When I first got online (many years ago), I thought AOL was the internet. And other countries had their version of AOL and that was all.
One of the first sites I went too, was a local message board. There were a lot of sex related threads, and several members had Hotmail addresses. So I thought “hotmail” was the email version of cyber sex.
When I found out that AOL was not the entire internet, I thought that if I ventured too far from AOL, I would get lost.
A thought that all web-based message boards were inhabited exclusively by subliterate buffoons.
Apart from that, I can’t think of any, so either I never had them or I’ve still got them.
I can offer my friend Jason’s humourous misconception up, though. He’s not a computer user, but he likes to come by and check the footie scores from time-to-time. Once, he was in hysterics at what a funny bunch o’ blokes made a page we was looking at. I looked, and it was just a page of soccer scores. 
He said “Yeah, but look at the address!” I look, and it was something like “www.footballcentral.uk/current_scores.shtml”
I’m expecting some obscure sports humour, and I keep staring blankly. Turns out what had him laughing so hard was this:[ul][]He extrapolated the significance of the familiar .html extension as shorthand for “HOTMAIL”[]This was the first page he’d seen that used Server Side Includes.[*]SHTML could only stand for… :eek:[/ul]
shotmail?
I can’t figure it out.
I first started using the internet when I was little (around 8-9) years old and would poke around my dad’s account with prodigy. They had some games to play so I came to the conclusion that the internet was just this small little area. I had no idea that there were a bunch of sites outside my little bubble.
hehehe 
I remember getting pissed off when people started using HTML for web pages.
My text based broused no longer worked 
I had that “Hotmail” misconception too - figured it was some kinda adult singles thingy.
Blowin’ the dust off this thing…
There’s an image hosting site that a lot of ebay sellers used when I first started ebaying. If you click on the auction picture, it goes to a window with an icon, you click the icon to see the enlarged picture.
It took awhile for me to realise that the icon is a magnifying glass … not a skillet. :smack:
My first experience with the internet was logging onto the university server with my friend’s father’s account. I had no idea what he was doing but I do remember that he had a book called “The Internet” which was like a phone book with addresses in it.
When I finally got my own account, the company sent me the software to load onto my computer. I successfully completed this step and then logged on. I then waited and waited but nothing happened. I called tech support who then informed me that once one was logged on, one had to open a browser in order to actually see anything.
I used to think you could find porn on the internet, but after years of looking I’ve come to the conclusion that there isn’t any.
Back about '89 or so my family got their first modem. I knew you used it to log on but I didn’t exactly understand how that particular feat was accomplished. I would click the program on and it would ask me for a number to dial.
Well what number was the internet listed under?
Fortunately I knew someone else in my class who had told me about a month before that he also had a modem. Sweet! We could talk to each other online. So I plugged his number into the dialer.
Ring Ring I heard through the speakers
“Hello?”
“Jason” I said happily, “Guess what I got?”
“Hello?”
“Jason, I’ve got a modem. Is that cool or what?”
“Is there anyone there?”
“I’m here!” I yelled, “Can you hear me? Do I need to turn the volume up?”
click
Thus concluded my first trip into cyberspace. Or…well…a close approximation thereof.
I’m pretty sure that web pages have always been in HTML. Before HTML there was no such thing as a web page. The whole point was that it was a web of infomation. What made it a web was the hyperlinks. Hyper** Text Markup L**anguage is what made the links possible. Without HTML you wouldn’t have a web. Text browsers (such as Lynx) worked because at that time HTML didn’t have an image tag. Once browsers that recognized the image tag (eg. Mozilla, Netscape) came along the text based browsers were doomed to obsolesence.
Back when the internet meant gopher, ftp, email, and telnet (not the web), I was under the impression that in order to be a server site your computer had to be some kind of huge industrial thing. I found it very disconcerting a few years later when I found I could make my own computer be an ftp server (and shortly after that, a web server).
I remember a bunch of years ago I didn’t think it was possible to make a regular phone call through a computer. Never even crossed my mind as being possible.
So one afternoon I get a rather large number of phone calls from people asking if I’ll take a poll, trying to sell insurance, other phone services, etc…
And I get a phone call. Maybe 10th one that night. I pick up the phone and hear nothing. Absolutely nothing.
So being my not so smart self I flip out. “I’m tired of you trying to sell your sit through the phone!! Don’t ever call here again! I’ll call the fucing cops!!” (this went on for a minute or so before I heard a distinct CLICK of the line disconnecting.
So I was all happy. I told off a telemarketer. But then I thought to myself… Hmmm… I should probably get the number of whoever that was, just in case they ever call back.
*69 “The number that last called this phone number was ###-###-####”.
:eek: It was the # of a good friend of mine!!!
I called him up and asked him if he called my place and if so I was very sorry.
He was in his room with his new computer and was testing out the new dialing software. All he heard was the dialing, me picking up and saying hi.
He said hey, but he thought there was a mike installed into his PC tower. There wasn’t.
So I told him off.
But to top it off, he was showing the new capabilities to his parents and his grandmother. They were in the room.
:smack: :smack: :smack: :smack: :smack: :smack: :smack:
And that’s how I found out that it is possible to make a phone call through a computer.
Oh, and he forgave me. His grandmother on the other hand…
I got started on Usenet in '92, and it took me a while to fully grasp that Usenet and the Intenet weren’t the same thing.
I had no idea how to type a web address in the address bar. I just figured that you had to follow hyperlinks until you finally found what you were looking for.
Hotmail… it just sounded like you were gonna get porn in your mail or something. I thought:
I once asked a guy who was a computer guru if I could download a website onto a disk then go back to it from any computer.
I knew a guy who got his first e-mail account through the military. To test it, he sent a message to his wife, who was computer literate. It didn’t work. In the “to” box, he had typed simply “Phyllis”. Just plain Phyllis.
When I was getting ready to sign up for my first e-mail account, I thought that you could only communicate with people who had the same domain. :smack:
Fortunately, I’m feeling much better now. :rolleyes:
Well, in ‘86 (OUCH!), when I was a wee youngun’, we got our first PC with a modem (400 baud, I think!). I would surf Bulletin Boards every once in a while but that isn’t quite the same as the internet. When the internet (with one dial in number that wasn’t necessarily long distance) came up I thought the only thing out there to go to were the Bulletin Boards. Since I wasn’t real thrilled about those I put off getting a decent PC that could actually surf around until '94 or '95. Graphical webpages really surprised me.
I thought it would be faster.
These aren’t my own misconceptions, but the misconceptions I have heard from other people:
You have to have your computer on and connected to the Internet at the time an email sent to you is to be received, otherwise it will forever disappear into cyberspace.
Someone at the ISP office is monitoring each and every user’s online activity (oh, and he also reads everyone’s email).
You can only send a Mac user an email if you also have a Mac, same goes for receiving an email from a Mac user.
You will incur long distance charges if you send email to someone out of state or outside the country.