I hope I don’t open a can of worms here. For the health of this thread lets keep it PG rated.
Portal websites include Yahoo and Google. I know a lot of people will answer with search engine URLs . This is exactly why I am posing my question to exclude them. I don’t want the thread to bog down with ‘Me too!’ comments.
What was the first Website you ever ‘went’ to? (Yes, websites come to you, but that is besides the point.) Why did you go there? How did you find out about the site?
Anyway. I dont remember if it was my first site ever, but one of my first was 7thlevel.com – The site is not there anymore (Squatted URL) but I believe I saw it on a billboard, and I knew what ‘to do’ with it, I just didnt have a net connection at the time. I used a friends computer, and got impatient with it loading, or didnt do anything with it once I ‘got’ there.
If I remember correctly, it was some fairly random Tolkien fansite. It was 1996, I didn’t have a computer, so I was connecting from some tiny Midway branch library of the St. Paul Public Library system. I had NO idea what I was doing and had a limited amount of time allowed, so I didn’t really get anywhere with it.
God…I remember later that same year after I bought a WebTV, also buying a World Wide Web directory, an actual book. The Web was small enough back then that you could actually fit most if not all of the extant websites in a physical book you could carry around…
Geez, I’m feeling kind of old right now…I think I’ll go take a nap…
The first one i remember was ZNet, a leftist website run by the people who publish Z Magazine. I was a subscriber to Z, and i sought out an internet-connected computer in my university library specifically to check the website.
The next was the Onion. I remember because i was laughing hard enough to annoy some other library patrons.
Must have been circa 1994, I loaded Mosiac onto the fastest PC we had at work (a 486-DX33 with a whopping 20MB of RAM!), dialed Compuserve’s number, opened Mosiac, and watched as, um, nothing happened.
I had no idea how a ‘browser’ worked and that I had to type an ‘address’ of some kind into it (so early that Mosiac had no default home page). Once I found that out I think I typed www.nra.org because it was short, easy to spell, and I figured they would probably have a site.
I used to be into bootleg trading, when it was all done by mail. Before we were married, my wife did it, too (it’s how we met!). She gave me the URL of a site belonging to a guy she traded with. I’m pretty sure that the first website I visited was of this guy who traded Beatles bootlegs, to look at his list and arrange a trade. This would have been in 1996, and I used the computers at the library.
I am having trouble remembering the exact site, but back in 1994 I saw a web address on “Inside Edition”. There was a big controversy about how children could easily access naked pictures of Pamela Anderson. Like any self-respecting 10-year-old, I did my patriotic duty and promptly went to the website at a friend’s house when his parents weren’t home.
I wasn’t impressed.
That was also the day we reasoned that closing the browser would make it so his parents wouldn’t know we had been to said website. Ah, the ignorance of youth…
It was so long ago, I’ll never remember. Friends of mine, who were both listed as “net gods” in an article somewhere, in the early days of the internet, told me about this new thing–the World Wide Web (email and chat rooms had become old hat by then), that allowed you to pull up a page on someone’s computer, and then link from that page to another page on someone else’s computer, anywhere in the world. The next time I was over at their house–every few days, usually–the showed me this amazing new thing, but I can’t for the life of me remember where we visited.
My husband visited some others before me, but http://www.ecto.org/ was the first I visited on my own. It was built in 1994 and is still used all the time by fans looking for lyrics.
Man I wish a link feature could be added to the Quick Reply box.
It would have been '94 - the website of Woods Hole Oceanographic, I think. Unless you count the UniCapeTown geology website, which was set as the home page for the browser I was using (Mosaic/Netscape).
It was a science department site at some university in Europe. There were only a handful of websites extant at that time–my graduate department at one of the University of Illinois campuses was helping beta-test a program called Mosaic that had been developed, in part, by the Computer Science department at the Urbana-Champaign campus.
“Meh,” I said to myself. “This’ll never replace anonymous FTP.” :smack:
In retrospect, that probably would have been a good time to learn HTML. :smack: :smack:
I don’t know. I was looking for straightdope before it was online. I typed in random addresses too. I went to websites to check out games coming soon, listed on boxes of games.
This site, which looked pretty much exactly like it does now, to find some Ben Folds Five lyrics in 1995.
Of course, I printed them out, not realizing that in a couple years I’d also have teh internets in my own home and could access the same info any time, any day, for eternity.
I do remember going to QuantumLink from a Commodore 64 back in the mid 80’s. I think it became AOL. But I suspect it should be counted as a portal of sorts.
My first access to a PC was at work and I suspect the company website was the first non-portal I saw, but I surely didn’t spend any real time there. Portals I tried before settling on Yahoo! included Lycos and AltaVista. This would be 1995 or so.
I do remember locating IMDB early on. Jokes sites. Time-of-day and calendar places. Chess sites.
But as to which specific one, not a clue. Too long ago.
There was a Mac LC set up with Mosaic 1.0 on it, and it has some text-based “home page” set up. I launched Mosaic out of curiosity and then followed some of the links. It was all education and science and the links were like footnotes and references would have been in the original document if it had been on paper.
Probably the first site I went to on purpose was the web incarnation of the Info-Mac archives, which I’d been visiting via FTP for many years prior to that to get my shareware and freeware.
Here is a still-extant mirror of what the Info-Mac website was like (it didn’t change much over the years other than contents)