For me, it was the early-mid 80’s.
A buddy of mine had a commodore vic 20 and he always had cool and different games. I asked him where he got them and if he could get some game or other for me, and was blown away when he said he could but it would take a couple of days because it was such a huge file to transfer from <some guy he named who was in California somewhere>
I was an Erasmus student in London in 1994-1995 and in that relatively short period of time, I discovered both mobile phones and the Internet.
Mobile phones were very visible and a bit startling to me at first (why are these guys talking to themselves aloud ?) but it didn’t take long for me to understand what they were for and, by the time my stay ended, I had grown pretty much blasé about them already.
The Internet was much more difficult to figure out. Everybody was talking about it as it was really taking off then, but for one thing, it was not very visible and for another, few could clearly explain what it was.
Then I read an article (in Playboy of all places…) and when I finished it, I understood the basics of it pretty well. It still took me about a year to use it for real (if you didn’t have a computer, access was relatively difficult in the mid-90s), and I only started using it on a daily basis around December 1999.
For me it was in someone’s home. I had heard of the Internet but believed it was solely the purvey of the US Gummint and of Universities.
This person was sitting in a chair with a 1994-era Toshiba Satellite Pro laptop in front of them.
It wasn’t what it was doing, it was the sound it was making. I was setting up a camera for a shoot and heard this ubiquitous sound of a dial-up Internet connection being made. Walked over, saw a B&W AOL icon appear on the fellow’s screen and asked what he was doing.
Kind of fell down the rabbit hole at that point…
The boys started doing it in a backroom at work, using a service line as a dialup. A bit later I moved over to a job where they were starting to use it to some extent, and eventually PCs instead of dumb terminals, and it was becoming apparent that the world was going to be divided into people who can do this stuff, and people who can’t.
I heard about it from my son in 1984. He was a freshman working as a computer consultant in the computer center. He discovered that McGill had an internet connection, but only the computer centre there was connected. So every night when he wasn’t busy he sent them an email saying they ought to open it up to the whole campus. Which they did in November and then I got an account and my son and I exchanged emails regularly. My daughter away at a different college finally got on in 1985.
But I was already using electronic connections. Starting around 1980, I was cowriting a book with a friend in Cleveland. Mail between Cleveland and Montreal took two weeks in either direction and that was just painful. Then a colleague going on sabbatical lent me his teletype terminal and, with help from my computer centre, I was able to arrange, using something called Tymnet in the US and Datapac in Canada for us to exchange files electronically from home. When the colleague took his TT back, I made some arrangement to exchange the files at my office. Then in early 1982, I got a brand new IBM-PC, a modem, a printer, and we were back in business working from home. My coauthor had bought an Apple II in the 1979, although I could not understand why at the time. Our book appeared at the very end of 1984, so we never used the internet for it. But we wrote another book and used email extensively in the late 80s.
Freshman year college, fall 1993. Before that, I was aware of and occasionally used BBSes and services like Prodigy, Compuserve, Quantum Link, and the like, but I don’t really recall being that aware of the internet.
An older Australian gentleman introduced me to this newfangled Internet thing in about 1995 or 1996. In Bangkok. I guess I’d heard of it in the news, and I was already doing e-mail, but surfing the Web was a whole new concept. He showed me what those blue, underlined portions in text were – links I could click on and be taken to other websites. Far out!
What the fuck is the innernet?!
Google search! 
My first experience with internet-like services was a friend in the early 80s who was dialing into BBSes. Then, sometime in the early 90s, a guy I had worked with on some films “hired” my writing partner and I to become moderators/contributors to a Comedy Central branded section of CompuServe. We weren’t actually paid anything, but got a lot of free access to CompuServe. Then came AOL, and I still remember the day they opened access up to this thing called “The World Wide Web”.
I don’t remember how I heard about it, but I had a 286 PC and a 2400 baud modem connected to our only home phone line. If the phone rang when I was online I would get kicked off and have to reconnect after the phone was hung up. Talk about frustrating - super slow connection and not infrequent disconnects. Given my total lack of patience, I’m surprised I stuck it out!
Man, that 56k thing is da bomb!
My first introduction to it was email. When I went to university in 1990, internal email addresses were being assigned to all students. The format was initially baffling - we’re used to it today but at the time email addresses looked like something spit out by an Enigma machine. I learned Usenet quickly after that because that’s where the good online discussions AND the porn was, and Lord knows I was an avid consumer of both. Stuff like Archie and that other FTP stuff and came soon after. The Web of course wasn’t even invented in 1990 but I heard about it at school soon after it was.
The concept of free emails anywhere in the world was itself quite amazing at the time, even to someone like me who knew about BBSes and such. My grandfather - who I must stress was highly technically savvy and a home computer hobbyist - had to have it explained to him multiple times before he could quite grasp the amazing concept of a universal, worldwide email system where sending an email to the other side of the world was a free thing. It was too good to be true.
The staggering change we’ve gone through in just a quarter of a century is dizzying.
I was never into BBSs or the early proto-internet stuff, what got me in was playing a MUD from a unix shell account at college in 1993. MUDs (Multi User Domain) were multiplayer online games, the text-based precursor to modern games like World of Warcraft. From there I started using email and ftp, then later tried that new Mozilla thing that was a neat project that was probably just going to be a passing fad.
Heard about while following the Greatful Dead in the late 80’s…The Well, was one of the first "virtual communities " and Deadheads used it to keep in touch . I first saw it in action at a girlfriends apartment in 91. She was a student at UMSL and had a dial up account through them.
I can’t remember when I first heard of or started using the Internet, but I had a Compuserve email address ca. 1980-something, and an AOL account sometime later. I remember running up a $75 monthly bill connecting to AOL over 2400-baud modems, a bill which seemed excessive at the time.
I remember accessing The Well, The Source, and considering starting a bulletin board dialup for local communication, but I never did.
One day some dude came into one lab at Litton Guidance (a mostly military contractor) in Woodland Hills, CA, who had an intrA-net program he had written, stored on an 8" floppy disk. He installed it on our computers (pre-PC, CP/M homebrews, all of them) and showed us how easy it was to communicate between the computers in our lab. It didn’t work the first time, but we could see the utility of something like this.
My college had internet, back before it was available at home, first couple years I really only used it for email, talking to friends at other schools. About midway through, some guy from the group that ran the mainframe came into one of the basic computer classes I really didn’t need but was a requirement and told us how the school now had Mosaic installed on the system and how to use it to get on the World Wide Web. By the time I graduated, internet was just starting to get into homes.
I don’t remember, but we telnetted into a local library using Gopher, and even when GUI options came up (AOL, Prodigy), my dad was too cheap to pay for them or a second phone line. Played some MUDs and such.
Or to steal a joke from the Simpsons, I don’t remember a time without the innernet. Ever since I wore swim trunks, they always had the comforting snugness of a netting inside.
I first heard about e-mail in 1990, my freshman year in college, but didn’t get access until 1994. The first time I saw hypertext it was not used for the internet but for a series of poems one of my wife’s classmates had written (she was a grad student in creative writing); you could go from one poem to another by clicking. This must have been around 1996.
The first time I “watched” sports online was in 1997 or '98, I think. I “watched” the pole vault competition at the US national track & field championships by hitting refresh and seeing x’s (misses) and o’s (makes) come up on the results page.
Freshman year of college (85) had an account on the local VAX, got a modem to do programming in my dorm room. Found out about some local BBSes.
Eventually we did get BITnet and access to listserves and CB (early messaging system). I worked at the computer center and my boss was pushing for internet access but the head of IT was, to put it kindly, suboptimal.
I recall ftp, gopher, and archie. I graduated in 1990, before the web was widespread,
I remember when we got internet access at work – I remember it wasn’t automatic, you had to do something special (proxy? I don’t remember exactly)
I was a beta tester for dial up access in my town, and for DSL (I now have fiber to the home).
Brian
By “Next” at the end of a poem? Most real hypertext has links embedded within the document, as we are now familiar with. Ted Nelson came up with the idea in 1963. I read one of his books in 19i73, but I first used real Hypertext on PLATO in 1974. The TUTOR language had inherent hypertext capabilities.
For my last Star Trek preview column for the PLATO newspaper I grafted my character onto Farmer’s genealogy from Tarzan Alive, with links that did pop-ups for the characters I added.