What was YOUR first web experience?

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
21

My first computer network experience… in 1985 my uncle who worked at what used to be known as Upjohn Pharmaceuticals showed me his IBM 8086 PC. He dialed into UPjohn’s mainframe, and started up a game for me, "The Collossal Cave adventure. I was hooked.

For my first Internet experience, the year was 1988 and I got an account on the university’s VAX/VMS system. I figured out pretty quickly how to email to my friends outside the university, plus they had access to Usenet, which I often perused. I thought it was one of the most amazing things I had ever experienced.

My first WEB experience? I would have to say that it was in 1994 when I had AOL. I had just downloaded v2 of the AOL software and one of the new experimental features was the AOL web browser. I looked up my favorite band at the time, “Art of Noise”, and found a site in France that had information on all of their albums that were out at the time. I was blown away. Here I was, sitting in MI accessing a computer in France.

22

First network experience was in college in 1981 when I took my first computer science class.

Later on at home (sometime around 1990 or so IIRC) we had the GEnie service and then switched to Prodigy. In 1992 along came Pinnacle Online, the first ISP in our area, and off we went. I honestly don’t remember what the first web page I ever saw was, but I do remember thinking how cool it was that my husband could play chess with anyone in the world AND actually have an image of a chess board to do it with (as opposed to sending moves via text).

23

Online experience: accessing BBSes, timeshare systems, and CompuServe from computer labs at museum and schools, late 1970s. Stayed a regular dial-up BBS user until 1996 or so, especially for Commodore 64 warez. (Huh. Spell check leaves “warez” alone…)

pre-Internet: accessed Arpanet occasionally while BBSing in the early 1980s, plus used FidoNet-linked BBSes through the mid-90s. Big Q-Link user in the mid-to-late 1980s.

Internet: late 1980s (wanna say 1988? 1989?) through a dial-up BBS run on the side by the IT department of IUPUI. Regulars users trusted by the sysop were given university usernames and accounts, and we could then dial into the university modem pool and run stuff remotely via C shell (with a large public directory) or use gateway portals on the university BBS. Became a regular, early user of ISCABBS via telnet. I don’t think the university ID thing was kosher, as actual students used to have their access suspended upon leaving the school. Highlights: downloading porn GIFs to the public directory, then downloading them locally at 2400 baud and immediately deleting them from the public directory to cover my tracks. Then, loading up a GIF viewer for my Commodore 64 that would chug away for a couple of minutes before showing a single improperly-proportioned picture that attempted to map EGA or VGA colors to the C64’s sickly 16-color palette, and 640x350/640x480 resolution to 160x200. Awesome! Free porn!

Web: 1992, through the above university BBS. I’d run Lynx remotely, and run Novaterm 9.6 locally, for a pretty credible version of the early web via Commodore. There wasn’t much to look at, since the web was new, and I still spent most of my time using other Internet services, mostly telnet to ISCA and gopher and archie to look for porn. I recall browsing some of the first online retailers using telnet and gopher, but not actually buying. Finally caved in 1994 and went PC, getting a 386 with Win 3.1, and went legit with a paid C shell account at one of the early local ISP startups, running Solaris on Sparcstations. Configuring everything to use the web properly was a pain; had to download and install Winsock locally, then hunt down and find some program that worked on Solaris; when I wanted to use the web, I had to launch my terminal emulator, dial up, run the Solaris program, run Winsock, then run my web browser. Most of the time, I just stayed text-only and used Lynx to browse the web… didn’t become a heavy user of a full-graphic web until 1996, when I upgraded to a 486 and the experience was a bit more smooth. The highlight for me was that there was a Solaris client for ISCA that allowed me to use the BBS more easily. It was so popular in the early 1990s that thousands of users would be in queue for hours to get on, there were time limits in being on it, etc. The client bumped you to the front of the queue, and IIRC removed the time-limit restriction. I also dug USENET, and was a heavy participant in a few groups until 2006 or so.

24

The hottest BBS in southern Michigan in 1983 was M-Net, running custom forum software called Picospan written by a U-of-M grad student.
I wonder how many hours I wasted dialing their phone number in hope of grabbing one of the eight or so precious modem lines.

Now as far as the World Wide Web goes, I remember my boss coming over to my desk some time in the early nineties and saying “Check this out…” as he used my mouse to grab this thing called “Mosaic” from a network share and drag it to my desktop.

He launched it and I watched in puzzlement as the Mosaic home page came up. I just wasn’t quite sure what it was all about at the time.

25

My first weblike experience was with GEnie in 1989. I stayed with them until GE sold them; at some point they added web access, though it was with a text-only browser.

26

Ah, PLATO. I was on that when I was at Illinois, 74-77. After my class I started a column on Star Trek (which was just beginning to be rerun on the local PBS station) and since the professor in the CS department liked it, I kept my login.
At this time PLATO had discussion boards, as mentioned, interaction via touch screen, an online newspaper, where my column was, instant messaging, multiplayer games and MUDs. Even quoting was new. Unlike here, quoting included embedded quoting, so when someone wrote “Don’t you get a sense of deja vu reading Pad” (Pad was the name of the base board) we enjoyed seeing how many levels of quoting we could do.

27

My old man was a student at the UofM, where the Gopher server was created. In 1981, he rented a 300b acoustic modem, and a VOX machine, that ran on thermal paper, instead of a monitor.

We logged into a Colossal Cave Adventure game hosted on the Gopher server, and played it for a while. My dad taught me how to log in, and told me that I could play it for a while.

6 rolls of paper later…

Dad came home & flipped out. Seems each of those rolls cost about $20…

28

I wonder of any of that stuff got archived anywhere. It’d be fun to read it again after all these years.

29

First online experience was around 1984 – using a 300-baud acoustic modem at my work-study job to dial into the University of Wisconsin’s mainframes, and download population data.

First real internet experience was getting an AOL account in 1994.

30

My very first actual WWW experience was on a WebTV. I used to spend a lot of time in the ChatHouse (East Wing, The Occult). I think I had an awful page (hell, who didn’t?) on Angelfire, with about 50 animated gifs of candle flames.

31

My first experiences with the internet were through webtv. This would have been back in about 1993/94. We couldn’t afford a nice enough computer for the internet. But we got webtv, and I spent lots of time giggling in chatrooms with my mom and sister. It was fun! My mom was REALLY into the internet, as a unhappily-married mother. She took us on a couple of RL trips to Kentucky to meet people from her favorite chatroom (talkcity’s Booktalk), where we camped outside. And I got my first kiss, which made me almost pass out, I was so scared.

32

Wow some of you guys are like a living history of computer technology.

I used an internet connection at work to download data in 1994 which I had to import into Lotus. Soon after we upgraded to Windows 95. Woo hoo. Since I worked for a newspaper, checking out the AP website was probably one of the first sites I surfed.

I got my own PC at home in 1998 and I was in a few IRC chat rooms and regularly reading Salon.com among other things. When I remember how much stuff was free online then as compared to now, it makes me yearn for the old days, although I wouldn’t trade my DSL for my old phone modem. It used to take minutes to download a webpage with graphics.

Bri2k

33

If we count the pre-WWW experience of Commodore-based BBS “modeming” as “web experience” then that would have been my start. Local BBS started by the Users Group I was a member of in 1983 or 4. I logged on once to Q-Link before learning it was a pay site. (It became AOL a few years later, and after I became aware of the PC-based WWW I probably spent a little time at AOL but it wasn’t my first exposure to the WWW as such.)

As for the World Wide Web proper, it would most likely have been 1985 at work and possibly Yahoo! If not, I can only guess and whatever site it was is most likely gone by now.

34

1993 or 94 is probably the earliest anyone could have had WWW experience, since the web browser wasn’t invented by the folks at CERN until then.

35

:smack: Ooops! Make that 1995! I had somehow squeezed the decade from 1983-1995 to a couple years in my mind. Damn! What was I doing for 11 years? I suppose the answer has to be that I was really enjoying the BBS days.

Thanks for the correction.

36

I’m thinking it was Jan or Feb of 1996. I wanted to work for E*Trade. I knew about the market, customer service, etc. but I didn’t know about “online” anything. So I set out to learn all about it that I could. Of course, when I was hired (that April), they had not yet launched their web-based trading. Everything was dialing in to place trades, view accounts, etc.

37

The first website I visited, appropriately enough, was CERN. I went from there to NASA. There really wasn’t a whole heckuva lot of stuff on the Web back then.
*
NOTE: The Internet is not the Web. The OP specifically asked about the first website you visited, and most of the responses are talking about newsgroups, CompuServe, gopher, AOL, BBS’s, and all kinds of other stuff that predates the World-Wide Web that Tim Berners-Lee created 20 years ago.*

38
  1. The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time was just coming out, and 12 year old me was ridiculously excited for it and bought all the gaming magazines and everything. And then I saw a classmate in the computer lab with this screen full of Zelda stuff! He told me it was a website. Excitedly, I sat in front of a computer and…had to ask how to get onto the internet. He told me to double-click the Netscape icon, disgusted my lack of internet knowledge.

And I haven’t gotten off the damn thing since!

39

Not sure what counts as internet, web, or whatever, so I’ll just share my “online” experiences.

BBS’s: I was on a ton of them, playing online psuedo-RPG games. They were text only and quite cool. Probably around 1992/1993.

AOL: First email account was here. Joined on July 17, 1994. They didn’t offer the web at that time, but it is how I first regularly accessed the web and how I found the Dope(the big brain thingy).

Geocities: I built my first web site there. It’s still up and running, but with no pictures and all dead links. About 1996.

After that, it’s pretty much continual access to high speed internet.

40

My first web experience was about 1997. My parents had just gotten a Dell computer and were hooked up via dial-up to some kind of homepage. My dad told me that I really needed to check this internet thing out, he thought I’d really be into it. Boy, was he right!
The first thing I typed into a search engine was “Stratocaster”. The results caused me to order a Dell within days. Also searched my two main fetishes and was shocked to find that there were numerous sites devoted to them. I wasn’t alone! Didn’t know enough to scrub the “history”, hope the 'rents didn’t know enough to check that!
Been an internet junkie ever since.