Ask Lemmy

May 1995. Started with Gopher to access other university sites. My e-mail client was through vi editor. Eventually, I got onto the WWW with the Mosaic browser. Back then, I didn't know how to even use a URL. The browser defaulted to Yahoo, and I just kept clicking through categories and then on links that sounded interesting. Even later, I discovered Geocities, created my own page (learned HTML by exploring the code the WYSIWYG editor generated), and collected lots of swag sent to me by up-and-coming online stores and search engines for placing their button on my page. I miss those simpler times...

First time accessing the internet would probably be 1992 or 1993 from the local school library. Before then, I used local bulletin board systems via modem to play games, send messages, download warez, etc. as a young kid. The sense of freedom and liberation between those technologies was amazing. Around the same time, the school system transitioned to a digital card catalog system and some of the librarians were absolutely furious that the card catalog they knew and loved was going away.

April 1994. I was thirteen, at a sleepover with friends, playing Starfox on the SNES when my friend’s older brother told us he’d connected the home computer to the phone line.

No Prodigy or AOL, this was something different- more raw and BBS-ey. We started messing around and figured out how to join a local chat room- I have no idea now what they were called back then. There were maybe fifteen people in there, all with William-Gibson-ass usernames.

We were eating pizza and Sour Patch Kids, just fucking around, typing and watching the others. Then someone in the chat said, “Hey, turn on MTV. Kurt Cobain’s dead.” We flipped on the TV and sure enough, there was Kurt Loder breaking the news.

Very vivid 1994 moment.

Most memories are from my early 2000s childhood:

• playing Ultima Online (MMO)
• playing Gunbound (artillery game)
• playing games and hoarding items on Neopets
• browsing nonsense on sites like Ebaumsworld & Newgrounds
• "dj-ing" on coke music (online lounge) to make dBs to spend on furniture for upgrading my clubhouse
• chatting with schoolmates on MSN messenger
• learning html to make my page on Nexopia (similar to Myspace)
• making little fashion avatars on Dollz Mania (and putting them on my Nexopia)
• downloading all sorts of viruses through music on Limewire

In 1995, our class had to take a field trip to the library's computer lab. The teacher had us open Netscape and go to http :// yahoo dot com. Then we printed off some kind of search query. That whole process took about 2 hours lol

I was like 9, which would make it like 2006, and I remember just typing 'Star Wars' into YouTube with my sibling every time we were on the PC unsupervised. The culture at the time in my area was very much that the internet wasn't for kids.

Mid to late 90s in regional Australia. First terrible dialup and then a government subsidised asymmetric dialup/satellite hybrid. You'd click something and wait a bit while the request went out at 28.8k then the response would come back much faster than the 486dx could handle it.

Search mostly sucked but Lycos knew where all the porn was and Jeeves was ok for other things.

I was on in the 80's! My first touch was using USENET through WWIVNET via local bulletin boards.

My relative was working for the government at the time and let me use their account to get my first direct access where i was able to use gopher.

I joined one of the first commercial ISPs to finally get that sweet PPP access for my slackware box and I was finally able to use IRC from my home computer. I spent so much of my time there making friends and learning and having fun.

Early '90's. At first only the government and universities had access to the internet, before the www/world wide web existed. I went to a university before the general public had access via ISPs (which were just dial-up for a long time), so I could get onto it. At first there were just things like Archie and gopher, and a text email thing (pine, I think it was).

When dial-up became available to the general public, very few people used it at first. I used Compuserve for a while with a 300 baud modem where you could read the text as it slowly came across. But very quickly AOL started up and sent out millions of CDs so more and more people signed up on that--I never used AOL, though. Once I had dial-up at home I used IRC to chat online. That was in the mid 90's. Good times.

Oh I love it, cause I actually remember: It was around 1998-1999. I was a child. A new mall opened and they had some kind of special. 1 hour surfing for 1 DM or 1 €. We had no internet at home yet only an old computer for fun. Nothing fancy. And I really wanted to go on the Diddl website. Imagine something like a german Mikey Mouse but as collectible like Beanie Baby’s. I was obsessed. Anyway I think each click took 5 min to load. There was lots to discover like the mid 2000 Gorillas website. My mom was annoyed. But I was hyped. 10/10.

Would have been 1998 at school. Can't remember what the very first thing I accessed was, probably something educational we were instructed to. We got it at home the following year. I remember downloading my first MP3s from Slipknot's website around then and spending time in its chatroom. Then I read about Napster in a magazine and gave it a go. We only had the internet at home for a year or two. I had to use it at school and later college or the library after that. But I did have my own website from 2002 - 2005. I remember switching between both Google video and YouTube when they first started. Didn't get the internet at home again until 2006, first smartphone in 2010.

I've been online since 1993.

Originally we just had CompuServe, which was kinda like AOL (or at least what I remember of AOL being shown off at the tech museum in San Jose). "Websites" didn't exactly exist on it, though the WWW became publicly accessible that same year.

I really only remember two things from CompuServe: the chat rooms, and their MUD "Neverwinter Nights." Not to be confused with the Bioware RPG, though it was based on the original PnP D&D module.

Not sure when we switched to the "real" internet, as it is now, but back in the early days it was pretty wild. Funky aesthetics, low res images, no video to speak of. It was super common to just type random words sandwiched between www. and .com to find interesting websites (search engines didn't exist at first and then kinda sucked once they started being a thing).

It was a place almost exclusively populated by geeks and enthusiasts so it was extremely weird. But that's what made it so fun.

Back in my day we had to get our Internet at the village Internet well.  I remember the dialup modem noises it made as you pulled the bucket up.

30 some years ago?

Everything was just more fractured. Instead of a handful of options for social media, there were thousands of forums on their own websites. ICQ handled IMs and away messages was basically twitter. Before YouTube/spotify everyone used Winamp and internet radio streams for music, you didn't have songs on demand, but compared to local "real" radio or MTV it was an overwhelming about of choice.

It's honestly not that much different though.

Sometime around 1996 for my personal Internet experience, we got it and a laptop for my mom around 1994 so she could do something while getting her master's and my parents thought it was super cool so we kept it. We finally got a family computer with a modem in 1996. I had an email penpal. I think I spent an entire day trying to download a demo for a video game that got stopped 75% through because my mom picked up the phone.

1999. I saw picture of a penis in a bathtub someone had titled "Moby dick" on my first day.

Forums were everywhere, and most websites from private entities looked like someone vomited gifs and word art everywhere. Backgrounds were the most insane of colors and oh my god I just now realized one of the sites I used to visit in the early 2000s was popular with trans people, the trans flag was all over the place and literally was the background

Also MySpace.

1995., I got an email account and discovered IRC and usenet via tin, ona a vt100 terminal

1992. I spent a lot of time on BBS's back in the day. One day a friend from there told me about this number I could dial with my computer to connect to a server at the local university that had a simple shell that couldn't do much more than telnet, and a few MU*es to check out. I played one of htem for a little bit, then learned about unix machines and shell accounts and managed to get myself one, but even then it was all text-based. I used gopher (before www was really a thing) and then lynx (text-based web browser) to poke around a bit, browsed some newsgroups, etc.

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.

Edit: that Dutch server was on a server list and I remember being mindblown that when I was on, the website would update to show that I was playing and my username was there. "A website with my name on it? I must be famous!"

The Internet of the 90s was such a simpler place. Better in many ways, worse in some. For instance, the Internet wasn't so commercialized back then. Instead of a bunch of services, it was a bunch of nerds sharing information and having conversations. If you liked a tv show, you would search for websites about that show. Anyone could make their own website, so you would find tons of fan sites dedicated to each thing. Search engines didn't provide you with information or answer questions, they just helped you sort through all the different websites, then you could look on those sites to find whatever information you were looking for. There was almost no video, it was all text and (small) images.

I got on Compuserve in the library I worked at when there was nothing that needed to be done. Had to put a disc in to run the software. It was black & white. I mostly just chatted with random people.

1996, It was magnificent in its simplicity. Very few walled gardens, no cookie-pop-ups, and very few ads.

And the best search engine was HotBot. Fight me.

It took until early 1998 before I got my own modem and could start to really enjoy it. For those of us who enjoyed "testing stuff with telnet", it was scary how much sensitive stuff was unencrypted and openly available. Anyone who knew how CGI worked could bypass a lot of stuff and craft custom headers to retrieve things they weren't supposed to.

First time using the internet was probably playing poptropica with my siblings.

First time really using the internet was trying to get the ancient windows XP computer in our basement to be less slow and connect to the internet secretly. Ended up going down rabbit holes leading me to learn to write simple viruses, learn what Linux was, and learn to hop on tor for anonymous chat rooms with random strangers across the world.

Sure I was super afraid of viruses and pedos, but it was a nice escape from the small religious town I was being raised in at the time. It was nice being able to talk about philosophy and my own opinions without an adult hitting me for “defying god” or saying “homeopathic medicine is pseudoscience” etc.

It’s kind of odd how nostalgic I am for basic html websites and old looking IRC clients. I’m pretty young for someone who misses “the old internet” but that was the only kind of internet interaction I could really access (without parental supervision) for a long time.

When I was in school, so early 1990s? There wasn't much. I had email, Usenet text based groups, a proxy server at the university I could log onto. That handshake sound of the modem connecting, I will never forget that. Any networking meant running cables to connect things.

I had a Radio Shack computer in the early 80's. When I sent in the warranty card, my address ended up on nerd mailing lists. Compuserve was the only public ISP and access cost $7 and hour IIRC plus it was a long distance call around 50 cents a minute (ask your grandparents). I was able to access the internet for free at public libraries. Had no idea what I was doing but managed to see weather predictions and access Nexus which was a digitized database of periodicals (magazines).

Memory has a way of being fuzzy and inaccurate. Probably not my actual first experience of it, and I'm probably combining several different occasions...

But I remember a new desk with a computer set up in the living room. My parents or brother set me down in front of it and asked what I wanted to look for, I could search for anything. The first thing that came to mind was to look for Zelda, so I got them to type in Zelda Link's Awakening for the search engine. I ended up on a cool little fansite, and learned about the bomb arrows trick.

1990, through a local dialup university system that had security issues.

Within a few years after that we had home dialup internet.

In 1998, cable modems came to town. My neighborhood was the beta test area, so I had friends in my living room playing Everquest almost daily.

First BBS in like... 86? 87?

Simple. Everything was simple.

2000, just after dial-up was phased out in my area and broadband was the hot new thing. These were the Windows XP days, and I was a kid, so most of my early memories of the internet were websites where I could play Flash games, like Neopets, Newgrounds, AddictingGames, etc. Maybe it was just because I was a kid, or because it was new to me, or maybe I'm just blinded my nostalgia, but the internet felt much more novel then, and you could spend hours jumping from site to site. It was more interesting to explore. Now it really feels like I cycle around the same 5 sites. Oh also - Googling something worked and was useful back then. Way different than trying to Google something today.

Fine, we get it. We're old. Way to rub it in.

Whippersnappers today.

First I used was dial up. My first recollection of using it was to browse my local kids tv network website.

Exactly like this

I was in 4th grade in the school library, and I don't think I really fully understood what was happening until much later. This was when people were still unironically calling it the Information Superhighway, and there was just the vague sense that we were seeing some crazy Star Trek tech whose origins could never be adequately explained.

It was when dialup started taking off in France, so probably 95 or 96. I had a computer at home, but only my uncle had a modem. When we would go to his place for a family dinner I'd take a few floppies and fill them with midi files from some website.

We had a sort of sneakernet going with a couple friends at school, just a disk we'd pass around to share whatever cool file we found. Let's just say having Metallica and Nirvana songs (even if it was just a midi version) put me on top of that game for some time...