We played in the streets, we rode our bicycles, came home when the street lights came on and well, you know the rest of the story. :) I was 12 when the first ever home computer invaded my home and I was hooked! It was a Tandy Radio Shack Color Computer II with a Tape drive and joystick. It was fantastic! My favorite game on there was a text adventure titled "Bedlam" in which you escape a mental institution. (https://www.figmentfly.com/bedlam/)
My first ever modem was a 300baud modem. I ran up a $200+ phone bill in long distance charges when I was able to magically find all this wonderful software for my computer. I remember being a teenager when AOL was staring to be popular and I used GENIE from General Electric for their WWW Multi user BBS. (I still remember my username, xky06729,publish (Second part was my assigned password) I also ran a few BBS's on Atari 8-bit computers and Atari ST computers. I was rockin' the 1200baud modem and remember the time when I hooked up a brand new out of the box 14,400baud modem. I was speeding along until about 45 minutes later and someone let the magic smoke come out! I was in high school when a fellow student bragged about getting online in AOL ('91-'92) and sat amazed listening to his stories. I still remember the dial up sound especially on the 56k modems with error correction.
I was in my early 20's when I first got my "Always on" internet connection from the cable company and it's never been the same! I have two grand kids which I plan on boring with my stories of the time before the Internet and how much better life was when they get a little bit older. (one's 2 and the other is 6).
Anyone else grow up playing on your home computer which hooked to the TV?
I'm a millennial and I also remember a time before the internet, kinda sorta. I mean, the internet existed before I was born in 1985. But the World Wide Web began in 1993, which is also the first time I went online. But it still wasn't like it was today. Didn't have a web browser; we used CompuServ. Which was basically the same kind of thing as AOL. It had its own interface and access to chat rooms, forums, "web pages," and other kind of infotainment things. But it had to be on their network. You couldn't just, like, randomly look for websites. This was well before web crawlers and search engines.
And even for years after being online, most other people I kmew IRL didn't even have a computer. The reason I wanted to try the internet so bad was because the encyclopedia and The Cable Guy both mentioned being able to play games through it, and I wanted to play the PC games I had with other people. I didn't have that experience until Quake came out in 1996.