My absolute first Internet experience at all was the Sierra On-Line BBS. My dad let me connect a few times to get hints for a few of the Quest games. I was probably seven or eight.
After that, it was Compuserve and Prodigy, but I didn’t do much more than tinker curiously. I started using AOL in full force around 1994, and haven’t looked back since.
My best early internet memory is The ImagiNation Network (INN), an early online graphical gaming network. I miss that service terribly; the awkward constraints of early Internet really made it a great social experience, especially for young kids.
I logged on to local BBSs starting about 1992 in Toronto. Then, I was exposed to Usenet when I did a tech writing contract at IBM in 1993. We were only supposed to use the fora for answers to questions we had about the IBM products and systems we were documenting, but somebody had put a few general-interest forums in the list of approved discussions, and those were fascinating. Here were people from all over the world discussing these topics!
I first went on the Web in 1995. Usenet still occupied some of my time, but the Web was even more fascinating. I surfed all kinds of sites (news sites, mostly), but I remember having some great laughs over “Mirsky’s Worst of the Web.”
I honestly don’t remember the first web page I looked at, but I do recall being able to check out every site listed on Yahoo’s “What’s New” page (when it was akebono.stanford.edu).
We got on the Net through world.std.com, quite possibly the first ISP. We had to call from Kansas City to Brookline, MA to get our e-mail and newsgroups. After we moved to Chicago, we got access through Chi.net, another pioneer.
My favorite story about how obscure the Internet was back then was going to the @Party at the 1991 Worldcon. It was just for people who had Internet access, and it fit in one hotel room.
I started playing around with local BBSs back in about 1990 or 1991, I think. In real life, I was unpopular, an outcast, nothing special to look at, and didn’t have many friends. Your typical awkward teenage girl.
Online, I quickly developed something that passed for an actual social life. It was so much easier to get to know people by typing instead of talking! There weren’t many girls online then, in my age bracket, and the local guys were practically lined up around the block to ask me out. It was good for my self esteem.
Try convincing your non-computer-savvy parents though, that it was no big deal to date someone you met online! You’d have thought I had announced that I wanted to join the circus.
I think I got an actual ISP in about 1995 when Why?Net offered their $99/year deal, and it was just too good to pass up. I remember searching the web endlessly looking for information on my favorite bands and musicians, using WebCrawler.
I had a brief account on Prodigy back in the day (I would have been about 12).
About age 14 or so, I think I remember seeing boxed copies of Netscape at Best Buy. I remember thinking that I needed a copy of Netscape to get on the internet, though I still had no idea what that entailed.
Fast forward to freshman year of high-school. We had an internet connection (dial-up) then. It was still early, but it was glorious.
Like I said, I can’t remember my first web experience. But since I was 14-15, I’m pretty sure my first search (on WebCrawler (!)) was either “porn” or “boobs”.
I really have no idea what my first web experience was. I was on intranet sometime in the late 80’s early 90’s but not on the internet until 1992 I think, when I first signed onto AOL. My first web experience was probably Usenet - ah the good old days of flame wars. But, that was almost 20 years ago, so I’m not really sure what the first thing I did was.
My first computer experience was in '98. A friend I worked with had a computer and invited me over to see it. She & I were going to see Rod Stewart in concert, and we did a search on his name… JACKPOT!
A different friend, also with a computer, used to print off stuff she thought I would like and bring it to me; she had AOL and would go to one of their message boards dedicated to Papillon dogs and print off page after page of posts by people about their dogs. I became addicted-it was like a canine soap opera. I got my first computer in 2000 and spent many hours on the AOL message boards. I kinda miss them. I made a lot of friends there that I still keep in touch with.
Pet related chat rooms were a lot of fun too. I was a regular in several.
First net experience: In high school (1990 or 1991), went to my friends house (the only person that I knew that had a computer in their house) and he was getting on BBS’s to download games and porn.
We got games like Scorched Earth and Wolfenstien 3D. All the pics were in .gif format and the .gif viewer would print it to the screen a line at a time. Also, I was amazed at what people could do with ASCII art.
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That guy was a freakin genius. He could open an .exe file and read the code in hex and make changes so that we could have unlimited lives and money. He went into journalism.
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I went to a engineering school in Chicago and we had our own BBS, Shadow. Don’t know if anyone here was on that. And there was all ISCA at the University of Iowa.
In '93 or '94, I got my own computer in my room and was able to connect directly to the school’s servers and use Netscape to get onto the web.
I think Netscape had netscape.com as the default homepage. So, that would have been my first webpage.
I was never part of AOL, CompuServe, Prodigy or anything like that. I got it for free through school, why pay for it?
