Ask Lemmy

Grab a 4 free AOL disk from blockbuster, use 3 of them as frisbees. Take the last one home and spend 10 minutes waiting the interface to install. Plug in the phone line and hear a series of beeps and schreeches before being greeted by an early robotic voice saying "welcome!" And often "you've got mail".

Afterwards you follow a guide to sign up for a mail account and a text like document with links to AOL platform tooling like chat rooms and search tools. You started looking for urls everywhere wondering what hidden gems you'll find in the virtual world and what kind of content was on cereal websites or Nickelodeon. There was a massive learning curve for multimedia, but you had a lot of pen pals from chatrooms. So much porn spam. Nabisco had an awesome gaming site

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

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

Definitely 2flashgames.com and Newgrounds.com.

Prodigy, then AOL, then real internet. Also eWorld, which was like AOL but for Mac users. It was kinda pointless.

A local BBS got internet service so I poked around with gopher and lynx. I remember it being slow, there was lots of waiting for things to load.

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

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

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

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

On university computers, using Netscape Navigator, browsing the information superhighway (i.e., mostly Geocities) filtered through Yahoo and, as soon as I found it, AltaVista (whose user experience was much more similar to what Google's would be), and reading hardcore erotic stories between classes...

The World Wide Web has only gone downhill from there. It probably died around the time when the blink and marquee tags were deprecated, and we've been browsing it's dessicated corpse since then, like maggots on a carcass already way too rotten to provide any nourishment.

The earliest thing I remember with certainty it's correct was my friend across the street, who was older than me, asking me to look up "naked girls" for him.

Piczo websites

Chatrooms on ilse.nl

Simple webpages.

No ads.

Dial up noises.

Altavista was the search engine. Astalavista was the search engine for pirated material.

"Internet Cafe" mid 90s. Clicked down through yahoo's directory not really knowing what I was looking for. Found the canonical list of lightbulb jokes. Funny but overall I was quite underwhelmed. Got a print magazine that listed and reviewed websites.

Probably Neopets. I heard some of my classmates talking about it at school so I used my dad's computer to create an account. Still have login access and all my original Neopets are still there 20+ years later!

Expage, and geocities quickly turned to MSN messenger and neopets. Some Yahoo! Games in there too.

@solarvalleys Definitely AOL chat rooms. But also figuring out how to use Netscape Navigator and search for things using a seach engine called Hotbot. And teaching myself how to build entire websites on notepad.

It was neat to see things evolve fast. Examples: AOL sent these loss leader free offers to grow their network, it gave you free time to try the service and was an installer package that came in the physical mail as little cartidges. A short time later as CDs (the precursor to DVDs), with even more time. It rapidly went from “90 minutes free, wow!” to “600 hours free, wow!” and they went from people coveting them to just piling up everywhere and getting upcycled around the house. 🤣 “Honey hand me one of those 3000 hours coasters for my drink”.

Or how fast web development went. I remember how excited we were for hotdog pro, where the html tags had *colors* and you could push *buttons* to add tags! A short time later “Hey Netobjects Fusion just stick this graphic here somewhere, i dunno you figure it out, use a dozen nested tables with a single clear pixel in each cell, kthx”

Man now that I think about it, the frequency that businesses and organizations had the word “hot” in their brand name back then was another thing lmao. Hotdog, Hotmail, Hotbot, and I know I’m forgetting some other ones. Because the internet was HOT my friends! 🔥

I remember clicking on a YouTube video and waiting about an hour for it to load. When it finished loading the whole Family gathered in front of the screen and watched it.

BBS on a commodore64 and a tiny bit of compuserve.

At home it was 28.8k dial-up (but my PC came without a modem, or a sound card or CD drive come to think of it, so I installed one myself), and Compuserve from 1993. Before that, dial-up BBS run by a hobbyist. Compuserve was great and the discussion forums in particular were fun, not unlike Lemmy.

At work, X400 email on a DOS PC. That was maybe around the very end of the '80s or early '90s. It seemed like science fiction, and very few people in business had email at the time so it wasn't really very useful.

Early CompuServe. I don't remember the exact timeframe but it was rather early. The first time I enjoyed the internet? Probably unreal tournament in 99. Me and my friends used to play and listen to Korn, Rammstein, limp Bizkit, P.O.D., slipknot, static-x, rage against the machine, etc. whoever was last in GoldenEye, played unreal until they came back in again.

flash games

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

Good

CBBC website

9600 baud > 14.4 > 56k dial-up modems and AOL chat rooms.

Quake online

plato/novanet, irc, newsgroups, email.

bitftp@pucc

If anyone gets that reference, congratulations, you are officially old.

I managed to blow up the BITNET mail quota right through the ceiling within a few days...

CompuServe chat rooms and the Neverwinter Nights MUD on the service.

Spent most my time going down bulbapedia rabbitholes . Pokemon websites . Watched pokemon YouTube sideshows , found out Cascada thru that . Once saw video of someone showing their splice portfolio , one splice was articuno but just the (head|tail) so lꝏked like sperm , kid me thought it wasz funny

Oh and don't forget this masterpice

Didn't get my own personal device till 2009ish , funnily enough didn't run into porn on that shared pc

youtube funny animations, minecraft classic gameplays, roblox screaming people on youtube, furry fandom on discord and reddit too, furry youtubers, furry community, i would make fan games of fnaf and post them on a website called gamejolt, i got my first online boyfriend at 14 on discord but it sucked because he was 26

I was a simple kid back then. I remember having seen 3D renders of south park characters back in the 90s. Marvin the Martian fansites. The #Trivia room in TalkCity.

Earliest I can recall would either be, from what I can remember, some odd ass yt videos from early yt. Videos that are probably long gone due to things like copyright and other bull. They were the joke videos where they edited shows like Ed Ed n Eddy or Adventures of Sonic The Hedgehog. Only a single video from that time that I can remember is still up.

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

ascii dicks on irc

Kinda limited, in the sense that I didn't have my own computer until about 2006 and just had a "family" PC before then, which my brother and dad used.

One of my earliest memories from the late 90's (I would have been about 8 years old) was making a website on MaxPages, which was one of those build-your-own-website services. Mine listed video game cheats and passcodes. I didn't have much time to add to my page as my computer skills were limited and I didn't get much time on the computer, so I got bad reviews just for not having much content. Some asshole on one of their public chatrooms hacked my account and defaced my site a few weeks later. I think his name was Ray.

For reasons I'd rather not go into, I had a more limited exposure to Flash games and didn't really get involved with Newgrounds until my late teens. Cartoon Network (at least the US/Canada site) used to have a great selection of Flash games though.

By my teens I was playing RuneScape actively (2005 - 2007), then World of Warcraft (2007 - 2012.)