I’m new to the internet. Only got access to it 3 years ago. Didn’t own a smartphone until last year. I’m curious how it was for people who discovered it earlier.
Fine, we get it. We’re old. Way to rub it in.
Whippersnappers today.
Memory has a way of being fuzzy and inaccurate. Probably not my actual first experience of it, and I’m probably combining several different occasions…
But I remember a new desk with a computer set up in the living room. My parents or brother set me down in front of it and asked what I wanted to look for, I could search for anything. The first thing that came to mind was to look for Zelda, so I got them to type in Zelda Link’s Aeakening for the search engine. I ended up on a cool little fansite, and learned about the bomb arrows trick.
1995., I got an email account and discovered IRC and usenet via tin, ona a vt100 terminal
It was great for music, and burning cds. I didn’t use it much back then though. On it much more nowadays, trying to scale it back again though. One reason I like it here lemmy reminds me more of a classic internet. I don’t online game much either but I like having the option to.
I don’t remember life without the internet. I was exposed to it when I was really little. Unfortunately it wasn’t that different from today. Was super corporate already at that point. It’s been cool to experiment with search engines that piorize obscure websites like Marginalia search to catch a glimpse of what the internet used to be like before my time.
AOL was my first access. Before that, it was local BBSs. I ran a BBS for a short time, there wasn’t much I could do with only two phone lines into the house.
Somewhere around 1987, I had my computer modem call my university library’s phone number directly so that I could see if the book that I needed was available (it was a long walk to the library). My computer acted as a terminal and the screen displayed everything pretty much the same as the terminals installed in the library itself (text only, monochrome display). Not really the internet, but probably the first practical use of a network of sorts for me.
Early internet for me was internet on cd that came in the mail, AIM chat, flash games, dedicated creepypasta sites, pics of boobs that loaded one line of pixels at a time, and getting kicked off so mom could use the phone.
Obligatory- https://youtu.be/gsNaR6FRuO0
In maybe 1989 my roommate had a computer with a modem and Compuserve. It was cool, but nothing like what came only a few years later when I had a computer with a Netscape browser.
The internet of my childhood was pretty awesome. All the TV channels I liked to watch had a bunch of amazing games that were absolutely free, sometimes you could join a kid-friendly chatroom with a big celebrity like Vitamin C. You could download whatever song or movie you wanted and half the time it was even labeled correctly. You didn’t have to search for anything, just type what you want and add a “.com” to the end and nine times out of ten it’s exactly what you are looking for. If you couldn’t find it Jeeves or Lycos could help. You could chat with your friends and ‘meet’ their friends, or just show off how cool the lyrics to the music you listen to are. The internet wasn’t free of idiots or trolls, but most of the riff-raff of humanity had not yet discovered it, or it was too "nerdy’ for them. When Myspace first came on the scene there were only three pages of people ‘near me’ and I knew half of them irl, and this was in massively overpopulated South Florida. Later I would come to know almost all of them IRL because the Internet used to bring people together. Now I don’t even want to use any social media that’s used by people I know IRL. There is nothing free without heavy microtransactions and/or data collection. It was never a great place for kids, but now I wouldn’t let a kid near it unsupervised. The only thing that’s really improved much is the piracy. I almost never accidentally download Shrek anymore.
Sometime around 1996 for my personal Internet experience, we got it and a laptop for my mom around 1994 so she could do something while getting her master’s and my parents thought it was super cool so we kept it. We finally got a family computer with a modem in 1996. I had an email penpal. I think I spent an entire day trying to download a demo for a video game that got stopped 75% through because my mom picked up the phone.
- I spent a lot of time on BBS’s back in the day. One day a friend from there told me about this number I could dial with my computer to connect to a server at the local university that had a simple shell that couldn’t do much more than telnet, and a few MU*es to check out. I played one of htem for a little bit, then learned about unix machines and shell accounts and managed to get myself one, but even then it was all text-based. I used gopher (before www was really a thing) and then lynx (text-based web browser) to poke around a bit, browsed some newsgroups, etc.
First internet experience for me was 2013 as a child. Back then our home connection had a usage cap of 10GB, but the ISP hosted a “free zone” website that contained a bunch of cartoons and mirrored ABC (Australia) content.
We would watch YouTube videos together as a family because the bandwidth was considered that previous and laugh at those fail compilations and whatnot.
Otherwise about a month or two into having internet, I realised that this would open me up to online gaming, and I excitedly put Mineplex’s IP into the cracked copy of Minecraft that I had on a USB from school, only to get an authentication error because I hadn’t bought an account. Managed to stumble into some Dutch server that was cracked and despite the language barrier, had tons of fun trying to work out the game.
Hang on, core memory unlocked.
About three years before that, a neighbour set up a WiFi network but had open authentication on it.
I remember seeing it on my little EEE PC and connecting to it. I remember completely not knowing what it was, if it was going to cost my parents data money, or if I’d otherwise get in trouble for using it.
I had friends on the same street as me, so I showed them this WiFi network and they weren’t really sure if it would charge my parents or not either.
I had been playing a game that came on a shareware disc called “Wild Wheels” (later learned that was the publisher’s name of the game, the actual name was BuzzingCars) and it referenced ceebot.com as a place to download more demos.
Well, that was the first website I ever visited and I downloaded a 26MB setup for Colobot, an RTS first person space exploration game that had you literally program robots to complete missions. I was still so anxious that there’d be some massive bill in the mail (hence the setup size still being burned in my head) so that was all I downloaded.
And oh boy did I play the shit out of that, and I attribute that game to why I still enjoy computing and programming today.
1996, It was magnificent in its simplicity. Very few walled gardens, no cookie-pop-ups, and very ads.
And the best search engine was HotBot. Fight me.
And the best search engine was HotBot. Fight me.
Dogpile 4 life…
…dogpile introduced me to google when it was a brand-new service: i noticed that all the best results increasingly came from the same search engine, so eventually i cut out the middleman and just started using google directly…
…how times have changed; i haven’t used google for years…
The cookie popups (you mean the cookie consent ones, right?) weren’t really common until like ~2016 or so, were they? (I found this post that claims May 2018) And I thought there were actual pop up ads before then, though yeah not as bad as modern internet browsing without an ad blocker, in some ways.
But there were other usability quirks… I remember always downloading Firefox on a new computer, because Internet Explorer 5 or whatever didn’t have tabs (and Firefox did). Then Chrome was faster and seemed to quickly take over. I remember that javascript alert popups were somewhat common, and would force their window or tab to the top, so a site could easily kind of hijack your whole desktop session, since I think you couldn’t resize the window or even close it until dismissing the popup. In fact at some point the major browsers added a checkbox “prevent this site from showing this dialog” (or something like that) as a mitigation. Before that you could do like
while (true) { alert('hello world'); }and I think the only workaround was to force-close the browser? Other random tidbit: you could also execute arbitrary javascript by putting it in the address bar,javascript:alert('hello world')would show the popup. And ha, I remember when the address bar didn’t default to search, it would only accept URLs.In 1996 I was quite young, but I remember my father connecting to bulletin boards to download free shareware games for me, and it would use up the home phone line. (For anyone who doesn’t know, bulletin boards were text based, like a terminal… and he’d have to call a number, we’d look up some in our area code to avoid long distance fees, I think. When visiting my grandmother’s house in another province, we used a different set of bulletin boards, I think. I remember seeing something like a phone book that would list a bunch of servers that could be called for different things. I remember seeing something like this on Reddit a long time ago:
April 1994. I was thirteen, at a sleepover with friends, playing Starfox on the SNES when my friend’s older brother told us he’d connected the home computer to the phone line.
No Prodigy or AOL, this was something different- more raw and BBS-ey. We started messing around and figured out how to join a local chat room- I have no idea now what they were called back then. There were maybe fifteen people in there, all with William-Gibson-ass usernames.
We were eating pizza and Sour Patch Kids, just fucking around, typing and watching the others. Then someone in the chat said, “Hey, turn on the TV. Kurt Cobain’s dead.” We flipped on the TV and sure enough, there was Kurt Loder breaking the news.
Very vivid 1994 moment.
