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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!”
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.
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.
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.
The heartbreak after spending hours downloading something and you hear “beepboopbeep beepboopboopbeep*…“ooops” clunk” through the modem.
- 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.
- 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.
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.
What is Compuserve
It was an old dial-up multi user system that charged monthly fees. Once the internet became popular, Compuserve connected, but they predate the commercial home internet.
Damn. The earliest thing I remember was AIM. I never used it, just remember being jealous of the other kids. Internet was so expensive.
Yeah, I was never on Compuserve, just aware of it’s history.
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.
There were many good-hearted feuds. SA versus Fark, newgrounds, photoshop wars… It was very tribal.
Also craigslist was a place people would just hangout.
Photoshop wars?
Photoshop wars?
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.
Holy shit I forgot about Poptropica!
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.
