Here’s a cheesy instructional video on learning to use the web.
I think 1997 may have been the first year I got connected.
How’s about you?
I was using BBS’s up to 1998, when I finally got on the Internet.
I was on the net by late 1995, thanks to university computer labs. 
Though I think I may have still been a little fuzzy on the distinction between Netscape and the web.
I had already been using the web for years by 1997. I got access through a lab I was an intern with in 1994. A graduate student handed me a floppy with something called 0.8 Netscape beta on it and showed me how to install it. I was instantly hooked even though there was very little on it at that time and no real search engines. You had to either skip from link to link hoping to stumble upon something cool or pick something from a list of web sites from a printed directory (and it wasn’t even that big). Oddly enough, both my graduate student mentor and I instantly understood the purpose of this new creation and we started looking for porn. It only took a few minutes to score a find and so that became one of my secondary tasks. If I tried really hard, I could uncover 1 - 2 new nudie picts an hour which I thought was an incredible rate of return especially because it was free!
My family had Compuserve in 1995.
I had been bangin’ on BBSes all through the 90s. I didn’t get a computer that I could use to access the Web until 1997 I think. But in 95 and 96 I got in to plenty of trouble using my friend’s AOL account at her house, and I think some stuff on the school computers.
In 1997 when I went to college I probably spent more time in the computer labs than in classrooms. I was hooked.
Let’s see… big into BBSes from about 1989-ish through about 1991, and toward the end of that stretch, there were usenet newsgroup feeds and the ability to relay mail across the internet.
Then I went to college, and had an email account, the ability to use Gopher and telnet and stuff like that, so I’ll say fall of 1991.
As for the World Wide Web, that had to wait a couple years until about early 1993 or so, when someone showed me Mosaic and this cool “web site” stuff. By late 1993, we(my computer science friends and I) were fully web-literate, at least as much as you could be at that point, running Netscape on our Windows 3.11 machines, or a little later, using IBM WebExplorer on OS2/Warp (and also Netscape, Mozilla, etc…).
Started with BBSes in '83 (on a friend’s computer, since I didn’t get a modem until a couple of years later). First used the 'Net in 1987. First connection at work in 1993.
I grew up in a rural area in the Midwest. I got my first computer with a modem in about 1994 and connected to a few local BBS systems until a nearby phone company made dial-up Internet access available. In probably 1995 I started out with a limited plan (30 hours/month or so – via “Internet In A Box” software on Windows 3.1!) but they quickly changed to unlimited access. In 1996, just after I got my drivers license, that local phone company hired me and a handful of other young people as their tech support staff, since business was booming. I worked at that job until I went off to college in 1998. We were the guys with alphanumeric pagers and an email-to-pager gateway, which was a pretty cool way to communicate for a group of teenagers back before we all had cell phones.
The internet was a really cool place in those days, and things were changing rapidly. In a very short period of time, people went from 14.4 to 28.8 to 56k modems, and then to DSL and cable broadband; while the amount of stuff online grew exponentially.
I’m guessing someday that being on what, in our neck of the woods, felt like the “ground floor” of the mainstream Internet boom (I know a lot of people were online well before that, but I didn’t know many of them!) will make for a pretty cool story to tell the grandkids.
Anyone know when AOL started having web access, other than just it’s own internal content? I’m thinking that’s when a lot of people started getting access, with acceleration when they stopped charging by the hour.
AOL added internet access in a piecemeal fashion starting with USENET in 1994. They started offering limited web connectivity in 1995 alongside their own content. I am not sure when they opened up their network so that it could access the entire web but it a little after that. They switched to an unlimited access plan for $19.95 in October 1996 and that is when things really took off.
I was fortunate - my husband got a job building websites in the early to mid '90’s. He had to teach himself since there was nobody around to do it, so his boss got him a bunch of books and said go learn and let us know when you are ready. He got me interested and shortly afterwards I was hired by a very forward-thinking corporation who thought all their employees, not just the tech and marketing people, should be web-savvy and made sure we had really good computers and access to the whole internet as it evolved.
Wow! That video is very instructive. The more things change, the more they are the same, no?
I’m struck by the graphic examples, which, at the typical 2400 baud of 1997, would never work that well without time lapse video. Try surfing at 2400 baud dialup sometime.
And I have neighbors who would learn a lot from the 1997 kids. A browser? A web address? What’s that?
Wouldn’t it be fun if someone got the 1997 kids in this video together again for a forum?
“You’re goin’ surfin’ on the Internet!”
I definitely wasn’t using 2400 baud in 1997…I was using 56k (USRobotics X2) by then, and everyone I knew was at least on a 14.4 modem, if not 28.8.
Yeah, I was a year or two behind. Horrors! 
That video shows they had about 1K(bytes) download speeds, which would have translated to roughly 9600 baud.
Technology moves fast, but it’s amazing what stays the same.
Also, I don’t recall any concerns in the video about viruses or “inappropriate” sites. They do hint at the latter, and advise you surf the Internet with your kids, but it seems more for “facts” that might not be “true facts.” Imagine what was yet to come!
I had an internet email address in 1992, via a local BBS. Then dialup internet with Trumpet Winsock and Linux PPP in 1993.
I started using the Arpanet in 1977 or 1978 and I’ve watched it develop all these years. The biggest non-technical change was from strictly noncommercial to very commercial. I used to eagerly adopt each new technology, but I’m starting to get old-man syndrome. (Facepage? Tweeter? Get off my lawn!)
I got online after looking longfully at all the pay-per-hour services (AOL, Compuserve, Genie, Prodigy) and realized there was no fricking way I could control costs on those services. Then there was a new ISP that effectively had a demo at the local science fiction convention. I signed up for the wonderful new internet thingy with them at just a flat monthly rate using a 1200 baud modem on a 2nd hand Mac SE. It was 1993.
But look how far it has come - Pointerpointer.
I did some temp office work for a branch of CompuServe in the early 80s. I had no idea what the company did. I just knew they had this big air conditioned, glass enclosed room full of machines that apparently functioned in ways I couldn’t imagine. It was a weird job. 
I was introduced to the internet in the mid 90s when my boss went out of town and I got on his laptop. I had heard things about it but didn’t know anyone with a computer. It was a revelation. A few years later I got my own internet access through WebTV. Yes, I was one of the folks looked down on by people with real computers. But to my credit, I didn’t post stupid things to newsgroups or make garish signatures with scrolling dancing gifs and loud muzak. Hell, I looked down on those people. 
Even so, I didn’t participate much because it really was a stigma and if some people saw you were on WebTV, no matter what you were posting, they could be brutal.