I was sitting with my son on the couch yesterday evening before bedtime, watching episodes of Baby Einsteins on youtube, when I started to think- this little man is going to grow up thinking that this amazing piece of technology is as commonplace as wearing shoes. This just blows my mind when I think about it. I mean, there is pretty much literally everything and anything I could want at my immediate disposal, and its doesn't even have to be connected to a wire. Its all done through the air, like some kind of friggin' space magic expelled from a Martian's butt (which, in the spirit of Calvin's dad, is probably how I'll explain the internet when he gets a little older). Point being, he's not really going to have a "first" memory of being exposed to the internet like most of us, as he's never going to experience a time without it. It'll just be something that has always been there- nothing fancy about it, kinda like most of us view TV (with the exception of our older members who used to ride tha' trolly down to the malt shoppe to watch the town's only 10inch black-and-white television broadcasting Howdy Doody). TV was just "there" for me, but I'll always remember sneaking inside the library during recess, firing up the old IBM with the original Netscape Navigator, clicking the "What's Cool" tab, searching and scanning until I found the hilarious picture that my friends' had told me about: Spoiler ... So yeah, that's my first memory of using the internet. Focus: Tell us the story of your first funny/bad/nostalgia-y experiences with the internet.
It was 1994 or 1995 and I was in the dorm in college. My neighbor had this crazy new thing on his computer that I'd been hearing about on the news called "the internet" so I went over to check it out. He turned on his computer and this crazy buzzing and high-pitched beeping sound started happening. When that was done, he typed in and address or something and an image started to appear, line by line. 2 or 3 minutes later, you could start to make out the top of the woman's head as the image progressed. 10 minutes later, and we had an image of a naked lady right there on his desk. It was like magic!
My first ventures online were to Bulletin Board Systems (BBSs) which, for those who never used them, were text-based, menu driven "communities" where you often had things like rudimentary message boards, community games (also menu/text driven; think Farmville if, instead of a cow, there was a description of what the cow looked like), live chats, etc. Frequently they were local and small, meaning only a few people could dial in at any time. Also, you could look at ASCII porn. Google it; I'm at work. Once I got onto the internet, though, one of the first things my dad showed me was NASA's homepage. They had a different image every day, and with the speed of our modem, we'd typically load up the page on a Saturday, then go make lunch. Sometimes, if our lunch lasted long enough, the image would be done by the time we finished eating and we could look at the first fuzzy images from Hubble, or some of the ground telescopes. That, logically, led to my own conclusion that I could probably also look at pictures of models in their bathing suits - which turned out to be true.
A little bit pre-"official internet", but to 12-year-old me, it was a good indication of what was to come. Spoiler
The first computer my family owned was one my dad was able to swipe from work. It had a 25MHz chip and who knows how much memory or hard drive space (I'm guessing not much). It was loaded with Windows 3.0. My window to the world, as I'm sure was the case with many people, was AOL. I'd double click the AOL icon, and in the time that the window came up and you could type your login info, I could walk--not run--to the kitchen, leisurely prepare a bowl of cereal, come back into the family room, turn the TV on, find the cartoons I'd be watching, and sit back down. One minute later, I could begin to sign on. The sign-in process, at times, would last at least through the first part of a Rocko's Modern Life episode, blooping, beeping, and buzzing, as only a 14.4 kbps modem could do. Once on, things lagged considerably, and IMs sent to my friends would take about 5-10 seconds to register as being sent in the dialog box, and another 30-45 seconds to see their response, even if it was typed instantly on the other end. Web browsing was hilariously dull. I honestly don't even remember what I looked at, and I'm pretty sure my mother had locked things down from her main account. In essence, my first internet was a way to communicate with people without using a phone and a digital Encyclopedia Britannica when I needed it for school projects. Later on, I made many fond memories going into "Lesbian" chat rooms and asking people to email me pictures. This worked well, and I had a nice catalog of pictures of naked women that a bunch of sweaty old men had probably sent to me.
I'm pretty sure it was late '95/ early '96 when I started fucking around with the internet when my dad bought a modem for it (you know, when you pick up a phone in the house and the connection is lost). I was a music maniac back then and was always using it to check concert listings and band sites, but I thought that the first true sensensation- chat rooms- were fascinating fun. I was always going on one called alamak.com, which was crowded but crude. Imagine being able to bitch and YELL IN CAPITAL LETTERS at strangers ffrom all around the world over their shitty tastes in pop culture without ever worrying about getting your ass kicked? Imagine a place that teaches you that Marilyn Manson had his lower ribs removed to suck his own dick (internet lies in the early days were a lot easier to believe). Of course, on the downside chat rooms also invented something else: shitty, lazy grammar. Soon afterwards porn was discovered and washed the entire internet in sleaze, and suddenly every guy in my high school had Tennis Elbow without ever owning a fucking racket.
I still remember how quickly my 14 year old sister (in 1996) discovered she could meet random men to have sex with. She latched on to chat rooms like a lamprey on a bottom feeding fish.
In '93 I was in 7th grade, and our school library had an "Internet Room". This was not to be confused with the Computer Lab, which was an entirely different room with about 30 computers not connected to the internet. The Internet room had three computers, each with their own separate phone lines. Guys were always keeping an eye open for times when the library cunt wasn't around and there was no one in the Internet room so they could sneak over there and look up porn. This was usually followed by the internet being suddenly disconnected, and the library cunt walking by the Internet room with a smug look on her face. Edit: I almost forgot to mention my first computer ever. Spoiler Feast your eyes on the Tandy 1000 TL2: We bought this around the same time the local video rental place also rented VCR's.
'97 or '98 when I was about 11, my best friend and I would always go in chat rooms and ask girls what their bra size was. It was awesome. I also remember not really believing people who said you could find anything online... like, anything. Yeah right, I thought, as I typed "naked ladies" into Altavista just in case.
Yea, that. I bought a computer from Best Buy and got a Free MSN disk. First word search............PUSSY.
Oh, man. You want dinosaur computers, I'll never forget when my Dad came home with OUR first computer: That's the Commodore Vic 20, kids. The "video games" were on a CASSETTE TAPE you had to manually type the commands into the computer to load. It would take about ten minutes to get a game started. You had to use it on your TV because there was no monitor, but the Commodore 64 came by soon and made this fucker obsolete in no time flat.
An AltaVista search for "Dinosaurs." And today I have a Jurassic Park character as my avatar. I haven't changed much since 2nd grade.
I was lucky enough to have a mom who was a teacher at the local high school (the first place to get internet in my town I believe). I have a very distinct memory of going up to school after-hours, hopping on the dial-up, and having her help me find NBA stats for Karl Malone and John Stockton. At least I started out pure and innocent.
I distinctly remember downloading an episode of what I thought was "Daria" on Kazaa. I hit "download" and ran along since it took about 2.3 hours to download a 22 minute episode. Unfortunately, "Daria" was really a porn. My poor Pops went upstairs to the family computer and was greeted by a girl getting railed by two black guys. "TX!!!!!!" I think I could've heard my name 2 miles away. He was so shocked and upset. At the time it was embarrassing, and I had a hell of a time convincing him that I really intended to watch a cartoon. Now it's just funny. I remember when it took about 10 minutes for a page to load.
noobs. I don't really remember my first internets. I started using Fidonets in the mid 80's when I was first learnig how to read, and BBS'es in the early 90's. My dad got into IT when I was a toddler and that shit has just always been around for me. My earliest 'internet' memories are mostly around playing old school games and a game where you played an animated penis that shot sperm up at raining bibles and condoms, and got bonus points if you managed to shoot a boob. I really didn't get the game, except that it was a pretty fun tank game - I was just fascinated by it because Dad didn't want me to play it, and you could compare your high scores with other peoples using the modem.
Our first computer used Prodigy, and the desktop was a bookshelf with the programs sitting on the shelves. AOL was in another "room" and I never used it because it was too slow to load or do anything on. We had Myst on that computer, and there was a game with a cat and mouse and cheese and blocks that if any of you nerds remember what it was called, tell me immediately because I would love to play it again. I do remember first learning how to use AIM. My dad made my screen name for me (Jrwriter14) and taught me how to make emoticons. He was showing me how to use it as I talked to one of my friends and she said "shit" and it was very scandalous.
My first experience with the interwebs was in high school. I would print out porn pics and place them in random books in the school library.
My grandfather was always very technical (he spent much of his life working for Control Data), and he hooked us up with a 486 in 1993, though we wouldn't hit the internets until 1996 - I was desperate to find a way to play Sonic the Hedgehog on my computer, because I wasn't allowed video game consoles, however I wasn't yet smart enough to figure out what a ROM was (or even if the ROM scene had really accomplished much at that point), so I was confined to fucking around on the Microsoft Network's prefab browser page until I finally broke out and disovered a real browser. From there I spent a lot of time in Beseen chatrooms about animorphs. I doubt any of those people remember me (I mean I was 8-9), but I still remember a few of the conversations, what fads were starting to take off at the time, and trying to figure out what someone meant when they said brb and stopped responding (I assumed 'bathroom break') I took to the internet pretty well, I'd already tried making a few web pages by 1998 (one of which still exists somewhere, no i will not link to my 1337 ten-year-old web design skillz) Being the only guy with internet at the school I went to after moving in 1999 was... kind of sad, but led me to at least one crucial debate on tits vs pussy
Add me to the Commodore Vic-20 crowd. I remember loading 'Frogger' with the cassette tape and playing it for hours. Windows 3.1 blew my mind when I first saw it. Now my five year old daughter plays with an iPad when we have to drive long distances.
I remember getting all excited about adding a separate phone line just for dial-up access at the house.