Ask Lemmy

I have vague memories of using Prodigy on Windows 3.1 but I don't remember much beyond the login screen.

My earliest clear memories were of AOL 3.0, during the era when the app didn't even have a URL bar because they wanted you to used their walled garden "AOL keyword" system. So I'd login, minimize the program, and immediately open Netscape so I could get to the real internet. Didn't do much online though, other than go to Nick.com to play games.

Didn't become a full-time internet user until 1998. Probably because that was the first year I went to a school with internet-connected computers in every classroom, where my parents couldn't restrict my online time.

I remember downloading the Hubble Deep Field on our shared family computer, filling up the entire hard drive, and barely even being able to open it. I distinctly remember this because I had to do it multiple times due to people picking up the phone halfway through.

I have older memories of computers (Amiga & Commodore) but this memory was specifically internet related.

AOL - ISP. Not sure order of operations here... I was also on Mozilla/Netscape (1991/92-?)

Bulletin Board Channels: There was at least one gay one in San Diego (ca. 1992-1995). We would chat and post online, then once a month, meet at a gay bar with name tags with our handles.

IRC - fun chat site (at least into 1997 for me)

LISTSERV - this was less useful for me. signing up for 'reading lists' or 'subscriptions' to 'butterflies' 'sourdough', etc. (I honestly do not recall the groups I signed on to) when no one really seemed to be there (1992-94?) though I didn't move with the hip crowd

I got my first "home computer" for Christmas in the early 80's. A TRS-80 CoCo with 16k RAM. After sending in the warranty information I started receiving nerd junk mail some of which I'm pretty sure I still have somewhere. One is an add for internet access from Compuserve. It cost $7 an hour IIRC. You had to use dial up and call long distance to Columbus, OH which probably cost somewhere around 50 cents a minute using my 1200 baud modem. Young teenage me couldn't afford the luxury. I also received a slender book of websites. Domain names weren't a thing so you had to know the ip address of what you wanted to look up. BBS's were more accessible to me. Sometimes in the early 90's I fumbled around on a computer at the library and saw weather forecasts and another time I searched Lexusnexus for an article about modifying hand held GPS units to increase accuracy. The public wasn't allowed the accuracy the military had (US). By the time the internet caught on thanks to AOL I hadn't messed with computers for ten years but picked it right back up now with a 36.6k modem. I know this is going to sound gross but I remember some of the earliest news reports regarding the internet were about pervs using it to share child porn. Does anyone else remember this? BBS's were used by mob bookies to take gambling bets. IIRC the Supreme Court decided the owners were responsible for monitoring and preventing the mob from doing this. Obviously this was all quite awhile ago and my memory is fallible

Using askjeeves was probably one of my earliest memories.

I met a girl on an MSN chat room and we talked for awhile and enjoyed each others’ company. We found out we lived pretty close and were the same age but went to different high schools. We decided to meet up in a public place for a date so I fired up mapquest and printed off directions. She did as well. Well, I took a wrong turn and couldn’t get back on track so I disappointingly went home to get back on MSN to give her the news that I got lost. Turns out she did as well! lol. Next time I just gave her my address and we dated for a bit ha

It was the mid-90s, and just a shell account. Gopher, archie, pine and zmodem.

We didn't get PPP access for a year or two; this was the days before google - yahoo, altavista, some other engines I can't remember, and metasearch engines like dogpile that would query a bunch of different search engines and return the combined set of results.

This was the days of mailing lists and usenet for the most part - connect up, download messages for like an hour, then log off, read and reply, then log on and send.

I was there for the original hamsterdance, and it ruled.

I remember coming home from school, and immediately going on to MSN. The silly gifs were so entertaining back then, and it was very cool to have a gif for each letter - like the letter A in flames LOL. I also used to love Club Penguin and ToonTown. Going into those type of cyberworlds felt pretty magical to me back then :)

Before I had the internet at home, I would use the school library to print out walkthroughs to videogames (at that time zelda.com was not about the nintendo game). I spent several weeks downloading a 100 megabyte demo of a star wars racing game, because at my download speeds it took 18 hours, but normally the connection would drop midway through and there was no way to resume the download without restarting it, so the only thing to do was keep trying and hope to get lucky.

America Online. Chat rooms. A/S/L? Beware sexual predators.

modem dialing sound

Around the mid-80s a friend of mine set up a public-access Unix system. You could dial in and get shell access, and from there newsgroups, email, etc. It technically wasn't a "live" internet connection, his system dialed in to Yale each night and downloaded newsgroups and stuff via UUCP, so there was at least a day's delay between writing messages and getting a response. I don't remember exactly when it was but I was around for the Morris worm so it was some time before that.

MSN IM was really popular. I remember it felt really funny to come home and talk to your friends you had just seen.

StumbleUpon was also really cool before it was sold to ebay. It's how I found cgsociety, but then the website owner shut the site down for some reason and everyone migrated to artstation.

There were also the video games on YTV's website, and all the other flash games that are hard to find now. Prime among them in my memory was the 3-d missile game. You would guide a missile through a series of spinning obstacles as the missile accelerated. Newgrounds, ebaums world, the original youtube that wasn't entirely focused on profit yet...

I don't remember using napster, but I did use Limewire until it shutdown. It was really cool to have access to so much music but IIRC it was mostly mp3's of a single song and sometimes it wouldn't even be the full song.

I also spent a lot of time playing tower defence maps on Starcraft \Battle.net, then it started to be over-run by spam bots and no one played anymore. It was really sad to see that happen, and eye-opening for me when no one at blizzard or whoever controlled battlenet did anything about it. Looking back, that was likely a large part of the reason for my eventual to switch to linux.

The games on the PBS kids website over dialup

"Get off the internet, I need to call grandma!"

And literally not knowing which websites exist out there and having no search engine to look em up

Lots of blinking geocities and angelfire sites. Waiting for NetZero dial up to noisily connect. Buffering music and video clips.

AOL keywords, AOL chatrooms, free AOL minutes on a disk, dial up modem sounds, slow af connection.

simple static personal websites with a single tiled image as background, dubious color palette, and a guestbook

Day of defeat on steam with a download speed of 56k modem... Took like 4 hours for nearly 700mb? And oh my, was it worth it !

ICQ for instant messages !

I guess my very first exposure was my brother letting me use his university account over dialup. You really had to know your way around in those days or know someone who did. He showed me how I could go to umich (U. of Michigan) and a few other places that ran public ftp servers full of games!

Then I landed a job at a small company which had accounts on CompuServe. Around this time at home, I was playing MUDs a lot on a free local BBS, and at some point, the people running the BBS decided to have a go at becoming the first commercial ISP in town. (They're still around, in fact!)

So I approached work about opening an Internet account, arguing that it was way cheaper than CompuServe. They reluctantly agreed. I was over the Moon but my superiors were not super impressed at first. They complained that they couldn't find anything while CompuServe was much better organized. I eventually found Yahoo which, at the time, had a sort of CompuServe-ish vibe of providing this directory that categorized most of the more popular sites by topic and that placated them. You have to remember this was long before search engines and even the www itself was still in its infancy.

I was having a blast, discovering something new every week. Usenet was so cool when I learned about that! And I found out about some sort of MIDI file format with embedded instrument samples you could play to get electronic music in a super compact format long before broadband made mp3s the way to go. What were they called again? Soundtrack files? Something like that. I played them all the time while I was coding.

Gen z here. Coolmathgames.com was fire. I actually bought a shirt from them last year and it gets a lot of compliments surprisingly 🤷‍♀️

Compuserve back in like ‘91.

VT100 terminals on Solaris (SunOS) reading usenet, chatting with ytalk, elm (email), Gopher (and searching Gopher with Archie), DartMUD. It was great. Pretty much once we got PC and Mac based clients that stitched together downloads out of usenet posts and could run multiple terminal sessions at once, we were set and the Internet peaked.

The first time I got onto the internet proper, I was over at a friend's house for his birthday as a teenager and his dad had an account and he dialed in and the very first thing he showed me was a picture of a lit red candle sticking out of a woman's butthole.

Prior to that, I had signed on to a local BBS with my home computer, but there was not any pornography available on that BBS.

It was glorious, though, being like 12 years old and figuring out how to make computers talk over telephone lines, though.

2nd hand.

Connecting to a text only BBS at 300 baud who got their content from the internet.

We took a class field trip to a students parents facility where they made supplements. They showed us a computer connected to university databases of research papers. Up until that point we called BBS servers directly and would rush to download everything before sometime accidentally picked up the phone. This was the early 90s

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_HiNote

The next year I got my first laptop and a 14.4baud us robotics pcmcia card.

A/s/l?

Cartoon Network games! I remember one set of adventure games that I loved to play but I couldn't understand English very well yet so I'd always make my dad play with me and translate. Resort something. I look them up on the Wayback machine once in a while.

Only had dial-up so insert youvegotmail but then got introduced to bbs and freaked out when I realized I was actually typing to a real person who would gasp! respond.

Not long after I entered the brave new world of irc and the rest was history. Internet=RabbitHole 4ever!

Playing Star Trek in my high-school counselor's office on a teletype machine that was connected to the local college's main frame. The teletype used a roll of paper. Type in a move, and a new "screen" was printed on the paper. I must have used miles of paper playing that game.

Evolution vs creationist forums as a teen on Win 2000. And of course porn.

Limewire to get early Naruto releases from Japan, subbed by a random guy on the internet one day later. 500MB and took at least an hour.

AOL IM

Not being able to get online because my dad was using the internet at a wholly different location for work.

Also the screams of a dialup modem through the tinny speakers of a first-gen, puck-moused iMac.

9600 baud connection. IBM PS2 running win 3.1. prodigy service, i think

Errghhh ooo oo uh uh oh uh uh.

Dial up

Prodigy, then AOL, then real internet. Also eWorld, which was like AOL but for Mac users. It was kinda pointless.

For me was using AOL free internet CDs cause we had to pay providers for time online..we used to walk around neighborhood looking for AOL CDs to get online and get to chatrooms pretending we were adults. After a year or so I had a real experience when Internet started to get popularized so I created an email account, an ICQ acc and downloaded a song from this website.

6th grade computer class. I grew up playing video games and liked medieval era stuff despite not knowing how to spell it, so I thought I'd try to type "midevil(dot)com" into the URL bar. At the time it was some kind of BDSM site with a black background, red font, and multiple cats-o-nine-tails slapping to and fro like animated gifs (were they gifs? idk). My blood ran cold and I closed the window. I wasn't caught thanks to the teacher also not knowing that browser history was a thing.

On university computers, using Netscape Navigator, browsing the information superhighway (i.e., mostly Geocities) filtered through Yahoo and, as soon as I found it, AltaVista (whose user experience was much more similar to what Google's would be), and reading hardcore erotic stories between classes...

The World Wide Web has only gone downhill from there. It probably died around the time when the blink and marquee tags were deprecated, and we've been browsing it's dessicated corpse since then, like maggots on a carcass already way too rotten to provide any nourishment.

A local BBS got internet service so I poked around with gopher and lynx. I remember it being slow, there was lots of waiting for things to load.

Gotta find the Netscape disk. Gotta get mom off the phone. Gotta wait 5 minutes for the space jam website to load.

Getting booted from your game because Mom got a phone call.

720p video was a straight up luxury that most of us didn't bother with because it took way too long to buffer lol.

It was a very different time.

Got dialup as a young teen in the 90s - first with CompuServe, then usenet and the early Web. Usenet was amazing, fun communities, kibology, and great for dialup, and as someone who lives in the country, I still wish sites had more options for downloading stuff in advance to view when out of signal.

A less positive part of usenet was back then it was completely uncensored (or at least, that child me had unrestricted access) . At the time I thought it was normal and good to be able to get porn with people my age, instead of weird adults. But now I feel pretty sad and icky that this was my introduction to sex, and horrible if I think abiut the situations behind those pictures.

Grab a 4 free AOL disk from blockbuster, use 3 of them as frisbees. Take the last one home and spend 10 minutes waiting the interface to install. Plug in the phone line and hear a series of beeps and schreeches before being greeted by an early robotic voice saying "welcome!" And often "you've got mail".

Afterwards you follow a guide to sign up for a mail account and a text like document with links to AOL platform tooling like chat rooms and search tools. You started looking for urls everywhere wondering what hidden gems you'll find in the virtual world and what kind of content was on cereal websites or Nickelodeon. There was a massive learning curve for multimedia, but you had a lot of pen pals from chatrooms. So much porn spam. Nabisco had an awesome gaming site

"Internet Cafe" mid 90s. Clicked down through yahoo's directory not really knowing what I was looking for. Found the canonical list of lightbulb jokes. Funny but overall I was quite underwhelmed. Got a print magazine that listed and reviewed websites.