Do you remember when you used the Internet?

I can remember my earliest encounters with the internet: the first memorable time was downloading guitar tablature on my brother's mac laptop from a local community college. the second was the time that i saw that spinny ncsa thingie in mosaic, in college, and the www: at which time i thought, "oh, fuck!"

I'm wondering about people who are maybe, 20 or younger -- is there anyone out there for whom the internet just seems to have "always been there"?

It's kind of an interesting thing to think about, because, of course, SG has an age limit.

I often wonder how different my life would have been if I had had internet access in high school, say. I could have slipped that girl an IM without too terribly much risk, right?

But then, I also wonder if maybe everyone on this site (since they're over 18 by definition) is in the same boat as me: the last generation to not grow up in a digital universe.

I got my first computer when I was 14, but I'm sure I'd been on the Internet before that, at some point. I don't remember a specific time though. One of the earliest memories I have of the Internet is being on Channel One's Web site (which is a news program broadcast during the mornings in some schools).

i rememer AOL V2.0 or some shit
back when you could have "Dave" as your SN.
oh those were the days...

of easy credit fraud

Oh, dude, I totally remember Channel One. In fact, I went to a taping of one of their shows.
Is that still on the air? It was kind of weird to meet the anchors of that show... poked a hole in the idea of media, somehow.

Do you really think it's sad though?

I used to think it was sad too, but I don't anymore.

It's your own conscious decision about defining yourself, after all...

i remember my first encounter with the internet...it was in about 93 i think....i had just gotten a computer for my piercing shop and the only access to the internet i knew of was the '10 free hours of aol' sent in the mail...i would use that to download the porn my friend was sending me thru email....alot of it was avi files so it would take forever.
wow..that brings back memories...i sure have matured with what i use the internet for havent i?

wow... forever is right. were they like 5 minute videos or what?

Late comer- 1999, I think. Mostly Napster. Tried XWvsTF online, but my ping was unbelievable.

My earliest encounter was in 1989 when my Dad hooked something up at home. It was mainly newsgroups and stuff at the time, and I posted on music boards mainly.

OVer the next few years it developed bit by bit, and by the time I went to university in '94, it was getting a bit more widespread in the UK. We didn't embrace it over here as quickly as in the US, but I think we're making up for lost time now!

You need to download Firefox (Mozilla's newie) - two weeks and no pop-ups. Its quite a godsend really.

I used to use Compuserve.. for me it must have been back in say....
1995-96?
I was playing a game called Gemstone 3 back then, it was a typing game.
We used to have a message board network on our school computers which was all the rage before our school got the internet. that was when i was about 12-13.

I often think the same about computer games. The ones i played earliest were things such as Dizzy and many typing adventures.
Then i hear kids complaining about GTA3 not having enough cars. or the helicopter being too slow to fly. Or the album they wanted taking more than 10 minutes to download, and i think "when i was your age (lets say their 10 as my friends brother recently turned 11) it was 1995. The playstation hadnt yet come out in this country and when it did.. i eagerly awaited 3D racers and the original top down GTA (i saw shots of that about a year before it came out i think).
I remember Donkey Kong Country on the SNES getting hype because of its apparently 3d characters.

I do realise how completely off topic i've gone but it always amazes me how much technology has moved on in my lifetime... and how much it may move on in the next 20 years.

Anyone else remember AOHell? I was like thirteen and got onto the AOL networks for FREE!!! Oh my god, how cool was I? Capable of downloading and installing a program...it's a wonder I haven't hacked the planet by now.

Actually I mostly just had Prodigy and played stupid games. I remember I read The Secret Garden online because they had a crudely illustrated version of it there and released one new chapter every week. And I'd play these little National Geographic Nova educational games.

Click here for a wonderful 1993 CBC report on "A Network Called 'Internet.'" It's so bizarre.

:-[ I am serious.


[Edited on Apr 21, 2005 by TedKoppel]

My family first got internet access in the early to mid-90's, but I don't remember exactly when. I'm 23 now, so it was at least before I was 13. Mostly I just killed time and looked at porn. I was left alone most of the time and I could hear my mom walking down the hall from a mile away, so it was definately good times. I think I grew up during a good period. The thirteenish years before I had the internet I just did normal kid stuff, so I have some appreciation for life without the internets. It also came early enough as to make reports super easy and sending private emails to my high school friends a useful form of communication. But of course the porn was absolutely the best part, high school would have been much more frustrating without it.

Surprising the number of people from that show that went on to other things. Nick Traina (now deceased) started Link 80, and Lisa Ling did the View.

I wasn't exposed to the internet until late high school.

I spent a lot of time at one point writing guitar tablature for the internet. What stuff did you download?

First time on a computer: I was using a Commodore 64 and playing Ernie's Splash Time.

First time on the internet: 486, 2400 bps modem and on a BBS.

First time on the internet as we know it now ("surfing" webpages): at a friend's house on his 14.4 modem.

Tell me more about this wonderful internet......

I was pretty obsessed with The Police back in the day.

Of course, Macs didnt' have fixed-width fonts, so the tabs didn't line up right -- I would arduously go through the whole file adding spaces by hand until the whole thing lined up, more or less.

I had no idea I could have just changed the whole fucking file to Courier and been done with it!

[Edited on Apr 21, 2005 by louys]

Old fogey alert: I'm old enough to remember when online-access to the public was a side business; businesses that owned large mainframes would "sell" their free cycles to avoid having their expensive machines just sitting idle. H&R Block started CompuServe in 1969 since their computers weren't being used much at night, but it was too expensive to shut them down. Same with General Electric's "GEnie," et al.

First computer use: '77 or so, S-100 machine. I think it was an Imsai model.

First online use: CompuServe, 1979. Expensive as hell- not only were the hourly rates prohibitive (something like $20 an hour during peak-time), but they charged *more* for higher baud modems. I was using a 300 baud modem; none of that pansy 110 baud stuff for me!

First Arpanet/Internet: ehhh... circa 1985, I think. Part of the BBSing scene with my trusty Commodore 128 and 300 baud Commodore 1660 modem. Played with various pseudo-networks like Fidonet and such, then found a public portals for Arpanet use. QuantumLink- the Commodore-friendly online service- was more my thing at the time, though. (Q-Link was another AOL precursor, along with AppleLink and PC-Link. A lot of the early AOL conventions (size of screennames, limit to # of users in chat rooms, etc) were due to the limitations of the Commodore 64...)

Arpanet became Internet eventually, and I continued using it... watching the development of the WWW was fun- used a VT-100 terminal emulator on the C128 to dial into a Unix account which ran Lynx to view HTML pages as text-only- and I was disturbed by the introduction of commercial elements into "my" online space. But, hey, it brought me SG, so it wasn't all bad.

It's been sad to watch the other elements of the Internet fade into obscurity; ftp's still common, since it can easily be displayed by browsers, and USENET's become the uber-free-porn source (though Time Warner has dropped access to it for their AOL/CompuServe/Road Runner users), but I can't remember the last time I've used Gopher, Archie, Telnet... or the last time I "finger"ed someone. The WWW is fun, but it was neat having so many tools/toys to play with online.

Yep, I remember being like 13 years old, and being in a "chat room" but it was really a big bulletin board-type thing. You posted Hi, and then waited like 2 days (since it was all dial-up at the time) for someone to respond.

The same year I got my own computer, and I had Juno for email.....soooo funny.

I first used the internet in 5th grade. for a class we had to go to the Smithsonian website. my friend kept quoting from Pinky and the Brain and then I thought I was really hilarious when I said, "help! I'm lost in cyberspace!"

somehow my childhood was even more embarrassing than my present state.

i remember being at a co-workers house at about 14-15 and watching him get all sorts of useful, seditionary information from newsgroups and bulletin boards. then my good friend got online (with Prodigy, if i recall) and it's been downhill from there.