Your first internet experience, and other nostalgia-induced conversations.

[EUBlink]

Blast from the past, yeah? It’s been a little over twenty-five years since I first stared impatiently at a 56K dial-up internet status window. It’s wild to recollect on how far we’ve come, how connected we all are now but how much the surplus of interconnectivity has ultimately led to us being less socially welcoming and more socially anxious with each other. Life has jokes.

How old were you when you first accessed Al Gore’s World Wide Web?

[BurghFan]

My family's first internet was something called WOW! which according to Wikipedia was a rather shortlived ISP provided by CompuServe from 3/96 to 1/97. CompuServe was then bought by AOL and AOL was our 2nd ISP. Apparently there is currently a farily large cable/internet provider called WOW based out of Denver that has no relation to CompuServe WOW!



In school I remember doing learning how to use the internet to search for information using a search endgine called Nando Net or Nando.net probably around the same time or slightly earlier.

[EUBlink]

We had dbTech at first, which split. One half was bought by Comcast at the time and the other was bought by Cox.

I don’t miss the days of screaming across the house whenever someone would pick up the phone and need to use it, messing up my internet chats, freezing slow-loading JPG images or, worst of all, a couple years later messing up my connection with the already-chopped multiplayer games of Delta Force. Oh the travesties of growing up in a barely middle class family.

[dickey1331]

I don’t know what my first internet memory was. But I do know my parents still had dial up when I left for the military in 2007. It was rough. I didn’t even have internet when I finally got my own place.


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[Majingir]

For me, it was dial up internet.

I don't even remember speeds back then because obviously I had nothing to compare it to.

But the main thing about dial up internet I remember is that when I tried connecting to the internet and someone was on the phone, I could hear their conversation on the computer.

[bcruise]

A - O - Hell. Do I need to say more? Ah, that glorious connection noise and 28k baud rate....not to mention the fact that you couldn't browse and use the landline phone at the same time.

I guess it was probably late '90's that I started using the internet, on the connection I mentioned above. The first home computer I used outside of Apple //e's at school was a MacIntosh Performa 430, IIRC. I played a few web-based games on it, but the first actual PC games I remember playing are a Sierra golf game, and Starcraft.

Edit: Correction - The first game I remember playing on that Performa was a golf game, but it wasn't Sierra (that came later). It was EA's "PGA Tour Golf II".

[caseyj622]

When I was about 11 or 12 in '97-98, my friends parents got AOL and I would stay the night at his house and we would stay up all night on yahoo chat rooms chatting with girls and watching HBO movies. We obviously weren't monitored and found some "interesting" things online.

[Gotmadskillzson]

Had that 50 ft phone cord. I remember those AOL free trial discs came in the mail every 3 days. Had so many of them I don't think we ever actually paid for AOL because we always had a drawer full of discs.