Ask Lemmy

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.

Errghhh ooo oo uh uh oh uh uh.

Dial up

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.

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.

9600 baud connection. IBM PS2 running win 3.1. prodigy service, i think

It was a lot better back then, then it became about money.

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.

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.

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!

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.

2nd hand.

Connecting to a text only BBS at 300 baud who got their content from the internet.

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.

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

Definitely 2flashgames.com and Newgrounds.com.

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.

BBS on a commodore64 and a tiny bit of compuserve.

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.

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 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.

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

"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.

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...

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

ascii dicks on irc

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.

@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! 🔥

Expage, and geocities quickly turned to MSN messenger and neopets. Some Yahoo! Games in there too.

CBBC website

Quake online

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.)

Good

9600 baud > 14.4 > 56k dial-up modems and AOL chat rooms.

CompuServe chat rooms and the Neverwinter Nights MUD on the service.

plato/novanet, irc, newsgroups, email.