Support NeoGAF

[doncale]

even though the Internet has been around since the 1960s, I never heard of it until the mid 1990s. first used Internet in 1996. first got Internet at home in 1997.

now, I had[i/] heard about 'online services' like America Online and CompuServe around 1989 or 1990, but online service was really different from the internet, whether or not these things actually made use of the internet. and also knew about BBSs, but I don't think I became aware of this all-encompasing Internet until it started to get mainstream.

now I dunno what I'd do without it. my life almost revolves around the internet, it's that damn important :lol

 

[ManaByte]

286 with a 40MB HD and a 2800 modem.

 

[fennec fox]

Around '92; didn't seriously begin using it till 93. I had a dialup shell account with an ISP that I paid $10/mo or so for, and I mostly used it to read newsgroups and download old emulator warez.

 

[doncale]

my first internet experience was on some 486 with Win95 on a college network,

 

[Deleted member 1235]

when did mortal kombat III come out? or was it 2, I can't remember but I remember the first thing I used it for was to look up moves for one of those games....

 

[Cubsfan23]

Not really sure, probably an AOL commercial

 

[Dilbert]

I was into BBSes as a kid, but only discovered the Internet proper when I started going to UCLA. The physics department had a huge lab full of Sun workstations running Mosaic...good times!

 

[Dan]

I'd say when I was in elementary school, maybe around '93. We did some rudimentary stuff with it in my computer classes.

 

[Dyne]

'90's computer class.

I got it in '94. I then proceeded to become an AOL kid. That lasted for a while before I got busted for looking at naughty things in '96 or '97. My dad cancelled it until we got it back in.. '98. We've had broadband ever since.

 

[UtadaBarkley]

Back in like late 1995. I used to go to the computer lab at a local college campus, and just play around on the net all day. I was sooooooo hyped because Hotmail was offering *gasp* FREE e-mail addresses. I thought at the time that it must have been a misprint, yet low and behold i went to hotmail.com on my trusty Netscape Navi, and got me a free e-mail addy. This was waaaaaay before the Microsoft takeover. I even used to go on those CRAPPY HTML chatrooms..where you had to refresh to see new messages...LOL. I forgot the name of it...but it was a popular html chatroom back in the day with different "floors" as rooms, and all types of weird stuff.

Those were the days when I used download crappy sharware games, and people would get on me because of the potential that i could download a virus. LOL. Man, life was sooo much more simpler then, and kids actually used to play outside. Wow.

 

[Gantz]

I started using the Internet in 96 via a BBS posting threads on fidonet. The same year our high school library got access. Students were given limited access. We had to fill out a permission slip and get our parents to sign. Totally lame. The first site I went to was the official x-files site.

 

[Iceman]

1993. First year of college. Some nerd took me a workstation lab in the middle of the night all excited... he downloaded a movie file showing the Hindenberg exploding and it literally blew my mind*


*not literally.

"The physics department had a huge lab full of Sun workstations running Mosaic...good times!"

OMG, I remember Mosaic!! Woot. X-Windows impressed the heck out of me too. So clunky though.

 

[pnjtony]

it was early 1997. I was at some kids house who said he could get guitar music online. He showed me OLGA. I was amazed. A few months later when I was in the air force I got to actually spend some time on it and a year later I bought my first PC (400mhz).

I do tech support now.

 

[mattiewheels]

Man, life was sooo much more simpler then, and kids actually used to play outside.

That is, until the internet.

 

[enjoy bell woods]

My dad brought some Prodigy thing home back in maybe 1993 or 1994, and I thought it was some sort of game. I guess we started using it back in 1994. And if that's the case, I've wasted years 8 to 18 entirely on the Internet. Doing completely nothing, too.

 

[Wario64]

I didn't hear about the internet, I found it first

Started using services like Prodigy in the late 80's. Also used the local BBSes to waste my time. Had AOL in the early 90s or so, or whatever year it was where they actually had a DOS version of AOL. First time I used the WORLD WIDE WEB was on Prodigy, which was the first service I saw that even offered this brand new and weird thing. It's interesting to see the internet evolve to what it is today. It took forever to browse through the gaming message boards on Prodigy I think I still had messages printed out about the SNES vs Genesis stuff somewhere, heh. 2800 bps modem rox

 

[doncale]

Back in like late 1995. I used to go to the computer lab at a local college campus, and just play around on the net all day. I was sooooooo hyped because Hotmail was offering *gasp* FREE e-mail addresses. I thought at the time that it must have been a misprint, yet low and behold i went to hotmail.com on my trusty Netscape Navi, and got me a free e-mail addy. This was waaaaaay before the Microsoft takeover. I even used to go on those CRAPPY HTML chatrooms..where you had to refresh to see new messages...LOL. I forgot the name of it...but it was a popular html chatroom back in the day with different "floors" as rooms, and all types of weird stuff.

Those were the days when I used download crappy sharware games, and people would get on me because of the potential that i could download a virus. LOL. Man, life was sooo much more simpler then, and kids actually used to play outside. Wow.

yeah it was at the local college campus, in their computer lab, that i first used the internet. i started going there when ever i could, and stayed till closing time, just looking stuff up. it was so awesome. porn was all over the place by then (1996) :lol

 

[Fresh Prince]

Man, life was sooo much more simpler then, and kids actually used to play ovideogames, watch TV, have sex and do drugs. Wow.

Now we have the Internet.

 

[jenov4]

I was a BBS kid for the early to mid 90's. I guess in 1994 or so, I heard about this free service dialup called FreeNET which was basically a shell account that gave you access to the Usenet, Gopher, Telnet and Email (via Pine) I thought it was a neat concept, but didn't really grasp the whole thing until I got into University (95) where they had workstations with Mosiac browser.

Hell, I even remember one of my UNIVERSITY assignments was to visit a World Wide Web page and find some useful information about a company. Naturally I went to Sony's website looking for any PSX stuff I could find.

Then I ventured into the wonderful world of usenet reading/posting mainly in the rec.games.video.sony groups. I believe some GAFfer's used to post there also.

Ahh the good ole days... I do miss the close friendly nature of BBS'es but I certainly don't miss the godawful dialup speeds. We're talking 2400 BAUD (YES that's 240 CHARACTERS PER SECOND, NOT EVEN 1 BYTE! LOL OMG WTF KIND WORLD WE WERE LIVING IN?!)

 

[B'z-chan]

First time i understood what the internet was. Was back in 1993 or so. I never got to use it till 95 on a old windows 3.1 system on a 14k connection.

I never got a computer till 2000 and i never learned how to type till 99 so i was behind the times. But now i've built countless computers and can type 45 wpm which is nice.

 

[Scrow]

my first experience with the Internet was either at a public library or at school on some relic of a computer

 

[belgurdo]

About 1997 or 98, when I saw some other kid use the computers and I basically repeated what he did when he finished and left.

Then I noticed that the library computers sometimes would let you go porn sites since the blockers would miss them, as I found out by accident. Been hooked ever since

Then I got AOL the next year, and used that until 2002 when I got DSL

 

[Dujour]

1994, aol those were the days.

 

[hobbitx]

GHOSTWRITER!!!

 

[wobedraggled]

1987

"borrowed" uni account's got me onto the irc and the stuff before all the pretty pictures and popup's and crap showed up

 

[Crow357]

Had AOL and there was this weird button called "WWW" but there was never anything there... and I didn't like it... LOL

This was sometime in the early 90's I believe.

 

[Morts]

I heard about it shortly after my family got our first computer in the mid 90s, but we never got hooked up until when I was in fifth grade, probably 1997. I remember looking up Nintendo stuff that first night and getting really hyped for the N64DD.

 

[teepo]

hell if i know. i've been using bbs's and the internet since i was in 1st grade.

i remeber it would take sometimes 30 minutes to load godzilla fan sites with nothing but god damn pictures. good times good times. the best was when i went into the irc channel called #13 or some shit on efnet and pretended i was 12 when i was really 8. i think they all bought it.

 

[OmniGamer]

GHOSTWRITER!!!

Damn it, i thought i'd be the first/only person to mention that...yeah, that whole Max Mouse story arc(with an early appearance from Julia Stiles). Though we did have an old ass modem for the Apple, but it was never hooked up. Eventually though I got online in summer of '95 on a 28.8K modem.

 

[Suerte]

Since I was 14 or something, on AOL. I remember going to a porn website and worrying if it would show up on the phonebill :lol

I remember the days of AllAdvantage.com too.

 

[Bigfoot]

Heard about it with a BBS I used in 94. They were the first to offer internet access in my city. I remember it was so slow that I turned off all images, or I would use the text only version over the BBS!

 

[Mugen]

1994, I was 11. I was so interested in it not because of porn or anything about obtaining information but mainly for GAMING. I was so worried that my 56k modem wouldn't connect to any modem BUT 56k ones, but apparently speed connections doesn't really matter (in terms of it working anyways). When I finally got into PC gaming, I was playing SF2 in kaillera, and it was laggy as hell but then I was really enjoying it like I was playing my first 3d videogame ever :lol. I was just really wowed by it and couldn't stop thinking of the possibilities for it.

 

[Spectral Glider]

First heard of it around 1986....when, as a young Commodore user, before AOL there was Quantum Link:

I never actually got on the net and use it until like 93 or 94 when I was in college where they used a gopher on dummy terminals. God, did those things suck. Thank heavens for the graphical push by Mosaic.

 

[The Faceless Master]

heard about in i think 1993 or so... first time using was at a public library in '95... that summer i was a library addict... got dialup in 1996...

 

[puck1337]

I think it was '94. I remember looking at IUMA with Lynx and just being blown away at the number of bands out there.

In '95, our school got a leased 56K line and the students went PORN CRAZY. It was quite something.

That was also the year I learned to love GB emulators. At the time, PasoFami and SuperPasoFami were the NES and SNES emulators of choice. They were absolutely HORRIBLE and ran like total shit. Still managed to grab dozens of awesome ROMs.

Good times.

 

[Hitokage]

When I was in middle school, so like 94 or 95 at the latest. Compuserve on a 14.4 modem. Good times.

OMG, I remember Mosaic!! Woot. X-Windows impressed the heck out of me too. So clunky though.

X is STILL going strong.

 

[Wario64]

Since I was 14 or something, on AOL. I remember going to a porn website and worrying if it would show up on the phonebill :lol

I remember the days of AllAdvantage.com too.

Haha, alladvantage actually worked for me. $100+ spending money on Dreamcast games

 

[capslock]

Back in like late 1995. I used to go to the computer lab at a local college campus, and just play around on the net all day. I was sooooooo hyped because Hotmail was offering *gasp* FREE e-mail addresses. I thought at the time that it must have been a misprint, yet low and behold i went to hotmail.com on my trusty Netscape Navi, and got me a free e-mail addy. This was waaaaaay before the Microsoft takeover. I even used to go on those CRAPPY HTML chatrooms..where you had to refresh to see new messages...LOL. I forgot the name of it...but it was a popular html chatroom back in the day with different "floors" as rooms, and all types of weird stuff.

Those were the days when I used download crappy sharware games, and people would get on me because of the potential that i could download a virus. LOL. Man, life was sooo much more simpler then, and kids actually used to play outside. Wow.

Was it called 'Alamak' by any chance?

 

[BeOnEdge]

1995. used aol and the sign in was all messed up. it had like blue lighting striking a gold key :lol i went to sega.com and around the sega logo they had spider webs because you were on "the web" :lol

 

[Raistlin]

when did you first hear about the Internet?

My buddy Al Gore told me about it back when he was beta testing it.

 

[ChristKiller]

We had Prodigy back in the early 90s, of course I was only around 5 years old back then and had no idea what the "internet" was. I remember reading bulletin boards and submitting captions for a site called "krazy kaptions", and also I remember this site that had some sort of 3D maze or mazes, I think it was in a medieval fantasy or something. I also remember this program called "Telix" which distributed a bunch of freeware games and game demos and stuff.

 

[Ecrofirt]

How the hell did someone calling himself ChristKiller get approved for this board?

 

[Triumph]

My buddy Al Gore told me about it back when he was beta testing it.

I helped that tree hugging fucker invent the internet, and I didn't get jack. Not even a lousy t-shirt!

Uh, seriously though, my uncle, who had a lovely career in military intelligence until he went batty, worked on ARPANET. So I'm pretty sure he first showed me some stuff on one of his home pcs in like the late '80's. I didn't really start fucking around with it until about '94 or '95, when I used it to trade Magic the Gathering cards and other shit.

Man, have I come along way, baby.

 

[AlphaSnake]

1995. I remember TimeWarner had this thing; order The Net on PayPer View (the Sandra Bullock movie) and get a disketted of 25 free hours of AOL. Granted in 95 we didn't have a computer, but at the end of 96 we got one and went online shortly after.

 

[Tommie Hu$tle]

I was into BBSes as a kid, but only discovered the Internet proper when I started going to UCLA. The physics department had a huge lab full of Sun workstations running Mosaic...good times!

Ditto except the UCLA part. I did about the same except that I was at TSU. So this is 92ish time.

 

[Joe]

early 90's on AOL at my friends house. he had a slow ass modem and he paid AOL by the minute. we used to go into chat rooms and talk to girls :lol

anyone remember ANT on aol? that was the shit.

 

[Dilbert]

How the hell did someone calling himself ChristKiller get approved for this board?

You're reading it wrong. He has a problem with someone named "Chris T."

 

[Kon Tiki]

First started using it in 92-93 in highschool. Do not remember when the first time I heard of it was.

 

[Flynn]

I was a BBSer all through high school, then fell of the PC wagon when hard drives came out because I couldn't afford the upgrade.

Heard about the Internet, the Well, etc. via Mondo 2000 and weaseled my way online around 1993 -- my school didn't give accounts to non-computer majors, but I talked them into letting me have one.

 

[MrPing1000]

I can't remember. My first use was in a net cafe £6 for an hour :lol I made a booklet of internet addresses I wanted to look at, which I think I might still have somewheres. That must have been 1995 or 1996