“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
America Online. Chat rooms. A/S/L? Beware sexual predators.
19/f/Cali always
I have vague memories of using Prodigy on Windows 3.1 but I don’t remember much beyond the login screen.
My earliest clear memories were of AOL 3.0, during the era when the app didn’t even have a URL bar because they wanted you to used their walled garden “AOL keyword” system. So I’d login, minimize the program, and immediately open Netscape so I could get to the real internet. Didn’t do much online though, other than go to Nick.com to play games.
Didn’t become a full-time internet user until 1998. Probably because that was the first year I went to a school with internet-connected computers in every classroom, where my parents couldn’t restrict my online time.
modem dialing sound
That, followed by the unmistakable “uh-oh” icq sound.
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 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.
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.
I was 1980 maybe 1981 and we all went to a classmate’s house to watch a computer test. Her dad worked for Bell Labs. They placed an order for groceries that the store delivered.
In 1992 I waited for three days to download a single picture off a telescope and knew this was the future
On university computers, using Netscape Navigator, browsing the information superhighway (i.e., mostly Geocities) filtered through Yahoo and, as soon as I found it, AltaVista (whose user experience was much more similar to what Google’s would be), and reading hardcore erotic stories between classes…
The World Wide Web has only gone downhill from there. It probably died around the time when the blink and marquee tags were deprecated, and we’ve been browsing it’s dessicated corpse since then, like maggots on a carcass already way too rotten to provide any nourishment.
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.
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.
Piczo websites
Chatrooms on ilse.nl
Simple webpages.
No ads.
Dial up noises.
Altavista was the search engine. Astalavista was the search engine for pirated material.
A/s/l?
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
