this post was submitted on 03 Apr 2024
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For me, my Dad brought home a laptop from work and we looked up pictures of pokemon and went to the Simpsons website, circa around 1999. How about you?

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[–] [email protected] 14 points 7 months ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 4 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Cool! May I ask, what was the vibe like back then?

[–] [email protected] 5 points 7 months ago (1 children)

very academic. it was largely only nerds/computer geeks that could cobble the hardware together to get online, or were maybe interfacing with the local college. i used kermit to upload my homework.

that said, first porn downloads were from these BBSs which were like little mini local AOLs.. provided 'email', chat and some gaming

[–] [email protected] 4 points 7 months ago

Best porn was IRC DCC bots with no ratio πŸ˜‡

[–] [email protected] 14 points 7 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] TopRamenBinLaden 3 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

Dick pic via a scanner is wild. Like, even if there was consent involved, there is no way that captures a flattering representation. Not to mention, it probably hurt.

I wish you the best of luck on dodging creeps like that, in the future.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 7 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 7 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 7 months ago

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

[–] [email protected] 7 points 7 months ago (1 children)

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 β€œβ€¦ 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.

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 7 months ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago

Lynx at the San Francisco public library! And Gopher was around before WWW.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 7 months ago (1 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 7 months ago

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 β€” 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.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Me: hi!!!!!!!

Guest816371: a/s/l

Me: what does that mean????

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 3 points 7 months ago

Hahahahah!!!

In case this wasn't a joke question, it's asking for my age, sex, and location.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 7 months ago (1 children)

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

[–] funkforager 1 points 7 months ago

Great game. Spent so much time in prison in LORD

[–] [email protected] 3 points 7 months ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago

Oh yeah, I remember CompuServe. I believe it was its own separate network from the Internet, though they had an email gateway at least. Maybe towards the end they became an ISP like AOL did? My memory is fuzzy on that.

I do remember they invented gif files which then of course spread to the Internet. But it was a mess because the compression they use was patent-protected. CompuServe had paid royalties on it, but the Internet was, well, the Internet…

[–] [email protected] 3 points 7 months ago

AOL Keywords.

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

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago

Can't remember the exact year but I imagine it was sometime in the mid-90s?

I used to play MUDs on a community BBS and one day the admins said they were testing out an Internet portal. Before long, they became the first ISP in town. It was weird because until they eventually upgraded to DSL, they had this quirky dialup script you had to use that navigated past the BBS part to get you on the Internet. For all I know, the BBS may still lurking around somewhere to this day?

[–] TopRamenBinLaden 2 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

Mid to late 1990s in elementary school computer class. The teacher had us boot up Netscape Navigator on the old Macintosh, and browse to askjeeves or excite or yahoo(I just remember it wasn't Google yet).

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago

Fidonet all the way initially (At the time it was faster to write your terminal program than to load it off tape every time you started the computer. Was only like 5 lines.)

But the with the "Internet" I was the first (I think, never saw any others) to write and release a Windows 3.1 program for Finger

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Usenet, email and MUDs via my universities remote UNIX terminals.

This was at the time of Mosaic and Netscape navigator, but honestly, at that point, there wasn't enough on the web to keep me coming back, so I spent my time on Usenet and MUDs instead of studying :P

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago

Same here, although it did eventually lead to years of employment as a web dev.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago

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.

[–] kakes 2 points 7 months ago (1 children)

One of my earliest memories of the internet is Yahoo games and playing Lenny Loosejocks.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago

Here is an alternative Piped link(s):

Lenny Loosejocks

Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.

I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago

Prodigy was my first experience, then we (parents) switched to AOL. Fondest memories are learning about AOL and IRC chat bots and getting into Linux

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago

For me, it was a game called Brick Breaker or something like that. It was a flash game that you can still find on and play using Y8 Browser. I'll see if I can find and link it here.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

My friend's dad had a computer with the internet and we used it to look at pictures of girls tits when he went out. Didn't seem like much of a big deal at the time.

Later on, downloading Beavis and Butthead audio clips on Napster or something: "Time for a little probation"

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago

Learning how to find flash games, then memes, then real games, then it all went down hill when I found my way to 4chan as a kid.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago

Prodigy dial-up. I was maybe in 4th grade. I checked out some online games they had, available as a part of their gateway. One was a graphical door/room game. I died almost immediately.

[–] otp 1 points 7 months ago

I can't even remember. It was dial-up, and I probably found my way to those sites for kids that were coming out around movies and kids TV stations.

The earliest things I can remember using the internet for were looking up cheats for video games, and Neopets, lol

[–] AlligatorBlizzard 1 points 7 months ago

Probably 1998, Apple donated a bunch of iMacs to my elementary school and that was the first time I had free access to the Internet before and after school. I remember learning about search engines in class (pre-Google - Altavista, Dogpile, and AskJeeves were the big ones), and I remember learning html and making a website as a group project in 5th grade. I also remember the stuff I shouldn't have been looking at, mainly FunnyJunk, lol. I got dial up at home in 1999 or so, and got into role playing forums and Gaia Online.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago

If I remember correctly, I was using it to download a virtual pet.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago

Compuserve and BBS in the '80s -> AOL in the '90s with some Prodigy sprinkled in. Aside from their curated content, a lot of NNTP. WWW starting whenever AOL got that (v 2.5 IIRC? Not sure) and IRC as well in the late '90s.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago

If Gopher counts, 1993, downloading Wayne’s World and Ren & Stimpy clips at the university’s biochemistry lab on a Mac IIsi. Otherwise 1996, looking up Green Day lyrics on Webcrawler.com and posting on Usenet from a Sun SPARCstation in the computer lab.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago

Geocities, yahoo chat, 28k modem loading pictures one line at a time, Windows 3.1 running on DOS.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago

Looking for cheats, or downloading trackmania car mods I can't remember what came first.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago

It was around 1991 in the university computer lab. Just a green screen dumb terminal for email and newsgroups. Played too much Nettrek after hours on the Spark workstations later on.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago

"Dad, Of everything out there, it had to be a CNN website 😣"

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago

I don't remember, neither the first time I used a computer, I was born in the 2000's.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago

Someone tried to get me to check out meatspin. Insisting it was a wonderful recipe site. I politely declined as I am a vegetarian.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago

Ha, using the internet to get pictures of Pokemon too. :D

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago

My very first was my dad showing me his ICQ convos and letting me say hi to one of his friends, the client going OH-OH every now and then. Late 90's.

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