In the mid-90s my dad bought a Compaq Presario and the LucasArts games multi-pack. X-Wing, Day of the Tentacle, Sam and Max, and Indiana Jones. Amazing. I was like a God.
I also remember playing a game called The Neverhood, which was a claymation liminal space game. Gave me nightmares of being trapped there, but it was still one of my favorites.
Neighbor: gets nice computer
Me: is this for me 🥺👉👈
I remember sharing porn on floppy disks in highschool. I didn't have Internet yet so a few of my friends were gods among men.
Click here if you're over 18?
Not much has changed there. Unless you live in a nanny state of "small government" and "save the children". Bitch you turned out fine! Let em rub one out in peace.
I used to phone the internet and sometimes it'd be busy and I'd have to phone it back later.
We actually went to a local department store (Karstadt), where they had a few computers lined up for people to play around with. It was all really expensive and very very beige, as was the style at the time. So we went there to "try out" the computers until the store clerks would approach us, eyebrow raised, asking if we were intending to buy one. Yes Mister, I am 10, and I would like to buy this computer that is about 5000 times my weekly allowance! I used to visit a neighbour who lived in the same house who actually had a computer that was hooked up to a TV. He was developing a game for it, and I was his alpha tester. It was way cool. It was so long ago that I forgot what the game was really about, but I loved going there and playing it everytime he finished a new part of it. Later, my mother would buy an Atari Mega ST 1 with an SM124 screen and one of those break-your-wrist mouses they had at the time. She had to chase me away from that to get any work done. It wasn't until 1993 that I would get my first own PC that I could use as much and as long as I wanted. Internet I got when I got a 14.4k modem. Dialed in to a BBS first, which only gave me usenet. Then later, the first internet provider opened in our town, and so I had 'real' internet. But damnit, did that shit cost money. Not the internet access itself, but the fees for the phone line, because we had to pay per minute even for local calls.
I'd say good times, but then I remember things like having to edit your startup files every time you wanted to play a different game, and how slow and horrible and expensive (not to mention beige) everything was.
I remember when digital audio first became available and downloading a supercut (which we didn't have a word for then) of Homer Simpson saying "d'oh". We probably had to wait at least half an hour, and then we didn't have a program on the computer that could play audio files (or at least not one we could find) so we had to search around and wait even longer to download some shareware program (Goldwave)
Some did this because it was a long time ago and the internet was new and only a few people had it.
Some people did this because the internet wasn't new, and the parents knew what kind of trouble giving a 10 year old unmonitored access to the internet could lead to - which meant that they would have to travel to that one friend's house whose parents didn't give a damn.
Then there are those that grew up after the age of smart phones and can't understand how two people could read from the same phone screen at the same time.
One of my buddies had a AOL birthday party where we got the internet for "30 days free" and we just spent the time taking turns chatting with people in chatrooms.
I remember learning about the Internet in school and coming home and asking my parents if we could get it. I was then informed we had the Internet for over a decade (both my parents were in IT and remoted in to work). I was so excited to go to pokemon.com but while lecturing me about URLs and spell checking my mom typed in pokeman.com. Very different site...
Talked to my friends the next day and none of them had internet so I got to brag about the pokemon info I had and about a cool wrestling site I found.
Old enough to remember a world without the internet.
I would go to my friends house to play RollerCoaster Tycoon 1 she bought for 60$, i would spent the day playing with her on a single computer taking turns and discovering the game and then walk 45 minutes back home. 🥰
Browsing atomfilms.com with friends after school on their family computer, housed in a stained wood "computer desk/cabinet" in the living room. Man, that takes me back. Haven't thought about that in a while... Searching for Atom Films took me to a depressing Wikipedia page detailing its death. Where does the time go?
I’d say the window of overlap for “look at the computer” and “information superhighway” was actually pretty small for most people.
Maybe 1996-2001?
So then you factor in how old people would have been during that period who would have done this. Being generous, I’d say 9-18. At different ages in that range “going to my friend’s place to look at the computer” would have been a euphemism for different things.
But the range there would be from 1977-1992, which is actually pretty impressive for a cultural moment. Essentially, most millennials.
As a kid, all of us nerds got our own computers eventually after much begging. (Commodore 64s and such.)
And occasionally, we had the magical moments when we got to visit the occasional person who had a big computer. (PC clones)
No information superhighways yet!
"Information superhighway" 🤣
More like flash games and Runescape private servers.
Be me, 6 or 7 years old, scrolling through BBS stuff for many hours, blissfully unaware of our ISP being long distance until my mom realized what was happening and totally freaked out
My best friend got cable internet around the same time we had just gotten dial-up at home, you're darn right I was gonna go over there so we could experience the Information Superhighway(r) together
I remember my, well, the house's first computer, a Windows 95 machine (no idea about the actual specs). Shit was magical to my then 5 year old eyes. The internet only came some 3 years later and time online was heavily regulated because of the phone bill, also because someone might be waiting for an important call or whatever, which was usually my older brother waiting for a friend or girl to call him.
I'm a 2000s child and did this
I'm certainly normally aged.
I built my first website without access to internet. Just locally for me and my friends.
I'm sure it's a normal distribution with a pretty amazing skew for late 30s to mid 40s and a high peak.
I'll do you one better...we'd use the internet together. Probably the inspiration for that well-known NCIS hacker-fight scene, except one of us would be on the mouse and the other on the keyboard.
I hope I just unlocked a core memory for a few more lemmings.
Shit, I remember when our public library got some fancy new computers with an internet connection which was super high tech at the time. Two of my buddies and I rode our bikes down there and we couldn't believe how cool this new thing called a "chatroom" was. Like... there were other people on there just talking to each other, long distance, mind you, and FOR FREE?!?!?!
ratemypoo.com the infromation pooperhighway.
I first learned about the Internet reading about it in the encyclopedia. We had CompuServe and I would chat and play Neverwinter Nights (not the Bioware game).
10? I guess if "Compuserve over slow dial-up" counts as "the information superhighway", then sure. Web browsers almost certainly weren't a thing yet. Hypertext had more-or-less just been invented.
Amateurs. When I went there all there was was a big screen with green block letters, no highway or whatever magic non sense you're talking about
PAC man , that was the real stuff. great graphics.
