Goddamn kids. They didn’t have “portals” when I found the net in my research lab in college in 1994. Netscape 0.8 beta was handed to me on a 3.5’’ diskette in a hushed tone to install on the lab’s Mac dedicated to brain cell imaging. I have no idea what site I went to first. I had never heard of any of it so I was just happy to get it working. Within an hour, both myself and my graduate student advisor realized the power of this new media. I found one naked picture and then he sent me on a quest for more. There weren’t any good search engines back then so true surfing was all I had. I could find one good, unique nudie picture about once an hour. I would show it to him and then dive back down to get more. I was fascinated with the whole process but the content was pathetic even by the standard of one year later in 1995.
I used to provide communications gear to the Tonight Show with Jay Leno. So I was there at NBC in Burbank one day when my contact told me to come back to his office.
I went back and he turned on his computer. He clicked on a few boxes and I heard a modem dialing and connecting.
“Cool! Which BBS are you connecting to?” I asked, totally clueless. I was a member of several Los Angeles area BBSes at the time.
“None. This is an internet provider.”
He then opened up Netscape and told me to type in www.nbc.com to the browser. When I did I was rewarded with a text-heavy, graphics light version of the NBC home page. At that point Jay Leno walked in and asked if his show was up on the “internet” yet, and my contact clicked a couple of “links” to show Jay the new Tonight Show page.
I joined AOL about 3 weeks later, using the floppy disk I still have in my archives of AOL version 1.5. It was on AOL I discovered The Straight Dope with it’s huge hyperlinked brain graphic.
So the answer for me is the NBC home page. And no, I’m not on AOL any more.
Well my first was yahoo- but back in 1995, and before I had started using a real browser. To be honest, I’m not even sure how we did it (we were on a SE30 MAc at home). Without a browser, Yahoo was a series of links that you tabbed to get between and hit “enter” to open. From there I can’t quite remember the first website (maybe Medline). Finally using Netscape a day or two later was a relevation. We were the coolest aunt and uncle because for Christmas 1997 we gave all the nieces and nephews Amazon.com gift certificates. That was new!
Before then, I used gopher to access info on other people’s computers (back in 1993 or 1994).
It seems so long ago, and yet it’s only 12 or so years since all this began in earnest.
My first experiences with the internet were at school. The first website was probably a Tamagotchi-related fanpage.
The first I successfully accessed from home was http://ytv.com
Showing my age, huh?
Jeez. I can’t even remember. It would certainly have been around 1993 though, connected through a dialup shell account and using Lynx (text-only) to browse, and I’m pretty sure it probably had something to do with Atari, since that was the platform I was using at the time (Atari ST).
It was so long ago…
I remember it being really cool to debate which search engine was superior, like… um… tip of my tongue, starts with ‘e’… Someone help me out here?
Somehow I found a homebrewing site with a gazillion recipes in 1996 called Cat’s Meow. Wierd I still remember the name as I probably haven’t looked at it since those first few times back then
The first one I remember was the CIA World Factbook.
I’m thinking it was FamilyTreeMaker.com. Way back in 1994 or so.
I believe it was The Lurker's Guide to Babylon 5, otherwise known as the Lurker’s Guide to Babylon 5.
I saw a guy I knew in college doing something interesting, so I asked him about it, and he hooked me up with Mosaic and the URL for the Lurker’s Guide, and I fired it up in the computer lab sitting next to him.
This was what… early Fall 1993?
It was long ago (1995), but I remember installing everything that came in the mail from the ISP, launching it, dialing in, and getting the ISP’s home page. Not sure where to go next, I picked the silliest-sounding link from the ISP’s suggested list: Mirsky’s Worst of the Web.
Not sure, but I think I visited my college or university website (York U in toronto) before I even had any notion what the web was. 
The first web site I ever went to was a page set up at UMBC to describe this new fangled “hypertext” stuff. This might count as a portal site though because it had links to every known web site on the internet (the list of which was a whopping 2 or 3 pages long at the most). You didn’t need a search engine back then. You could probably print out the entire “internet” (or what most people these days think is the internet) if you wanted to.
The first link I clicked on was a link to commodore 64 information. The c64 was old by then but there were still people using it. If the above doesn’t count then the c64 page definately counts. It was not a portal of any sort.