Ask Lemmy

I think I first started regularly using the internet in the early 2000s, when I was a little older than 10.

I mostly remember looking up N64 game walkthroughs on “GameFAQs”, reading some big text file with occasional ASCII diagrams. I think I’d sometimes print them. I also used MSN Messenger to talk to some friends. Not many people had microphones so often I’d still use the house phone to call a friend if we were chatting over MSN but wanted to say a lot over voice.

But for most of my PC gaming time before that, I would just ignore the (network) multiplayer option in games, since I never had a LAN party and mostly only had dial up, where you would tie up the home phone line, and I assume actually call the person you want to game with, or maybe call some specific server (and I was too young to do that on my own anyway).

But I remember one day playing StarCraft (the original), realizing that I finally had a dedicated and decent internet connection, and that I’d be ignoring the multiplayer button unnecessarily. I joined a random multiplayer game, a 7 vs 1 “comp[uter player] stomp”. It was quite novel for me to get to play a computer game and chat with random people, I remember showing my parents. Later I played “James Bond: Nightfire” on PC a lot with randoms, and joined clans and all that. Later I played Runescape and most of the rest of my friends and classmates eventually played too.

It’s kind of sad now that everyone is on the internet, and that we’re “always” on. You don’t really say “brb” anymore. I kind of liked when the internet was something that you’d only get to see when using the shared family computer, not something that’s constantly accessible to us at all times. I even wrote this when I meant to just relax in the sun, not scroll on my phone.

Playing Warcraft 3 custom maps online and roleplaying in Yahoo! Chatrooms were some of my first uses.

(My other comment posted half way typing it so I deleted that one)

It was like 2010s when I first immigrated to the US. I never had internet before, neither did my parents or brother.

I think Mainland China probably had internet, but like... I lived in a part of the city that is sort of 50% resembling the "Favalas" of Brazil (no offense, I just can't find a better term to describe it). Its like this area of tall building that has little to no safety. No elevators, a staircase that ran from ground floor to like idk 7 or 8 floors? And the stairs were exposed to outside the building, meaning you could accidentally fall and die. It took a half an hour to get to the main road where you can actually take a bus and where the malls are at.

So you get the idea of where I was...

Basically, I doubt there even is an internet connection, at least not in my area of Guangzhou City. I assume some rich people probably would have access.

So I was a kid, and came with my parents and my brother to NYC on an immigration visa. And we got a used desktop computer setup that a relative no longer needed. They gave this wifi addon thing that scans for wifi in the area, and there was a free wifi, but the signal was too weak. So we later got a laptop on Black Friday (back then, people actually waited hours to get in), and use the laptop on a nearby mcdonalds to download stuff. Also we use the public library of Brooklyn for internet access.

Well I didn't really have my own computer, it was basically just sharing with my brother (who gotten more toxic as we got older)

Then later on we got home internet, it was like $30 for introductory 2 year price, but later it wne tup to like $50. I don't remember what speed, but I'm assuming it was like 30 or 50 mbps download. I never ran any speedtests, but youtube videos worked fine.

I mostly just used the internet for information. Like looking up info about space, science. I also played a lot of Flash games on webpages I find, that was essentially my main source of "gaming" at the time.

Some kids at my (elementary) school had facebooks, I made one, and added a few people I talked to, played some games on facebook that ran on the Unity Plugin. I eventually stopped using facebook. But still play Unity Games on websites

Then we moved cities and now have slightly better internet. Then I got my own laptop.

And I was like 13/14 I think, and I started to read a lot of wikipedia and a lot of Youtube educational videos, but my main "gaming" was still those web Unity Games. I mean, it was just a shitty laptop, not a gaming rig, not I wouldn't have been able to run any actual "real" games.

Then I learned about reddit and the "free" 😉 stuff you can download from the internet, but unfortunately, I could not find a car to download... 🤷‍♂️

As for my parents, once they got smartphones, they were just glued to Wechat like some rural US Fox news watchers... 🤦‍♂️

I could go more in detail about early internet (well, "early" from my PoV), but I doubt people are gonna read this if I write a whole wall of text.

(Sorry if this was incoherent, I can't keep my words clear and concise)

In the beginning it screamed at me. Images loaded line by line over minutes. The most novel thing was being able to message my friends, who would make a creaking door-opening sound when they came online, and set "away" messages with in-jokes or vague angsty song lyrics. I was told not to share any personal or private information, which made discussion rooms seem like mysterious masquerade balls. I could find anything about anything if I looked hard enough, and the minutes spent waiting for replies in discussion boards where your only caché was your previous interactions on the board felt like hours.

I don't remember life without the internet. I was exposed to it when I was really little. Unfortunately it wasn't that different from today. Was super corporate already at that point. It's been cool to experiment with search engines that piorize obscure websites like Marginalia search to catch a glimpse of what the internet used to be like before my time.

I got interested in it when my dad found a site that was an earlier, crappier version of ebaums world with song parodies on it. We'd click on and load it while we ate dinner and it'd barely be ready to play by the time we were done cleaning.

My first experience was with an AOL free disk where you could only go to certain things. I was in 5th grade, around 1995 or so.

It was dark times all the way to college when I finally moved somewhere with broadband and Google started to exist.

Piracy was always there as a good friend though.

In my case it was AOL in the early 90's. It was my first e-mail address, and miraculously I still have it.

Started with playing MUDs in the university computer lab. Started on Windows 3.11. Got a Mindspring dial-up account while in college, and discovered IRC not long after. Wound up working for an ISP (InfiNet) for awhile in the late 90s.

First time I touched the internet would have been around 1990. I dialed up and connected to a BBS and it had a connection to the internet. I think it had gopher, and I couldn't figure out what use it was at the time.

It wasn't until the mid nineties that I really connected and understood what it was.

Some time around 2001 or so. Frequented various Pokemon fansites and also had some kind of "100 coolest websites for kids" book.

2016, teen or pre teen idk basically all day just watching YouTube videos and never going outside

Early 80s which probably doesn't qualify as internet. Direct dial into various BBS message boards. Usenet to download boundaries and images.

Early 90s. I used to have an email and I also used to connect to some BBS through a 14.4 kbit dialup, I had to pay by the minute of connection and that certainly was not cheap to young me. Then, came the WWW and demise of BBS, and then the marketing money that ruined the everything.

For me, the amount of crap is the real main change, as I'm mostly looking for the same kind of content which is text-based. Sure, since the 06s and YT I've also consumed a lot of videos but as far as I'm concerned this is something I'm getting rid of: back to text and a more humane and less corporate-owned Web.

The second change would the proportion of absolute morons populating the Web. There were always some amazing troll and some clinical case out there but they were amusing events. Now? they're on the verge of becoming the norm and that's as sad as it's terrifying: think Idiocracy but not in a funny movie and with real life consequences.

Speed of connection? Not so much. I remember my 14.4 dial-up modem but my unlimited high speed fiber connection (that cost me nothing) doesn't feel that much speedier. Why? Because all its amazing power is used to load a shit ton of tracking scripts and another shit ton of marketing scripts with almost every single webpage, and then the pages themselves are poorly (if at all) optimized.

Thinking about it, it's almost funny to realize the hardware is so much more powerful nowadays but the content has become so bloated with tracking (spying) and ads that it loads much slower than web pages used to, back then. That's what they call technological progress, and that's something we pay good money for.

...almost fourty years ago, pulse-dial 300-baud modem from my apple //e running VT-52 terminal emulation into a mainframe shell account: just green monochrome text displaying an rn client, you had to be very strategic about what you chose to display because with that kind of bandwidth characters scrolled across the screen slightly slower than your natural reading pace and significantly slower than skimming past anything you weren't interested in reading...

...most early usenet clients routinely displayed profound boilerplate warning of posts costing thousands of dollars in computing time, which were pretty intimidating to neophyte users!..

It was great for music, and burning cds. I didn't use it much back then though. On it much more nowadays, trying to scale it back again though. One reason I like it here lemmy reminds me more of a classic internet. I don't online game much either but I like having the option to.

1988. Text only. You learned Unix or you didn't go play.

I think the first proper internet I had was downloading files from FTP servers at university. The first time I had it from home was over a modem to Demon ISP running some cobbled together TCP/IP stack for my Atari Falcon.

It was wild back then, I think even on windows you needed to install an IP stack before you could do anything because Windows didn't have one but default because why would you?

My first experience was playing lego inventor on windows XP. it was so fun and would hook me for awhile. I could load the site then disconnect from the internet during play since it loaded the entire game at once, so I wouldn't need to worry about holding the phone line up. Before that was usenet.

The internet of my childhood was pretty awesome. All the TV channels I liked to watch had a bunch of amazing games that were absolutely free, sometimes you could join a kid-friendly chatroom with a big celebrity like Vitamin C. You could download whatever song or movie you wanted and half the time it was even labeled correctly. You didn't have to search for anything, just type what you want and add a ".com" to the end and nine times out of ten it's exactly what you are looking for. If you couldn't find it Jeeves or Lycos could help. You could chat with your friends and 'meet' their friends, or just show off how cool the lyrics to the music you listen to are. The internet wasn't free of idiots or trolls, but most of the riff-raff of humanity had not yet discovered it, or it was too "nerdy' for them. When Myspace first came on the scene there were only three pages of people 'near me' and I knew half of them irl, and this was in massively overpopulated South Florida. Later I would come to know almost all of them IRL because the Internet used to bring people together. Now I don't even want to use any social media that's used by people I know IRL. There is nothing free without heavy microtransactions and/or data collection. It was never a great place for kids, but now I wouldn't let a kid near it unsupervised. The only thing that's really improved much is the piracy. I almost never accidentally download Shrek anymore.

Early internet for me was internet on cd that came in the mail, AIM chat, flash games, dedicated creepypasta sites, pics of boobs that loaded one line of pixels at a time, and getting kicked off so mom could use the phone.

Obligatory- https://youtu.be/gsNaR6FRuO0

My first experience with the internet was in the early 90s, when our high school computer science class went to a programming competition held at one of the state universities. While wandering through the library I came across a gopher terminal attached to the campus mainframe. It wasn't much, and at one point I thought I locked it up, but tapping through hyperlinks on that amber monochrome display felt pretty amazing to me at the time.

Early nineties, used Telnet to access my local library's card catalog. I could even reserve books or request an inter-library loan. That's when I first learned about boolean searching. I miss that feeling from back then.

Showing my age here, but the first time I remember using the web was in the mid-90s when there were only a girl's of hundred web sites. Almost all of them were universities. But I remember going to playboy.com as a joke and being amazed that there's was actually a website for it. There was also a pizzahut.com website that pointed to a specific restaurant in San Jose CA.

Somewhere around 1987, I had my computer modem call my university library's phone number directly so that I could see if the book that I needed was available (it was a long walk to the library). My computer acted as a terminal and the screen displayed everything pretty much the same as the terminals installed in the library itself (text only, monochrome display). Not really the internet, but probably the first practical use of a network of sorts for me.

AOL was my first access. Before that, it was local BBSs. I ran a BBS for a short time, there wasn't much I could do with only two phone lines into the house.

2400 baud on a Packard Bell running Windows 3.1, connecting to AOL for an hourly rate.

Ran up a $300 bill the first month hanging around seedy chat rooms

In maybe 1989 my roommate had a computer with a modem and Compuserve. It was cool, but nothing like what came only a few years later when I had a computer with a Netscape browser.

Deployed in Saudi Arabia, sent email to my Dad who was working at GE 1991

Pretty awful. I had 56k modem at hand, loading speed of websites was below any reasonable minimum and cost per minute of connection was huge, as it added up over the month. Internet got usable only after my parents decided to buy ADSL subscription from loacal telcom

It would have been around the time of the EverQuest release I got cable Internet, before that it was dial up shared with a frequently used house phone (11 people in the house). Mostly used dial up for web sites like geocities and forums and instant messenger chats (Yahoo, MSN, icq, etc).

My earliest memories of using the internet were sometime between 1998 and 2000. We had Windows 95 and my dad showed me how to look up pictures of spaceships.

Email and usenet mostly. Later added Archie.

Late 90s for me and we were VERY into music so a lot of my early internet experience was on a site called shoutweb.com. It had news articles and forums dedicated to music and tours.

It was so much better to be able to search through and find different fan websites and forums. Nowadays that’s just Reddit and Facebook groups, and although I don’t use either anymore, they were never as good or as fun and compelling as all the fan sites made back in the day.