I remember downloading the Hubble Deep Field on our shared family computer, filling up the entire hard drive, and barely even being able to open it. I distinctly remember this because I had to do it multiple times due to people picking up the phone halfway through.
I have older memories of computers (Amiga & Commodore) but this memory was specifically internet related.
I met a girl on an MSN chat room and we talked for awhile and enjoyed each others’ company. We found out we lived pretty close and were the same age but went to different high schools. We decided to meet up in a public place for a date so I fired up mapquest and printed off directions. She did as well. Well, I took a wrong turn and couldn’t get back on track so I disappointingly went home to get back on MSN to give her the news that I got lost. Turns out she did as well! lol. Next time I just gave her my address and we dated for a bit ha
It was the mid-90s, and just a shell account. Gopher, archie, pine and zmodem.
We didn't get PPP access for a year or two; this was the days before google - yahoo, altavista, some other engines I can't remember, and metasearch engines like dogpile that would query a bunch of different search engines and return the combined set of results.
This was the days of mailing lists and usenet for the most part - connect up, download messages for like an hour, then log off, read and reply, then log on and send.
I was there for the original hamsterdance, and it ruled.
I remember coming home from school, and immediately going on to MSN. The silly gifs were so entertaining back then, and it was very cool to have a gif for each letter - like the letter A in flames LOL. I also used to love Club Penguin and ToonTown. Going into those type of cyberworlds felt pretty magical to me back then :)
Omg I forgot about the letters. Also made me remember those characters you could customize with clothes and backgrounds and stuff. I guess the prequel to bitmojis but they were like, edgy and cool.
If anyone remembers what I'm talking about can you remind me the name?
Before I had the internet at home, I would use the school library to print out walkthroughs to videogames (at that time zelda.com was not about the nintendo game). I spent several weeks downloading a 100 megabyte demo of a star wars racing game, because at my download speeds it took 18 hours, but normally the connection would drop midway through and there was no way to resume the download without restarting it, so the only thing to do was keep trying and hope to get lucky.
America Online. Chat rooms. A/S/L? Beware sexual predators.
modem dialing sound
That, followed by the unmistakable "uh-oh" icq sound.
"Get off the internet, I need to call grandma!"
And literally not knowing which websites exist out there and having no search engine to look em up
Around the mid-80s a friend of mine set up a public-access Unix system. You could dial in and get shell access, and from there newsgroups, email, etc. It technically wasn't a "live" internet connection, his system dialed in to Yale each night and downloaded newsgroups and stuff via UUCP, so there was at least a day's delay between writing messages and getting a response. I don't remember exactly when it was but I was around for the Morris worm so it was some time before that.
Lots of blinking geocities and angelfire sites. Waiting for NetZero dial up to noisily connect. Buffering music and video clips.
MSN IM was really popular. I remember it felt really funny to come home and talk to your friends you had just seen.
StumbleUpon was also really cool before it was sold to ebay. It's how I found cgsociety, but then the website owner shut the site down for some reason and everyone migrated to artstation.
There were also the video games on YTV's website, and all the other flash games that are hard to find now. Prime among them in my memory was the 3-d missile game. You would guide a missile through a series of spinning obstacles as the missile accelerated. Newgrounds, ebaums world, the original youtube that wasn't entirely focused on profit yet...
I don't remember using napster, but I did use Limewire until it shutdown. It was really cool to have access to so much music but IIRC it was mostly mp3's of a single song and sometimes it wouldn't even be the full song.
I also spent a lot of time playing tower defence maps on Starcraft \Battle.net, then it started to be over-run by spam bots and no one played anymore. It was really sad to see that happen, and eye-opening for me when no one at blizzard or whoever controlled battlenet did anything about it. Looking back, that was likely a large part of the reason for my eventual to switch to linux.
The games on the PBS kids website over dialup
I guess my very first exposure was my brother letting me use his university account over dialup. You really had to know your way around in those days or know someone who did. He showed me how I could go to umich (U. of Michigan) and a few other places that ran public ftp servers full of games!
Then I landed a job at a small company which had accounts on CompuServe. Around this time at home, I was playing MUDs a lot on a free local BBS, and at some point, the people running the BBS decided to have a go at becoming the first commercial ISP in town. (They're still around, in fact!)
So I approached work about opening an Internet account, arguing that it was way cheaper than CompuServe. They reluctantly agreed. I was over the Moon but my superiors were not super impressed at first. They complained that they couldn't find anything while CompuServe was much better organized. I eventually found Yahoo which, at the time, had a sort of CompuServe-ish vibe of providing this directory that categorized most of the more popular sites by topic and that placated them. You have to remember this was long before search engines and even the www itself was still in its infancy.
I was having a blast, discovering something new every week. Usenet was so cool when I learned about that! And I found out about some sort of MIDI file format with embedded instrument samples you could play to get electronic music in a super compact format long before broadband made mp3s the way to go. What were they called again? Soundtrack files? Something like that. I played them all the time while I was coding.
Mod files played with tracker software. They were awesome at the time (and still are).
Oh yeah right! Mod files. I remember thinking when pdf came into being, it was to postscript like mod was to midi. A pdf is ps with fonts and whatever else embedded in it so that you could render it in a self-contained sort of way. The mod file was midi + samples to make them self-contained as well. I don't know how accurate that is, but that's how I pictured it in my head.
AOL keywords, AOL chatrooms, free AOL minutes on a disk, dial up modem sounds, slow af connection.
a/s/l?
☝️✋👇👈✌️👆🙌
simple static personal websites with a single tiled image as background, dubious color palette, and a guestbook
Gen z here. Coolmathgames.com was fire. I actually bought a shirt from them last year and it gets a lot of compliments surprisingly 🤷♀️
A/s/l?
Compuserve back in like ‘91.
CompuServe was a large part of the lack of parenting I received during the 90s. 3-5 hours a night, plus work/school and sleep means I didn't see my mom much for more than a decade.
Only had dial-up so insert youvegotmail but then got introduced to bbs and freaked out when I realized I was actually typing to a real person who would gasp! respond.
Not long after I entered the brave new world of irc and the rest was history. Internet=RabbitHole 4ever!
We took a class field trip to a students parents facility where they made supplements. They showed us a computer connected to university databases of research papers. Up until that point we called BBS servers directly and would rush to download everything before sometime accidentally picked up the phone. This was the early 90s
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_HiNote
The next year I got my first laptop and a 14.4baud us robotics pcmcia card.
The first time I got onto the internet proper, I was over at a friend's house for his birthday as a teenager and his dad had an account and he dialed in and the very first thing he showed me was a picture of a lit red candle sticking out of a woman's butthole.
Prior to that, I had signed on to a local BBS with my home computer, but there was not any pornography available on that BBS.
It was glorious, though, being like 12 years old and figuring out how to make computers talk over telephone lines, though.
9600 baud connection. IBM PS2 running win 3.1. prodigy service, i think
Evolution vs creationist forums as a teen on Win 2000. And of course porn.
Limewire to get early Naruto releases from Japan, subbed by a random guy on the internet one day later. 500MB and took at least an hour.
AOL IM
VT100 terminals on Solaris (SunOS) reading usenet, chatting with ytalk, elm (email), Gopher (and searching Gopher with Archie), DartMUD. It was great. Pretty much once we got PC and Mac based clients that stitched together downloads out of usenet posts and could run multiple terminal sessions at once, we were set and the Internet peaked.
Errghhh ooo oo uh uh oh uh uh.
Dial up
Playing Star Trek in my high-school counselor's office on a teletype machine that was connected to the local college's main frame. The teletype used a roll of paper. Type in a move, and a new "screen" was printed on the paper. I must have used miles of paper playing that game.
Holy shit. I never knew teletype ever became a civilian technology. I only know of it from my military training. Though it was old technology by the time we trained on it.
I also played this in High School. We thought it was fantastic.
Not being able to get online because my dad was using the internet at a wholly different location for work.
Also the screams of a dialup modem through the tinny speakers of a first-gen, puck-moused iMac.
Those had good speakers
eh, for the time I guess.
Cartoon Network games! I remember one set of adventure games that I loved to play but I couldn't understand English very well yet so I'd always make my dad play with me and translate. Resort something. I look them up on the Wayback machine once in a while.
One of the earliest things I can remember was encountering a thread on the forums of nuklearpower.com (home of the 8-Bit Theater webcomic) that simply asked, "Religious people, why do you believe in God?" and that was the first time I ever had ever encountered atheist perspectives or questioned what my parents taught me. At the time, there was very much this idea of, "Nobody ever changed their mind from an internet argument" but the internet exposed me to a lot of different views that I would never have encountered otherwise (see also: queer people).
Other than that, I used to gather around with friends to browse icanhazcheezeburger and failblog and stuff. I stayed up late grinding levels in RuneScape. Newgrounds and flash games were a big thing. Some of my friends were into 4chan in the early days when it was more about edgy shock humor than straight up Nazis. There was social media like MySpace and Facebook but I had no interest in them bc I was a nerd. There were a lot more random little websites that passed around by word of mouth.
Very different experiences here, but I'm seeing a lot of sites I recognize. I was pre-4Chan, but browsed SomethingAwful and Neopets at different points in my life.
Also lots of Pokemon sites. And GameFAQs of course.
It was a lot better back then, then it became about money.
Prodigy, then AOL, then real internet. Also eWorld, which was like AOL but for Mac users. It was kinda pointless.
For me was using AOL free internet CDs cause we had to pay providers for time online..we used to walk around neighborhood looking for AOL CDs to get online and get to chatrooms pretending we were adults. After a year or so I had a real experience when Internet started to get popularized so I created an email account, an ICQ acc and downloaded a song from this website.
"Internet Cafe" mid 90s. Clicked down through yahoo's directory not really knowing what I was looking for. Found the canonical list of lightbulb jokes. Funny but overall I was quite underwhelmed. Got a print magazine that listed and reviewed websites.
Got dialup as a young teen in the 90s - first with CompuServe, then usenet and the early Web. Usenet was amazing, fun communities, kibology, and great for dialup, and as someone who lives in the country, I still wish sites had more options for downloading stuff in advance to view when out of signal.
A less positive part of usenet was back then it was completely uncensored (or at least, that child me had unrestricted access) . At the time I thought it was normal and good to be able to get porn with people my age, instead of weird adults. But now I feel pretty sad and icky that this was my introduction to sex, and horrible if I think abiut the situations behind those pictures.
6th grade computer class. I grew up playing video games and liked medieval era stuff despite not knowing how to spell it, so I thought I'd try to type "midevil(dot)com" into the URL bar. At the time it was some kind of BDSM site with a black background, red font, and multiple cats-o-nine-tails slapping to and fro like animated gifs (were they gifs? idk). My blood ran cold and I closed the window. I wasn't caught thanks to the teacher also not knowing that browser history was a thing.
Chatrooms on ilse.nl
Simple webpages.
No ads.
Dial up noises.
Altavista was the search engine. Astalavista was the search engine for pirated material.
Grab a 4 free AOL disk from blockbuster, use 3 of them as frisbees. Take the last one home and spend 10 minutes waiting the interface to install. Plug in the phone line and hear a series of beeps and schreeches before being greeted by an early robotic voice saying "welcome!" And often "you've got mail".
Afterwards you follow a guide to sign up for a mail account and a text like document with links to AOL platform tooling like chat rooms and search tools. You started looking for urls everywhere wondering what hidden gems you'll find in the virtual world and what kind of content was on cereal websites or Nickelodeon. There was a massive learning curve for multimedia, but you had a lot of pen pals from chatrooms. So much porn spam. Nabisco had an awesome gaming site
I dialed into the local university's phone bank and could access fun stuff like... Kermit and Gopher. It was cool in the sense that I could read words in someone else's computer, but content was really sparse, so mostly I hit the outbound network in another city to but porn BBSs that weren't local calls for me.
Eventually I discovered IRC and trivia. And then they invented WWW and DSL and it started to explode.
And now it's all commercialized garbage. I wonder if the internet would've held so much fascination for me if I'd known it would become a tool to view constant advertisements like a brainwash machine in Clockwork Orange.
Definitely 2flashgames.com and Newgrounds.com.
A local BBS got internet service so I poked around with gopher and lynx. I remember it being slow, there was lots of waiting for things to load.
I used to go to internet cafes to look for cheats for video games. Pretty much all I ever used the internet for back then. Don't remember many other sites but I do remember a website where you slaughtered the teletubbies in various ways, like dismembering them or slicing them in half with meat saws.
After that, my first social uses of the internet were MySpace, a forum for metal and alternative music called MakeSomeNoise (named after a magazine that came out in my country) and the chat rooms on The Offspring's website.
The earliest thing I remember with certainty it's correct was my friend across the street, who was older than me, asking me to look up "naked girls" for him.
Piczo websites
Playing MUDs on JANET (not exactly the internet but close enough). We played late at night on university computers knowing that this wasn't really what either the computers or JANET were supposed to be used for but it was still great.
Expage, and geocities quickly turned to MSN messenger and neopets. Some Yahoo! Games in there too.
@solarvalleys Definitely AOL chat rooms. But also figuring out how to use Netscape Navigator and search for things using a seach engine called Hotbot. And teaching myself how to build entire websites on notepad.
It was neat to see things evolve fast. Examples: AOL sent these loss leader free offers to grow their network, it gave you free time to try the service and was an installer package that came in the physical mail as little cartidges. A short time later as CDs (the precursor to DVDs), with even more time. It rapidly went from “90 minutes free, wow!” to “600 hours free, wow!” and they went from people coveting them to just piling up everywhere and getting upcycled around the house. 🤣 “Honey hand me one of those 3000 hours coasters for my drink”.
Or how fast web development went. I remember how excited we were for hotdog pro, where the html tags had *colors* and you could push *buttons* to add tags! A short time later “Hey Netobjects Fusion just stick this graphic here somewhere, i dunno you figure it out, use a dozen nested tables with a single clear pixel in each cell, kthx”
Man now that I think about it, the frequency that businesses and organizations had the word “hot” in their brand name back then was another thing lmao. Hotdog, Hotmail, Hotbot, and I know I’m forgetting some other ones. Because the internet was HOT my friends! 🔥
@solarvalleys Oh AND: the Fediverse reminds me of it a lot. People were inventing new weird cool ways to use it all the time; the implementations were a jarring mix of professional and amateur; tools and platforms and communities would rapidly rise and fall … It was beautiful chaos, and you felt like you were just seeing people’s minds made manifest. Fediverse has that same feel to me. Somebody better name a new Fediverse tool with the word “hot” and then the vibe is complete!
BBS on a commodore64 and a tiny bit of compuserve.
I remember clicking on a YouTube video and waiting about an hour for it to load. When it finished loading the whole Family gathered in front of the screen and watched it.
At home it was 28.8k dial-up (but my PC came without a modem, or a sound card or CD drive come to think of it, so I installed one myself), and Compuserve from 1993. Before that, dial-up BBS run by a hobbyist. Compuserve was great and the discussion forums in particular were fun, not unlike Lemmy.
At work, X400 email on a DOS PC. That was maybe around the very end of the '80s or early '90s. It seemed like science fiction, and very few people in business had email at the time so it wasn't really very useful.
Probably Neopets. I heard some of my classmates talking about it at school so I used my dad's computer to create an account. Still have login access and all my original Neopets are still there 20+ years later!
flash games
Spent most my time going down bulbapedia rabbitholes . Pokemon websites . Watched pokemon YouTube sideshows , found out Cascada thru that . Once saw video of someone showing their splice portfolio , one splice was articuno but just the (head|tail) so lꝏked like sperm , kid me thought it wasz funny
Oh and don't forget this masterpice
Didn't get my own personal device till 2009ish , funnily enough didn't run into porn on that shared pc
You're still young if youtube already existed in your first memories of the internet.
bitftp@pucc
If anyone gets that reference, congratulations, you are officially old.
I managed to blow up the BITNET mail quota right through the ceiling within a few days...
AOL - ISP. Not sure order of operations here... I was also on Mozilla/Netscape (1991/92-?)
Bulletin Board Channels: There was at least one gay one in San Diego (ca. 1992-1995). We would chat and post online, then once a month, meet at a gay bar with name tags with our handles.
IRC - fun chat site (at least into 1997 for me)
LISTSERV - this was less useful for me. signing up for 'reading lists' or 'subscriptions' to 'butterflies' 'sourdough', etc. (I honestly do not recall the groups I signed on to) when no one really seemed to be there (1992-94?) though I didn't move with the hip crowd
I was a simple kid back then. I remember having seen 3D renders of south park characters back in the 90s. Marvin the Martian fansites. The #Trivia room in TalkCity.
Earliest I can recall would either be, from what I can remember, some odd ass yt videos from early yt. Videos that are probably long gone due to things like copyright and other bull. They were the joke videos where they edited shows like Ed Ed n Eddy or Adventures of Sonic The Hedgehog. Only a single video from that time that I can remember is still up.
I remember early YouTube, but that was years after I was playing with Photoshop and throwing up pics on AOL chat rooms. I even still talk to a girl I met on there nearly 30 years ago.
Absolutely no way my parents would have let me on a chat room with random people before maybe middle school or highschool because they'd be worried about their autistic son. So I never got to experience them since by the time I was old enough, chat rooms were dying to macrohard controlled skype.
Early yt was definitely a wild west from my hazy memories. Definitely a much more free and friendly time for the content you could make and language you could use.
Kinda limited, in the sense that I didn't have my own computer until about 2006 and just had a "family" PC before then, which my brother and dad used.
One of my earliest memories from the late 90's (I would have been about 8 years old) was making a website on MaxPages, which was one of those build-your-own-website services. Mine listed video game cheats and passcodes. I didn't have much time to add to my page as my computer skills were limited and I didn't get much time on the computer, so I got bad reviews just for not having much content. Some asshole on one of their public chatrooms hacked my account and defaced my site a few weeks later. I think his name was Ray.
For reasons I'd rather not go into, I had a more limited exposure to Flash games and didn't really get involved with Newgrounds until my late teens. Cartoon Network (at least the US/Canada site) used to have a great selection of Flash games though.
By my teens I was playing RuneScape actively (2005 - 2007), then World of Warcraft (2007 - 2012.)
Early CompuServe. I don't remember the exact timeframe but it was rather early. The first time I enjoyed the internet? Probably unreal tournament in 99. Me and my friends used to play and listen to Korn, Rammstein, limp Bizkit, P.O.D., slipknot, static-x, rage against the machine, etc. whoever was last in GoldenEye, played unreal until they came back in again.
9600 baud > 14.4 > 56k dial-up modems and AOL chat rooms.
Good
AND HOW IS IT NOW, FUKKFACE??? (I am totally joking, peace)
I remember downloading grainy Quicktime video files from people's homepages. We didn't need YouTube then and we don't need it now.
plato/novanet, irc, newsgroups, email.
CompuServe chat rooms and the Neverwinter Nights MUD on the service.
Web pages didn't exist. I remember when Netscape began and it was such a surprising idea. We would use telnet talkers, which basically meant opening a telnet session and entering an IP address which you had written on paper, and there were all of these people there, mostly from a university, that you would talk to. I still have several as friends 30+ years later. It was super benign by and large, although there were sex telnet talkers that were sometimes full of pedophiles if you didn't realize it. Nobody has the Internet at home unless you were in higher education, but there was what was called Freenet, which like it sounds was free internet, which you could only connect to for small amounts of time each week, and it was a question of whose modem got in first. It was super binary and full of ASCII art that was a marvel.
Later when web based social media became a thing, we migrated to Livejournal, and as far as I'm concerned everything that was good about social media ever was there for a brief shining moment, and I still have friends from there and we know EVERYTHING about each other. Nothing has ever replaced those deep friendships. Before it got enshittified it was an absolutely beautiful place. I'm convinced that the earliest Russian forays into weaponized disinformation happened there because it definitely helped give birth to the crunchy parent movement, with mild vaccine disinformation (pre Wakefield), unassisted birth (the wildly dangerous birth stories I've read!), and silly things like claiming shampoo was bad and how you should clean your hair with cider vinegar, or things like extreme breastfeeding. I think it was Russia's first steps into seeing what the west would buy into being manipulated with, and it was extremely successful. The Russian government bought Livejournal as a propaganda tool, thinly veiled by a company called SUP, and used it to disguise what they really do. Reply All did an episode about Russia disinformation on Livejournal.
Most pages weren't heavy js bloat. Lots more adware, at least in an obvious way. Google search wasn't faster than other search engines. Websites (even for well known companies) would actually have downtime for maintenance and there wasn't such a focus on having six 9s worth of availability. Could also probably hack a lot of what was out there back in the day. I kind of miss it but I really don't. Nostalgia factor is only just that... very fleeting. Only thing I miss the most is used to being able to watch porn on my 3DS. The sites I used were still not using the weird players they use now and so mostly everything I could play. It would take a hot min to load but would come through eventually. Oh well.
It was the middle of the 90s, I had just managed to buy my new computer after saving for years. It came with Windows 95, and I was so excited to finally get a graphical interface. It also had a modem, which an aunt's boyfriend came home to configure and show us how to use. I went online and I remember having this feeling of "wow, I can access computers anywhere..." I had learned that sites where in the format www.<something>.com so the first thing I tried was www.china.com, a site in Chinese loaded and I was so excited that I had loaded information from across the globe, it felt like the world had no barriers anymore.
I also remember using a chat that kept writing a comic with what people said, https://es.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Comic_Chat for the new guys out there who have no idea what I'm talking about. And my father trying to communicate with some random person from Italy on that thing because we pushed him to and open something like #italy or similar. Looking back it feels like those parents that put the kid together in a room with another kid and say "he's also wearing blue, be friends".
I got my first "home computer" for Christmas in the early 80's. A TRS-80 CoCo with 16k RAM. After sending in the warranty information I started receiving nerd junk mail some of which I'm pretty sure I still have somewhere. One is an add for internet access from Compuserve. It cost $7 an hour IIRC. You had to use dial up and call long distance to Columbus, OH which probably cost somewhere around 50 cents a minute using my 1200 baud modem. Young teenage me couldn't afford the luxury. I also received a slender book of websites. Domain names weren't a thing so you had to know the ip address of what you wanted to look up. BBS's were more accessible to me. Sometimes in the early 90's I fumbled around on a computer at the library and saw weather forecasts and another time I searched Lexusnexus for an article about modifying hand held GPS units to increase accuracy. The public wasn't allowed the accuracy the military had (US). By the time the internet caught on thanks to AOL I hadn't messed with computers for ten years but picked it right back up now with a 36.6k modem. I know this is going to sound gross but I remember some of the earliest news reports regarding the internet were about pervs using it to share child porn. Does anyone else remember this? BBS's were used by mob bookies to take gambling bets. IIRC the Supreme Court decided the owners were responsible for monitoring and preventing the mob from doing this. Obviously this was all quite awhile ago and my memory is fallible
ascii dicks on irc
Using askjeeves was probably one of my earliest memories.
