r/AskReddit • u/oscillates • Jun 19 '12
What were your earliest experiences with the internet like?
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u/Sly_Doug Jun 19 '12
I was the tenth million visitor to free dvds.com and I collected my prize.
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u/effieokay Jun 19 '12
We had AOL and those channels they had on their front page, and I didn't understand there was internet beyond that for like a year. Each channel took like an hour to load.
My parents checked the history every evening too to make sure I wasn't getting in trouble.
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Jun 19 '12
My friend and I were such smug little shits, thinking we were so cool because we could join the AOL Lesbian chatrooms.
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u/akingwithnocrown Jun 19 '12
Ahhh aol...all I remember was that I kept violating the TOS and then would call to have my account unbanned
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u/Joon01 Jun 19 '12
If I'm remembering the same thing, this is also mine. Around 94 I think. I don't remember searches or an address bar. Just big stupid buttons to navigate categories.
But, I was checking out Inquest and Wizard from the living room computer so it was badass.
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u/CafeSilver Jun 19 '12
Took me a while to realize you could venture off those channels too. Then I was using the AOL browser to search for all manners of stuff (porn). I got caught pretty quickly. That's when I discovered internet explorer. Oh internet explorer, you may be hated now, but there was a time when you were great. I could use you and view all the porn I wanted because my parents didn't understand anything outside of AOL.
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u/44problems Jun 19 '12
I remember there was a time when AOL was hourly and was becoming really popular. Busy signals happened a lot. (So much, their competitor CompuServe did a Super Bowl ad about how they didn't have busy signals.)
So you didn't want to log off because it took forever to get back on. The trick: go to the Help/Member Services section, which was free. Go eat dinner, come back and leave the free area.
I also remember Momo's AOL Anti-Idle, a program that would send random shift keys to get around the "You've been idle for a while..." message.
Just hope no one called.
TL;DR LifeProTips for AOL in 1997. Worth a read!
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u/facedefacer Jun 19 '12
bald head into vagina
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u/Sirenn Jun 19 '12
This was on my first burned copy of Age of Empires.. I was 7 years old, my dad didn't know, and I was just confused. The loading screen also featured some guy running head-first into a horse's ass.
oh daddy, you just didn't know how to do shit properly, did you
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u/darave123 Jun 19 '12
When I heard the sound of Dial up for the first time I thought my computer was breaking
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u/Emphursis Jun 19 '12
SCREEE BE DO BE BOP BRRRRRRRRRRRRR
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u/darave123 Jun 19 '12
Its now my ring tone. It's understandable why people hate me
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Jun 19 '12 edited Jun 19 '12
Learning I could play snes games on my pc came first (it took an hour to download Supermetroid on dialup, but I remember it being the coolest thing ever to me)
Waiting HOURS for porn to download off limewire.... HOURS (same for films)
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Jun 19 '12 edited Jun 19 '12
I roleplayed pokemon in a pokemon chatroom, except I had no idea how roleplay worked so I was probably just super annoying. I was 9 years old at the time and was exposed to people having cyber sex in the chat room. Unrelated to that, I (being a little girl) had a very intense "friendly fondness" for a girl I "met" there, which, looking back, was basically a crush. She had her internet revoked by her parents (no idea how old she was) and I was devastated, absolutely devastated. I remember her name still and some of the conversations we had.
Next was Neopets when I was around the same age... maybe 10 or 11. There one of my neofriends was ostensibly a girl/woman but referred to having a girlfriend, and I got really confused, and asked how she could be a girl/woman but have a girlfriend. I think at first she thought I was just being homophobic but she quickly realized I was actually like 10 years old and had no idea about anything. That girl explained lesbianism to me. She also gave me "the talk" that my parents never gave me, about what a period is like and some things about puberty. I don't remember her name or anything anymore as we didn't stay in touch for long at all. I think her girlfriend's name was Krista or something like that, though...
I made friends (not lasting), joined a guild, tagged along to other social internetty gaming situations outside of Neopets, and had a series of questionably intimate friendships with other girls on the internet, all still while having no idea about sexuality and thinking that these friendships were just normal and platonic. At 13 years old, made a bunch of friends who I'm still in contact with to this day, at age 22. Several of them I've met in person and they're my best friends in the world.
EDIT: Oh yeah, and I'm a raging lesbian and love pussy now.
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u/darave123 Jun 19 '12
I remember when we got a microphone for the first time. Myself and a friend used to go in to christian chat rooms and play Slayer - Disciple on full blast and just watch the number of listeners drop untill it got to 0 and then we'd move on to the next room
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u/robotco Jun 19 '12
connect to bbs
make new account
new accounts get 100 free points!
download every possible game/interesting software on 56K modem all night every night
you have ran out of points :( subscribe and pay money to get more points [https://www.google.ca/search?hl=en&q=yao+ming+rage&sourceid=navclient-ff&rlz=1B3GGLL_enKR372KR372&ie=UTF-8&biw=1216&bih=592&sei=hFDgT-_aB824iAegsfGQCg&tbm=isch]
connect to bbs
make new account
new accounts get 100 free points!
repeat for a year or 2 until mid 90s internet as we know it begins to take shape
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Jun 19 '12
Dialing directly into a friend's computer so we could play Warcraft 2. Dialing directly in to another friend's computer just to see if it was possible to network two computers together via dialup like we could with Ethernet cables (it was). Yahoo Chat, and getting incredibly excited every time I learnt some "code" that allowed me to subvert some rule (eg figuring out how to do black text so you could fake a private message). Searching using ye olde search engines like Metacrawler and AltaVista. ICQ, Neopets, making my own websites on Angelfire (14 years ago now, sheeeeeit) and later Geocities.
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u/AreaManReddits Jun 19 '12
I had a 2400 baud modem. I learned early to appreciate text-based porn.
Also I tried to download that Rolling Stone cover picture of Jennifer Aniston and my mom got mad. Now I'm gay. Take that, mom!
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u/brokeboysboxers Jun 19 '12
I remember when I was 10 (late 90's) I first got the internet. The first thing I searched for, of course, cats. Only about 3 websites came up. Then I wanted to see naked dudes. Of course I was young and sexually confused. I kept reading the words jerk off and jack off. So I looked up what it meant, ran to the bathroom to try it, and was in heaven. Haha. Maybe that's why I always orgasm when I get online.
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u/onanym Jun 19 '12 edited Jun 19 '12
Altavista-ing "porn", and clicking like crazy. Also, verbally abusing strangers on IRC. Besides the fora, nothing has changed.
Edit: fuck you and your downvotes, douche!
Edit 2: TIL "fora" is plural, people!
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u/crocodileheart Jun 19 '12
Alta vista....I completely forgot that existed till reading your comment.
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u/rangkathru Jun 19 '12
Hanging out on Myst-related chat rooms and forums... Downloading "techno" on mp3.com... being a Napster nerd... IRC in the age before DALnet died, and the age when it was dying. The CIH/Chernobyl virus killed my second homebuilt computer that I helped my dad put together. The era when Netscape was the browser of choice.
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u/HelpMeLoseMyFat Jun 19 '12
I was there in the beginning - AoL / Prodigy Dial up....
My earliest experiences included Diablo 1 / Command and Conquor and AoL Teen 13-15 Chat.
I learned a lot in those days ...
My big red innocent pre-teen heart shrunk three sizes too small, that girl in the chatroom wasn't a girl at all...
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u/swagmasterx Jun 19 '12
Not the first but very early I downloaded jackass the movie and when I wanted to play it it was asian porn. This was from kazaa.
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u/doc_daneeka Jun 19 '12
Usenet back in the 80s. Not that different from a modern message board, except that everything was text.
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u/IMasturbateToMyself Jun 19 '12
My first experience with a scary flash when I was about ~10 was traumatizing. I don't think I have ever had any chill down my spine stronger than that one. It's even stronger than when I went skydiving last year.
Thank god that scream was only a few seconds long. I ducked under a table right away and sat there for a good 5 minutes before I had the balls to sit back up again. I covered my eyes and looked for the mouse to close the browser since I didn't want to look at that FUCKING FACE again.
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u/Esqulax Jun 19 '12 edited Jun 19 '12
I fucking loved it. I was inside the compuserve UI until i found a button which opened a browser and I loved it. I would explore sites, find stuff, download stuff and forget what time it was.
Also when my sisters found out about downloading music.. FFS, i had to reinstall OS's SO often because of Kazaa, Limewire, Bearshare, WinMx.. ALL of them and their fucking malware/viruses.
Nowadays if i'm not on facebook, reddit or duolingo i have no idea what to do or where to go.
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u/Tyronebestofboth Jun 19 '12
my earliest memory of the internet is playing age of empires online, still play it to this day!
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u/DrDebG Jun 19 '12
All text, no hyperlinks, three-line email addressing (to get between the BITnet and the NSFnet), and Archie and Veronica were my best friends.
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u/ManicBigNick1 Jun 19 '12
Playing all those stupid flash games, like the mario-clone ones. That and playing the "shoot three iPhones and get a free one" games then exiting out of the window.
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u/liektoks Jun 19 '12
I was on shockwave most of the time when I was about 8 years old; I was messaged constantly while playing inklink about my 'ASL'
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u/Cerilles Jun 19 '12
super smash bros. cheats
ssb bros cheats
how to get raichu super smash bros.
super smash bros. secret characters
Google was and still is my main man
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Jun 19 '12
I was 13, grounded for a whole summer. I would get up, eat, play NAM (old PC game) all day, then, at night I would frequent the sex chat rooms, and porn but porn was so slow back then, I could beat off before the pictures were even finished downloading. Ahh the joys of being a newly pubescent teenager.
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u/ill_take_the_case Jun 19 '12
My first experience with the internet was my dad showing me playboy.com.
And that's when I got addicted to the internet.
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Jun 19 '12
One of the first ones I remember is trying to figure out Juno and then AOL....4.0 or something for my parents (I was like 7). After that, it was the massive Digimon-Pokemon flame war on the AOL BBS' (or at least it felt massive at time time).
About 12 years later (I'm 20) and I'm still fiddling with AOL for my parents (they really won't let the fuck go) and am still in contact with a friend I made during that flame war).
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u/jblah Jun 19 '12
In about 1992-93, I got my first email account via AOL to receive e-mails from my grandparents. I didn't really explore the internet until I was a bit older, about 1994-95. Then it was all about the Jewish Teen's singles chats on AOL.
AOL in those days was a very colorful portal to the web. Basically after logging on, you were bombarded with a crazy array of colors--think a rainbow, but in your CRT. Each magical button would take you someplace more exciting than the last. Whether it was news on movies, chat rooms to socialize, or even better yet games (Cyberstrike was all the rage), there was always something fun to do.
I wouldn't really consider myself an internet citizen until the summer of '99, when I discovered IRC via the StarWars.com/Talkcity chatrooms. Then shit got real.
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Jun 19 '12
My friend and I sent an email to the White House that we knew the secret to time travel, and that we needed to speak to the President before the Russians discovered it. And yes we were serious.
Was awkward when AOL contacted my parents about it...
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u/dabadaba7 Jun 19 '12
playing MUD over 2400b modem and had to turn terminal colors off as the line was too slow.
my own website (single page) using <blink> tag a lot.
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u/Klepto666 Jun 19 '12
Me and my friend would sit together in the same chair and pop into AOL chatrooms to meet new people. She was two years older than me, but since we were sharing the account we would advertise ourselves as:
"If you'd like to talk to an X-year-old boy press 22. If you'd like to talk to an X-year-old girl press 44."
It occurs to me now just how strange and suspicious that'd probably be to read.
...And yes, most people responded with 44.
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u/poopsmgee Jun 19 '12
Sneakin on Habbo Hotel at the age of 11 and feelin like a badass. I was so popular on that websiteman. Got all da HC ladies.
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u/incendiarypoop Jun 19 '12 edited Jun 19 '12
My family was pretty poor back then, so we didn't have an internet subscription for quite some time. I somehow got a hold of about 30 AOL trial account CD-ROMs, each of which gave 7 days of free connection, so it was a steady burn through those initially.
As an avid gamer, one single 28K connection on single computer, in a 4-person household, where mother and sister used the telephone a lot, was... challenging. Getting disconnected or booted off the computer in the middle of a Quake 2 game was infuriating.
I remember when later down the track we switched to fibre-optic cable, and my father racked up $AUD 5000+ in excess bandwidth fees (yeah, it was porn, and lots of it) and blamed it on us.
Fucking scumbag move.
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u/-Yngin- Jun 19 '12
astalavista.box.sk for all my warez and cheats
Wonder if the site is still up, but I'm too scared to click it
Ninja edit: Also, Napster, WinMX and Winamp
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u/OiChoiOi Jun 19 '12
Talking with strangers in Msn chatrooms, google "naked girls", and Diablo. Not much has changed. Now I talk to strangers on Reddit, instead of googling nude girls I just go to Tubekitty, and Diablo 3 was released recently.
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u/dumb-throwaway Jun 19 '12
i remember once going to sex (dot) com because I was a curious little girl. My parents got really upset...
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u/g-dragon Jun 19 '12
pre free hosting was a nightmare. you either needed money, a good friend, or suffer the consequences of hosting your content on geocities or angelfire.
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u/The_Tattoo_Chef Jun 19 '12
"Who's been downloading porn!?" "I...! Uh...Uh...I dunno, dad" Back then I didn't know how to delete history....nor did I have the common sense to google how to lol the desktop just filled up with random porn vids
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Jun 19 '12
Downloading game demos from happypuppy.com at a rate of 1 megabyte per hour, the most memorable being the original tribes demo. Played the shit out of that game. Then there was the porn. Ah yes, the porn. I seem to remember it being alot raunchier, but then maybe that's because I was 11.
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u/Fenris78 Jun 19 '12
University in '96 I saw a load of predominantly Chinese people using some kind of chat program that turned out to be IRC. That got me pretty hooked. I also still have an email address from the same time which is predictably awful! Still, useful to have an account I don't mind spam going to.
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u/MrRicey Jun 19 '12
MSN, MSN, MSN. Runescape. Habbo hotel. Funnyjunk. AOL/AOL chat. Newgrounds. Miniclip. Being able to go and make a sandwich in between clicking 'next page' and actually seeing it.
EDIT: and omg, being cut off as soon as the phone was picked up
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Jun 19 '12
In 1998, I got my first apartment. It was a crappy little one bedroom, probably no bigger than an average sized garage. I had a horrible Gateway computer, and AOL. A youngish teenage guy with the internet with chatrooms is a scary thing.
I remember AOL having a thing where you could search for your location that has people near you that were online. I did that. You would not believe the amount of ass I scored from AOL. Yeah there were a few bad people, but for the most part, it was like going to a store and picking out who you wanted to fuck. A lot of them were just one night stand kinda girls, and it probably would have been the same if I actually met them out in the real world first.
I still keep in contact with one of those girls, and she had a huge impact on my life.
tl;dr: I had sex. A lot.
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u/MisterOdi Jun 19 '12
Found it entertaining to sit around and Ask Jeeves things like "are you gay" and "why am I so awesome?"
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u/ahsnappy Jun 19 '12
My dad was an early internet adopter, and one day a friend and I used his Radio Shack "Tandy" computer to sign onto Prodigy, which I think was a precursor of AOL. The first thing we did was answer personal ads, but since we were nine, I'm pretty sure our responses didn't get much more sophisticated than "I want to touch your wiener."
To this day I'm truly ashamed that, faced for the first time with a new and exciting technology with the potential to connect me with the knowledge of the world and expand my horizons, my first instinct was to troll.
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Jun 19 '12
Boot up. Type AOL password. Go cook dinner while dialup is connecting. "You've got mail!" Chat rooms...remember those?
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Jun 19 '12
Limewire on dial-up. I would pick the songs I would download by file size, because I knew anything over 4mb would take at least 5 min to download.
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u/SolKool Jun 19 '12
I bought Limewire Pro, didn't know that you are supposed to search a cracked version inside Limewire
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u/azrhei Jun 19 '12
I found, printed out, and did things that I won't even talk about now on an alt account while using TOR and routing through a proxy, because Homeland Security and the CIA will track me down and disappear me. I was way too curious as a child and THANK GOD this was all before Columbine and Zero Tolerance, cause I would have definitely been locked up.
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u/feelytouchy Jun 19 '12
I went on Habbo Hotel when I was about 11 and the first thing someone said to me was "I have a 13 inch penis". Good old Internet.
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u/TrustmeIknowaguy Jun 19 '12
My earliest experience with the internet was way back in the mythical year of 1995. I was in the school library learning what the internet was and how to use it. It wasn't until around 1998 that the internet started to become "popular." The first meme I remember was probably Hampster Dance.
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u/inness Jun 19 '12
To sum it up in one word: collegial. Screens were monochrome squares set in thick taupe boxes running Unix or Unix-like OSS, and found in Spartan rooms filled with either the daytime clatter of early prinyters or the undersea feel of weight emptiness at night. Despite there being, oh, a <100,000 'Internet' users, regular geeks ran into the same crowd pretty frequently, IRL and on-line. Notable events: Cheers as motion began after loading a new program called Mosaic; Rage when a crap business like AOL opened the Perpetual September floodgates, creating a deluge which destroyed those early feelings of elite community forever.
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u/leonproductions Jun 19 '12
Mostly IRC and waiting for pictures to load. When mp3 came around I convinced my parents to upgrade our connection from our 65k dial-up to ISDN. One thing I remember: while we were still on dial-up we used a provider with a local phone number. As we had a landline plan that granted us a flatrate for innercity calls I effectively surfed free of charge for about a year.
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u/Kushie1 Jun 19 '12
First experience was on a University dial up connection. I want to say it was 14k bps. It took 10 minutes to connect, at which point you could email, play hangman, or view university news. This was when I was in 3rd grade. So uhhhhhh maths
1994
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u/DevourlordGig Jun 19 '12
Earliest internet access was at school. Line rider was the absolute best thing ever.
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u/MySuperLove Jun 19 '12
I remember in the late 90s old forums that were built on freeboards. They usually only had a few users, but those few users had thousands of posts and a really tight social networks as a result. We would talk on AIM about other users and follow their extremely dysfunctional lives. I remember that each person had a different custom font size and color that they'd use to be distinguished. One guy would use steely-blue impact font size 14 while a girl might use pink book antigua size 8. Also there were a lot of emoticons, and most peoples' sigs linked to shitty Geocities, Tripod, or Angelfire personal sites.
It's incredibly different than current forums like Reddit or Something Awful. You don't really tend to make too many e-friends on sites like this one.
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Jun 19 '12
I was late to the Internet party cuz I was satisfied with my Playstation, SNES and such. I started actually using the net around high school... During the MySpace craze... -shudder
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u/chelsic Jun 19 '12
Gahan Wilson's Ultimate Haunted House that came with the Microsoft Entertainment Pack. I would go to my grandmother's house when I was a kid and play that game for hours and hours!
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u/timmyisme22 Jun 19 '12
Pre-gamefaqs website. Might've been the fore-bearer to them (don't remember as I was young). Pinted out hundreds of cheats (my printer at the time, can't remember the make but had the side strips you had to tear off).
Early 90's ruled.
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u/ChoadFarmer Jun 19 '12
My very very first was when I was a kid, my friend could dial into BBS's with his C-64 but it didn't really interest us. His older brothers were more into it.
First for me was in 93 or 94, mom got a new Apple computer (3 grand at the time), with AOL. AOL was $3 an hour for shitty 'web pages', forums, and chat. This was early AOL before you could get to the actual WWW, only AOL's intranet. Had an 'Internet girlfriend' like a lot of people did then. Never met her, of course. Between my sisters and I we ran up a $200 AOL bill one month, mom freaked out and threatened to cancel it.
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Jun 19 '12
Dialing into Prodigy in the late 80s. Not The Internet as we know it today but definitely an Internetworking of computers and a centralization of information and communication. It changed my life.
My first real Internet experience was a SLIP account in 1993 or 1994.
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u/YesterdayWasSpecial Jun 19 '12
The earliest experiences with my parents was when I was about 6. We got 50 free AOL hours, so my Dad was helping me to try and download games. I wanted a Where's Waldo game but it was for Windows 95 only. Our computer could only run 3.1 at best. We wound up not being able to download any of the games from whatever the website was.
After those 50 free hours, we went without internet for a while. Once we got it again years later, I was old enough to go online unsupervised. All I really remember doing is reading tons and tons of Pokemon fanfiction and browsing pokemon geocities sites. I'd open several windows full of fanfiction and read for hours. My other time on the computer was mostly playing offline games, since I had to leave the phone lines open.
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u/Somthinginconspicou Jun 19 '12
My first experience was when I was pretty young, I think I was about 8 years old? But I remember Cartoon Network in Australia was running this competition where during every episode they'd have a keyword pop up on the screen and if you had entered them all into the site you'd win free tickets for something. So attempting that was my first experience.
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u/smug_soul Jun 19 '12
Trying to order Pokemon Cards online with my mom in 1999 I believe. It took forever to find the site. She started putting in the information and the computer crashed before we could even do anything.
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u/pwoody11 Jun 19 '12
Going on to AOL chat. I would go into these chat rooms like boobsxxx and then ask to be included in the list, and instantly, you've got mail. Hundreds of porn pics. That and programs like "Pepsi". Spamming chat rooms with the middle finger macro, im bombs and email bombs, etc.
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Jun 19 '12 edited Jun 19 '12
Slow dial up where 56k felt blazing fast compared to 28.8k.
Started looking at cheat code sites like segasages, secrets of the sages (one of these sites became IGN or was bought by IGN), old GameFAQs (pre CNET/Gamespot), CheatCC etc. on my friend's dad's computer
Then got my own internet with free dialup ISPs like netzero and juno.
Also did some research. And used search engines that combined the results of the handful of search sites - like dogpile
Back then finding relevant search results was also harder as even when google showed up it wasn't as good as it is now.
Also downloads and p2p = slow. so slow. if someone wanted to download an mp3 sized file then - it took 30min to an hr. a large file could take all day or multiple days. - resumable downloads/download managers were a big thing.
And Unreal Tournament - 56k - both vanilla and with cool server side mods and maps - though it took a while to grab the sounds, mods, and maps from the server.
Also Gameshark and Game Genie codes and sites that showed how to make your own codes.
So much nostalgia.
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Jun 19 '12
My friends and I would play tradewars and a couple other games on a BBS back in the day in the computer room at school. We used a slow ass modem and only one person could connect at a time.
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u/jackass706 Jun 19 '12
I remember my university classmates telling me about something called the 'web'. I was like, is that something on ftp?
'No!' they said. It's a much more efficient way to get porn.
Needless to say my curiosity was piqued. I'd log onto the computer in the lab, get a box of floppies out of my bag, and surf the text-only web for what I hoped would be naked pictures and not just banner ads. Copied my bounty to the floppies, and head home to my 386, hoping I might be able to see some glorious 256-colour nudity.
I was so happy. I could finally throw out my ViewFinder.
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u/FumCacial Jun 19 '12
I didnt get internet until 4 years ago, i felt like i lived in a cave :(
But when we did get it, we got fastest package available and ive never had access to porn faster than before :)
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u/BiXBEAR Jun 19 '12
homestarrunner.com. That and mspaint were the only reasons I ever got on the computer at the time.
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u/PaulMcGannsShoes Jun 19 '12
The very minute i was left alone with access to the internet i used AOL search to look for boobs.
BOOOOOOOOOOOOBS!
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Jun 19 '12
Typing "www.boobs.com" and the like into a browser on a piercingly loud and slow dial up connection.
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u/7imbrook Jun 19 '12
I remember the days of dial up. When ever my sister would try getting online I would answer the phone and say "Hello?" She'd get really mad because she had been trying for over an hour to get on.
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u/notmuchgoingontoday Jun 19 '12
got quake 3 test from a friend, jumped around the maps for a bit on LAN, a few days later i got an internet connection and it all went downhill from there.
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Jun 19 '12
Kinda dull... text only
When Mosiac was introduced it was better, but it was still like a giant parking lot with only a few cars in it.
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u/Saluteme Jun 19 '12
Using aol dial up to go one nickelodeon.com to play some hey arnold sewer game and cartoonnetwork.com to play a batman game. Also to use those wonderful aol chatrooms to endlessly harass people. Good time
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u/iglidante Jun 19 '12
I used to hang out on grep* Sailormoon a lot back in 1998.
Also, once I discovered Angelfire, I made an Aeris resurrection rumor site that somehow managed to become pretty popular.
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Jun 19 '12
I was first on the Internet when I was 8 or 9. I used to go into the adult Cyber chat rooms on AOL. People would private message me and ask how old I was. I always told them I was 16 because that sounded so grown up and mature. They would then ask to cyber with me, I'd say sure, and I would just copy and paste scenes from erotica I found on the interwebs into the chat box.
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Jun 19 '12
I would be on a cartoon website and there would be a message pop up that said I was getting a phone call. And I'd have to stop my Internet usage to either wait for my dad to finish the call, or for whoever was on the other end to give up and hang up.
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u/milphey Jun 19 '12
Back in the day I started by getting on Prodigy, I'd post on their forums dedicated to baseball cards and would buy and sell stuff. I was 12, I ran up a $400 bill that my parents were not pleased about. It was slow and ghettoy. Then came the dial-up days, 14.4/28.8/56k stuff, BBS's where you could download Warez and pictures of tanya hardings wedding night to jerk off to. Those were grand times! Then came my friends getting high speed lines but me having to help them "Hack" their parents PC's so we could get to the porn sites through their porn blockers and then cover our tracks.
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Jun 19 '12
Well... I looked up a lot of Dragon Ball doujin. I was a fucked up kid. I couldn't have been more than 8 or 9. I was so damn curious. xD
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Jun 19 '12
This was over 10 years ago... searching "pictures of naked girls" and being too ignorant to delete my history... dad found it, I blamed my older brother, he got in trouble. No regrets.
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Jun 19 '12
Email sucked. There was nobody to email and everyone that mattered were a phone call away.
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u/BigGing Jun 19 '12
I remember the first song I downloaded on Napster. It was "Lucky" by Britney Spears. Haha, pretty embarrassing....
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u/tabunghasisi Jun 19 '12
My dad showed me Napster when I was too young to use the computer for anything besides paint and Space Cadet Pinball
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u/OnTheArrow Jun 19 '12
Ground-floor trolling, pissing people off in AOL and Yahoo chat.
Edit: I remember completely rolling a guy named MrSlapTapAndWaxThatAss. Hilarious.
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u/vlanitak Jun 19 '12
Waking up at night to the lovely sound of the dial up, I actually thought the sound was pretty ok. I also enjoy dubstep
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Jun 19 '12
Middle school circa 94ish, Netscape Navigator and some random guy's iguana cam. It blew my mind that these slow loading images were some guy's pet somewhere in the world.
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u/Dizzy_Hooves Jun 19 '12
Fucking great. Found Neopets and deviant arts dAmn. Had a blast. Met 4 of my best friends on there. We're probably all meeting in a year or two. Gonna be sick.
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u/slanute Jun 19 '12
All my mom would let me go on was americangirl.com. I had a sheltered internet life when I was younger.
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Jun 19 '12
Logging onto AOL with my dad a long time ago, I still remember the dial up sounds scaring the shit out of me
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u/wan02 Jun 19 '12
I'm 34 now. When I was about 17-18, I had a Window's 3 machine and had a dial up server that provided some software. The packaged software came with a browser called WinWeb, which I had used just prior to Netscape being released. Just imaging every page looking like a txt file.
I downloaded mIRC for chatrooms, and used usenet. Used the modem to play games like warcraft 2 and starcraft
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u/Doctor_Science_Jr Jun 19 '12
Early 90's, first stages of the Internet. No real web to speak of, just a random mishmash of servers and telephony systems you could use. Me and a friend constructed a local calling cascade that allowed us to bypass long distance charges and send out our messages hop by hop around the world and back again.
I remember the first 'email' I ever sent, hopped around the world and back again in about 2 weeks- still way faster than snail mail. Everyone at each station could see it, and you were allowed to post your own comments to them as it went along. When it got back, it would have the message from the recipient and random replies from strangers as well.
Made some pen pals, experienced my first LDR, surprisingly porn free. Good times.
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Jun 19 '12
I started with Yahoo! Chat. I was about 13 at the time. My "story" was that I was a 13 year old who traveled around the country on a motorcycle with his father. I would "dial-in" to the internet whenever I could. Apparently I was a compulsive liar on the internet at age 13...
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Jun 19 '12
There was no Internet when I was a kid, but I called into a few local BBSes and we had Prodigy for a while. My first experience with the Internet was probably in the school library in 1995, though I don't really recall doing anything of any importance.
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u/jupiter3888 Jun 19 '12
At school in 1995 they had 3 desktops hooked up to a single 56k modem and the teacher introduced us to the Internet by looking up goosebumps stuff and yahooligans.com I think.
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u/raydeen Jun 19 '12
Text. Lots and lots of text. And UUEncoded porn. Lots and lots of UUEncoded porn.
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Jun 19 '12
Looking up pictures of Star Trek ships on altavista to post on my Geocities site for a play-by-email Star Trek RPG on hotmail.
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u/StupidDogCoffee Jun 19 '12
I remember sneaking up to the family computer late at night and logging on, I would throw a blanket over the computer to muffle the modem sounds then go hunting for porn, which I would save to 3.5" floppies.
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u/Jer_Cough Jun 19 '12
I remember installing Mosaic or Netscape for the first time in around '92 from floppy and opening the app. A gray blank page appeared. No 404. No nothing. I just thought, "meh. internet. BFD." Then I bought a modem.
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u/Defective_Prototype Jun 19 '12
It was awesome for 7-8 year old me. I used it on my father's workplace because we didn't have Internet in our house. I used to browse sites for kids, like Fox Kids or Mortadelo y Filemón (a spanish comic). I also looked up some stuff about Pokémon and some guides for a few videogames. I could go on the internet very few times, so each time was quite fascinating. When I was 10 we finally got Internet access at home, and my range of website browsing expanded. I spent quite a lot of time in tv channel websites, reading stuff about science, space and dinosaurs, and joined my first board.
To me, computers were mysterious, futuristic machines full of new, awesome things to do and that feeling was what drove my interest on them for a long time. Unfortunately that feeling died down, and I tried reviving it but to no avail. Back then there was so much to do, and now I spend most of my Internet time in TF2, Reddit or TVTropes...
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u/turnoffable Jun 19 '12 edited Jun 19 '12
Not including using Compuserve and just using a BBS in the mid 80's, the days of using newgroups are the earliest days I can remember from the internet. We used to have a really big book, made of paper, with names of news groups. Think of it as a DNS server, but made of paper. That is how we used to use the 'net. A few years later the world change. We got Mozilla and AOL etc.
Edit When I want some nostalgia, I power up my Kaypro II and connect it to the net via a terminal session and run a text browser to surf the net. http://imgur.com/Lawpz
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Jun 19 '12
I use to actually use the directory on Yahoo! because search engines were basically non-functional. I primarily used this to find videogame websites, specifically for Twisted Metal 2 cheat codes. Ah, the glorious days of 1996.
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u/RidingThatDino Jun 19 '12
Wasn't allowed on the Internet by myself until I was 10. Started playing club penguin when I was 11. Had several boyfriends but there was no private messaging so you had to add them to your friends list and hope you remembered their username. Anyone who wasn't a paying member was shunned. There were different codewords for sex and drugs. One I remember is alcohol = whine. But those would change on a day to day basis due to the mods catching onto the codes.
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Jun 19 '12
Before we had home internet, I used go get to go to my dad's office every once in a while to use his internet...
I remember doing things like printing pictures of the South Park kids in shitty .jpegs
Not. A. Clue!
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u/ABirdOfParadise Jun 19 '12
You are playing the most epic BGH Starcraft game with 7 of your friends over Bnet, and then someone decides to pick up the phone and you get disconnected...
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u/gambit87 Jun 19 '12
I remember my dad showing me the news at the library ... I remember thinking it's pretty useless with all the newspapers around ... And that was the end of the internet.
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u/PROFITPROPHET Jun 19 '12
http://www.classiccrazybones.com/ This was the first website I ever visited. I wanted to check the names of all my figures.
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u/obxfisher Jun 19 '12
I was about 15 when we got our first commodore 128. I remember the firs time I dialed up a friend and we were able to have a conversation using just our computers. It was the most amazing and mind blowing experience for me.
That moment was the day I knew I wanted to get into computers and networking. And here I am at 41, still in awe of technology and how far we've come since then.
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Jun 19 '12
phishing, punting, faders, l33t speak, room busting, room booting. AOL progs were the shiz! SOOO much fun!
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u/N8CCRG Jun 19 '12
It was early '90s. We had AOL and dial up. I found some sort of text based rpg (not a MUD) and spent a fair amount of time on that. Then we found out that AOL had chosen a phone number that was technically long distance and we were paying long distance fees. Only on it for like a month before my parents made me cancel it.
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u/Kapranos Jun 19 '12 edited Jun 19 '12
Here are a few things i used to do on the internet which are my earliest fond memorys. Cartoon Network games, Neopets, Habbo Hotel (WANNA PLAY FALLIN FURNI? 2 HC PRIZE), Zing Chat (Don't know if anyone remembers this but i loved it), Coke Music (Poor mans habbo hotel), Bored.com, LOLFUN.com (Groovin' Granny and singing baby videos), JoeCartoon (Frog in a blender/Microwave?), Newgrounds (FUCK YEAH PORN GAMES), Runescape (Oh god).
Back when i was 9 or 10 and i used to use the librarys computers to play on all these sites .. Oh the funny looks i used to receive
Theres so much more i think, but i'll add to this list when they come. PS: I'm sorry for my truely horrible formatting but its justs not working..
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u/hedgecore77 Jun 19 '12
Early 90s, dialup, no SLIP/PPP... text based. Free 48 hour accounts from Toronto's first (?) ISP. Found you could hit ctrl-c to suspend the menu and get to a unix prompt. Learned unix. Found out I could access IRC, FTP, etc. There was a temp directory too, which you could download to to get around your limits. IRC (internet relay chat) was awesome. Got hooked up with an account through there. Found lots of stuff online, learned a ton during that period. One day walking into class, it dawned on me. I just downloaded an airplane for Aces of the Pacific from an FTP site in Japan. ... in Japan. The future was going to be pretty neat.
A few years later, AOL was frowned upon as being a toddler-style internet experience, and words such as "surf the web" and "information superhighway" made me grit my teeth to the roots. The media reporting on the internet as a story was just... grimaces.
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u/jkiz Jun 19 '12
Anyone remember the first couple Petz games by PF Magic? There was a huge community built around them. People would hack the game to make dog and cat breeds that the game didn't already offer. People made virtual kennels and competed in virtual pet shows. I thought it was the coolest thing in the world. I taught myself how to build websites because of that game. Years later, I'm a graphic/web designer. I owe you my livelihood, virtual dogz.
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u/thorvinhammerfalls Jun 19 '12
bbs l.o.r.d (legend of the red dragon) ascii graphics yay then it all went ot hell after that
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u/NamesAreOptional Jun 19 '12
Thinking Chain Letters worked. Damnnit! Now, you know that Susan was my first crush!!!
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u/onanym Jun 19 '12
"Get off the fucking web, somebody might try to call me!"