OT: When did you first start using the interwebs?

My family's first computer was a top-of-the-line Dell in '97, right heart of the Dell/Gateway war. I remember my dad literally lecturing me how Dell was a superior machine. 300mhz processor and a 7gb hard drive. I remember thinking, "how the eff would anyone fill up 7 GIGS?!"

My dad loved that computer and I absolutely ruined it with Kazaa porn viruses.

Today...

The place I worked from 89-93 switched from UUCP to SMTP in the early 90s, and I had access to Usenet there as well. That was pretty much the internet then. Had an AOL account by 93 or 94, and got a domain around 96.

I first accessed a dial-up BBS in circa... 87. Whenever I installed my first modem, which may have been 300 or 1200 baud for all I remember, in my Leading Edge PC ($5,000, two floppy drives, amber monitor).

My first memories of the Internet were convincing my mom to use the phone connection for dialup long enough for me to find out how to get unlimited master balls in Pokemon red with missingno.

My friend at school knew and teased us with the info but wouldn't tell...

1987, when I enrolled as a PhD student at UM. We got email addresses and joined Usenet and subscribed to daily feeds from bulletin boards. I had an Apple Mac II but I visited the lab to get online.

freshman year 1996, my roomate had a computer.

I learned how to create word documents...

then I learned how to find guitar tab...

then I found porn... glorious glorious porn... my dick still gets hard just thinking of thronson house...  

jdon

 

First computer: Apple II Plus, 1982.

At the Mason Hall computer lab.

It had to be somewhere between 94-96.  My dads friend was a computer teacher at the school, and he came over Thanksgiving morning to set it all up for us.  I was able to access ESPN on the web when the thanksgiving games were over, then I looked up some info on Green Day (back when they were actually cool).  Will never forget it.

I remember being at a friends' house waiting for an image of Cindy Crawford to load for about 30 minutes.  I think it was 1994.

My forays on the internet began in the early 90's doing mad libs on Prodigy. My earliest computer story was graduating from games on floppy disks to Sim City 2000 on a cd. Unfortunately my computer didn't have the minimum 4mb of ram to run it.

Trumpet Winsock with Netscape 2.0. Had to be winter 95/96. First kid in town with an email address and was teased mercilessly. Now, all those assholes are addicted to FarmVille. I win.

90 or 91. My parents got a PC, don't remember what brand, and subscribed to Prodigy.

I followed the whole ugly story fairly closely on ESPN.

I had sporadic access to the Internet for 2-3 years prior to that. Primarily I used gopher and FTP, though.

my dad taught me about computers in 1985 with our commodore 64. I was 5. I've been into computers ever since, and turned it into a career. as for the internet, it was 1994 or 1995 with AOL chat rooms. first seeing it at my friends house, then talking my mom into getting it. that led to Napster in 97 or 98. between Napster and porn, the late 90s were a great time to be a teen and discover the Internet

It was a Gateway. I would occasionally get "you have performed an illegal function" and it would scare the hell out of me.

Remember I had altelco email domain. AIM was super addicting once I forgot got it and even went in the AIM chat rooms a lot. ESPN message boards were a lot of fun . Michigan had its own board.

You guys are (almost) all young whippersnappers. I began using the ancient Prodigy service no later than 1992, and possibly in '91. There were lots of geeky message boards to plug into. I remember the glorious early days of the World Wide Web with its all-gray backgrounds and images that didn't automatically load because your 14.4 dialup couldn't handle it. Back then the best sites were places like "Star Wars at UPENN" and various converted Usenet resources. In '94 I started using Grex, an Ann Arbor-based conference/chat/open Linux system that offered free email (I'm a fellow pine guy, Sharik!), a well-designed "party" chat system, and the attractive address of "cyberspace.org." It was a split from the older m-net (arbornet.org) that offered substantially the same services but differed wildly in financial stability (both ran on donations), governance, and culture. I used Grex more, but I was involved in both and the culture was pretty involved. I believe grex still exists, but it is a shell (ha ha Unix joke) of its former self. I learned a great deal from these early immersions in net culture, and I retain a number of skills (rapid typing, for example--posts like this, composed on an iPad, would be triple the size if I had a regular keyboard) and holdover predispositions that were learned the hard way, through years of discussion and conversation and debate and hurt feelings and misunderstandings and adaptation. I encountered and dealt with abusive posting, gutless anonymity, fake accounts, way-too-personal flame war, grammar fascism (I was a big offender--I still do not respond well to a question that begins "r u") and robust debate before it was cool. I feel old. But I'm grateful for the experience. Prior to entering ministry I worked in a hospital support career that has stretched to 14 years (I still fill in every so often at a scheduling office) that I started entirely because I was able to type very fast, thanks to spending hours every day talking to people I had never met.

Mid 90's. Telnet. Around the time I was making BNC cables by hand to network Windows 3.11 machines. Not my first use of computers, but that's the first I remeber of dialing up other computers. People sent messages to other people they knew, there were some bulletin boards, all ascii stuff. The coolest thing I'd seen anyone do was go to a site that had guitar tabs. I also knew a guy who was very excited about his webcrawling program. You could type in a word, go to bed, and when you came back the next day it would show you a list of things it found on the web that had that word it in. Very exciting stuff.

Had to be mid 90's. Five minutes just to see some naked boobs in a jpeg on the 56k dialup. But it was glorious.

I remember the first time I was able to exchange email with an old high school friend who worked at Motorola.  My company only connected to the Internet to exchange email once a day and, in those days, you had to know the path of computers the email would take.  In my case, the mail address to my friend was something like:

ingr!mot!cid!john

I also remember seeing and using one of the first beta versions of Mosaic (which later become Netscape)..

I bought my first PC in 1995.  It was a 486 DX/4 with a turbo button.  I got an AOL, Compuserve, and Prodigy disks with it.  Free 10 hours on each.  Before I knew it, I surfed for over 24 hours straight.

We had usenet bulletin boards and email, and Gopher.  You could dial-up Westaw for legal research (I was in law school at the time) and...that was about it.

1998

I was connecting to random online bulletin boards and doing online gaming with my friends in the mid to late 80's, but that wasn't the real Internet yet.  Online gaming over 2400 baud modems was, to say the least, frustrating.

 

I didn't start using the real thing on a daily basis until ESPN.com came online and had live game updates, so probably 1995 time frame or so. 

When I first came to America in 2002. It didn't really hold much interest for me at the time though since I was too busy catching up on cartoons I'd missed in earlier childhood. Then I discovered computer games on the internet. I'm just now realizing how far computers have come in just 13 years, especially the internet.

Mid 80s. My dad was a computer programmer back then and had me programming on our C64. Then had a 476 with turbo button too and logged into prodigy to get data downloads. Just text! Probably 87/88. Before that we did lots of those touch tone info numbers...like get sports scores or weather reports. Essentially it was the internet on a phone!

'94. West quad computer lab. Freshman year. Friend told me you can look at naked pictures of Pamela Anderson on computers. And so we did. Spent a lot of time in that lab.