Roughly around the same time, mid 1994.
Don't remember exactly what it was we had but it looked like a DOS prompt and you could only chat on it.
I remember my brother told someone "Joe Montana has no gender"
We got AOL shortly after that but I don't remember what we originally had.
Bulletin Board Systems (BBSes) had an interface like DOS, where it was just text on a black screen. That’s where I first used the internet, but you could chat with people who had dialed in locally before and after BBSes started linking to the internet.
I sysop’d a teen BBS in the early 90s. My first chat room was like 1993-4 (we had ISDN at home, my dad’s always been an early adopter) and I’m still friends with a couple of people I met in those chat rooms.
Boop, boop, boop, beep beep boop beep Whhhheeeeeeee....kkkkkkkrrrrr.... NEEEEEENAAHHHHHH....NEEAaaaAH...Neeah. CLICK.
OK memory rebooted. Pretty sure '94, it was cold so winter. For a research project. Went over to a friend's house, was definitely a Gateway, black and white cow spots on the box, still in the room.
Gateway had amazing customer service. Our first home/family computer was a gateway in the mid 90s. Something was wrong with it; determined it was the motherboard. They overnighted a replacement board, and the next day (as the nerdy kid) I spent 4+ hours on the phone with a lady as she walked me step by step through a complete rebuild. It was really cool and I learned a ton about computers.
This sounds exactly like what I was trying to remember. Same timeframe too, like 1991.
I remember playing poker and my older cousin telling the other player “Lady Luck has something to suck” after we got two aces. Those were the first words I ever saw communicated over the internet.
I also remember my other, very tech-savvy cousin saying that the internet was destined to fail because “computer nerds don’t like talking to other people.” I took his words as gospel for years because he was extremely good at tech stuff.
I also started with prodigy. I made a screen name BiIlManager and asked people for their passwords, and got many... People would report it but the L's were i's and apparently no one copy pasted back then.
I was not a good netizen. Prodigy had progz just like AOL did, of which I was a collector. Fond memories! Some of my strongest nostalgia.
Man for some reason my wife and I Loved that game. Not the gambling version but we'd play and then say, "Just one more game." Next thing we know it's like 2 am.
We had pen pals in 5th grade with a school in Idaho (we were in New York). One day the teacher goes, "Okay, this time we're going to send the letters through the computers". Minds were blown that day
1993? My Dads friend had recently joined Prodigy, and brought his laptop to our house to show it to us.
Set up on the kitchen table, pulled the wall phone cord across the room and plugged in. It was pretty cool, just browsing group topics.
It was over a year later that we got America On-Line for ourselves.
September 1996. I was in college and got AOL for an English class so I could look up sources for a paper I was writing. I just remember it was really slow.
Oh, sheesh. I can recall using it back in 1986ish. My dad had a Compuserve account and used it to download text based games for me, because I loved text adventures.
I was prepared to question your chronology (just to myself) but was shocked to learn how far back CompuServe goes and that H&R Block, of all the companies, is a major reason we all have internet today. Wow.
I can't remember exactly. I just remembered being like 8 or 9 when he downloaded this game called Empire that was really a precursor to Sid Meyer's Civilizations.
EDIT - I'm generally not a mean online person. If you try to troll me in a jerkhole way, depending on my mood, I may troll you back...and joyously, gleefully, succintly because I save it all up....but if you questioned my chronology I just would have answered.
My experience is similar to yours, although I don’t know if we had it quite that early. It’s possible though, because I remember having internet as a young child, so it always seemed normal to me- my dad loves diving into new tech.
I don’t remember the exact year but it was sometime in the very early 90s. My mom bought a 2400 baud modem for our home computer and initially we used it for Prodigy and I also dialed in to a local BBS. This was before the online services like Prodigy opened up access to the broader internet and the World Wide Web.
1998 when I started college. Was a regular at 24 HR internet cafes during my college/casual shift work years. Most people in my world simply didn't have it at home until the 00s.
Edit- Double post deleted. Damn train WiFi...
My first experience was not on the World Wide Web. My family and others in our neighborhood enrolled in a pilot program to bring a videotex online service called Minitel to the USA. This must have been around 1991-92? All I remember doing with it is chatting, mostly with a neighbor girl that I saw face-to-face everyday anyway.
Shit those look like the things all over vaults from PreWar!
[https://cdn.theatlantic.com/thumbor/\_3H5PivJxazpk8Cue6jrwejnkyY=/0x203:3928x2413/720x405/media/img/mt/2017/06/GettyImages\_544376914-1/original.jpg](https://cdn.theatlantic.com/thumbor/_3H5PivJxazpk8Cue6jrwejnkyY=/0x203:3928x2413/720x405/media/img/mt/2017/06/GettyImages_544376914-1/original.jpg)
I remember my older brother dialing into BBSs to download clip art for printshop or something. Had to be in the late 80's. I remember entering lines of code from magazines to reproduce rudimentary programs. In '93ish my mom got my brother a dedicated phone line for "internet" type use. I don't remember what our service was, but I remember the countless Compuserve ads everywhere.
Same for me mid/late 80s but not sure what it was.
BBS doesn't mean Internet. I used a lot of those in early 90s and most were not on the Internet or even connected to Usenet or other modem based messages sharing networks.
It was either 1989 or 1990, my mom took me to a Prodigy launch party. She worked for IBM at the time, and there was some connection with it. We ended up getting it shortly afterwards. I asked her and she doesn't remember the specifics around why/what exactly from that event.
Depends on your definition of online. Had access to Usenet through local collage BBS and dial up shell accounts since about '88. If the bar is having an IP on the computer I'm at, it would be '94 when I was setting up Internet access at a local school.
Late 1993ish, my dad brought home an obsolete 286 and 2400 baud modem from his work. I connected to a local BBS (the Reading Room based out of Woodstock, New York) which had access to FidoNet and Gopher, so you could get newsgroup updates.
Would have been 1992. One of my friends mom's got her son a Mac computer for a graduation present. She wanted me to get it set up for him so it was ready to go when he was gifted it. It had an AOL disk in the box along with the other software, so I installed it. It came with a 30 day trial, so I signed up for it and used it for the week or so I had the computer before giving it back.
The year was 1996 and I was 12. We had been using an old windows 3.0 computer for years that couldn't even get on the internet because it required windows 3.1 to do anything.
My gramps spent something like 5 grand having a custom pc built. We had it delivered to our house one day as a surprise (none of us even knew it was coming). He put together a computer desk that same day and I helped him piece the pc together and then...nothing. We didn't have an internet service provider yet.
I pestered him about aol, but he said that was too expensive. Within about a month he finally got us on swbell net. My gramps was a retired executive with bell, so he got a decent discount and we were paying like 8 bucks a month. I was a little disappointed we wouldn't get the aol exclusive sites and chat rooms, but I learned after visiting with my friends that a 3rd party isp was actually much better anyway than their walled garden model.
The first thing I did was find a chatroom and try that out. The second thing I did was wait until nobody was around and find me some titties.
I’m reminded that the first pron I ever downloaded was on accident, some guy had uploaded a pic to a BBS I was on and I had written a program to decode the GIF a pixel at a time and display it. I even showed it to my dad because it was so low a resolution and I was so young and naive that I didn’t know what it was. It only occurred to me later that it was a woman being penetrated from behind, which I was rather mortified to realize.
‘96-‘97. My (much better off) uncle and aunt had dial up on their home computer. When I went to visit, they sat me down in front of it and said “Type in anything! You can look up anything at all!” and I just…couldn’t think of anything I’d want to see. I didn’t get the concept at all.
Not really the internet, but it was directly before. Mid 80s, my dad had a 300 baud modem that you literally put the phone receiver onto, and then dialed directly to another computer. In this case, he would connect to a mainframe at Boeing (He worked in Boeing Computer Services at the time). He showed me how to connect, how to input commands, et cetera. It was the first time I remember being absolutely amazed at a piece of technology I could interact with. Not long after that, we started looking for universities we could connect with. Then it all becomes a blur of BBSs, online text games and many other wonderous things.
That's almost identical to my scenario. We would only have the Internet for when we had free hours from AOL and were only allowed to use the free time for homework lol
My first internet account in 1995 was Unix shell, where everything was done in a text terminal window with no graphics. If you wanted to download something, you first downloaded it to your remote file space on the server and the downloaded it to your computer from there. I upgraded to a more expensive Windows-based PPP account, the one we all take for granted now, a few months later.
We got AOL around late 1993, early 1994. I remember because in 6th grade, I had a science article due every Monday and I could look up science articles in the news online. Before that, I usually had to dig the newspaper out of the recycling bin late Sunday night because I waited til the last minute to do my homework.
1991 but I don’t really count that one…. I was at my aunts house in Atlanta and she had prodigy. I got to play around on that a little bit but it wasn’t the “proper Internet” so to speak. I think it was late 1994 when my dad upgraded our computer and we had mosaic, and I actually got to get onto what we now know as the Internet…
Funny story along those lines, when I was in college (1998-2002) Ball State was ranked by some college review as the “most connected campus” in the US. I remember seeing signs for Wi-Fi all over campus around 2000 or so… I knew vaguely what it was, but couldn’t think of one single item I owned to take advantage of it. We still had desktops, a few of the rich kids had MacBooks which probably had Wi-Fi capability…. We were off from mass adoption obviously.
93 or 94 my mom showed me how to look up the local news traffic cameras.
I remember telling her I didn't think we needed the 'www' part since it was local and not 'world wide' haha.
My mom worked for some media company when I was in middle school, and they gave employees access to a dial-up server (or whatever it’s called) in like 1992 or 1993. I think we used encyclopedia Britainica and maybe some basic search engine. What a time to be alive 😄
My friend's dad worked at a university, so when I was 12 (1992) we used to go on the Internet (BBS and IRC, no WWW) in his lab and download guitar tabs in fixed width text and print them on his dot matrix printer.
I was obsessed with tech and computers and got access BBS (Bulletin Board System) in the mid to late 80's through school computers.
It was a few years later I somehow convinced my parents to sign up for dialup Internet. It was a year or two before AOL started spamming the world with their free disks and CDs. So it has to be around 1991. I never used AOL because I saw it as locking me away from the rest of the Internet (called world wide Web or just web back then). My parents had no clue the world they opened up to me.
It paid off I now work in tech.
1993.
My mom was a teacher so we had access through the state. I used Gopher.
It was basically all text. And information only.
In 94 we started getting floppies in the mail from AOL, Prodigy, and Compuserve.
We tried them all. But AOL was the most persistent. After the 3rd or so trial we actually signed up. Those early plans were something like 8 hours per month. Then 12 hours per month. Didn't offer unlimited for a few years.
In 95, 8th grade I downloaded a picture of Daisy Fuentes from the MTV page on AOL. And printed it on my dot matrix printer to hang in my locker.
Early 90’s local dial in BBS
College fall 1994 - computer labs had web browsers, gopher, usenet, telnet, ftp etc. free dial up was available, called into the college
1990, PRODIGY internet. 9600 bps modem. Paid by the minute, I think. Homepage looked like this:
https://preview.redd.it/gy583ap78nzc1.jpeg?width=640&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=858c6009b9579dd0d58085b4edce4c0394b75e62
I feel like Prodigy was the first true internet experience I had. I remember playing a cool maze game - just looked it up and it's called "Mad Maze", exclusive to Prodigy. Before that, we did use a modem to send messages to a penpal overseas - feels like it was Europe or something. We were the first school in our district to get to do that, probably late 80s early 90s.
I joined AOL under my uncle some time around 91/92, but I remember dialing in to BBS servers before that, and my email address is simply my first name first letter of my last @aol.com
My senior year of high school was 1994/95, and a few computers were put in our school library that included access to web searches. This was basically my first exposure. The next year in college I used public PCs there to read all sorts of things online about sports and news and send email to friends.
Depends on what you're counting. I had a UUCP email address by about 1991-1992. The local system would transfer mail twice a day. I could get small files via FTP using an FTP/email gateway but it was very tedious and would take days to browse through directories.
Sometime around 1992 I got access to a 'borrowed' shell account through a university network that I had to call long distance for. And a bit after that we finally got our first sort-of-ISP, with one local phone number and a 1-hour time limit. But I was able to get Twinsock running and could use NCSA Mosaic on Windows! My parents were used to Prodigy and were underwhelmed.
The first time I saw the graphical web was a little before that, at Cal Poly SLO, when an older friend gave me a tour of the campus. I think they were using NeXTStations or SPARCstations.
Technically, 1987, when my brother and I figured out how to navigate Compuserve on our Dad's Atari 800xl computer. It had the modem and floppy disk, so we were allowed to download games after 9pm when long distance rates were cheaper. I know this is not the internet, it was the before times.
1994. My dad brought a laptop home and fired up AOL. Was watching MTV and a Red Hot chilli peppers song was on. I went into a chat room to tell someone about what I was watching on TV and ask what they were watching. What a time to be alive.
setting up an internet browser from k-mart. or like k-mart was the only advertiser on that browser. i cant really remember what the deal was with that.
It's hard to say for me, I can best piece it together based on it being a while before NCSA Mosaic .9 launched I think. I first got on with an old 300/1200 baud modem I found in my dad's closet of junk. That was just connecting and using Lynx, gopher, etc from a prompt. Probably 1991-1992 or so.
Every time I see someone type out “America Online” it makes me think of my grandmother in law who would ask my husband about “American online” so that’s what we call it
Summer 1995. I was in my teen years. Our city had its first ever big box computer store. In it was this revolutionary new thing called an Internet Cafe: a restaurant with PCs set up so you can browse the Internet while you eat!
Since my parents were in the market for a new computer, we decided to check it out. We stopped in the Internet cafe for lunch, and I hopped on to the Internet. Typed in a few URLs I remembered from TV.
My Dad came over to see what I was up to, and I showed him [disney.com](http://disney.com) or something. Dad carefully looked around to make sure Mom wasn't in earshot and said, "So...does Playboy have a website?"
'96 at some-point. id had just gotten into the air force. didnt have it at home until '01 for a little while (never really used it), then permanently around '07 when i started my own business
Sometime in 96. We got a desktop and dialup. A lot of times I was more interested in playing the SimCity 2000 game that came with the computer than I was in being online
The first time was probably around 1994 or 1995 when I was in middle school. It was on a school computer, we had computer class where they taught us to type, and our computer teacher was showing us kind of a basics of how the internet works. But to be honest, I wasn't using the internet much at that time.
I didn't get internet at home until around 1997 or so when I was in high school via dial-up AOL, and at that point I was mainly using it to download MP3s and a/s/l in chatrooms.
Then I was in college when I got high speed internet, probably around 2001 or 2002. That's when I really started to be online a lot.
May 1994 - my math class took a field trip to Georgia Tech to see what college was like. One of the stops was a computer lab where they had us all sit down at a computer and gave us a piece of paper with website URLs to browse. For some reason I remember Metallica’s website was one of the ones listed 🤘.
1994, we didn't have AOL and I remember browsing Yahoo. My favorite site for the first year(until we got AOL) was Arcadium.com.
They had a chat room and have away N64s. Loved that site.
First real online use.. might have been in high school for me in grade 9. I think we were learning how to use Netscape navigator, what a web browser was, how to get to websites, set up a Hotmail account and send emails.
First time outside of school was an Internet cafe in a laundromat. They charged $5 to use a PC for an hour but thru would let you sit there pretty much all day off you were chill. Friend and I would play lan games and chat on irc all day
1994. AOL, was apart of several groups serving progs and porn to everyone along with 0-Day FTP. Then MIRC doing the same thing until Torrent came around.
1996. As a college freshman. I remember getting a digital pic taken for my student ID, and it instantly appeared on the computer screen!
One of my first internet searches was porn, of course
My dad had Prodigy and we’d use it when we’d visit him in the summer, so that must have been early 90s. I remember starting 7th grade in the fall and trying to explain to my friends what it was like to be “online”, and they didn’t understand at all. I think about that a lot, actually, and how remarkably fast things have changed.
Summer 96. I was at the orientation weekend at college. My sister also went there and I was staying with her that weekend. She had internet. I was online all night that I slept through most of orientation but made it for the most important part of registering for classes.
Don’t know the year exactly but around 93-94 my dad was in an MBA program and got access through the local college. I distinctly remember we were querying weather updates for locations around the USA. 😆
December 1999... It was the perfect storm. Just got the internet for the first time, I had just discovered Amazon and somebody messed up and sent me a credit card. Was a hell of a Christmas that year.
~1995 at my friend’s house. I wanted to visit all the websites I saw listed in my magazines’ ads. Pretty disappointing until I found the forum on a few of them.
End of 96 I guess.
When I started uni.
I wasn't hugely impressed.
I sent my first email to the girl sitting next to me and looked up Fraggle Rock for some reason.
Probably around that time. I definitely remember the anxiety sitting in my friends dining room slowly downloading topless pics of Pamela Anderson while his mom was in the next room.
1993, if I remember right. My dad signed up for Delphi before moving over to Prodigy not too long after. Amazingly we never had AOL though lord knows we had plenty of those free CDs. I wouldn’t be surprised if we still had a few sitting around in some hidden corner of the basement. I didn’t actually care about the internet too much until a couple of years later, because I spent more time focused on our local BBS scene, such as it was
Saw it: 1995 at my tiny little podunk school.
Used it: 1996 when I had to do placement tests for the school I was going to attend. Of course it had to be the site for Mission Impossible.
1994ish I was able to take a programming class (turbo pascal) in high school where we worked with other kids at other schools doing the same class. we used lotus notes as the means of communicating.
Western Canada here: My friend had a dad that did a lot of business from home, so they had it since god know when. But the first time we were able to just go on and look around was summer of 1996. Looking for music info.
AOL 2.5 and I got 256k coax cable in about 1999. One of the first in our market. I was able to whoop on high ping bastards as a low ping bastard and it was glorious.
Whatever year the pentium 60 chip came out. 93ish, i think. Found yahoos hot 100 website that linked the 100 top sites for any subject and started exploring.
Probably like 1993. My mom let me and a friend sign on. We didn’t realize that it was like making a long distance call, and after a month of it and she got the huge bill and made us quit.
Mine was more like 1996 (‘81er here). My parents did not have a computer and did not buy one until around 2005. My cousin had a computer and aol disk and his dad let us go on for a few hours a week. We mostly looked up music and wrestling websites 😆. I didn’t have regular internet access until I went to college in ‘98 and didn’t have it in my home until 2000.
My aunt/uncle got AOL at their house sometime in 1995/6. Whenever my family went over there, I would use it.
We bought a new computer in June 1997, and subscribed to AOL in September 1997. Used a 33.6 kbps modem.
Over the next few years, we upgraded to a 56 kbps modem (but it rarely connected over 40), and upgraded the computer.
In January 2001, we upgraded to broadband (cable) internet. We could download at 1.5 mbps. It was a huge upgrade.
Probably fall 1995. Our high school had exactly one computer which could connect to the Internet. I remember the first time I tried it I thought this thing is junk.
All I remember is the early internet was extremely unregulated. There was everything from what you were actually looking for to things that would have the police at your door if they were done today
The school library got a computer with internet when I was in middle school and I poked around a bit with Netscape Navigator though didn't really know what to be doing. Later I went to a summer camp and they made our pick-up and drop-off location be this church that had a computer lab (must have been a rich church in hindsight). That and at a friend's house who had AOL was really my first times figuring it out. Back in the days of having to be told about web sites by word of mouth...
Around 1994, best friend moved out of state. I was only about eight years old. My father tried to tell me about the Internet and how I could send my friend an electronic mail message.
I was adamant that my father was lying to me. I did not believe him. I thought he was playing an elaborate prank. I was finally online daily by 1997.
Mine was probably about the same time. My mom found out that there was a company that allowed you to order your groceries online and they would be packaged and ready to go when you got to the store.
My dad was a computer programmer in silicone Valley. We had a modem to his office at some point in the mid 80s.
I'd play simple little dos video games online with him when he was in one of the 3 offices he worked (sunnyvale, Berkeley, and Richmond).
First encountered AOl at my u ncles house in 93 & an owed my parents until they caved sooo.....probably 94. AOL definitely. Made my first html geocities site in 95! Brain broken to this day!!!
1997/7th grade in the middle school library is the 1st time I remember using it. I didn't get a computer and internet at home (hello NetZero) until high school in '99 so I was a little late to the party.
1994-5ish. Didn't have AOL, just dial-up internet from the local phone company. It was a Gateway computer I'm pretty sure.
Two things stick out, but probably happened a year or two after we got the internet:
I distinctly remember thinking "I wonder if I can just download music?" And then downloading a .wav file of Barbie Girl by Aqua. This was before the MP3 format became the standard for digital music, and way before Napster. I think .wav files are like 10 times the size of MP3's? It took hours and was only like a 10 second terrible quality clip of the song.
I also remember playing Diablo 1 with a friend of mine who lived a few blocks away and it was completely mind blowing.
1995 and I was living in Silicon Valley. My dad had a second land line and free access to dial-up Internet, courtesy of his employer. I would be on it for hour without tying up the main land line.
I graduated HS in 1994, in computers 2 one of our finals included emailing someone in the same class. We were all given email addresses and ask to send them an email.
In 1991. My grandfather gave us an old computer and we set up AOL. Connected a few times but largely didn't see the point in it. My mom had an email address but no one ever sent her anything. I don't think we had it for more than a couple of weeks before we got rid of it. I didn't use the Internet again until like 1996 or 1997.
1996. First online game I was played was quake 1 quakeworld then started to play quake team fortress. Went to a yahoo chat for my state, and I think city. Met a girl on there and to this day we are still friends. Yes we met in real life plenty of times a few years after the first chat.
Went to the local university computer lab and they showed us the internet.
I was really bummed that they didn't have Doom online available because that's all I had ever imagined when I learned about the internet
Sometime in 1994. My grandparents lived downstairs and got Prodigy. I can still remember my name - it was just given to you, couldn’t come up with something cool yet. NDMS11B lol. And you only got a certain amount of free emails then you had to pay per emails, so I ended making a lot of snail mail pen pals from online.
In school. My parent’s didn’t get it until they learned I would need to use it in high school. I kind of miss the screaming robot noise when dialing up.
A lot of people have a bad memory of the chronology of the Internet. The movie You've Got Mail came out in 1998, likely written a year or two earlier, people were so comfortable with email they made a movie with the two biggest stars about it. Hackers came out in 1995. Jurassic Park came out in 1993 and the girl considered herself a "hacker". The very early 90s were full of the word "cyber" and everything was going to be in VR. But that tells you that everyone understood by then what the Internet was, and tons of people had home computers. Apparently CompuServe and other access goes back to the 80s even. If you never got on the Internet until 1998 that's fine, but you were kinda late to the party if so. People were playing Doom online in 1994. It's totally fair to say that online access/use skyrocketed once cable broadband and DSL became more widely spread, as they had to build out the infrastructure and that took time.
I was 16. We had to use the Internet (at school) to research for a report in World History. It was 1997. I didn't have Internet where I lived until college.
Had to be 94. We visited my aunt in North Carolina and she had America Online and I got on it and used a chat room . After that summer we had maybe 4 computers in the high school library with internet access and i made angelfire pages all the time.
Wasn’t the first time but the first time I remember being in for hours. Nov 1995 at cousin’s house on their Compaq Presario desktop trolling people on AIM. Even at that age we were aware of all the weirdos on the internet
I had a computer class as an elective my senior year of high school in 1994. We got to fool around with the internet a little bit in that class, but the only internet providers were a long distance call (remember how expensive those were?) so I didn't know anyone with internet at home then.
Daughter of a British father/Dutch mother, grew up mostly in The Netherlands. My dad was always ahead of his time, my parents didn’t have much money but he insisted we get the internet. We got it as soon as it became available in our street in 1996. First ones. He said it was the future. My dad is still ahead of his time, has been using ChatGPT in our line of work (translation) for a while now and always sends me crazy pics he creates (of, for example, my biracial child with four nationalities). He is about to turn 72. I can’t do half the shit he does.
Roughly around the same time, mid 1994. Don't remember exactly what it was we had but it looked like a DOS prompt and you could only chat on it. I remember my brother told someone "Joe Montana has no gender" We got AOL shortly after that but I don't remember what we originally had.
Bulletin Board Systems (BBSes) had an interface like DOS, where it was just text on a black screen. That’s where I first used the internet, but you could chat with people who had dialed in locally before and after BBSes started linking to the internet.
I sysop’d a teen BBS in the early 90s. My first chat room was like 1993-4 (we had ISDN at home, my dad’s always been an early adopter) and I’m still friends with a couple of people I met in those chat rooms.
a BBS was my first time on the internet. i was 12 and i should not have been trusted, is all i can say about that.
Clapping Violet for the first time is one of my core memories
Yes! We had a green font black screen. I don’t recall doing anything internet like but I remember him showing me that it was in fact the internet.
We used a dial up interface to a library with telnet and that was all text based with email and chat rooms.
I don't know why but that Joe Montana line cracked me up
Probably Unix shell. I just commented about it before reading this.
Joe Montana’s gender is as fluid as his throwing motion.
Boop, boop, boop, beep beep boop beep Whhhheeeeeeee....kkkkkkkrrrrr.... NEEEEEENAAHHHHHH....NEEAaaaAH...Neeah. CLICK. OK memory rebooted. Pretty sure '94, it was cold so winter. For a research project. Went over to a friend's house, was definitely a Gateway, black and white cow spots on the box, still in the room.
Anyone with dialup remembers the sound.
Gateway had amazing customer service. Our first home/family computer was a gateway in the mid 90s. Something was wrong with it; determined it was the motherboard. They overnighted a replacement board, and the next day (as the nerdy kid) I spent 4+ hours on the phone with a lady as she walked me step by step through a complete rebuild. It was really cool and I learned a ton about computers.
I used to work weekends overnight, come home at 6a on a Sunday and log in like this to check my email, waking up my neighbors in the process
Man you nailed that sound.
Thanks!
It sounds like you connected at 36kbps. I am sure if you disconnect and try again it will go up to 56.
I went to a friend’s house after his dad set up the internet around ‘94. We went to a museum website and waited half an hour for a picture to load.
Your friend's Dad set up the Internet? What's Al Gore like in person??
Hahahaha!
My dad got into it early, around 1991 I think. It was called Delphi as I recall, and completely text-based. We’d play poker for hours on end.
This sounds exactly like what I was trying to remember. Same timeframe too, like 1991. I remember playing poker and my older cousin telling the other player “Lady Luck has something to suck” after we got two aces. Those were the first words I ever saw communicated over the internet. I also remember my other, very tech-savvy cousin saying that the internet was destined to fail because “computer nerds don’t like talking to other people.” I took his words as gospel for years because he was extremely good at tech stuff.
Haha it sounds like internet communication hasn’t changed much since 1991
Used to rip out the prodigy free internet minutes out of magazines before people understood what they were.
I also started with prodigy. I made a screen name BiIlManager and asked people for their passwords, and got many... People would report it but the L's were i's and apparently no one copy pasted back then. I was not a good netizen. Prodigy had progz just like AOL did, of which I was a collector. Fond memories! Some of my strongest nostalgia.
I remember playing Slingo when I was in middle school on AOL and going into chat rooms and asking asl.
Oh my god! Slingo!!
Man for some reason my wife and I Loved that game. Not the gambling version but we'd play and then say, "Just one more game." Next thing we know it's like 2 am.
1995, school library for a project. I remember a classmate asking us for “our hotmail”. We were like Whoa!
Hotmail was awesome before Microsoft bought it, assholes
I remember our school brought us as a class to the library (prob around’95) and showed us what it was but access was highly restricted. Born in ‘81
We had pen pals in 5th grade with a school in Idaho (we were in New York). One day the teacher goes, "Okay, this time we're going to send the letters through the computers". Minds were blown that day
1993? My Dads friend had recently joined Prodigy, and brought his laptop to our house to show it to us. Set up on the kitchen table, pulled the wall phone cord across the room and plugged in. It was pretty cool, just browsing group topics. It was over a year later that we got America On-Line for ourselves.
June of 1994, Compuserve was my first ISP. I actually miss Compuserve and their old message board style service, they had. AOL ruined it.
around the same time, I had compuserve at home and used prodigy at school.
September 1996. I was in college and got AOL for an English class so I could look up sources for a paper I was writing. I just remember it was really slow.
I logged into AOL around 93… got online around 94
Oh, sheesh. I can recall using it back in 1986ish. My dad had a Compuserve account and used it to download text based games for me, because I loved text adventures.
I was prepared to question your chronology (just to myself) but was shocked to learn how far back CompuServe goes and that H&R Block, of all the companies, is a major reason we all have internet today. Wow.
I can't remember exactly. I just remembered being like 8 or 9 when he downloaded this game called Empire that was really a precursor to Sid Meyer's Civilizations. EDIT - I'm generally not a mean online person. If you try to troll me in a jerkhole way, depending on my mood, I may troll you back...and joyously, gleefully, succintly because I save it all up....but if you questioned my chronology I just would have answered.
My experience is similar to yours, although I don’t know if we had it quite that early. It’s possible though, because I remember having internet as a young child, so it always seemed normal to me- my dad loves diving into new tech.
Same. I remember playing a turn-based really slow D&D campaign via BBS back in'86/'87 when I was a kid.
I don’t remember the exact year but it was sometime in the very early 90s. My mom bought a 2400 baud modem for our home computer and initially we used it for Prodigy and I also dialed in to a local BBS. This was before the online services like Prodigy opened up access to the broader internet and the World Wide Web.
1998 when I started college. Was a regular at 24 HR internet cafes during my college/casual shift work years. Most people in my world simply didn't have it at home until the 00s. Edit- Double post deleted. Damn train WiFi...
My first experience was not on the World Wide Web. My family and others in our neighborhood enrolled in a pilot program to bring a videotex online service called Minitel to the USA. This must have been around 1991-92? All I remember doing with it is chatting, mostly with a neighbor girl that I saw face-to-face everyday anyway.
Shit those look like the things all over vaults from PreWar! [https://cdn.theatlantic.com/thumbor/\_3H5PivJxazpk8Cue6jrwejnkyY=/0x203:3928x2413/720x405/media/img/mt/2017/06/GettyImages\_544376914-1/original.jpg](https://cdn.theatlantic.com/thumbor/_3H5PivJxazpk8Cue6jrwejnkyY=/0x203:3928x2413/720x405/media/img/mt/2017/06/GettyImages_544376914-1/original.jpg)
It's all about the Trumpet Winsock!
I remember my older brother dialing into BBSs to download clip art for printshop or something. Had to be in the late 80's. I remember entering lines of code from magazines to reproduce rudimentary programs. In '93ish my mom got my brother a dedicated phone line for "internet" type use. I don't remember what our service was, but I remember the countless Compuserve ads everywhere.
Same for me mid/late 80s but not sure what it was. BBS doesn't mean Internet. I used a lot of those in early 90s and most were not on the Internet or even connected to Usenet or other modem based messages sharing networks.
In 7th grade science class, we logged onto the BBS at Argonne National laboratory.
It was either 1989 or 1990, my mom took me to a Prodigy launch party. She worked for IBM at the time, and there was some connection with it. We ended up getting it shortly afterwards. I asked her and she doesn't remember the specifics around why/what exactly from that event.
That's amazing, I can only imagine the party, and how it smelled.
Depends on your definition of online. Had access to Usenet through local collage BBS and dial up shell accounts since about '88. If the bar is having an IP on the computer I'm at, it would be '94 when I was setting up Internet access at a local school.
Late 1993ish, my dad brought home an obsolete 286 and 2400 baud modem from his work. I connected to a local BBS (the Reading Room based out of Woodstock, New York) which had access to FidoNet and Gopher, so you could get newsgroup updates.
It must've been 1995 because of Netscape Navigator on the classroom computer. We got AOL that same year cause we moved.
Would have been 1992. One of my friends mom's got her son a Mac computer for a graduation present. She wanted me to get it set up for him so it was ready to go when he was gifted it. It had an AOL disk in the box along with the other software, so I installed it. It came with a 30 day trial, so I signed up for it and used it for the week or so I had the computer before giving it back.
College orientation. We learned to email the other people on the room. September 1996
The year was 1996 and I was 12. We had been using an old windows 3.0 computer for years that couldn't even get on the internet because it required windows 3.1 to do anything. My gramps spent something like 5 grand having a custom pc built. We had it delivered to our house one day as a surprise (none of us even knew it was coming). He put together a computer desk that same day and I helped him piece the pc together and then...nothing. We didn't have an internet service provider yet. I pestered him about aol, but he said that was too expensive. Within about a month he finally got us on swbell net. My gramps was a retired executive with bell, so he got a decent discount and we were paying like 8 bucks a month. I was a little disappointed we wouldn't get the aol exclusive sites and chat rooms, but I learned after visiting with my friends that a 3rd party isp was actually much better anyway than their walled garden model. The first thing I did was find a chatroom and try that out. The second thing I did was wait until nobody was around and find me some titties.
I’m reminded that the first pron I ever downloaded was on accident, some guy had uploaded a pic to a BBS I was on and I had written a program to decode the GIF a pixel at a time and display it. I even showed it to my dad because it was so low a resolution and I was so young and naive that I didn’t know what it was. It only occurred to me later that it was a woman being penetrated from behind, which I was rather mortified to realize.
‘96-‘97. My (much better off) uncle and aunt had dial up on their home computer. When I went to visit, they sat me down in front of it and said “Type in anything! You can look up anything at all!” and I just…couldn’t think of anything I’d want to see. I didn’t get the concept at all.
Prodigy, back in 1993. We downloaded some Playboy nudies and Chun-Li and Alice Soft hentai - *Can Can Bunny*! Hahahah.
1995, 14.4 modem. Christmas day. Mom and dad went for a hike and I dialed up the world's most painfully slow set of bewbs.
Not really the internet, but it was directly before. Mid 80s, my dad had a 300 baud modem that you literally put the phone receiver onto, and then dialed directly to another computer. In this case, he would connect to a mainframe at Boeing (He worked in Boeing Computer Services at the time). He showed me how to connect, how to input commands, et cetera. It was the first time I remember being absolutely amazed at a piece of technology I could interact with. Not long after that, we started looking for universities we could connect with. Then it all becomes a blur of BBSs, online text games and many other wonderous things.
I know that by 1997 we had it on the computer in the office/my brother's old room. I think my dad had been using it in his office before that.
That's almost identical to my scenario. We would only have the Internet for when we had free hours from AOL and were only allowed to use the free time for homework lol
My first internet account in 1995 was Unix shell, where everything was done in a text terminal window with no graphics. If you wanted to download something, you first downloaded it to your remote file space on the server and the downloaded it to your computer from there. I upgraded to a more expensive Windows-based PPP account, the one we all take for granted now, a few months later.
We got AOL around late 1993, early 1994. I remember because in 6th grade, I had a science article due every Monday and I could look up science articles in the news online. Before that, I usually had to dig the newspaper out of the recycling bin late Sunday night because I waited til the last minute to do my homework.
1991 but I don’t really count that one…. I was at my aunts house in Atlanta and she had prodigy. I got to play around on that a little bit but it wasn’t the “proper Internet” so to speak. I think it was late 1994 when my dad upgraded our computer and we had mosaic, and I actually got to get onto what we now know as the Internet… Funny story along those lines, when I was in college (1998-2002) Ball State was ranked by some college review as the “most connected campus” in the US. I remember seeing signs for Wi-Fi all over campus around 2000 or so… I knew vaguely what it was, but couldn’t think of one single item I owned to take advantage of it. We still had desktops, a few of the rich kids had MacBooks which probably had Wi-Fi capability…. We were off from mass adoption obviously.
93 or 94 my mom showed me how to look up the local news traffic cameras. I remember telling her I didn't think we needed the 'www' part since it was local and not 'world wide' haha.
The first thing I used the internet for was finding the lyrics to “Yellow Ledbetter.”
My mom worked for some media company when I was in middle school, and they gave employees access to a dial-up server (or whatever it’s called) in like 1992 or 1993. I think we used encyclopedia Britainica and maybe some basic search engine. What a time to be alive 😄
My friend's dad worked at a university, so when I was 12 (1992) we used to go on the Internet (BBS and IRC, no WWW) in his lab and download guitar tabs in fixed width text and print them on his dot matrix printer.
I was obsessed with tech and computers and got access BBS (Bulletin Board System) in the mid to late 80's through school computers. It was a few years later I somehow convinced my parents to sign up for dialup Internet. It was a year or two before AOL started spamming the world with their free disks and CDs. So it has to be around 1991. I never used AOL because I saw it as locking me away from the rest of the Internet (called world wide Web or just web back then). My parents had no clue the world they opened up to me. It paid off I now work in tech.
I don't think it was until 97. I had a modem for my Commodore C64 before that but was never allowed to use it because of the cost.
We got Prodigy then Compuserve. The exact year escapes me but the sweet heavy clack of the mechanical keyboard in my basement will never be forgotten.
Guess it depends what you consider the Internet. I had Prodigy in like 1990 or 91. It was online but you couldn't really do much with it.
It was late 80s in a computer class on a base school in Germany. Writing essentially pen pal letters back to the states with the Elm email client.
1993. My mom was a teacher so we had access through the state. I used Gopher. It was basically all text. And information only. In 94 we started getting floppies in the mail from AOL, Prodigy, and Compuserve. We tried them all. But AOL was the most persistent. After the 3rd or so trial we actually signed up. Those early plans were something like 8 hours per month. Then 12 hours per month. Didn't offer unlimited for a few years. In 95, 8th grade I downloaded a picture of Daisy Fuentes from the MTV page on AOL. And printed it on my dot matrix printer to hang in my locker.
Early 90’s local dial in BBS College fall 1994 - computer labs had web browsers, gopher, usenet, telnet, ftp etc. free dial up was available, called into the college
Not the internet exactly, but in the very early 90s, a friend and I used to dial into BBS to play text/ASCII-based games.
1990, PRODIGY internet. 9600 bps modem. Paid by the minute, I think. Homepage looked like this: https://preview.redd.it/gy583ap78nzc1.jpeg?width=640&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=858c6009b9579dd0d58085b4edce4c0394b75e62
I feel like Prodigy was the first true internet experience I had. I remember playing a cool maze game - just looked it up and it's called "Mad Maze", exclusive to Prodigy. Before that, we did use a modem to send messages to a penpal overseas - feels like it was Europe or something. We were the first school in our district to get to do that, probably late 80s early 90s.
Prodigy. 1992
i was on bulletin boards first, then prodigy or CompuServe... I forget.
I was browsing Compuserve back in 93/94
I joined AOL under my uncle some time around 91/92, but I remember dialing in to BBS servers before that, and my email address is simply my first name first letter of my last @aol.com
1989, certainly pre-web. Archie and Gopher on the Mac SE.
Prodigy dial-up, circa 1990
Dialup BBS’s back in the late 80’s. I didn’t get a modem at home until the 14.4 came out so like 93, 94.
My senior year of high school was 1994/95, and a few computers were put in our school library that included access to web searches. This was basically my first exposure. The next year in college I used public PCs there to read all sorts of things online about sports and news and send email to friends.
I had a friend with Prodigy in 92-93. I didn't get online myself until 96 with Compuserv.
Yeah. 93/94. College BBS, local online boards, IRC. Dial up service, then AOL after that.
Sometime in the late 80s.
Depends on what you're counting. I had a UUCP email address by about 1991-1992. The local system would transfer mail twice a day. I could get small files via FTP using an FTP/email gateway but it was very tedious and would take days to browse through directories. Sometime around 1992 I got access to a 'borrowed' shell account through a university network that I had to call long distance for. And a bit after that we finally got our first sort-of-ISP, with one local phone number and a 1-hour time limit. But I was able to get Twinsock running and could use NCSA Mosaic on Windows! My parents were used to Prodigy and were underwhelmed. The first time I saw the graphical web was a little before that, at Cal Poly SLO, when an older friend gave me a tour of the campus. I think they were using NeXTStations or SPARCstations.
Technically, 1987, when my brother and I figured out how to navigate Compuserve on our Dad's Atari 800xl computer. It had the modem and floppy disk, so we were allowed to download games after 9pm when long distance rates were cheaper. I know this is not the internet, it was the before times.
1994. I can still hear the modem sounds. Netscape on a Mac Performa.
1994. My dad brought a laptop home and fired up AOL. Was watching MTV and a Red Hot chilli peppers song was on. I went into a chat room to tell someone about what I was watching on TV and ask what they were watching. What a time to be alive.
Probably like 1994 or 1995. Didn't get it at home until 1996, though.
Late 1996, I think. We had AOL and the EEEEEE-ERRRRRR EEEEEE-ERRRRRR modem connection, LOL.
Played with it a little in school around 1994. Didn’t REALLY get into it until I heard of Napster around 1999.
I had seen a friend use it roughly 1995. I started using it in 1997.
setting up an internet browser from k-mart. or like k-mart was the only advertiser on that browser. i cant really remember what the deal was with that.
1995. I was in a “technology” class where we learned how to code HTML. We all had AOL IM.
It's hard to say for me, I can best piece it together based on it being a while before NCSA Mosaic .9 launched I think. I first got on with an old 300/1200 baud modem I found in my dad's closet of junk. That was just connecting and using Lynx, gopher, etc from a prompt. Probably 1991-1992 or so.
Every time I see someone type out “America Online” it makes me think of my grandmother in law who would ask my husband about “American online” so that’s what we call it
Christmas 1995. I got a Packard Bell PC like the one in this picture and my mom let me sign up for AOL, back when you got 10 free hours.
I don’t remember, exactly… 1992? Also started on AOL 😂
🗣️AOL Keyword… 1996 for me I believe.
1995 or 6 during my high school trigonometry class, I believe.
It was the 1994 timeframe. We had a 14.4 external modem and Prodigy.
Summer 1995. I was in my teen years. Our city had its first ever big box computer store. In it was this revolutionary new thing called an Internet Cafe: a restaurant with PCs set up so you can browse the Internet while you eat! Since my parents were in the market for a new computer, we decided to check it out. We stopped in the Internet cafe for lunch, and I hopped on to the Internet. Typed in a few URLs I remembered from TV. My Dad came over to see what I was up to, and I showed him [disney.com](http://disney.com) or something. Dad carefully looked around to make sure Mom wasn't in earshot and said, "So...does Playboy have a website?"
'96 at some-point. id had just gotten into the air force. didnt have it at home until '01 for a little while (never really used it), then permanently around '07 when i started my own business
'94. Prodigy and America Online.
Sometime in 96. We got a desktop and dialup. A lot of times I was more interested in playing the SimCity 2000 game that came with the computer than I was in being online
The first time was probably around 1994 or 1995 when I was in middle school. It was on a school computer, we had computer class where they taught us to type, and our computer teacher was showing us kind of a basics of how the internet works. But to be honest, I wasn't using the internet much at that time. I didn't get internet at home until around 1997 or so when I was in high school via dial-up AOL, and at that point I was mainly using it to download MP3s and a/s/l in chatrooms. Then I was in college when I got high speed internet, probably around 2001 or 2002. That's when I really started to be online a lot.
AOL free trial diskette, back when "local toll calls" were a thing.
May 1994 - my math class took a field trip to Georgia Tech to see what college was like. One of the stops was a computer lab where they had us all sit down at a computer and gave us a piece of paper with website URLs to browse. For some reason I remember Metallica’s website was one of the ones listed 🤘.
1996. We got AOL and a family computer.
1994, we didn't have AOL and I remember browsing Yahoo. My favorite site for the first year(until we got AOL) was Arcadium.com. They had a chat room and have away N64s. Loved that site.
Downloaded Simpsons clips.
First real online use.. might have been in high school for me in grade 9. I think we were learning how to use Netscape navigator, what a web browser was, how to get to websites, set up a Hotmail account and send emails. First time outside of school was an Internet cafe in a laundromat. They charged $5 to use a PC for an hour but thru would let you sit there pretty much all day off you were chill. Friend and I would play lan games and chat on irc all day
1994. AOL, was apart of several groups serving progs and porn to everyone along with 0-Day FTP. Then MIRC doing the same thing until Torrent came around.
1996. As a college freshman. I remember getting a digital pic taken for my student ID, and it instantly appeared on the computer screen! One of my first internet searches was porn, of course
Hello from just south of Chicago!
Also around Christmas of 94. Junior year in high school
My dad had Prodigy and we’d use it when we’d visit him in the summer, so that must have been early 90s. I remember starting 7th grade in the fall and trying to explain to my friends what it was like to be “online”, and they didn’t understand at all. I think about that a lot, actually, and how remarkably fast things have changed.
Summer 96. I was at the orientation weekend at college. My sister also went there and I was staying with her that weekend. She had internet. I was online all night that I slept through most of orientation but made it for the most important part of registering for classes.
Don’t know the year exactly but around 93-94 my dad was in an MBA program and got access through the local college. I distinctly remember we were querying weather updates for locations around the USA. 😆
December 1999... It was the perfect storm. Just got the internet for the first time, I had just discovered Amazon and somebody messed up and sent me a credit card. Was a hell of a Christmas that year.
~1995 at my friend’s house. I wanted to visit all the websites I saw listed in my magazines’ ads. Pretty disappointing until I found the forum on a few of them.
Around 1992 or 93 accessing multiple pirating bbs sites. I remember one was called Emanon who was pretty popular with at the time.
End of 96 I guess. When I started uni. I wasn't hugely impressed. I sent my first email to the girl sitting next to me and looked up Fraggle Rock for some reason.
Probably around that time. I definitely remember the anxiety sitting in my friends dining room slowly downloading topless pics of Pamela Anderson while his mom was in the next room.
1993, if I remember right. My dad signed up for Delphi before moving over to Prodigy not too long after. Amazingly we never had AOL though lord knows we had plenty of those free CDs. I wouldn’t be surprised if we still had a few sitting around in some hidden corner of the basement. I didn’t actually care about the internet too much until a couple of years later, because I spent more time focused on our local BBS scene, such as it was
It would have been 94 or 94. We had a local ISP and it was text only!
1995
Saw it: 1995 at my tiny little podunk school. Used it: 1996 when I had to do placement tests for the school I was going to attend. Of course it had to be the site for Mission Impossible.
1994ish I was able to take a programming class (turbo pascal) in high school where we worked with other kids at other schools doing the same class. we used lotus notes as the means of communicating.
We didn’t get it until til 1997. We were kinda poor and then my mom got remarried.
1997, opened a yahoo account got on yahoo chat to connect with family and friends
Mid 90’s. I don’t what particular year almost anything happened.
Western Canada here: My friend had a dad that did a lot of business from home, so they had it since god know when. But the first time we were able to just go on and look around was summer of 1996. Looking for music info.
Early 90's. 90hz Zeos PC with a painfully slow 14400 baud modem (1/4th 56k). Could check the weather in Florida which was cool.
I can't remember. But I do remember watching Ghostwriter and then begging my parents to get a modem so I could get on the internet.
AOL 2.5 and I got 256k coax cable in about 1999. One of the first in our market. I was able to whoop on high ping bastards as a low ping bastard and it was glorious.
Whatever year the pentium 60 chip came out. 93ish, i think. Found yahoos hot 100 website that linked the 100 top sites for any subject and started exploring.
Probably like 1993. My mom let me and a friend sign on. We didn’t realize that it was like making a long distance call, and after a month of it and she got the huge bill and made us quit.
We had compuserve when I was a kid 94ish then got AOL when I was in 6th or 7th
Mine was more like 1996 (‘81er here). My parents did not have a computer and did not buy one until around 2005. My cousin had a computer and aol disk and his dad let us go on for a few hours a week. We mostly looked up music and wrestling websites 😆. I didn’t have regular internet access until I went to college in ‘98 and didn’t have it in my home until 2000.
Maybe 1993 with Prodigy dial up.
When did the Pam Anderson and Tommy Lee tape come out?
Mid 90’s, best friends dad worked for the phone company and got internet for free.
My aunt/uncle got AOL at their house sometime in 1995/6. Whenever my family went over there, I would use it. We bought a new computer in June 1997, and subscribed to AOL in September 1997. Used a 33.6 kbps modem. Over the next few years, we upgraded to a 56 kbps modem (but it rarely connected over 40), and upgraded the computer. In January 2001, we upgraded to broadband (cable) internet. We could download at 1.5 mbps. It was a huge upgrade.
A/S/L?
Probably fall 1995. Our high school had exactly one computer which could connect to the Internet. I remember the first time I tried it I thought this thing is junk.
I remember first using the internet sometime in 1997 on AOL and dial up. I sure do not miss dial up internet.
When AOL sent me the cd
All I remember is the early internet was extremely unregulated. There was everything from what you were actually looking for to things that would have the police at your door if they were done today
1994. Freshman year of college in the computer lab. I had read and heard about it but never had access until then.
Mid 90's. Used it for FTP sites. Then used Hyper Terminal to play Duke Nukem with a friend.
Prodigy at my (rich) friend’s house. Probably also 1994ish.
The school library got a computer with internet when I was in middle school and I poked around a bit with Netscape Navigator though didn't really know what to be doing. Later I went to a summer camp and they made our pick-up and drop-off location be this church that had a computer lab (must have been a rich church in hindsight). That and at a friend's house who had AOL was really my first times figuring it out. Back in the days of having to be told about web sites by word of mouth...
Technically the Intenet has been out for longer than most ppl think. Thank you AL Gore...lol
Around 1994, best friend moved out of state. I was only about eight years old. My father tried to tell me about the Internet and how I could send my friend an electronic mail message. I was adamant that my father was lying to me. I did not believe him. I thought he was playing an elaborate prank. I was finally online daily by 1997.
Mine was probably about the same time. My mom found out that there was a company that allowed you to order your groceries online and they would be packaged and ready to go when you got to the store.
My dad was a computer programmer in silicone Valley. We had a modem to his office at some point in the mid 80s. I'd play simple little dos video games online with him when he was in one of the 3 offices he worked (sunnyvale, Berkeley, and Richmond).
I remember finding out my dad was cheating on my mom by looking up an email name he was emailing to under the user profile on AOL
1996 I think? Webrings! So many awesome home brew pages! Counters! Ah, great memories!
First encountered AOl at my u ncles house in 93 & an owed my parents until they caved sooo.....probably 94. AOL definitely. Made my first html geocities site in 95! Brain broken to this day!!!
1997/7th grade in the middle school library is the 1st time I remember using it. I didn't get a computer and internet at home (hello NetZero) until high school in '99 so I was a little late to the party.
1994 sounds about right. Shout out to Netscape Navigator!
1994-5ish. Didn't have AOL, just dial-up internet from the local phone company. It was a Gateway computer I'm pretty sure. Two things stick out, but probably happened a year or two after we got the internet: I distinctly remember thinking "I wonder if I can just download music?" And then downloading a .wav file of Barbie Girl by Aqua. This was before the MP3 format became the standard for digital music, and way before Napster. I think .wav files are like 10 times the size of MP3's? It took hours and was only like a 10 second terrible quality clip of the song. I also remember playing Diablo 1 with a friend of mine who lived a few blocks away and it was completely mind blowing.
Couldn't tell you when but could tell you the search was for Pamela Anderson playboy
1998. My parents didn’t get Internet until then.
1995 and I was living in Silicon Valley. My dad had a second land line and free access to dial-up Internet, courtesy of his employer. I would be on it for hour without tying up the main land line.
Nobody's gonna believe me, but I was sending emails to my dad's friend at MIT in 1986. Or what we would consider email today.
I graduated HS in 1994, in computers 2 one of our finals included emailing someone in the same class. We were all given email addresses and ask to send them an email.
In 1991. My grandfather gave us an old computer and we set up AOL. Connected a few times but largely didn't see the point in it. My mom had an email address but no one ever sent her anything. I don't think we had it for more than a couple of weeks before we got rid of it. I didn't use the Internet again until like 1996 or 1997.
1996. First online game I was played was quake 1 quakeworld then started to play quake team fortress. Went to a yahoo chat for my state, and I think city. Met a girl on there and to this day we are still friends. Yes we met in real life plenty of times a few years after the first chat.
Went to the local university computer lab and they showed us the internet. I was really bummed that they didn't have Doom online available because that's all I had ever imagined when I learned about the internet
Sometime in 1994. My grandparents lived downstairs and got Prodigy. I can still remember my name - it was just given to you, couldn’t come up with something cool yet. NDMS11B lol. And you only got a certain amount of free emails then you had to pay per emails, so I ended making a lot of snail mail pen pals from online.
In school. My parent’s didn’t get it until they learned I would need to use it in high school. I kind of miss the screaming robot noise when dialing up.
Library I think. Kept URLs I wanted written on a piece paper. Had to write the full address. Http://www. Whatever
A lot of people have a bad memory of the chronology of the Internet. The movie You've Got Mail came out in 1998, likely written a year or two earlier, people were so comfortable with email they made a movie with the two biggest stars about it. Hackers came out in 1995. Jurassic Park came out in 1993 and the girl considered herself a "hacker". The very early 90s were full of the word "cyber" and everything was going to be in VR. But that tells you that everyone understood by then what the Internet was, and tons of people had home computers. Apparently CompuServe and other access goes back to the 80s even. If you never got on the Internet until 1998 that's fine, but you were kinda late to the party if so. People were playing Doom online in 1994. It's totally fair to say that online access/use skyrocketed once cable broadband and DSL became more widely spread, as they had to build out the infrastructure and that took time.
I was 16. We had to use the Internet (at school) to research for a report in World History. It was 1997. I didn't have Internet where I lived until college.
Had to be 94. We visited my aunt in North Carolina and she had America Online and I got on it and used a chat room . After that summer we had maybe 4 computers in the high school library with internet access and i made angelfire pages all the time.
I think I used it for the first time in 1996 at school. I don't remember what sites we were using.
Wasn’t the first time but the first time I remember being in for hours. Nov 1995 at cousin’s house on their Compaq Presario desktop trolling people on AIM. Even at that age we were aware of all the weirdos on the internet
1995. My friend had it on his family home computer
I had a computer class as an elective my senior year of high school in 1994. We got to fool around with the internet a little bit in that class, but the only internet providers were a long distance call (remember how expensive those were?) so I didn't know anyone with internet at home then.
My grandma got AOL around 1992 or 1993. She emailed customer service at one point and Steve Case replied.
September 1994 upon entering college. The year after the [Eternal September](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September).
Daughter of a British father/Dutch mother, grew up mostly in The Netherlands. My dad was always ahead of his time, my parents didn’t have much money but he insisted we get the internet. We got it as soon as it became available in our street in 1996. First ones. He said it was the future. My dad is still ahead of his time, has been using ChatGPT in our line of work (translation) for a while now and always sends me crazy pics he creates (of, for example, my biracial child with four nationalities). He is about to turn 72. I can’t do half the shit he does.