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?
Geocities, yahoo chat, 28k modem loading pictures one line at a time, Windows 3.1 running on DOS.
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 😇
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.
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.
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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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
My family used a WebTV for god knows what reason, so for a long time I only saw the internet through that portal. I think I spent most of my time on a Sailor Moon fansite just staring at screen shots of the characters.
Oddly enough, I remember the website said it was built with WebTV at the bottom, but I never learned how to upload images on the website builder… I had my own shitty WebTV site but I had to choose from the provided clip art.
Using LYNX on a monochrome terminal in the university computer lab. Yes, I’m old.
Lynx at the San Francisco public library! And Gopher was around before WWW.
Pre proper internet but I was a fan briefly of playing L.O.R.D (Legend of the red dragon) on BBS.
