Asklemmy

Voraciously reading gURL.com. Got me into zine and riot grrl culture, and helped me actually learn about my body and sex in a positive way despite growing up in a conservative home.

This was in one of the first emails my dad ever got. We had the video saved to our desktop and would bug our dad to show us "the bear video" over and over again.

In the 90s, before the social media and Google existed, it was customary to create your own home page. My page was about koalas. I was really into koalas. I had a crush in the digital art class, and she made her page about Hanson (a boyband). I remember feeling jealous about the attention they were getting hehe.

Watching flash animations and playing flash games on Newgrounds.

I spent a disgusting amount of time with MOOs in the 90s. Diversity University, RiverMOO, BayMOO, LambdaMOO. MOOs differed from MUDs in that you could program rooms and objects yourself, and they were more chat and exploration than MUDs which were mostly RP and combat. MUDs are still around, but the only MOO still up is LambdaMOO.

Also not necessarily my own memory, but getting to listen to albums made of up songs my dad would find on limewire

Newsgroups and livejournal.

Newgrounds most definitely. And as an earlier poster stated, muds. Specifically MUME. Oh man many hours have been spent playing that game

How early is early / does early have to be?

My gaming clan.

If it has to be before that, I guess the multiplayer "text" browser games?

So many!

MS Comic Chat and their weird VR Chat, the former was always very lively and a great introduction to the world of IRC, the latter was just experimental and trippy.

Usenet and finding lively discussion, flamewars and so much porn and spam under one roof.

Instant Messengers like ICQ and AIM being the lifeblood of the social world.

I think the thing I miss the most is that there was so much to discover and discovering it was very much a word of mouth thing, you had to find links from friends, follow webrings and pointers from sites that made it onto Altavista and Yahoo (or astalavista for the less legit stuff), now everything is consolidated onto a handful of platforms, it feels less open than ever.

Sierra on line. They made some website with different sections to visit like a theme park. I really enjoyed Quest for Glory and thise types of computer games so I was excited for Sierra to make a website like that.

Also, asl?

Dialing up to Prodigy to try and do homework with info from the Internet, but just using Microsoft Encarta instead.

When there were dedicated websites to silly gimmick/songs like Hamster Dance, Boogie Blocks, etc.

I started using the internet later than some, but finding YTPs and fan-made video game blooper videos on early YouTube. I though they were the funniest things in the world, still do to some extent looking back on how weird and experimental they could be. I'm still recovering from having my sense of humour melted at a young age lol

The Netscape loading logo was pretty cool, and of course it took a while to load every page!

A bit later than what I'd call the early internet, I'd say my favourite memory was winning a Super Soaker CPS 2500 when I was 13.

BonziBuddy destroying the family computer.

AOL keyword NICK

Earliest thing I remember was, as a kid of maybe 6 or 7, my family got internet installed (circa 95/96), and I found an early Pokémon fansite (via Yahooligans, most likely) that listed all 150 Pokémon and the "meaning" of their names (ie Hitmonchan and Hitmonlee are combinations of "hit" and Jackie Chan and Bruce Lee respectively). I was of course only just learning to read, so it took me a few visits to the website to read though every entry, but I was so stoked to see such engaging content on this new "internet"-thing

I remember buying a very specific blacksmith vise from someone on a forum where I spent a lot of time.

I never really discussed with herb specifically on this forum except to arrange the sale but when I met her it was like meeting a friend.

She was in a meet with other people from this forum the week before, she told me about the projects they had and gave me extra pieces of exotic wood and Damascus steel that she made with another member for me to work with.

We didn't knew each other at all be the fact that we belonged to the same online community was enough for us to be instantly friend.

One of my first internet experience was on a forum for a kid tv channel. There was a point system where posting a message would give you a point and certain amount of points would grant you ranks. I discovered that sending private messages also counted and clicking space repeatedly when submitting a message would multiply the message and the points. I am sorry to whoever received thousands of mps every single day back then but I had a lot of fun increasing that rank.

That may also explain why I still like incremental games nowadays

making a geocities with friends

Finding out that I can download & emulate NeoGeo games on my potato PC early 2000 :)

An old browser strategy game called Archmage, run by a company called Mari, if I remember right. You accumulated turns over time, and then you spent your turns casting spells, summoning armies and attacking other players for land. All text based, but with a fair bit of complexity.

MUDs too. I played on one called Elsweyr, that was a good time.

I can't remember the name of the game, but there was this flash powered tank game that I spent hours on during middle school. Oh, and interactive buddy...that game was a trip with its scripting engine!

I'd played Doom with people on networked computers in college, but that wasn't really "internet". But right at the end of the 90's when we started getting online game servers was great. Being able to play Unreal or Battlefield 1942 with random people from anywhere was amazing, and very addicting. Servers would have like 8 or maybe 16 player slots. More than that and lag would make the games unplayable. You'd keep refreshing the server lists looking for an open slot with a low ping, and join in. Actual early internet wasn't terribly exciting. Pretty much just text only, maybe some tiny graphics, since download speeds were unbearably slow.

There's a lot - MSN, forums in their hey-day, Geocities, the days when almost every ISP had free web hosting, long-form letter style emails being a common means of communication, email newsletters, etc. etc.

But three particular things come to mind:

R.E. League at Reality's End (https://www.realitysend.com/) - like many children in the 90s-2000s, I was obsessed with Pokemon. This guy made a web-based Pokemon RPG, with all the usual stuff (battles, badges, etc.) BUT with puzzles and amazing writing. What's more, anyone could make a website and be their own gym leader, WITH BADGE, with just a little code from Reality's End. It. Was. Awesome. Still around, kind of, but most of the fan-made gyms are looong gone, and I'm not certain you can create a new user for the main site stuff anymore. Edit: OMG I WAS WRONG, you can still make new accounts! Nostalgia time! For anyone wanting to try this, see: https://www.realitysend.com/league/gssignup

[Town Redacted]MP3.com - As a young teenager I lived in a small city with a disproportionally lively music scene. This website had recordings from local artists of all genres, and started me off on finding all ages shows [this was also still thriving, I don't see that many posters etc. for these anymore]. Met a ton of other kids, listened to a lot of good music, and it became a 'cool kid' feather in my cap. Also, in a roundabout way, was a catalyst for me discovering pot (listen to music and click on link for the band's webpage -> get into a discussion in their guestbook with a member of a different, all teen girl punk band -> start chatting with members of this band often -> band smokes me out for the first time at a show for the band we met over, which was also my last night in town before moving)

The Pojo.com Forums - Again, Pokemon obsessed kid. Loved Pojo for TCG stuff, but it also introduced me to fanfiction. I wrote my own fanfics that were well received, which gave me a lot of confidence about writing in general. Also met some cool people here, and for nostalgia's sake I find myself Googling usernames I remember sometimes.

Downloading a file and after hours of downloading it gets stuck at 99%

The many NSFL sites that you could very easily end up on, if you didnt take a small amount of care to avoid

My first experience with the internet was using a Unix shell account that I used to dial into using "Telix for DOS". For browsing I had Lynx, for mail PINE, and for IRC it was some client called "irc" and so on. This was in the early 90s, maybe 1991 or 92.

Everything was text only, dial-up with 9600 baud, and it was glorious because before that all we had was BBSes (which were even more glorious in some ways actually).

My first Internet connection was based on GPRS and I remember images taking ages to load and loading in chunks. Moreover the connection kept interfering with the surround audio system and sometimes I would hear noises similar to the dial up modems.

I also remember the first times I tried using eMule (is it still up and running?): I was searching for the video song "Elevation" by U2 but I was unaware of rule 34; you can imagine what I actually downloaded.

Posting to a Usenet newsgroup to inquire about a research paper I was interested in, and having the author snail mail me a printed copy of the paper. The power of community blew my mind.

Vbulletin boards and general forum sites before the likes of Facebook and Reddit got big. Made a lot of friends on there.

Neopets was great as well. Loved the minigames.