I remember Yahooligans and Geocities very fondly. I also remember anxiously awaiting my 13h birthday so I could have my own accounts. Specifically a non-dumbed-down Horseland account that could...
I remember Yahooligans and Geocities very fondly. I also remember anxiously awaiting my 13h birthday so I could have my own accounts. Specifically a non-dumbed-down Horseland account that could message other folks.
You can still recover/revisit some Geocities websites through the WaybackMachine, though it seems like a coin toss as to whether they'll actually be archived.
You can still recover/revisit some Geocities websites through the WaybackMachine, though it seems like a coin toss as to whether they'll actually be archived.
It's seriously ridiculous that no official effort was made to archive and preserve geocities. Unofficial ones were made, but they're not complete. A giant chunk of internet history got wiped out...
It's seriously ridiculous that no official effort was made to archive and preserve geocities. Unofficial ones were made, but they're not complete. A giant chunk of internet history got wiped out because Yahoo couldn't keep a bunch of tiny HTML sites sitting on a server or be bothered to pass the data on to someone who could.
God. Reminds me of when Netflix deleted all user reviews. “Thanks for investing so much of your time to write thoughtful and heartfelt reviews for the benefit of others, but fuck you.”
God. Reminds me of when Netflix deleted all user reviews.
“Thanks for investing so much of your time to write thoughtful and heartfelt reviews for the benefit of others, but fuck you.”
I remember moving into the Hollywood neighbourhood of Geocities back in 1998. Just wish I'd jotted down the exact address now, but it all seemed so transient back then. Pretty sure my lot number...
I remember moving into the Hollywood neighbourhood of Geocities back in 1998. Just wish I'd jotted down the exact address now, but it all seemed so transient back then. Pretty sure my lot number was 1994...
Got myself the visitor counter, link to CDNow and connected to a few rings. All so I could transcribe the dialogue from my favourite spoof films like Naked Gun 2½ onto a black background with yellow text for the world to read! Bliss.
Long before the internet was available to me, I had something called teletext. It was, as the name implies, entirely text-based. There was no independent service provider, your computer called the...
Long before the internet was available to me, I had something called teletext. It was, as the name implies, entirely text-based. There was no independent service provider, your computer called the telecom company directly and it was not cheap. There were other features I don't remember anymore because I never used them, the only thing we kids cared about was the "video chat". I can't remember what I talked about with people, probably the zeitgeist of the time... maybe The Goonies, or Tim Burton's Batman.
My sister is younger than me, but was a bit precocious for her age and had an interest in meeting boys. When one of them called our landline asking for "Demi Moore", I realized that was her nickname on the chat. We were all so young, how could a dude believe her name really was "Demi Moore"?
Now for the actual internet, my memory is fuzzier. I remember visiting a relative's place of work and they had dozens of terminals, and he explained to me that they were connected to a central machine and that central machine gave them access to the internet. According to him, that was highly efficient and, in the future, you wouldn't need to buy a whole computer, just a terminal. I thought that was so awesome!
I'm not sure why, but our computer came with something called "Compuserve", which was supposed to give internet access or something like that. I figure it only worked in the US. I read about BBSs and felt so jealous. I didn't have any idea how to get on something like that.
When I finally got internet, years later, Trumpet Winsock's"music" was like the most beautiful and joyful sound for me.
mIRC was a big deal, met quite a few people in real life because of it, and had some crazy experiences as well. Me and my friend's main IRC channel was for the local metal music scene. Interesting crowd, to say the least. IRC was a driving force in my life that made me get out of my shell and socialize. To this day, I don't think I ever "hooked up" without some element of digital assistance. My dating life was online almost 30 years before Tinder.
So many stories. I miss those times so much it hurts sometimes.
We all stayed up for as long as we could because after midnight we didn't pay for the call. Internet during the day was so expensive it could easily make our parents have a nervous breakdown.
When The Matrix came out, it was like a documentary about how we saw ourselves. A friend of mine used to say "I didn't sleep at all last night, I was in The Matrix lol".
I was part of a few email groups, that was my "social media". One for The X-Files, another for fiction writing, one for skepticism, and another for religion. Even under 13, talking with 40-year-olds was a regular occurrence, didn't even register as something out of the ordinary. Now, when I think about how kids are exposed online, I realize how lucky I was that was never the target of anything bad.
At first, there were no search engines because there was not enough useful internet to require them. We had curated lists of websites, made by people. It was certainly interesting to see websites like AltaVista and Lycos come along, and remember a time when Google was just one option among many. Or watching videos on 240p on a YouTube that didn't belong to Google.
One day my friend took the keyboard of out my hands and asked all my PVTs (private chats) on IRC if they liked rice. That is the kind of silly harmless thing we used to do. And yeah, it turns out everyone likes rice.
My first encounter with the internet was through my dad's work, in the early 90s. He taught at a university for a few years, and I would occasionally get to tag along (I was 10-12yr old) and play...
My first encounter with the internet was through my dad's work, in the early 90s. He taught at a university for a few years, and I would occasionally get to tag along (I was 10-12yr old) and play with the computer in his office or one of the labs. One of the earliest things I remember doing was trying to find more information on fractals and the really need pictures that you could create with math I didn't understand. I remember finding a site that had huge! (like 640x480!!) resolution pictures. By they were in a weird format called ... JPG. And Netscape Navigator at the time didn't know how to read a JPG file, so I had to download a separate program to view them.
We got dialup at home sometime in the early to mid 90s. I remember using AltaVista to try and find new free games to play (hey, remember shareware?!). Eventually I spent a lot of time on Battle.net via Starcraft, which was one of the first (if not the actual first) online games I ever played.
Learning how to search using google in the 90s. Back when it was just colored letters and a text input I think around '97, as I was in the 3rd grade. Doing online research for a science project...
Learning how to search using google in the 90s. Back when it was just colored letters and a text input I think around '97, as I was in the 3rd grade.
Doing online research for a science project about acoustics in 5th grade was a blast, using the Internet to find cool sites that contained the info I needed, also on dialup.
Playing Runescape on a dialup connection with a phone-call interruptor around '03/'04? (my mom was, and still is, an apartment manager, calls > gaming, but we had plenty of offline stuff), and flash games for the few years before.
The transition to DSL which was amazing despite it cutting out at 7PM every night for a few minutes.
I’m an 00s kid. My dad got a desktop computer. I was elementary school age. Maybe like 5, give or take. I would use Microsoft Paint and Word and some of the games that were on there. I vaguely...
I’m an 00s kid. My dad got a desktop computer. I was elementary school age. Maybe like 5, give or take. I would use Microsoft Paint and Word and some of the games that were on there. I vaguely remember seeing the icon for the web browser, but, and my mom refutes this, I was told that didn’t work and that we didn’t have internet. Years later I would learn that we did actually have a dial-up they just lied to me because they didn’t want me using the internet.
I think in school they started letting us use computers in 3rd grade. And I only remember using coolmathgames and addicting games (which for some reason was not blocked).
I’m just now realizing how screwed up my memories are, because at some point my dad bought a laptop but I don’t know when. It was big and chunky, and we still didn’t have wi-fi. I remember my sister teaching me how to use internet explorer and going on YouTube. One of the first things I watched on YouTube was a Chris Brown music video for whatever song of his was popular at the time. I also watched early nigahiga videos that were titled “How to be Nerd” and other variations of that.
I didn’t really get deep into internet stuff until I was 10 and my parents bought me a cheap laptop. This was in order for me to do homework since school was already requiring stuff to be typed up and there were some other online components also being introduced. I remember spending most of the “free time” I had on YouTube. Watching really anything.
I then learned about limewire and started downloading movies. I never really interacted with people online. I never really did social media (Myspace and then a few years later Facebook I just never got into it). I had no idea that communities could even exist online.
In middle school I had a friend introduce me to 9gag. I started playing Xbox online but my mom was convinced someone would kidnap me so that didn’t last long. In high school, considering I went to a primarily white high school, I was introduced to Reddit and 4chan. And from then on its history.
The first time I used the internet, it was all usenet and IRC at this girl's house. Shortly after, we had a trial with a local ISP and I got to looking up COOL CARS and whatever dumb crap. Anyway,...
The first time I used the internet, it was all usenet and IRC at this girl's house.
Shortly after, we had a trial with a local ISP and I got to looking up COOL CARS and whatever dumb crap. Anyway, I stumbled onto some site with a bunch of video that was taking forever to load. I figured it was going to be COOL CAR VIDEOS, but after I got my parents to show them how amazing the internet is, the video turned out to be a man sitting on a chair masturbating.
The video was such poor quality that it wasn't totally clear what it was.. until it was.
I think it was around 1994 when my parents signed us up for AOL with our 2400 baud modem. It was mostly a walled garden in those days, there were newsgroups I was too young to understand or...
I think it was around 1994 when my parents signed us up for AOL with our 2400 baud modem. It was mostly a walled garden in those days, there were newsgroups I was too young to understand or appreciate. I spent a bunch of time kicking around the Kids Only area, keyword Nickelodeon, and downloading Mac shareware games. I got into a lot of old-school text adventures and World Builder games, those ignited my interest in programming. I remember a ton of ridiculous screensavers and stupid "kill Barney" desktop toy things, it was an interesting time.
I did a small bit of chatting but was mostly underwhelmed (or maybe intimidated) by that scene. I did briefly penpal with I kid my age I met on there whose grandparents happened to live in the town I was in, and we were able to meet up IRL when he came to visit. I remember searching AOL's member directory for "famous" people using their real names and IMing a few of them. The ones that notably responded to me were Craig Hickman, the creator of Kid Pix, and Ray Dunakin, the creator of the most highly-regarded games in the mostly-unknown World Builder universe. I have eclectic tastes in celebrities, haha. But chatting with them really cemented the idea that programmers were relatable and creative cool people.
Later on AOL opened up and provided their own web browser to access the greater internet, and I quickly found I could just run Netscape and skip the AOL stuff altogether. Though by that point IIRC I was into a couple MUDs that ran through AOL so I kept using it for that. Eventually they started monetizing access so I moved on and discovered telnet and some fun free MUDs and MUSHes I could access through there.
My mom learned that the local community college opened their computer lab to the public so she would drop me off for a few hours once a week to surf on their blazing fast connection. I can't recall if it was ISDN or T1, but I remember being blown away at the (relatively, nearly) instant speed pages would load at. Like 5 seconds, down from a minute or longer at home. Of course I didn't know what to do with it. I spent a bunch of time typing random company names I knew of, and appending .com just to see if they were "online yet." I remember being particularly impressed with the McDonald's site. There were lots of "Best of the Web" lists and webpage award sites back in those days. I'd crawl through them seeing what looked interesting. I remember being impressed by MIT's coffee cam and some other similar things like Jennicam. You'd only get a new tiny, grainy image every 60 seconds or so but the anticipation of seeing something happening more-or-less right now on another part of the planet was always exciting. In those days Yahoo hand-curated a categorized directory of websites which was a great way to find new stuff.
Not to turn a "first memory" post into a "whole life story" post but things really kicked into gear for me when I got on Geocities. Actually, that along with Tripod and AOL Member Pages. Each service offered a certain amount of file storage for free so by dividing my site among the three of them I could host triple the content! The problems of cross-domain requests weren't exactly on my radar at the time. Unfortunately this structure made it unarchivable by the Wayback Machine, which only captured a few pages full of broken images and links, and the rest is lost to time. It's probably better that way.
Couple of memories come to mind: Seeing the Prodigy icon on our family computer and asking my mom what it was and being told not to click it (so I didn't) Spending a lot of time on Blackberry...
Couple of memories come to mind:
Seeing the Prodigy icon on our family computer and asking my mom what it was and being told not to click it (so I didn't)
Spending a lot of time on Blackberry Creek, which was a big user-submitted web comic site back in the day. All of it was very obviously created in MSPaint, and I'm sure a ton of it went over my head.
Somehow managing to get my hands on Gameboy emulation without getting a virus. I had no concept of what emulation or roms were, just that this random .exe let me play Pokemon Yellow (I guess the emu and rom were bundled somehow). Which was HUGE for me because my parents were very much so in the "Pokemon is evil" camp, which meant I couldn't have owned a copy as a kid. But I could very easily hide the emulator in a folder somewhere and play the game on the computer when my parents weren't in the room.
I somehow found my way to the World Industries (the skateboarding company) website where they had a chat room. I quickly grouped up with some guy and started "the ban squad" where we'd just randomly ban people because the moderation tools were open to everyone for some reason. I got bored of it after a day or so, but for some reason "the ban squad" is etched into my mind.
Woah! I did the College for Kids thing at UW Parkside in '80 or '81, at 13-ish, did horribly, but got a permanent UW library card out of it, which gave me grown-up access to the biggest library...
Woah! I did the College for Kids thing at UW Parkside in '80 or '81, at 13-ish, did horribly, but got a permanent UW library card out of it, which gave me grown-up access to the biggest library I'd ever seen, 5 stories, each story bigger than the main Kenosha public library.
And full access to the computer lab in the basement. I lived down there for 4-5 years.
I'm about as old as the term "Web 2.0" and most of my memories of this sort come from YouTube and Flash games. I recall watching Gummy Bear as a toddler (by far my oldest web-related memory) and...
I'm about as old as the term "Web 2.0" and most of my memories of this sort come from YouTube and Flash games.
I recall watching Gummy Bear as a toddler (by far my oldest web-related memory) and "Tha Cliff" as a kid. I recall playing these flash games and watching videos of Doodie man and Turbo Dismount as a kid (among other things, also go figure.)
I had just started my career as a multimedia designer for a large company and we were excited that they were getting a T1 line run to the campus. If I remember correctly we were able to dial into...
I had just started my career as a multimedia designer for a large company and we were excited that they were getting a T1 line run to the campus. If I remember correctly we were able to dial into their ISP from home, but that didn't last long. I got my first ISP access account (which I still have and use) and started teaching myself to code webpages in a text editor. I was so excited that a webpage design was not static like a printed page, but could be changed and improved as I learned more. I remember learning how to make and optimize animated gifs from videos. I remember BBEdit, Myrmidon, PageMill and then Dreamweaver. I remember feeling like I was part of this small community figuring out how the web would look and work.
The black magic of trying to wrangle a stable connection out of endless wi-fi boosters and coils of ethernet cable running around the concrete walls of our apartment, the hideous dial-up sound,...
The black magic of trying to wrangle a stable connection out of endless wi-fi boosters and coils of ethernet cable running around the concrete walls of our apartment, the hideous dial-up sound, and probably the Flash-animated joys of Neopets and Stickdeath.com.
I think my first memory of the Internet as a thing-that-exists was hearing the sound of my parents' dial-up modem around the time I was in second grade. I was in a typing class at my school at...
I think my first memory of the Internet as a thing-that-exists was hearing the sound of my parents' dial-up modem around the time I was in second grade. I was in a typing class at my school at around the same time, and played some games on the house's old Mac (still had a floppy drive!), but I don't think I got on the internet at home or at school.
My first memories of actually using the internet likely came around the time I was in sixth grade, though I don't doubt I used it some at school before then. It was around that time that I would use library computers to play the flash games on Cartoon Network's website. I would get an email address shortly thereafter (Yahoo! first, and later Gmail), and for many years I was a prolific and dedicated email correspondent. The bulk of my Internet use for much of my childhood was email and GameFAQs.com, which supplanted my earlier addiction to Prima's Official Strategy Guides (which I would often get for games I didn't even have!).
First time seeing someone use the internet: my dad connecting via Prodigy and seeing those crude ASCII-UIs First time I used the internet. My dad let me use AOL IM and someone immediately wanted...
First time seeing someone use the internet: my dad connecting via Prodigy and seeing those crude ASCII-UIs
First time I used the internet. My dad let me use AOL IM and someone immediately wanted to chat with me within seconds of connecting to a chat room and I chickened out
I got VERY addicted to Yahoo Hearts; thought our connection wasn't good enough for anything more complex (plus dad wouldn't buy me any video games in which I could kill other people, so no Quake)
First time connecting to the internet unsupervised... still too chicken to just look up pornography, just visited garfield.com, foxtrot.com (i think it was), read archives of my favorite comics and visited movie websites like the one for The Iron Giant in which you have to piece him back together.
First time playing a FPS multiplayer game: Half Life 1 DM and shitting my pants that a walking avatar was moving around the map representing someone else (and they'd constantly kill me but i didn't care 'cause i was very excited)
First experience was early to mid nineties using altavista to maybe find something relevant to my interests under the guise of needing it for some homework at the local library. Due to my mother's...
First experience was early to mid nineties using altavista to maybe find something relevant to my interests under the guise of needing it for some homework at the local library.
Due to my mother's job as a researcher we got a 56 kbps dialup at home soon enough. Her home office and 486 computer were located in a quiet corner of our living room and I remember pressing a bunch of pillows on top of that noisy US Robotics modem while logging in on early Sunday mornings trying to connect to the html-(inline CSS)-enabled chatroom at mtve.com.
While chatting we figured out how to change the font to Wingdings, change text color (nothing beats lime) and use sub- and superscript to make your texts really swinging, did I mention: <marquee behavior="alternate">.
Of course things really went downhill when everyone caught on and a bunch of trolls decided to spam chat without closing </> tags turning the whole chatroom in a scrolling, seizure inducing bunch of gibberish. I was 14 and loved it.
IRC in the mid 90s. Didn't know what the web was, but a friend showed IRC to me and said he was chatting to someone from an island he made friends with. Soon I pestered my parents to get me "the...
IRC in the mid 90s. Didn't know what the web was, but a friend showed IRC to me and said he was chatting to someone from an island he made friends with. Soon I pestered my parents to get me "the internet" too (incredibly expensive and slow dial-up). Our country's sole ISP+universities IRC network had, like, 200 users! So many!
Later my friend's online acquaintance claimed to be our age (way too young to be online, by the way) and told us what he claimed was his real name. Many years later during a brief period during which both myself and this childhood friend happened to be studying in the same university campus, I happened to notice our first IRC friend's name on the intranet's list of users. I messaged him, dropped a few hints, it was the same person! I checked with my childhood friend and he said he'd also noticed and had met the guy. But I was way too anxious and depressed at the time so I never tried to get reacquainted myself.
When all of this was new, you were either already a part of the scene by occupation or you had to know a guy. You'd bust out the phonebook and find an ISP with a local number and get to writing a...
When all of this was new, you were either already a part of the scene by occupation or you had to know a guy.
You'd bust out the phonebook and find an ISP with a local number and get to writing a PPP script, because AT commands felt outdated now. AOL, Prodigy, and Compuserve nearly killed the BBS scene anyway. Still, those are fond memories of an even older era. Regardless of when you started the screech of a modem instantly settled you into your happy place. You'd get it all working and then your mom would pick up the phone.
You'd explore the early, almost entirely ad-free web. Websites were super simple; writing HTML was akin to voodoo to nearly everyone around you, and you could get a job designing websites just by walking into an ISP office and declaring you could do so - and they would pay you, oftentimes a lot. No one cared if the site you slapped together didn't work on Mosaic because they already forget it existed.
mIRC was good. BitchX was great. EPIC+LiCe was my personal favorite. IRC was life. There was a learning curve just to get online, and so you instantly had that one thing in common with everyone you met there. There was a culture, and it was better. I'll die on that hill. Get you a bouncer and a fancy vanity vhost and you were looking the part. A/S/L?
After a while you'd wait to upgrade your rig, but you couldn't go to the store and just buy computer parts. Nah, you'd have an annual membership to a traveling computer show that'd set up shop in a local hotel or event space for a weekend and buy your gear there. Eventually you'd become blind to the color beige, but you'd have enough Slackware disks to tile a floor.
Eventually there was DOOM. I had a registered copy of PK-ZIP. I never liked Winamp. I lost years of my life writing TCL scripts for Eggdrop. I love every one of those statements.
And then the marketing people showed up.
I'm certain I won't experience a similar period of wonderment, engagement, and awe in my remaining lifetime.
Like many others, staying up late to wait for the dialup fee to go down, and the sound of beep-bop-be-bop-be-bop Waiting for more than five minutes for a single mp3 file to finish downloading...
Like many others, staying up late to wait for the dialup fee to go down, and the sound of beep-bop-be-bop-be-bop
Waiting for more than five minutes for a single mp3 file to finish downloading
Becoming a regular in a cgi chat room of a website about a pet simulation game that I'd wanted to play forever. I was something like ten or twelve at the time, and I think a lot of the regulars were much older. We expanded to IRC some time later
Watching Netscape's throbber twinkle and flash
General sense of excitement, adventure, community, and discovery
Trumpet Winsock. Archie. FTP bin/asc mode. Hash off for long downloads. Retrieving Chemistry 101 materials via Gopher. Eudora email. Slackware installs via floppy. Suddenly being able to talk...
Trumpet Winsock.
Archie.
FTP bin/asc mode. Hash off for long downloads.
Retrieving Chemistry 101 materials via Gopher.
Eudora email.
Slackware installs via floppy.
Suddenly being able to talk (chat) instantly, freely, with a high-school friend living across the country when long-distance phone calls were still charged (a lot!) by the minute.
Someone down the hall briefly mirrored the Linux kernel from their dorm room. I think IT had a talk with them.
Campus-wide games of Descent
Downloading lewds over translatlantic cables from ftp.funet.fi, several minutes per 10-100kb file.
Usenet. Oh, usenet sigh.
UNC Sunsite! Reading the description of every single source package archived there, and trying to compile anything that looked interesting.
MUDs.
Failing to get my parents to invest in some short domain names when .com registrations opened up.
PPP/SLIP
RealAudio
I'm also an early 00s kid. Both my parents were programmers, so I grew up with computers and the kind of programming language books that would have random illustrations of animals on them. I...
I'm also an early 00s kid. Both my parents were programmers, so I grew up with computers and the kind of programming language books that would have random illustrations of animals on them.
I remember...
Dial up and then later, oooh, aaah, DSL
Slowly downloading Sims 1 custom furniture off fan sites
Pirating music and movies off Limewire
Playing flash games on Miniclip and Original
Being on Habbo Hotel
Playing Runescape
Using MySpace and Friendster
My first dip into programming was using Macromedia Dreamweaver and building MySpace themes. Eventually I learned Javascript and PHP.
I remember when Web Standards were a hot topic, and jQuery was new and shiny.
Building my first site using some crappy web host and an FTP client to upload some static HTML files
Building some gaming clan forums using phpBB
Being on TheGYC.com — The Gay Youth Corner — an early social network site for gay teens. It allowed me to explore my queer sexuality as a teen in a semi-safe* space. (Semi-space because there were apparently some predators who would groom children, which is why it eventually shut down. But I personally didn't experience any grooming.)
There used to be these things called Cyber Café (do they still exist?). I used to visit there often to check my Yahoo Mail and then visit these awesome things called websites that typically...
There used to be these things called Cyber Café (do they still exist?). I used to visit there often to check my Yahoo Mail and then visit these awesome things called websites that typically started with the letters "www". This used to happen with a program called Internet Explorer (with a large blue "e" icon). I vaguely recall that I was more fond of the Yahoo Search engine in those early days than Google, don't remember the reason though.
I think the first thing I really remember was playing browser games on Lego.com (shoutouts to Junkbot, Backlot, and the Mata Nui Online Game in particular). From there it was probably Miniclip...
I think the first thing I really remember was playing browser games on Lego.com (shoutouts to Junkbot, Backlot, and the Mata Nui Online Game in particular). From there it was probably Miniclip (and therefore Runescape). The first notable community for me was a fan forum for the Animorphs book series, and that was the most formative experience of my early-internet times. I've made some incredible friends there.
First time my school had PCs with monochromatic displays. Our teacher showed us the internet thing on his new PC with colored display. I did not know what he was talking about, stuff about...
First time my school had PCs with monochromatic displays. Our teacher showed us the internet thing on his new PC with colored display. I did not know what he was talking about, stuff about Hotmail, Netscape and Yahoo. But the wow moment was he said he could find anything, we asked Dragon Ball and the search result spoiled us Dragon Ball Z arc and Goku died.
Later that time my second PC was an Intel Pentium, the only kid with CD burner, and dial-up internet. The cool stuff was Netscape/IE/Opera, Real Time Player, ICQ, Windows 98, Encarta, Yahoo, Altavista, Astalavista, Geocities, Hotmail.
My father was a technophile and while he couldn’t ever afford the nicest gadgets we did have early access to the internet. We actually had access before I could reliably read so I didn’t care much...
My father was a technophile and while he couldn’t ever afford the nicest gadgets we did have early access to the internet. We actually had access before I could reliably read so I didn’t care much for it. It didn’t help that my father didn’t want me going there on my own (not so much for content but for the expense). When my reading was better I enjoyed going into Microsoft Comic Chat because that was even more forbidden.
We were also early adopters of broadband internet when we got a cable modem. That was when the internet was actually becoming useful because it didn’t take long to download things and it didn’t inconvenience anyone because it didn’t take up the phone.
First time I ever saw the internet was via a home-made radio link at my dad's friend's house. 150 baud connection to his friend's house a few miles away and if his friend had his modem connected,...
First time I ever saw the internet was via a home-made radio link at my dad's friend's house. 150 baud connection to his friend's house a few miles away and if his friend had his modem connected, you could get out to the internet. Well, email/usenet, maybe try to load a bulletin board if the wind was in the right direction and you were feeling lucky. Green on black, text-only display with a few tens of pixels here and there. But it was jolly exciting, even if I didn't really understand what was happening.
A little later when we got a new PC with colour graphics and a modem at home, I signed up for a free hotmail account before Microsoft bought them and I still use that address to this day. I remember spending a lot of time on BBSs and USEnet. Not exclusively (and very slowly) downloading porn. But certainly for a 16 year old that was what I considered an important use of my time.
Even later again, I remember a friend telling me about a new kind of search engine that was supposed to be even better than AltaVista. You could find it at google.stanford.edu
I remember Yahooligans and Geocities very fondly. I also remember anxiously awaiting my 13h birthday so I could have my own accounts. Specifically a non-dumbed-down Horseland account that could message other folks.
You can still recover/revisit some Geocities websites through the WaybackMachine, though it seems like a coin toss as to whether they'll actually be archived.
It's seriously ridiculous that no official effort was made to archive and preserve geocities. Unofficial ones were made, but they're not complete. A giant chunk of internet history got wiped out because Yahoo couldn't keep a bunch of tiny HTML sites sitting on a server or be bothered to pass the data on to someone who could.
God. Reminds me of when Netflix deleted all user reviews.
“Thanks for investing so much of your time to write thoughtful and heartfelt reviews for the benefit of others, but fuck you.”
IMDB did something like that. There used to be threads on profiles of performers, directors, etc. It was great.
I remember moving into the Hollywood neighbourhood of Geocities back in 1998. Just wish I'd jotted down the exact address now, but it all seemed so transient back then. Pretty sure my lot number was 1994...
Got myself the visitor counter, link to CDNow and connected to a few rings. All so I could transcribe the dialogue from my favourite spoof films like Naked Gun 2½ onto a black background with yellow text for the world to read! Bliss.
It's quite possible that your transcription is still alive in one the many movie scripts/transcription websites.
And Naked Gun 2.5 was solid!
Long before the internet was available to me, I had something called teletext. It was, as the name implies, entirely text-based. There was no independent service provider, your computer called the telecom company directly and it was not cheap. There were other features I don't remember anymore because I never used them, the only thing we kids cared about was the "video chat". I can't remember what I talked about with people, probably the zeitgeist of the time... maybe The Goonies, or Tim Burton's Batman.
My sister is younger than me, but was a bit precocious for her age and had an interest in meeting boys. When one of them called our landline asking for "Demi Moore", I realized that was her nickname on the chat. We were all so young, how could a dude believe her name really was "Demi Moore"?
Now for the actual internet, my memory is fuzzier. I remember visiting a relative's place of work and they had dozens of terminals, and he explained to me that they were connected to a central machine and that central machine gave them access to the internet. According to him, that was highly efficient and, in the future, you wouldn't need to buy a whole computer, just a terminal. I thought that was so awesome!
I'm not sure why, but our computer came with something called "Compuserve", which was supposed to give internet access or something like that. I figure it only worked in the US. I read about BBSs and felt so jealous. I didn't have any idea how to get on something like that.
When I finally got internet, years later, Trumpet Winsock's "music" was like the most beautiful and joyful sound for me.
mIRC was a big deal, met quite a few people in real life because of it, and had some crazy experiences as well. Me and my friend's main IRC channel was for the local metal music scene. Interesting crowd, to say the least. IRC was a driving force in my life that made me get out of my shell and socialize. To this day, I don't think I ever "hooked up" without some element of digital assistance. My dating life was online almost 30 years before Tinder.
So many stories. I miss those times so much it hurts sometimes.
We all stayed up for as long as we could because after midnight we didn't pay for the call. Internet during the day was so expensive it could easily make our parents have a nervous breakdown.
When The Matrix came out, it was like a documentary about how we saw ourselves. A friend of mine used to say "I didn't sleep at all last night, I was in The Matrix lol".
I was part of a few email groups, that was my "social media". One for The X-Files, another for fiction writing, one for skepticism, and another for religion. Even under 13, talking with 40-year-olds was a regular occurrence, didn't even register as something out of the ordinary. Now, when I think about how kids are exposed online, I realize how lucky I was that was never the target of anything bad.
At first, there were no search engines because there was not enough useful internet to require them. We had curated lists of websites, made by people. It was certainly interesting to see websites like AltaVista and Lycos come along, and remember a time when Google was just one option among many. Or watching videos on 240p on a YouTube that didn't belong to Google.
One day my friend took the keyboard of out my hands and asked all my PVTs (private chats) on IRC if they liked rice. That is the kind of silly harmless thing we used to do. And yeah, it turns out everyone likes rice.
My first encounter with the internet was through my dad's work, in the early 90s. He taught at a university for a few years, and I would occasionally get to tag along (I was 10-12yr old) and play with the computer in his office or one of the labs. One of the earliest things I remember doing was trying to find more information on fractals and the really need pictures that you could create with math I didn't understand. I remember finding a site that had huge! (like 640x480!!) resolution pictures. By they were in a weird format called ... JPG. And Netscape Navigator at the time didn't know how to read a JPG file, so I had to download a separate program to view them.
We got dialup at home sometime in the early to mid 90s. I remember using AltaVista to try and find new free games to play (hey, remember shareware?!). Eventually I spent a lot of time on Battle.net via Starcraft, which was one of the first (if not the actual first) online games I ever played.
I remember thinking I had it good when I went to 800x600, and then my friend got 1024x600 and I was like "woah, slow down! too many pixels!"
Learning how to search using google in the 90s. Back when it was just colored letters and a text input I think around '97, as I was in the 3rd grade.
Doing online research for a science project about acoustics in 5th grade was a blast, using the Internet to find cool sites that contained the info I needed, also on dialup.
Playing Runescape on a dialup connection with a phone-call interruptor around '03/'04? (my mom was, and still is, an apartment manager, calls > gaming, but we had plenty of offline stuff), and flash games for the few years before.
The transition to DSL which was amazing despite it cutting out at 7PM every night for a few minutes.
I’m an 00s kid. My dad got a desktop computer. I was elementary school age. Maybe like 5, give or take. I would use Microsoft Paint and Word and some of the games that were on there. I vaguely remember seeing the icon for the web browser, but, and my mom refutes this, I was told that didn’t work and that we didn’t have internet. Years later I would learn that we did actually have a dial-up they just lied to me because they didn’t want me using the internet.
I think in school they started letting us use computers in 3rd grade. And I only remember using coolmathgames and addicting games (which for some reason was not blocked).
I’m just now realizing how screwed up my memories are, because at some point my dad bought a laptop but I don’t know when. It was big and chunky, and we still didn’t have wi-fi. I remember my sister teaching me how to use internet explorer and going on YouTube. One of the first things I watched on YouTube was a Chris Brown music video for whatever song of his was popular at the time. I also watched early nigahiga videos that were titled “How to be Nerd” and other variations of that.
I didn’t really get deep into internet stuff until I was 10 and my parents bought me a cheap laptop. This was in order for me to do homework since school was already requiring stuff to be typed up and there were some other online components also being introduced. I remember spending most of the “free time” I had on YouTube. Watching really anything.
I then learned about limewire and started downloading movies. I never really interacted with people online. I never really did social media (Myspace and then a few years later Facebook I just never got into it). I had no idea that communities could even exist online.
In middle school I had a friend introduce me to 9gag. I started playing Xbox online but my mom was convinced someone would kidnap me so that didn’t last long. In high school, considering I went to a primarily white high school, I was introduced to Reddit and 4chan. And from then on its history.
The first time I used the internet, it was all usenet and IRC at this girl's house.
Shortly after, we had a trial with a local ISP and I got to looking up COOL CARS and whatever dumb crap. Anyway, I stumbled onto some site with a bunch of video that was taking forever to load. I figured it was going to be COOL CAR VIDEOS, but after I got my parents to show them how amazing the internet is, the video turned out to be a man sitting on a chair masturbating.
The video was such poor quality that it wasn't totally clear what it was.. until it was.
I think it was around 1994 when my parents signed us up for AOL with our 2400 baud modem. It was mostly a walled garden in those days, there were newsgroups I was too young to understand or appreciate. I spent a bunch of time kicking around the Kids Only area, keyword
Nickelodeon, and downloading Mac shareware games. I got into a lot of old-school text adventures and World Builder games, those ignited my interest in programming. I remember a ton of ridiculous screensavers and stupid "kill Barney" desktop toy things, it was an interesting time.I did a small bit of chatting but was mostly underwhelmed (or maybe intimidated) by that scene. I did briefly penpal with I kid my age I met on there whose grandparents happened to live in the town I was in, and we were able to meet up IRL when he came to visit. I remember searching AOL's member directory for "famous" people using their real names and IMing a few of them. The ones that notably responded to me were Craig Hickman, the creator of Kid Pix, and Ray Dunakin, the creator of the most highly-regarded games in the mostly-unknown World Builder universe. I have eclectic tastes in celebrities, haha. But chatting with them really cemented the idea that programmers were relatable and creative cool people.
Later on AOL opened up and provided their own web browser to access the greater internet, and I quickly found I could just run Netscape and skip the AOL stuff altogether. Though by that point IIRC I was into a couple MUDs that ran through AOL so I kept using it for that. Eventually they started monetizing access so I moved on and discovered telnet and some fun free MUDs and MUSHes I could access through there.
My mom learned that the local community college opened their computer lab to the public so she would drop me off for a few hours once a week to surf on their blazing fast connection. I can't recall if it was ISDN or T1, but I remember being blown away at the (relatively, nearly) instant speed pages would load at. Like 5 seconds, down from a minute or longer at home. Of course I didn't know what to do with it. I spent a bunch of time typing random company names I knew of, and appending
.comjust to see if they were "online yet." I remember being particularly impressed with the McDonald's site. There were lots of "Best of the Web" lists and webpage award sites back in those days. I'd crawl through them seeing what looked interesting. I remember being impressed by MIT's coffee cam and some other similar things like Jennicam. You'd only get a new tiny, grainy image every 60 seconds or so but the anticipation of seeing something happening more-or-less right now on another part of the planet was always exciting. In those days Yahoo hand-curated a categorized directory of websites which was a great way to find new stuff.Not to turn a "first memory" post into a "whole life story" post but things really kicked into gear for me when I got on Geocities. Actually, that along with Tripod and AOL Member Pages. Each service offered a certain amount of file storage for free so by dividing my site among the three of them I could host triple the content! The problems of cross-domain requests weren't exactly on my radar at the time. Unfortunately this structure made it unarchivable by the Wayback Machine, which only captured a few pages full of broken images and links, and the rest is lost to time. It's probably better that way.
Couple of memories come to mind:
College for Kids at University of Wisconsin-Platteville, mid-to-late 90s. Spent the whole time on Yahooligans and Doom fan sites.
Woah! I did the College for Kids thing at UW Parkside in '80 or '81, at 13-ish, did horribly, but got a permanent UW library card out of it, which gave me grown-up access to the biggest library I'd ever seen, 5 stories, each story bigger than the main Kenosha public library.
And full access to the computer lab in the basement. I lived down there for 4-5 years.
I'm about as old as the term "Web 2.0" and most of my memories of this sort come from YouTube and Flash games.
I recall watching Gummy Bear as a toddler (by far my oldest web-related memory) and "Tha Cliff" as a kid. I recall playing these flash games and watching videos of Doodie man and Turbo Dismount as a kid (among other things, also go figure.)
I had just started my career as a multimedia designer for a large company and we were excited that they were getting a T1 line run to the campus. If I remember correctly we were able to dial into their ISP from home, but that didn't last long. I got my first ISP access account (which I still have and use) and started teaching myself to code webpages in a text editor. I was so excited that a webpage design was not static like a printed page, but could be changed and improved as I learned more. I remember learning how to make and optimize animated gifs from videos. I remember BBEdit, Myrmidon, PageMill and then Dreamweaver. I remember feeling like I was part of this small community figuring out how the web would look and work.
The black magic of trying to wrangle a stable connection out of endless wi-fi boosters and coils of ethernet cable running around the concrete walls of our apartment, the hideous dial-up sound, and probably the Flash-animated joys of Neopets and Stickdeath.com.
I think my first memory of the Internet as a thing-that-exists was hearing the sound of my parents' dial-up modem around the time I was in second grade. I was in a typing class at my school at around the same time, and played some games on the house's old Mac (still had a floppy drive!), but I don't think I got on the internet at home or at school.
My first memories of actually using the internet likely came around the time I was in sixth grade, though I don't doubt I used it some at school before then. It was around that time that I would use library computers to play the flash games on Cartoon Network's website. I would get an email address shortly thereafter (Yahoo! first, and later Gmail), and for many years I was a prolific and dedicated email correspondent. The bulk of my Internet use for much of my childhood was email and GameFAQs.com, which supplanted my earlier addiction to Prima's Official Strategy Guides (which I would often get for games I didn't even have!).
First experience was early to mid nineties using altavista to maybe find something relevant to my interests under the guise of needing it for some homework at the local library.
Due to my mother's job as a researcher we got a 56 kbps dialup at home soon enough. Her home office and 486 computer were located in a quiet corner of our living room and I remember pressing a bunch of pillows on top of that noisy US Robotics modem while logging in on early Sunday mornings trying to connect to the html-(inline CSS)-enabled chatroom at mtve.com.
While chatting we figured out how to change the font to Wingdings, change text color (nothing beats lime) and use sub- and superscript to make your texts really swinging, did I mention: <marquee behavior="alternate">.
Of course things really went downhill when everyone caught on and a bunch of trolls decided to spam chat without closing </> tags turning the whole chatroom in a scrolling, seizure inducing bunch of gibberish. I was 14 and loved it.
IRC in the mid 90s. Didn't know what the web was, but a friend showed IRC to me and said he was chatting to someone from an island he made friends with. Soon I pestered my parents to get me "the internet" too (incredibly expensive and slow dial-up). Our country's sole ISP+universities IRC network had, like, 200 users! So many!
Later my friend's online acquaintance claimed to be our age (way too young to be online, by the way) and told us what he claimed was his real name. Many years later during a brief period during which both myself and this childhood friend happened to be studying in the same university campus, I happened to notice our first IRC friend's name on the intranet's list of users. I messaged him, dropped a few hints, it was the same person! I checked with my childhood friend and he said he'd also noticed and had met the guy. But I was way too anxious and depressed at the time so I never tried to get reacquainted myself.
When all of this was new, you were either already a part of the scene by occupation or you had to know a guy.
You'd bust out the phonebook and find an ISP with a local number and get to writing a PPP script, because AT commands felt outdated now. AOL, Prodigy, and Compuserve nearly killed the BBS scene anyway. Still, those are fond memories of an even older era. Regardless of when you started the screech of a modem instantly settled you into your happy place. You'd get it all working and then your mom would pick up the phone.
You'd explore the early, almost entirely ad-free web. Websites were super simple; writing HTML was akin to voodoo to nearly everyone around you, and you could get a job designing websites just by walking into an ISP office and declaring you could do so - and they would pay you, oftentimes a lot. No one cared if the site you slapped together didn't work on Mosaic because they already forget it existed.
mIRC was good. BitchX was great. EPIC+LiCe was my personal favorite. IRC was life. There was a learning curve just to get online, and so you instantly had that one thing in common with everyone you met there. There was a culture, and it was better. I'll die on that hill. Get you a bouncer and a fancy vanity vhost and you were looking the part. A/S/L?
After a while you'd wait to upgrade your rig, but you couldn't go to the store and just buy computer parts. Nah, you'd have an annual membership to a traveling computer show that'd set up shop in a local hotel or event space for a weekend and buy your gear there. Eventually you'd become blind to the color beige, but you'd have enough Slackware disks to tile a floor.
Eventually there was DOOM. I had a registered copy of PK-ZIP. I never liked Winamp. I lost years of my life writing TCL scripts for Eggdrop. I love every one of those statements.
And then the marketing people showed up.
I'm certain I won't experience a similar period of wonderment, engagement, and awe in my remaining lifetime.
Trumpet Winsock.
Archie.
FTP bin/asc mode. Hash off for long downloads.
Retrieving Chemistry 101 materials via Gopher.
Eudora email.
Slackware installs via floppy.
Suddenly being able to talk (chat) instantly, freely, with a high-school friend living across the country when long-distance phone calls were still charged (a lot!) by the minute.
Someone down the hall briefly mirrored the Linux kernel from their dorm room. I think IT had a talk with them.
Campus-wide games of Descent
Downloading lewds over translatlantic cables from ftp.funet.fi, several minutes per 10-100kb file.
Usenet. Oh, usenet sigh.
UNC Sunsite! Reading the description of every single source package archived there, and trying to compile anything that looked interesting.
MUDs.
Failing to get my parents to invest in some short domain names when .com registrations opened up.
PPP/SLIP
RealAudio
I'm also an early 00s kid. Both my parents were programmers, so I grew up with computers and the kind of programming language books that would have random illustrations of animals on them.
I remember...
There used to be these things called Cyber Café (do they still exist?). I used to visit there often to check my Yahoo Mail and then visit these awesome things called websites that typically started with the letters "www". This used to happen with a program called Internet Explorer (with a large blue "e" icon). I vaguely recall that I was more fond of the Yahoo Search engine in those early days than Google, don't remember the reason though.
I think the first thing I really remember was playing browser games on Lego.com (shoutouts to Junkbot, Backlot, and the Mata Nui Online Game in particular). From there it was probably Miniclip (and therefore Runescape). The first notable community for me was a fan forum for the Animorphs book series, and that was the most formative experience of my early-internet times. I've made some incredible friends there.
First time my school had PCs with monochromatic displays. Our teacher showed us the internet thing on his new PC with colored display. I did not know what he was talking about, stuff about Hotmail, Netscape and Yahoo. But the wow moment was he said he could find anything, we asked Dragon Ball and the search result spoiled us Dragon Ball Z arc and Goku died.
Later that time my second PC was an Intel Pentium, the only kid with CD burner, and dial-up internet. The cool stuff was Netscape/IE/Opera, Real Time Player, ICQ, Windows 98, Encarta, Yahoo, Altavista, Astalavista, Geocities, Hotmail.
My father was a technophile and while he couldn’t ever afford the nicest gadgets we did have early access to the internet. We actually had access before I could reliably read so I didn’t care much for it. It didn’t help that my father didn’t want me going there on my own (not so much for content but for the expense). When my reading was better I enjoyed going into Microsoft Comic Chat because that was even more forbidden.
We were also early adopters of broadband internet when we got a cable modem. That was when the internet was actually becoming useful because it didn’t take long to download things and it didn’t inconvenience anyone because it didn’t take up the phone.
First time I ever saw the internet was via a home-made radio link at my dad's friend's house. 150 baud connection to his friend's house a few miles away and if his friend had his modem connected, you could get out to the internet. Well, email/usenet, maybe try to load a bulletin board if the wind was in the right direction and you were feeling lucky. Green on black, text-only display with a few tens of pixels here and there. But it was jolly exciting, even if I didn't really understand what was happening.
A little later when we got a new PC with colour graphics and a modem at home, I signed up for a free hotmail account before Microsoft bought them and I still use that address to this day. I remember spending a lot of time on BBSs and USEnet. Not exclusively (and very slowly) downloading porn. But certainly for a 16 year old that was what I considered an important use of my time.
Even later again, I remember a friend telling me about a new kind of search engine that was supposed to be even better than AltaVista. You could find it at google.stanford.edu