Fifth grade. Got a free Unix shell account, and used it to go places. Wound up gravitating towards the Web, even back then. But I also used Telnet and Gopher. And I downloaded games using FTP and Xmodem.
I’ve told this story before: I was well known as being very technical and loving computers. But I had no way to get online at home–until just before Christmas of my fifth grade year. My teachers made a big deal out of one kid getting a present from Santa. I had no doubt it would be for someone else. But no, it was actually for me. And it was a frankly huge 2400 baud modem. The adapter for it was literally about the volume of a brick. I hooked it up to the 286 I’d recently gotten from my uncle, who had moved on to a 486.
And, yeah, thinking back, the modem was also probably a hand-me-down. But I was floored and a very, very happy kid. Well, until I got home and couldn’t get Telix to work right–I had to learn the commands to set the baud rate from my uncle.
I’m not sure when I first heard about it. In 1996 I worked for a company in New Zillund that had an email address and an internet connection obviously. Sometime between then and 2000 I designed a crappy little website for it (which still exists out there on the web, even though the company is long gone). Prior to 1996 I had no direct interaction with the internet but I may have been aware of it.
I grew into it as a kid in the 80s because I had a modem for my Commodore and would contact BBS’s. I did much of the same stuff as today only on a much more limited scale: chatted on forums, used (local) email, played a MUD and downloaded games. Heck, my first computer porn was on those things between terrible ASCII images you had to poke yourself in the eye and squint at and that C-64 Samantha Fox strip poker game.
My first bona fide internet experience was in college in 1991 when I gained access to Usenet and Mosaic but it wasn’t really a sea change moment for me but rather an expansion of what I already knew. Better porn, though.
My first Internet access was in the early 1980s; my university had access to Usenet. After that, it wasn’t until around 1992, when my job had Telnet, and I got a free university UNIX account (first at North Carolina, then University of Denver) that included both E-mail and Usenet.