My parents bought a Tandy hooked it up real early, without understanding what the internet was. I was given access to it at maybe age 9 and I got my first dick pic sent to me VIA SCANNER. Pre-digital camera era. Someone literally put their hardon in a scanner, closed the lid, and sat there while it scanned. Just to send it to 16, f, California.

irc chatting ~1988, lynx via a BBS was my first browsing

When we got our first IBM compatible PC (a 486) my father wanted to have a modem in it. His friend who sold it to him couldn’t fathom why he would want a modem. But of course he got it anyways.

In the beginning my father used it for online banking over BTX. And when my brother got his own PC a few years later we played Doom with the modems over our house’s internal telephone lines.

My actual first internet experience was reading and writing to newsgroups on Usenet. (that worked more or less the same as Lemmy) My posts can probably still be found in archives. I mostly hung out in de.rec.sf.starwars. That’s actually how I found my first girlfriend.

Besides that I also surfed the web for different stuff. I still remember how Google became popular because it wasn’t so weighed down by ads and clutter and it actually gave you much better results than Alta Vista or Yahoo.

I started pwning noobs online in Quake 3 Arena on my family PC. One day my older brother’s friend saw me playing and was like “… you do know you can use the mouse to aim?”

I did not know.

I somehow had mastered controlling the character like a tank with my keyboard.

My first memories were just getting the damn thing working. We had to add RAM to our Packard Bell 486 and buy a modem. Getting email working on it was a chore but that was for my parents so I did not care until Hotmail came out a few months later when I could get my own. Then I essentially signed up for spam. I read a lot of PC World and looked through Yahoo’s categorized websites which were a lot of Geocity sites. I’d use WebCrawler to search for SimCity 2000 sites and since I was 12, boobs. That last one was risky because closing Netscape Navigator took a good minute to close out so there was no quick switching to something else if someone walked in. I would also hit up chat rooms and forums, generally PC or N64 related ones. Many of those probably should have had a lot more moderation than they did. I think I remember Tom’s Hardware’s chatroom/forum exposing me to things that a 12 year old and even adults should probably not be exposed to.

Overall, there was a lot less moderation and a lot less centralization. You had to seek out what you were looking for because there was not a ton of tracking and your interests would not be constantly bombarding you and reinforcing your views.

This was probably 1997ish. My godparents had a computer with AOL, and I remember being blown away by chat rooms and being able to instantly communicate with people from all over the world. A year later, my family joined got our first internet connection.

Being into marvel superheros, i tried spiderman.com, and it brought mento a spiderman website. pretty straight forward i thought. next i wanted to see xmen stuff, but i typed in xman. there was a big difference between xmen.com and xman.com

Using LYNX on a monochrome terminal in the university computer lab. Yes, I’m old.

Me: hi!!!

Guest816371: a/s/l

Me: what does that mean???

Enrolled in a summer course at the local college, the summer before starting junior high, so… 1996? The instructors showed us how to format an http query (you had to do it by hand back then) and a few different sites with games and information. They explained hyperlinks for those of us who weren’t lucky enough to be familiar with HyperCard (RIP) and, IIRC, webrings and search engines. Then they let us loose.

Most of those first sites I visited were student websites from the Berkeley CS department, and few of them remain. I remember playing Hunt the Wumpus, Colossal Cave Adventure, and the Barney Fun Page. I also remember lots of LotR fanpages, discovering anime, and stumbling on child pornography for the first time (though I didn’t think of it in those terms until recently — at the time the model was older than I was!).

After the course ended I bugged my parents until we got a 10hr/mo plan at home that I was allowed to use for 2hr/wk.

AOL Keywords.

Anyone remember brands putting their keyword in all their advertisements, like they do for a hashtags and @ signs today?

CompuServe BBS, playing the British Legends MUD they charged $8 an hour for.

Pre proper internet but I was a fan briefly of playing L.O.R.D (Legend of the red dragon) on BBS.

Back in high school, I worked with a guy at the computer store who was a freshman at the university. He was very conservative, a Limbaugh fan, who had a “girlfriend back home” whom nobody ever saw. I didn’t connect the dots until years later.

He never said or did anything inappropriate, but was solicitous, and he let me use his account on the university’s VAX cluster. I used it to explore Gopher, read Usenet, and download software.

It was around the mid/late 90s. Maybe around 96 or 97, so I would’ve been 9 or 10. We had a computer at home, and my brother and I played games on it, but we didn’t have Internet. One day, my dad who works in IT, installed AOL and on our computer and paid for it. And he set up an account for me and showed me how to use it. And I was blown away. Eventually. even though I was a kid, I’d hang out in Star Trek chatrooms, created mailing lists for like a kids writers club, and ofc started playing online games. Eventually even had my own website on like GeoCities, handcrafted in HTML.