AOL - ISP. Not sure order of operations here… I was also on Mozilla/Netscape (1991/92-?)

Bulletin Board Channels: There was at least one gay one in San Diego (ca. 1992-1995). We would chat and post online, then once a month, meet at a gay bar with name tags with our handles.

IRC - fun chat site (at least into 1997 for me)

LISTSERV - this was less useful for me. signing up for ‘reading lists’ or ‘subscriptions’ to ‘butterflies’ ‘sourdough’, etc. (I honestly do not recall the groups I signed on to) when no one really seemed to be there (1992-94?) though I didn’t move with the hip crowd

The games on the PBS kids website over dialup

Gen z here. Coolmathgames.com was fire. I actually bought a shirt from them last year and it gets a lot of compliments surprisingly 🤷‍♀️

I met a girl on an MSN chat room and we talked for awhile and enjoyed each others’ company. We found out we lived pretty close and were the same age but went to different high schools. We decided to meet up in a public place for a date so I fired up mapquest and printed off directions. She did as well. Well, I took a wrong turn and couldn’t get back on track so I disappointingly went home to get back on MSN to give her the news that I got lost. Turns out she did as well! lol. Next time I just gave her my address and we dated for a bit ha

“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.

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

Day of defeat on steam with a download speed of 56k modem… Took like 4 hours for nearly 700mb? And oh my, was it worth it !

ICQ for instant messages !

It was the mid-90s, and just a shell account. Gopher, archie, pine and zmodem.

We didn’t get PPP access for a year or two; this was the days before google - yahoo, altavista, some other engines I can’t remember, and metasearch engines like dogpile that would query a bunch of different search engines and return the combined set of results.

This was the days of mailing lists and usenet for the most part - connect up, download messages for like an hour, then log off, read and reply, then log on and send.

I was there for the original hamsterdance, and it ruled.

For me was using AOL free internet CDs cause we had to pay providers for time online…we used to walk around neighborhood looking for AOL CDs to get online and get to chatrooms pretending we were adults. After a year or so I had a real experience when Internet started to get popularized so I created an email account, an ICQ acc and downloaded a song from this website.

I was 1980 maybe 1981 and we all went to a classmate’s house to watch a computer test. Her dad worked for Bell Labs. They placed an order for groceries that the store delivered.

In 1992 I waited for three days to download a single picture off a telescope and knew this was the future

One of the earliest things I can remember was encountering a thread on the forums of nuklearpower.com (home of the 8-Bit Theater webcomic) that simply asked, “Religious people, why do you believe in God?” and that was the first time I ever had ever encountered atheist perspectives or questioned what my parents taught me. At the time, there was very much this idea of, “Nobody ever changed their mind from an internet argument” but the internet exposed me to a lot of different views that I would never have encountered otherwise (see also: queer people).

Other than that, I used to gather around with friends to browse icanhazcheezeburger and failblog and stuff. I stayed up late grinding levels in RuneScape. Newgrounds and flash games were a big thing. Some of my friends were into 4chan in the early days when it was more about edgy shock humor than straight up Nazis. There was social media like MySpace and Facebook but I had no interest in them bc I was a nerd. There were a lot more random little websites that passed around by word of mouth.

Playing MUDs on JANET (not exactly the internet but close enough). We played late at night on university computers knowing that this wasn’t really what either the computers or JANET were supposed to be used for but it was still great.

I used to go to internet cafes to look for cheats for video games. Pretty much all I ever used the internet for back then. Don’t remember many other sites but I do remember a website where you slaughtered the teletubbies in various ways, like dismembering them or slicing them in half with meat saws.

After that, my first social uses of the internet were MySpace, a forum for metal and alternative music called MakeSomeNoise (named after a magazine that came out in my country) and the chat rooms on The Offspring’s website.

I remember downloading grainy Quicktime video files from people’s homepages. We didn’t need YouTube then and we don’t need it now.

I have vague memories of using Prodigy on Windows 3.1 but I don’t remember much beyond the login screen.

My earliest clear memories were of AOL 3.0, during the era when the app didn’t even have a URL bar because they wanted you to used their walled garden “AOL keyword” system. So I’d login, minimize the program, and immediately open Netscape so I could get to the real internet. Didn’t do much online though, other than go to Nick.com to play games.

Didn’t become a full-time internet user until 1998. Probably because that was the first year I went to a school with internet-connected computers in every classroom, where my parents couldn’t restrict my online time.