I remember downloading the Hubble Deep Field on our shared family computer, filling up the entire hard drive, and barely even being able to open it. I distinctly remember this because I had to do it multiple times due to people picking up the phone halfway through.

I have older memories of computers (Amiga & Commodore) but this memory was specifically internet related.

I have vague memories of using Prodigy on Windows 3.1 but I don’t remember much beyond the login screen.

My earliest clear memories were of AOL 3.0, during the era when the app didn’t even have a URL bar because they wanted you to used their walled garden “AOL keyword” system. So I’d login, minimize the program, and immediately open Netscape so I could get to the real internet. Didn’t do much online though, other than go to Nick.com to play games.

Didn’t become a full-time internet user until 1998. Probably because that was the first year I went to a school with internet-connected computers in every classroom, where my parents couldn’t restrict my online time.

America Online. Chat rooms. A/S/L? Beware sexual predators.

“Get off the internet, I need to call grandma!”

And literally not knowing which websites exist out there and having no search engine to look em up

AOL - ISP. Not sure order of operations here… I was also on Mozilla/Netscape (1991/92-?)

Bulletin Board Channels: There was at least one gay one in San Diego (ca. 1992-1995). We would chat and post online, then once a month, meet at a gay bar with name tags with our handles.

IRC - fun chat site (at least into 1997 for me)

LISTSERV - this was less useful for me. signing up for ‘reading lists’ or ‘subscriptions’ to ‘butterflies’ ‘sourdough’, etc. (I honestly do not recall the groups I signed on to) when no one really seemed to be there (1992-94?) though I didn’t move with the hip crowd

I met a girl on an MSN chat room and we talked for awhile and enjoyed each others’ company. We found out we lived pretty close and were the same age but went to different high schools. We decided to meet up in a public place for a date so I fired up mapquest and printed off directions. She did as well. Well, I took a wrong turn and couldn’t get back on track so I disappointingly went home to get back on MSN to give her the news that I got lost. Turns out she did as well! lol. Next time I just gave her my address and we dated for a bit ha

I used to go to internet cafes to look for cheats for video games. Pretty much all I ever used the internet for back then. Don’t remember many other sites but I do remember a website where you slaughtered the teletubbies in various ways, like dismembering them or slicing them in half with meat saws.

After that, my first social uses of the internet were MySpace, a forum for metal and alternative music called MakeSomeNoise (named after a magazine that came out in my country) and the chat rooms on The Offspring’s website.

One of the earliest things I can remember was encountering a thread on the forums of nuklearpower.com (home of the 8-Bit Theater webcomic) that simply asked, “Religious people, why do you believe in God?” and that was the first time I ever had ever encountered atheist perspectives or questioned what my parents taught me. At the time, there was very much this idea of, “Nobody ever changed their mind from an internet argument” but the internet exposed me to a lot of different views that I would never have encountered otherwise (see also: queer people).

Other than that, I used to gather around with friends to browse icanhazcheezeburger and failblog and stuff. I stayed up late grinding levels in RuneScape. Newgrounds and flash games were a big thing. Some of my friends were into 4chan in the early days when it was more about edgy shock humor than straight up Nazis. There was social media like MySpace and Facebook but I had no interest in them bc I was a nerd. There were a lot more random little websites that passed around by word of mouth.

I got my first “home computer” for Christmas in the early 80’s. A TRS-80 CoCo with 16k RAM. After sending in the warranty information I started receiving nerd junk mail some of which I’m pretty sure I still have somewhere. One is an add for internet access from Compuserve. It cost $7 an hour IIRC. You had to use dial up and call long distance to Columbus, OH which probably cost somewhere around 50 cents a minute using my 1200 baud modem. Young teenage me couldn’t afford the luxury. I also received a slender book of websites. Domain names weren’t a thing so you had to know the ip address of what you wanted to look up. BBS’s were more accessible to me. Sometimes in the early 90’s I fumbled around on a computer at the library and saw weather forecasts and another time I searched Lexusnexus for an article about modifying hand held GPS units to increase accuracy. The public wasn’t allowed the accuracy the military had (US). By the time the internet caught on thanks to AOL I hadn’t messed with computers for ten years but picked it right back up now with a 36.6k modem. I know this is going to sound gross but I remember some of the earliest news reports regarding the internet were about pervs using it to share child porn. Does anyone else remember this? BBS’s were used by mob bookies to take gambling bets. IIRC the Supreme Court decided the owners were responsible for monitoring and preventing the mob from doing this. Obviously this was all quite awhile ago and my memory is fallible

I was 1980 maybe 1981 and we all went to a classmate’s house to watch a computer test. Her dad worked for Bell Labs. They placed an order for groceries that the store delivered.

In 1992 I waited for three days to download a single picture off a telescope and knew this was the future

On university computers, using Netscape Navigator, browsing the information superhighway (i.e., mostly Geocities) filtered through Yahoo and, as soon as I found it, AltaVista (whose user experience was much more similar to what Google’s would be), and reading hardcore erotic stories between classes…

The World Wide Web has only gone downhill from there. It probably died around the time when the blink and marquee tags were deprecated, and we’ve been browsing it’s dessicated corpse since then, like maggots on a carcass already way too rotten to provide any nourishment.

It was the middle of the 90s, I had just managed to buy my new computer after saving for years. It came with Windows 95, and I was so excited to finally get a graphical interface. It also had a modem, which an aunt’s boyfriend came home to configure and show us how to use. I went online and I remember having this feeling of “wow, I can access computers anywhere…” I had learned that sites where in the format www.<something>.com so the first thing I tried was www.china.com, a site in Chinese loaded and I was so excited that I had loaded information from across the globe, it felt like the world had no barriers anymore.

I also remember using a chat that kept writing a comic with what people said, https://es.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Comic_Chat for the new guys out there who have no idea what I’m talking about. And my father trying to communicate with some random person from Italy on that thing because we pushed him to and open something like #italy or similar. Looking back it feels like those parents that put the kid together in a room with another kid and say “he’s also wearing blue, be friends”.

Piczo websites

Most pages weren’t heavy js bloat. Lots more adware, at least in an obvious way. Google search wasn’t faster than other search engines. Websites (even for well known companies) would actually have downtime for maintenance and there wasn’t such a focus on having six 9s worth of availability. Could also probably hack a lot of what was out there back in the day. I kind of miss it but I really don’t. Nostalgia factor is only just that… very fleeting. Only thing I miss the most is used to being able to watch porn on my 3DS. The sites I used were still not using the weird players they use now and so mostly everything I could play. It would take a hot min to load but would come through eventually. Oh well.

modem dialing sound