9.6 or 14.4 dialup but the first thing we did was to look for nude pics of Pam Anderson.

It was a simpler time and you have to wait a long time just to see static pornographic images.

I remember the Internet changing dramatically around 95 or 96, around the same time I got LAN in college.

 

[alphaNoid]

I've been 'online' since 1989 using a 300 baud modem. In 1991 my mom brought home a 286 from work, and we had a 2400 baud modem setup on it. I started getting in to BBS's real big. In high school, myself and 5 guys ran an 8 node(line) Synchronet BBS that had 300 paying subscribers. We had a newsletter every month that went out and all sorts of shit.

This was all before the internet was a public resource. I believe around 1993ish, services like AOL, Prodigy and CompuServ started to mail out 30 day trial discs for Windows 3.1 users. It was the first introduction to GUI based online services, whereas BBS were always text/console (ASCII/ANSI) based interfaces. They slowly caught on, but it took until like 1995 and the invent of Windows 95 before this kind of shit garnered REAL media attention.

Within about 2 years the entire BBS scene dried up, I mean.. fucking bellied up. The internet had arrived in the force of Windows95 and services like AOL. But even then, the 'net' of the inters was fledgling. AOL had its own services that in some minor fashion linked outwards to other companies using the internet. AOL was its own brand, and service for awhile, a large intranet with small internet features. But suddenly the fucking internet exploded around 1998 and people could get 'online' using a plethra of services. Now these independent services didn't have an expensive unified front end, so they just got you online. Thats all it took.

My friends and I had taken our 8 node BBS and met with business partners (mostly family) when we were all 15, 16 years old. My brother (did commercial real estate) leased us a building in our city for cheap and we bought up hundreds (later thousands) of telephone lines. We started our own ISP at teenagers, and had several hundred customers in a few month period (door to door sales). But being high school kids we got tired of it, the commitment and we all let it fall apart from under us. We sold the business for dirt cheap to some guy who then never did anything with it. REGRET TO THE MAX.

A friend/coworker of my brother later sold our property to this company called NetZero. They offered him a job, since they were a startup company. He accepted, later got his hands on some partial ownership and a few years later before NetZero took a dive, the guy.. now the kid (I think he was 25 at the time) sold what he had and retired a multi-millionaire.

FML

 

[Jade Knight 08]

Summer of July 1997:

Packard Bell Desktop
Windows 95
100MHz processor
1GB hard drive
8mb Ram
14k modem (56k modem upgraded in 1999 or 2000)
AOL 3.0 disc ( came in the mail )
I.E. 1.0
Apple Quicktime 3.0



Websites discovered:

IGN website during N64 days and IGN message board. Asking us to pay when they're down and I bailed out.
Planetgamecube
AOL chatrooms and emails
Gaming-age Ez Message Board then migrated to this brand new GAF message board w/ hard ass members and became family here ever since. Love you guys!!!


And bunch of others i barely remembered and websites probably phased out of business.

 

[kai3345]

I was excited for the movie "X-Men" so I typed "www.xmen.com" (meaning to type x-men.com) and a porn site popped up.

I was hooked on the internet forever.

 

[ronito]

I was excited for the movie "X-Men" so I typed "www.xmen.com" (meaning to type x-men.com) and a porn site popped up.

I was hooked on the internet forever.

 

[Jill Sandwich]

A 2400 modem slapped into the back of an Amiga opened me up to the world of tomorrow about '93. Then it was spending far too much time and money at an Internet cafe using Eudora and Netscape to get my fix of WWW, until I got it at home.

 

[Tamanon]

2400 baud modem on my old 80386 dialing into local BBSes. Think it was around 89 or 90. Ah the halcyon days of MUDs.

 

[Lothar]

AOL on DOS in 1995 since the computer couldn't support Windows for some reason.

AOL in the mid to late 90s was honestly the most I've ever enjoyed the internet. It seemed like such a tightly knit community. You went on and saw of all your friends on instantly, if they were on a chat room you could find it and join it. You saw the same people everywhere. If you like games for example, the same people were in all the message boards and chat rooms. Everyone knew everyone.

 

[ReBurn]

Internet Gopher Information Client v1.03

Root gopher server: gopher.micro.umn.edu

--> 1. Information About Gopher/
2. Computer Information/
3. Discussion Groups/
4. Fun & Games/
5. Internet file server (ftp) sites/
6. Libraries/
7. News/
8. Other Gopher and Information Servers/
9. Phone Books/
10. Search lots of places at the U of M <?>
11. University of Minnesota Campus Information/

Press ? for Help, q to Quit, u to go up a menu Page: 1/1

Pretty much the same for me, but a different school. I was in college and the campus was wired up in 1992. Lynx for the world wide web, what there was of it. Gopher servers at all of the local schools, searchable via Veronica with some Archie and Jughead tossed in.

By the mid-90's we were so modern with Webcrawler. The good old days, when things were so much harder than they needed to be.

BBS in 1989/1990 timeframe, but that wasn't really the Internet.

 

[Zee-Row]

Around the time Windows 95 was new.

 

[disappeared]

Probably 1995 or 96 in school, grade 5. First thing I ever searched was star wars. Printed off some black and white pictures from A New Hope and Empire.

 

[NEOPARADIGM]

AOL Chatrooms in the early 90s.

Same.

 

[Bubbins]

lego.com

 

[railGUN]

89-90. Using a free educational telnet. We had a 14.4 modem, which was the fastest available at the time (I think). 12 people could be online at one time, in an area with 12,000 + population, and it usually wasn't full. I would gopher into universities and download freeware mac games.

 

[weekend_warrior]

yahoo chat in the school library when no one was around.

 

[Heel]

Yahooligans in elementary school. AOL at home after that.

 

[DiscoJer]

1989, my freshman year at the university computer lab

Only thing I used it for was finding some lyric server (or something) and printing out 100s of lyrics, then found UFO stuff on a usenet group

 

[RPGCrazied]

I was probably 16 or 17. Yeah, I'm old.

 

[Dice]

1994. Let's just say it sucked.

 

[Zeth]

I also use to think I was hot shit in 1996 in AOL using those warez programs like FadeX and shit to post those ascii images in chatrooms.

I could only do it once or twice though before I would be kicked for scrolling, lol

This! I was the envy of the 2 other people I talked to via IM/email with my badass rainbow font macros.

 

[Kazerei]

I got dial-up at home back in the mid-90s. I remember using WebCrawler at first and then switching over to Yahoo. I would mainly just look up information on Super Nintendo, and Sailor Moon, and Power Rangers and stuff. And I used Netscape.

 

[mj1108]

Dial-up BBS's....with lightning fast speeds on my 2400 baud modem. Very late 80's/early 90's.

Once an internet provider came into town I had to dial in using Trumpet Winsock on my Windows for Workgroups 3.11 machine, then minimize it and launch the browser.

 

[adelante]

I think it was 1996? EGM was promoting its web presence known as NUKE back then and I wanted to check it out. Did so with some Internet terminal at a local library...

 

[BertramCooper]

One of my earliest memories of the web was visiting the Titanic website in 1997, and it taking about five minutes to fully load.

 

[Mik2121]

A 2400 modem slapped into the back of an Amiga opened me up to the world of tomorrow about '93. Then it was spending far too much time and money at an Internet cafe using Eudora and Netscape to get my fix of WWW, until I got it at home.

Woah, this really made me remember the days way more than all the stuff other people posted here. Not Amiga Line Freaks itself, but the whole ascii stuff. I know some people still uses it, but dunno.. it just reminded me of back in 1999 playing Counter Strike with other people online, getting into clans and whatnot and seeing all those awesome clan logos and stuff all written like that.

That was so damn cool...

I started doing online stuff back with the Windows Chat that someone else posted. I didn't know the name though (guess I was too young to bother about that). I would also spend an awful lot of time on the iRC joining the iRC-Hispano server (back then I could only speak Spanish!) and talking about the most random stuff.

I think I used 56k only for a few years, then we jumped straight onto ADSL 256kb (I was the first one to get into that out of all my friends, afaik). That shit felt like a whole different thing, everything would load lighting fast, and we would get awesome ping playing online. Then ADSL 512kb, etc..

 

[sajj316]

AOL, goIng to the WWF portal looking at bikini shots of Sunny.

 

[IAmtheFMan]

Telnet 2.6

 

[Mik2121]

I was just using the wayback machine to check my website, but the oldest version it has is from 2001

http://web.archive.org/web/20010516203328/http://mik.dharana.net/

Back then it was a clan for Counter Strike called HEAT (because of the movie).

 

[Spocker]

Are the ones writhing about their "56k modems" in early/mid-90's using the term 56k for modems in general, or misremembering the years? 56k didn't arrive until late 90's. (1998-2000 according to wikipedia)

I personally used internet in school in '95 or so. They had one computer with dial-up that we could use to search for information.

Mosaic browser and the old Webcrawler search engine were the used tools.

 

[freenudemacusers]

Actual first time was using a BBS or Prodigy, on my uncle's computer when I was 10 ish. I got 24.4 internet or whatever it speed it was at the time when I was... 12? Was funny, I had one of those huge pc gamer magazines sitting next to me as I strapped myself in my chair, waiting to be blown away by the first sweet gaming site I visited... Except when I entered the url in the box, I wasn't sure what button to push to actually register the command lol. I vividly remember feeling really dumb for a few moments until I hit enter.

and yeah 56Kx2 was a revelation at the time.

 

[celebi23]

It must've been 199/1996 and we were at my mom's cousin's house and they had AOL. I remember seeing a commercial for nick.com and asked if I could go online. Man, I'll never forget when the modem connected and visiting that webpage. The one part that stuck out for me was:

http://web.archive.org/web/19970126142258/http://nick.com/nat/
Oh and here's a youtube video of it

It was either this or visiting

during 3rd grade (1995) & visiting

to play

. It was a game where you were an aspiring musician and your goal was to make it big. You had to think about costs for concerts/gear/etc. Man, I used to play that game non-stop during library time. Too bad the wayback machine doesn't have it archived >_< We then finally got an internet connection in 1998. It's been fun ever since

 

[Shagwell]

Not my first experience, but one of the earliest I remember well was seeing a porno with Ava Devine in it. It was pretty cool until I saw her snatch. Not cool when you're young man, not cool.