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.
1987? Email address at university but didn’t know anyone off campus with an email address to use it with. There was a MUD one of the computer room assistants was coding.
Real Internet started for me around 1992 working for a company funded by Vint Cerf and Bob Khan. Found Mosaic on release date in 1993 on an ftp site and my mind was blown. Every morning I’d check the Cambridge coffee pot, and Library of Congress which was digitalizing documents and uploading new files all the time, and Adam Curry’s MTV which had a new article every few days or so.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
- 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.
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.
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.
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.
Fine, we get it. We’re old. Way to rub it in.
Whippersnappers today.
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.
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.
This is my experience as well. I remember moving from a 28K to a 56K modem was a big deal! Then my dad upgraded us to cable and hoooooooooooly shit!
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.
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
