I’m new to the internet. Only got access to it 3 years ago. Didn’t own a smartphone until last year. I’m curious how it was for people who discovered it earlier.
I’m new to the internet. Only got access to it 3 years ago. Didn’t own a smartphone until last year. I’m curious how it was for people who discovered it earlier.
First internet experience for me was 2013 as a child. Back then our home connection had a usage cap of 10GB, but the ISP hosted a “free zone” website that contained a bunch of cartoons and mirrored ABC (Australia) content.
We would watch YouTube videos together as a family because the bandwidth was considered that previous and laugh at those fail compilations and whatnot.
Otherwise about a month or two into having internet, I realised that this would open me up to online gaming, and I excitedly put Mineplex’s IP into the cracked copy of Minecraft that I had on a USB from school, only to get an authentication error because I hadn’t bought an account. Managed to stumble into some Dutch server that was cracked and despite the language barrier, had tons of fun trying to work out the game.
Hang on, core memory unlocked.
About three years before that, a neighbour set up a WiFi network but had open authentication on it.
I remember seeing it on my little EEE PC and connecting to it. I remember completely not knowing what it was, if it was going to cost my parents data money, or if I’d otherwise get in trouble for using it.
I had friends on the same street as me, so I showed them this WiFi network and they weren’t really sure if it would charge my parents or not either.
I had been playing a game that came on a shareware disc called “Wild Wheels” (later learned that was the publisher’s name of the game, the actual name was BuzzingCars) and it referenced ceebot.com as a place to download more demos.
Well, that was the first website I ever visited and I downloaded a 26MB setup for Colobot, an RTS first person space exploration game that had you literally program robots to complete missions. I was still so anxious that there’d be some massive bill in the mail (hence the setup size still being burned in my head) so that was all I downloaded.
And oh boy did I play the shit out of that, and I attribute that game to why I still enjoy computing and programming today.