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

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

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.

Me: hi!!!

Guest816371: a/s/l

Me: what does that mean???

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.

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.

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.

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?

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

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.

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

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.