What was your first experience using the Internet?
For me, my Dad brought home a laptop from work and we looked up pictures of pokemon and went to the Simpsons website, circa around 1999. How about you?
My family used a WebTV for god knows what reason, so for a long time I only saw the internet through that portal. I think I spent most of my time on a Sailor Moon fansite just staring at screen shots of the characters.
Oddly enough, I remember the website said it was built with WebTV at the bottom, but I never learned how to upload images on the website builder... I had my own shitty WebTV site but I had to choose from the provided clip art.
I started pwning noobs online in Quake 3 Arena on my family PC. One day my older brother’s friend saw me playing and was like “… you do know you can use the mouse to aim?”
I did not know.
I somehow had mastered controlling the character like a tank with my keyboard.
This was probably 1997ish. My godparents had a computer with AOL, and I remember being blown away by chat rooms and being able to instantly communicate with people from all over the world. A year later, my family joined got our first internet connection.
Prodigy dial-up. I was maybe in 4th grade. I checked out some online games they had, available as a part of their gateway. One was a graphical door/room game. I died almost immediately.
I was obsessed with LEGO as a kid and any time we went somewhere where a computer had internet access, I would go to www.lego.com and visit the site, especially the LEGO backlot they had there. I remember that name but don’t remember exactly what it did or what was there.
This was around 1999 too.
When we got our own internet access at home, not just my mom and dad having dial up on their personal laptops, but having a DSL router and we could all plug in (no WiFi just yet, plus I was on a IBM ThinkPad with no WiFi capabilities and only have a USB Ethernet adapter) around 2004/2005, I began getting into MySpace heavily.
The flash games on the Lego website were dope. That's probably my earliest internet memory as well. I still have certain scenes from the Mata Nui point and click adventure game burned into my brain.
Can't remember the exact year but I imagine it was sometime in the mid-90s?
I used to play MUDs on a community BBS and one day the admins said they were testing out an Internet portal. Before long, they became the first ISP in town. It was weird because until they eventually upgraded to DSL, they had this quirky dialup script you had to use that navigated past the BBS part to get you on the Internet. For all I know, the BBS may still lurking around somewhere to this day?
My friend's dad had a computer with the internet and we used it to look at pictures of girls tits when he went out. Didn't seem like much of a big deal at the time.
Later on, downloading Beavis and Butthead audio clips on Napster or something: "Time for a little probation"
My parents bought a Tandy hooked it up real early, without understanding what the internet was. I was given access to it at maybe age 9 and I got my first dick pic sent to me VIA SCANNER. Pre-digital camera era. Someone literally put their hardon in a scanner, closed the lid, and sat there while it scanned. Just to send it to 16, f, California.
Dick pic via a scanner is wild. Like, even if there was consent involved, there is no way that captures a flattering representation. Not to mention, it probably hurt.
I wish you the best of luck on dodging creeps like that, in the future.
It was around the mid/late 90s. Maybe around 96 or 97, so I would've been 9 or 10. We had a computer at home, and my brother and I played games on it, but we didn't have Internet. One day, my dad who works in IT, installed AOL and on our computer and paid for it. And he set up an account for me and showed me how to use it. And I was blown away. Eventually. even though I was a kid, I'd hang out in Star Trek chatrooms, created mailing lists for like a kids writers club, and ofc started playing online games. Eventually even had my own website on like GeoCities, handcrafted in HTML.
When we got our first IBM compatible PC (a 486) my father wanted to have a modem in it. His friend who sold it to him couldn't fathom why he would want a modem. But of course he got it anyways.
In the beginning my father used it for online banking over BTX. And when my brother got his own PC a few years later we played Doom with the modems over our house's internal telephone lines.
My actual first internet experience was reading and writing to newsgroups on Usenet. (that worked more or less the same as Lemmy) My posts can probably still be found in archives. I mostly hung out in de.rec.sf.starwars. That's actually how I found my first girlfriend.
Besides that I also surfed the web for different stuff. I still remember how Google became popular because it wasn't so weighed down by ads and clutter and it actually gave you much better results than Alta Vista or Yahoo.
very academic. it was largely only nerds/computer geeks that could cobble the hardware together to get online, or were maybe interfacing with the local college. i used kermit to upload my homework.
that said, first porn downloads were from these BBSs which were like little mini local AOLs.. provided 'email', chat and some gaming