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.

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

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.

Me: hi!!!!!!!

Guest816371: a/s/l

Me: what does that mean????

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

AOL Keywords.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

My family used a WebTV for god knows what reason, so for a long time I only saw the internet through that portal. I think I spent most of my time on a Sailor Moon fansite just staring at screen shots of the characters.

Oddly enough, I remember the website said it was built with WebTV at the bottom, but I never learned how to upload images on the website builder... I had my own shitty WebTV site but I had to choose from the provided clip art.

Obligatory WebTV connecting music.

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.

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

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

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?

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.

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.

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"

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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).

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

Searching for random stuff on Yahoo with my friend when I was in 5th grade.

Playing flash games on cartoon network and nickelodeon. Not long after, my uncle exposed me to newgrounds. Good times.

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

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

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

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