When I first used the internet, it wasn't called the internet, it was ARPAnet, and it was all text based forums and email. Websites hadn't been invented yet.

Summer of 1994 on a 486 Windows 3.1 PC. I had gotten back to the States after graduating high school at an American high school in Germany after living there for 10 years. I later reflected that I was the last generation who would experience living in a foreign country in the pre-internet age, being far more cut off from my home country than people would be after. I remember not liking web browsers much in the beginning because they were so slow and preferred Usenet groups. The internet was much more clunky and primitive, but also much more human. I really miss that aspect.

1994 a service called e world.

It was a funny little thing, My 2800 baud modem brought me tons of adventures and gave me a place to share D&D ideas with others.

Around 1998, got big into Napster and warcraft 2, trillion (man yahoo ICQ) chats. Was happy to get 30kbps download speeds for music. Tied up a phone line.

90s, 56k dial up modem. Couldn't use the phone and the internet at the same time. Took a couple minutes to download a photo of topless Carmen Electra but saved that shit to my 3.5“ floppy disk for easier viewing later.

1994

Slow

I was just excited to play the South Park game on The comedy Central website.

Last week of 1997 I think (got a computer programmable barbie for xmas and somehow my older sister took this as "time to put her on the internet" lol). First thing she did was sign me up for AOL chat then put me in a "kid friendly" chat room (think there was a suggested list or smtg). Ended up being a roleplaying animals chat and.......well it wasn't just kids in there lol. Half of us were just typing "turns into a panda and rolls around" and others were typing "bear sits at bar and winks at panda". We quickly exited that and she searched me a cat facts site and left me to it.

With the new found power of search I started looking up where we were blocked in whatever the current Tomb Raider was which led me to fanfic porn which led me to what's 69 which actually led me to a couple different groups of older people who were very chill and "you shouldn't be here", but also gave me a lot of advice on sex ed (which was appreciated, my mom's period talk was vague and conducted like I was in a war now lmao), keeping private on the internet and what's an inappropriate conversation someone's trying to have with me, saying no and I don't have to talk to anyone who's making me uncomfortable. Also taught me how to download music and safe practices. So thanks "perverts" of the 90s, I appreciated learning what reverse cowgirl was, no means no and how to download music for free so I could stop tape recording my favorites off the radio lol.

First time I remember was a Nintendo forum, where someone accused me of masturbating in the shower and I had no comeback.

Space Jam website, I am quite sure this was the first thing my dad showed me. That or something else WB related.

May 1995. Started with Gopher to access other university sites. My e-mail client was through vi editor. Eventually, I got onto the WWW with the Mosaic browser. Back then, I didn't know how to even use a URL. The browser defaulted to Yahoo, and I just kept clicking through categories and then on links that sounded interesting. Even later, I discovered Geocities, created my own page (learned HTML by exploring the code the WYSIWYG editor generated), and collected lots of swag sent to me by up-and-coming online stores and search engines for placing their button on my page. I miss those simpler times...

First time accessing the internet would probably be 1992 or 1993 from the local school library. Before then, I used local bulletin board systems via modem to play games, send messages, download warez, etc. as a young kid. The sense of freedom and liberation between those technologies was amazing. Around the same time, the school system transitioned to a digital card catalog system and some of the librarians were absolutely furious that the card catalog they knew and loved was going away.

April 1994. I was thirteen, at a sleepover with friends, playing Starfox on the SNES when my friend’s older brother told us he’d connected the home computer to the phone line.

No Prodigy or AOL, this was something different- more raw and BBS-ey. We started messing around and figured out how to join a local chat room- I have no idea now what they were called back then. There were maybe fifteen people in there, all with William-Gibson-ass usernames.

We were eating pizza and Sour Patch Kids, just fucking around, typing and watching the others. Then someone in the chat said, “Hey, turn on MTV. Kurt Cobain’s dead.” We flipped on the TV and sure enough, there was Kurt Loder breaking the news.

Very vivid 1994 moment.

Most memories are from my early 2000s childhood:

• playing Ultima Online (MMO)
• playing Gunbound (artillery game)
• playing games and hoarding items on Neopets
• browsing nonsense on sites like Ebaumsworld & Newgrounds
• "dj-ing" on coke music (online lounge) to make dBs to spend on furniture for upgrading my clubhouse
• chatting with schoolmates on MSN messenger
• learning html to make my page on Nexopia (similar to Myspace)
• making little fashion avatars on Dollz Mania (and putting them on my Nexopia)
• downloading all sorts of viruses through music on Limewire

In 1995, our class had to take a field trip to the library's computer lab. The teacher had us open Netscape and go to http :// yahoo dot com. Then we printed off some kind of search query. That whole process took about 2 hours lol

I was like 9, which would make it like 2006, and I remember just typing 'Star Wars' into YouTube with my sibling every time we were on the PC unsupervised. The culture at the time in my area was very much that the internet wasn't for kids.

Mid to late 90s in regional Australia. First terrible dialup and then a government subsidised asymmetric dialup/satellite hybrid. You'd click something and wait a bit while the request went out at 28.8k then the response would come back much faster than the 486dx could handle it.

Search mostly sucked but Lycos knew where all the porn was and Jeeves was ok for other things.

Early '90's. At first only the government and universities had access to the internet, before the www/world wide web existed. I went to a university before the general public had access via ISPs (which were just dial-up for a long time), so I could get onto it. At first there were just things like Archie and gopher, and a text email thing (pine, I think it was).

When dial-up became available to the general public, very few people used it at first. I used Compuserve for a while with a 300 baud modem where you could read the text as it slowly came across. But very quickly AOL started up and sent out millions of CDs so more and more people signed up on that--I never used AOL, though. Once I had dial-up at home I used IRC to chat online. That was in the mid 90's. Good times.

Back in my day we had to get our Internet at the village Internet well.  I remember the dialup modem noises it made as you pulled the bucket up.

I was on in the 80's! My first touch was using USENET through WWIVNET via local bulletin boards.

My relative was working for the government at the time and let me use their account to get my first direct access where i was able to use gopher.

I joined one of the first commercial ISPs to finally get that sweet PPP access for my slackware box and I was finally able to use IRC from my home computer. I spent so much of my time there making friends and learning and having fun.

Oh I love it, cause I actually remember: It was around 1998-1999. I was a child. A new mall opened and they had some kind of special. 1 hour surfing for 1 DM or 1 €. We had no internet at home yet only an old computer for fun. Nothing fancy. And I really wanted to go on the Diddl website. Imagine something like a german Mikey Mouse but as collectible like Beanie Baby’s. I was obsessed. Anyway I think each click took 5 min to load. There was lots to discover like the mid 2000 Gorillas website. My mom was annoyed. But I was hyped. 10/10.

Would have been 1998 at school. Can't remember what the very first thing I accessed was, probably something educational we were instructed to. We got it at home the following year. I remember downloading my first MP3s from Slipknot's website around then and spending time in its chatroom. Then I read about Napster in a magazine and gave it a go. We only had the internet at home for a year or two. I had to use it at school and later college or the library after that. But I did have my own website from 2002 - 2005. I remember switching between both Google video and YouTube when they first started. Didn't get the internet at home again until 2006, first smartphone in 2010.

30 some years ago?

Everything was just more fractured. Instead of a handful of options for social media, there were thousands of forums on their own websites. ICQ handled IMs and away messages was basically twitter. Before YouTube/spotify everyone used Winamp and internet radio streams for music, you didn't have songs on demand, but compared to local "real" radio or MTV it was an overwhelming about of choice.

It's honestly not that much different though.

I've been online since 1993.

Originally we just had CompuServe, which was kinda like AOL (or at least what I remember of AOL being shown off at the tech museum in San Jose). "Websites" didn't exactly exist on it, though the WWW became publicly accessible that same year.

I really only remember two things from CompuServe: the chat rooms, and their MUD "Neverwinter Nights." Not to be confused with the Bioware RPG, though it was based on the original PnP D&D module.

Not sure when we switched to the "real" internet, as it is now, but back in the early days it was pretty wild. Funky aesthetics, low res images, no video to speak of. It was super common to just type random words sandwiched between www. and .com to find interesting websites (search engines didn't exist at first and then kinda sucked once they started being a thing).

It was a place almost exclusively populated by geeks and enthusiasts so it was extremely weird. But that's what made it so fun.

1995., I got an email account and discovered IRC and usenet via tin, ona a vt100 terminal

Sometime around 1996 for my personal Internet experience, we got it and a laptop for my mom around 1994 so she could do something while getting her master's and my parents thought it was super cool so we kept it. We finally got a family computer with a modem in 1996. I had an email penpal. I think I spent an entire day trying to download a demo for a video game that got stopped 75% through because my mom picked up the phone.

The Internet of the 90s was such a simpler place. Better in many ways, worse in some. For instance, the Internet wasn't so commercialized back then. Instead of a bunch of services, it was a bunch of nerds sharing information and having conversations. If you liked a tv show, you would search for websites about that show. Anyone could make their own website, so you would find tons of fan sites dedicated to each thing. Search engines didn't provide you with information or answer questions, they just helped you sort through all the different websites, then you could look on those sites to find whatever information you were looking for. There was almost no video, it was all text and (small) images.

1999. I saw picture of a penis in a bathtub someone had titled "Moby dick" on my first day.

Forums were everywhere, and most websites from private entities looked like someone vomited gifs and word art everywhere. Backgrounds were the most insane of colors and oh my god I just now realized one of the sites I used to visit in the early 2000s was popular with trans people, the trans flag was all over the place and literally was the background

Also MySpace.

1996, It was magnificent in its simplicity. Very few walled gardens, no cookie-pop-ups, and very few ads.

And the best search engine was HotBot. Fight me.

It took until early 1998 before I got my own modem and could start to really enjoy it. For those of us who enjoyed "testing stuff with telnet", it was scary how much sensitive stuff was unencrypted and openly available. Anyone who knew how CGI worked could bypass a lot of stuff and craft custom headers to retrieve things they weren't supposed to.

Memory has a way of being fuzzy and inaccurate. Probably not my actual first experience of it, and I'm probably combining several different occasions...

But I remember a new desk with a computer set up in the living room. My parents or brother set me down in front of it and asked what I wanted to look for, I could search for anything. The first thing that came to mind was to look for Zelda, so I got them to type in Zelda Link's Awakening for the search engine. I ended up on a cool little fansite, and learned about the bomb arrows trick.

1992. I spent a lot of time on BBS's back in the day. One day a friend from there told me about this number I could dial with my computer to connect to a server at the local university that had a simple shell that couldn't do much more than telnet, and a few MU*es to check out. I played one of htem for a little bit, then learned about unix machines and shell accounts and managed to get myself one, but even then it was all text-based. I used gopher (before www was really a thing) and then lynx (text-based web browser) to poke around a bit, browsed some newsgroups, etc.

I got on Compuserve in the library I worked at when there was nothing that needed to be done. Had to put a disc in to run the software. It was black & white. I mostly just chatted with random people.

First time using the internet was probably playing poptropica with my siblings.

First time really using the internet was trying to get the ancient windows XP computer in our basement to be less slow and connect to the internet secretly. Ended up going down rabbit holes leading me to learn to write simple viruses, learn what Linux was, and learn to hop on tor for anonymous chat rooms with random strangers across the world.

Sure I was super afraid of viruses and pedos, but it was a nice escape from the small religious town I was being raised in at the time. It was nice being able to talk about philosophy and my own opinions without an adult hitting me for “defying god” or saying “homeopathic medicine is pseudoscience” etc.

It’s kind of odd how nostalgic I am for basic html websites and old looking IRC clients. I’m pretty young for someone who misses “the old internet” but that was the only kind of internet interaction I could really access (without parental supervision) for a long time.

Exactly like this