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Remember Your First Time on the Internet?

Back in fall 1997. It took ages to configure/get it to work. First site I went to was Nintendo.com - I still remember the opener screen. It took 3 minutes to load the simple opener screen.
 
The first time I used the internet was back in 1995. I was at a family friend's house, and the first site/search I did was looking for Sailor Moon on Yahoo lol
 
I remember it was at my dad's office... I went to lego.com, because, you know, it was written on the side of my new lego set. Not sure of how old I was, but I guess between 5 and 7.

And I remember I told myself "So this is internet?" The images took ages to load, there was this little "loading picture" logo, with a square, a triangle and a circle everywhere. Netscape... wow. This looks like another world compared to today's internet. 😎
 
How could I forget... waiting for forever and a damn day for the connection (our dial up wasn't always a first shot deal 🙄 ) I probably searched for cars all day on netscape and yahoo (until someone picked up the phone 🙁 )
 
It was about 1994 or 1995, and it was the Nintendo Power AOL site-thing.

You know, one of those sites in the AOL walled garden. Yuck. Didn't know nothing back then. Blew me away.
 
ravenvii said:
It was about 1994 or 1995, and it was the Nintendo Power AOL site-thing.

You know, one of those sites in the AOL walled garden. Yuck. Didn't know nothing back then. Blew me away.
Click to expand...

Yeah I thought the AOL "Channels" was the true Internet. FAIL. They had a Mac Games section in 3.0 that I used to death! Bunch of games that no one ever speaks of. A lot of em were shareware though.
 
First proper time was at Manchester University (or whoever owns the campus now). They had some internet demonstration (an internet cafe minus the cafe), I brought a PC magazine that linked to some websites. Ended up joining a chatroom about Tamagotchi and bought a load of floppies to store downloaded midi files. I must have been around 11 (1997) at the time!

Simpler time eh 😱.
 
Bobdude161 said:
Yeah I thought the AOL "Channels" was the true Internet. FAIL. They had a Mac Games section in 3.0 that I used to death! Bunch of games that no one ever speaks of. A lot of em were shareware though.
Click to expand...

Oh yeah, that's right, Channels. Man, AOL blew even back then and we had no idea. At least it only took me ~3 years to figure it out, as I switched to cable internet in 1998. Now *that* was when I truly got into the internet - learned how to design a webpage, designed and maintained quite a few during my high school years, learned a lot about computers, even built one myself.

The AOL years, I barely used the computer because it was too slow and cumbersome. That's the stone ages, AOL.
 
1992-93. A friend turned me on to Compuserve and or AOL. Never looked back. Built a website with a few graphics etc. Those were the days..... LOL.
 
Used to hit BBS for Apple software. It was a strange but exciting time! Still can't believe people lived (including me for a while) without it!
 
I remember using Netscape and eWorld at school in 1994. We didn't get the Internet at home until 1995 (originally with the 30 free days via MSN that came included with Windows 95). We had a 4.8 kb/s modem at the time, if I recall correctly.

I can't for the life of me remember what the first site I went to was. I do remember using Yahoo, Excite and AltaVista though. AV was my preferred search engine until Google came along.
 
I think the first time was in school in 1991 on an SE/30 sending e-mails back and forth with a high school in Australia.... it was a history class with all this newer technology at the time so the video telephone and video laser disc player were popular and used quite a bit at the time for in class instruction and connecting with other classrooms around the world.

people kept saying those monsterous Laser discs were going to replace VHS LOL
 
Some people still confuse the web as being the internet. The internet has, technically, been around for over 40 years. The web is merely just one part of the internet....although, arguably, the largest part of the current internet. My first experience with the internet came in the late 80's. I think it was Usenet, not BBS...although, I remember playing with BBS on a high school computer. I'm shaky with what my first experience technically was. I remember using Gopher (I think) to try and download some stuff...but that was a little bit later.
 
I think my first time was some time in 1996. I remember spending hours on my family's Performa 6300CD hopping around those Geocities webring pages -- you know the type of page: chunky-looking HTML pages with monotone background colors, littered with those silly rainbow-gradient-color page dividers and animated GIFs. I still remember the thrill of searching for everything that happened to pop into my head at any given time--probably on Lycos or AltaVista or some such antiquated/defunct site. Then I discovered the AOL chatrooms and had lots of fun with those, especially in the Nintendo64 chat. Usually the conversation was something like, "//\\//64 rulz! PSX sux!!1 //\\//64 //\\//64 //\\//64" all night long. 🙄

I still get a bit nostalgic when thinking about those old days of AOL, but then I remember all those times I got booted by some prickly TOS moderator. Anybody remember OneClick AOL punters & proggies? 😀
 
For me it was '78 or '79. It was pretty much all BBS's, I remember Usenet being introduced. Thought I was pretty hot stuff at the time with my 300-baud modem without an acoustic coupler.

Now if I could just forget the AT command set and make room for more useful data.
 
JNB said:
For me it was '78 or '79. It was pretty much all BBS's, I remember Usenet being introduced. Thought I was pretty hot stuff at the time with my 300-baud modem without an acoustic coupler.

Now if I could just forget the AT command set and make room for more useful data.
Click to expand...
Oh man, I remember then. I used to have a 150 baud modem with the coupler and when I got a 300 baud modem, I thought the speed was blazing. I also recall needing to know the AT command set to properly get the connections and beyond some of the short comings of the phone line.
 
Oh yeah i remember my first time on the internet

We had a pentium 100, running windows 95. We had dial up at the time it connected a 28000kbps and we had internet explorer 4, norton antivirus.

Soon as it connected the machine would like run so so slow.

Our first internet provider was Optusnet. I used to chat in the yahoo chat rooms and microsoft chat lol ah and that hissing noise those where the days.
 
Queso said:
My university's web site. Back in late 1991 the entire Web was uni sites, computer fanboy sites, links to Usenet groups and sites devoted to Star Trek. Seriously, that was it. Nothing else 😀

Oh and our university had its own search engine based on Gopher. There was no Yahoo! or Google back then 🙂
Click to expand...

An internet with no porn? I didn't even realize that was possible 😀

I don't remember my first time online. I know it was at school, but I don't remember where I went or what I was doing. I just remember it being on an ancient Mac and extremely slow.
 
I miss the early internet.

My first experience on using the internet was using a computer at my dad's work. It had AOL v2.0 installed and I remember feeling at the time that I couldn't believe that I was actually talking to "real people" (AOL chatrooms / IM).

I think I visited StarTrek.com?

I think I starting using the internet around 1996. It was AOL v3.0 that I used 🙂. Those were the days where everyone had AOL Instant Messenger (or AIM), Netscape was an ISP and web browser, and I had a US Robotics modem that connected by a serial connection (?). 36.6kbs or something like that.

Oh and those were the days everyone used Yahoo! and Altavista for their search engines and Geocities for their free webspace.

Also the days of "Welcome to AOL" and "You have email".

I also ran a Star Trek play by email RPG online at the end of the 90s which ran for about 1.5-2 years.

I would have to say that comparing the internet then to the internet now I would without a doubt prefer the 90s 🙂.
 
I'm not old enough to have used an acoustic coupler, but I do remember the 1200 baud modem that was NOT Hayes compatible. You had to dial the number yourself, and push a button on the modem to connect once you heard the tones. When I was little, this was connected to a VT100 terminal -- green text on black. I eventually learned to use this terminal to dial into BBSes.

I was into BBSing for a number of years, even joined FidoNet at one point. I was a member of a fairly large BBS (they had twelve phone lines!) which also had an internet connection, and this was my first experience with internet services like gopher and telnet. They had a text-based web connection too but it was so slow and frustrating that I gave up quickly.

In 1995, I did a co-op term at a company that had its own dedicated ISDN line -- a huge 128 kbps pipe that was shared across the entire company. I don't recall the very first website I visited, but Yahoo and IMDB were certainly among the first. I learned HTML that fall and did a lot of work converting Word documents to HTML by hand for the company intranet. Everyone was saying that if I knew HTML, I'd have a very marketable skill that would land me all kinds of high-paying jobs... I was even hired by the school librarian to tutor her son for $15/hour so he could get in on this too. I even went so far as to start writing a book to teach HTML to students. Too bad I never finished, I might actually have been one of the earlier books published before the market got completely flooded.
 
yg17 said:
An internet with no porn? I didn't even realize that was possible 😀

I don't remember my first time online. I know it was at school, but I don't remember where I went or what I was doing. I just remember it being on an ancient Mac and extremely slow.
Click to expand...

Oh there was porn aplenty in alt.sex. People were the same even if the tech was basic 😉
 
Queso said:
Oh there was porn aplenty in alt.sex. People were the same even if the tech was basic 😉
Click to expand...

Mmmm...

begin 666 hotgurl.gif
M5&5S="$-"@T*1V5N=&QE(%)E861E<CH-"@T*5&AI<R!I<R!N;W1H:6YG(&UO

... oh, wait, sorry.

Then there was ASCII porn... 😉
 
First time on internet as defined by using the backbone of the internet: Compuserve in 1990 I was 73302,477

First FTP: 1992
First Http 1995
 
1984 - My $600 300-baud hayes smartmodem came with smartcom software and a list of like 20 arpanet addresses to dial into.

I remember how cool lynx was at the time, the talk of the first gui based web browser and http shot around the BBS forums like wildfire. I was a member of planetBBS at the time. There were a few others with freeware games like zork.

It didn't take long for the web to get jumpstarted once the gui tools were released.

Funny how porn always seemed to lead the way, with pictures (gif files) and animated "movies" (fli files) LOL if you can call them that.

Wasn't too long before viruses were started.
 
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