Ask Lemmy

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.

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.

In like 2004-2005 and it was very coll and different and wacky, interesting, unique.

Nowadays the internet is kinda like NYC Times Square and I hate it.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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...

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

Whippersnappers today.

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.

First BBS in like... 86? 87?

Simple. Everything was simple.

Damn must have been the early 2000's when I was a kid. I probably went to flash games websites most of the time.

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).

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.

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

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.

Very slow. I sometimes took days to download a song through KaZaA. A lot of chatrooms. And the porn was always there.

In college could get email, irc, and newsgroups via commandline and there were some networked games like this tank one and avatar on the plato/novanet system. I was talking with someone from china on irc and it was so wild. People would drop out of school do to irc addiction. Chatting all hours of the day in the computer room. Nothing but text but given there was nothing before it was amazing even though it sounds like such weak sauce nowadays.

Exactly like this

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

1990, so 35 years ago, there was no WWW, we had IRC, Gopher, Usenet. It was mainly students/universities and a couple of companies.

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.

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.

(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.

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.

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