I first started on the internet in the late 80s - BBS and all the unpretty stuff. I actually first came across the Web at a business conference. I had heard of it but had no browser and awefully slow stuff to work with. At the conference they had machines hooked up to the web and their business message got lost in everyone’s fascination with browsing the web. Very odd.
I first surfed the web in the early ninties (1993 maybe?). I heard about it, but I didn’t understand the mechanism of surfing. I thought that the only way to get around was to start from the predesignated homepage, in this case our university’s home page, and click on links until you found what you wanted. I sat there clicking and clicking that first day.
I eventually reached a Norwegian language page for fans of “The X-Files” and then I was stuck in a Scandanavian language loop from which I could not escape. I concluded that this internet thing was a fad and I couldn’t imagine how it could be useful. I have never been entirely technologically literate in case you couldn’t tell.
Lessee now…I got my first computer, a Packard Bell 286, I think, around 1992. Like some others here, I did the GEnie thing.
But my earliest exposure to any kind of remote computer access was in 1982 in library school, when they demonstrated citation databases like MEDLINE, BIOSIS, and ORBIT to us. You’d have to dial the Telnet number, then push the actual handset from the phone into a big desktop modem that had two rubber receptacles for either end of the handset.
For an interesting read, go to a library find a copy of the September 1966 Scientific American. The entire issue was devoted to the state of the computer art at that time; there’s one article about the remarkable “MAC” setup at MIT, a time sharing system that could handle 30 users at once. Some people even had terminals in their own homes!
Christmas 1999, when we got our first computer. The first website of note I visited was an X-Men site. Yeah, I’m a geek.
Funny story: back in the '60s, my uncle was in the Navy and went to a meeting with some tech guys. This one man kept trying to tell him about this exciting new technology with computers, and how they were going to revolutionize everything. My uncle of course ignored him, believing no one would be interested in looking at boxes all day. Hah!
Hmm, faulty memory on my part. '93 then. It was definitely Mosaic on Macintosh.
What BBS’s were.
As this article mentions BBS’s required direct phone connections. It mentions one of the biggest BBS’s was based in Finland. Ever make a long distance call to Finland? I was lucky because I lived in western NY at the time and SUNY Buffalo was a major computer center.
Another factor was that BBS’s did not link. Each one was an island. And there was no equivalent of Google. The only way to know what content a site had was to call them and look.
And speed. It was considered a major revolution when 1200 baud modems came out. Some BBS’s ran on 300 baud or less.
From the college computer lab, newly installed, in about 1992. Spent an awful lot of time in that lab…
I have clear memories of my elementary-school teacher trying to show us how to look at BBS’s, but not finding any that were currently connected, so although I heard about them, I didn’t really see one. That would have been around 1985.
Once upon a time in SD, ComputorEdge had a listing near the back with all the local (and some not-so-local) BBS numbers on it. Occasionally you would find board ads that told you what the place was all about, and most places I visited had a front page that laid down the rules, regs, and themes (if any).
Many of them voice-validated you. How weird does that sound, in this age of online privacy scares? You left your phone number and a bit of personal information in your profile, and the sysop would call you up that day or the next and sort of “interview” you before he let you set up a permanent account.
My old monster was a Xerox 820-II with a 300 baud acoustic coupler , which was archaic even for those days (1988 or so). In the early 90’s, I began to be banned from the local boards because they were all moving to 2400 baud connections and would no longer accept anyone under 1200 baud.
That was actually how I met my husband, because his was one of the few boards left that was still taking 300 baud users. His best friend was also on 300 baud, so we stood out in the user logs. Mr. Verm read my profile and assumed his friend was jerking him around because this purported “newbie” had interests that dovetailed so closely with his own. His validation call the next morning lasted three hours and we’ve been together ever since.
I’m not sure exactly when we began using the actual internet. My husband used to go on QuantumLink (Q-Link) on his Commodore 128, and then on PC-Link until the early 90’s. Then we converted over to AOL, but we were only there for a year or so before we bailed out and dialed in through the brand-new local ISP. Shortly thereafter my dad brought in a '286 (again, rather archaic for the times) and I started putting my first web pages up.
How old was I? I graduated in '91, so that should tell you all you need to know. 
First found the Internet in 1992 when I was 20. No GUI, command-line interface only, and spent most of my time aroud Usenet. Tried some of this ‘web’ stuff, but it didn’t really look that interesting.
After college I actually spent about a year and a half ('95-96) completely offline before getting a new computer. When I did, I discovered this newfangled ‘Web’-thingie had actually caught on. I remember the shock of doing a vanity search on my name and seeing “There are 2,763,952 entries about XXXXXXX.” (although the first couple actually were about me).
My connections have progressed from 2400 -> 28.8 -> 100Mbps.
I remember going on to the local BBS and looking up how to phreak phones and make “boxes.” I had some inane vision of my using my neighbor’s phone line to make long distance calls. To whom, I have no idea, since I was 11 or 12 at the time and could still walk to all my friends’ houses.
I also remember when I first found out about MUDs. The one I was really interested in was based out of Northwestern University I think… crap. I can’t remember the name. I had such grand visions of programming out the coolest house thing in the world. Those were the days…
It’s not like Mosaic was the first web browser though. Tim Berners-Lee wrote the first browser back in 1990. I recall using Lynx or something like it in late '91 or early '92 when it appeared in my list of options provided by my free account at UNC. At the time, I would have put my money on WAIS, though.
Fall '94 was when I first got on Mosaic and the first time I remember the term “World Wibe Web”.
Before, '91 or '92, I’d done stuff with gopher and archie. I’m not sure if that is distinguished from “the web”. It was all text-based, but you could go to a NASA site, University sites. I remember some “fake city” site where you could go to different “buildings”. I worked in a library and we’d do online searches for things.
Also, as kid, we had a Commodore 64 with like a 1200 baud modem that I used for Compuserve, but I remember that costing a lot and I was a kid.
That would be spring 1993. My university opened up a slick new computer lab for undergrads, and assigned everyone an account. I remember spending hours trying to figure out what to do with FTP and gopher, and I finally stumbled across Mosaic. There wasn’t much online back then, but I did visit a few other university websites (some of them in Europe! Gasp!–that was way cool at the time :)) and I remember finding the NASA website and looking at their image archive. I was suitably impressed as a 19-year old, but it wasn’t until I graduated and got a real job that I really mastered the art of web-surfing.
First use of a modem was in 1992 when a friend of mine got a hand-me-down 2400 baud modem from another friend who had upgraded to a SupraModem 144, which was then cutting edge and expensive ($250-300 or so). We hooked up his “portable” Macintosh Portable and used it as a terminal to connect to our friend’s new Macintosh. I inherited that modem when my friend subsequently bought a PowerBook 165c and got the 144 from our friend who had by then upgraded to one of the new 28.8 modems.
I bought a Quadra 610 and used a terminal program called Xterm to connect to dozens of local BBSs. I had loads of free time and spent literally hours online. Of course it took hours to get much of anything at 2400 baud and some of the BBSs could only connect at 1200 or even 300 baud. My friend set up his own BBSs after getting some software at MacWorld 1993.
One of the bigger BBSs started to talk about offering access to something called The Internet at the end of 1993 or early 1994. I didn’t really know what that was yet, but I wanted it. Getting a connection was extremely expensive. The BBS that finally was able to offer it was asking about $120 a month and the access number was a local toll call. I had to wait a while for access to become more widespread before actually getting online in late 1994.
That, and I had to get a faster modem. Even ASCI pictures took %^¢#ing ages at 2400 baud. My gods! 14.4 felt screaming fast when I finally dropped $120 on a new modem.
Probably '91 or '92, when I worked at DEC. We were a Usenet backbone but we had just started playing with Lynx and getting into some web based projects. I remember checking the NAIS website which would list all the new websites each week. It was a single page long.
I created a website in 1993 to learn HTML and I am still running it to this day.
web: 1993 with Mosaic. I was using the BBS’s - oh I think as far back as 1983 when I was 13. Maybe 14 or 15 but I think 13 is right.
I used Mosaic at work in '93, and Gopher, Archie and Veronica at home with a shell account. I also had a UNIX PC at home which I used to call work and for usenet. (Back then there was only one, low volume, alt.sex newsgroup.)
My first net experience was in 1974 or so, when a bunch of us in my group at the U of I got onto Arpanet to get to Stanford, where we played with Parry, the AI project that simulated a paranoid person. Around that time I started on Plato, on a single machine, with terminals all over the country, but with most of the features of the net today except spam.
And who here had an email address before domain addressing? Mine was
{ucbvax,decvax,ihnp4}!erc3ba!sd
Wow! You are old!
My first on-line experience was in 1993or '94( I think) I was 46 years old. I bought an Apple Performa 575. I got over my initial fear of the computer in general by playing games for quite a while, then ventured on-line. AOL 5 hours a month for a base rate, around $10.00 then $$$ per minute after that. I never went over my 5 hours, but wowwy zoiwy, some people had bills in the $500 range. To just. basicly, do what we’re doing here.
You’re a mere baby in online years. 
I signed onto CompuServe in 1983 with a Commodore Vic-20 and a 300 baud modem that you connected by dialing the number on the phone, waiting for the connect tone, and then unplugging the handset cord from the phone and plugging it into the modem.
And then after CompuServe there was Viewtron, and PlayNet, and QuantumLink and The Source…
My first exposure to the web as we know it today was in August of 1994, when I popped in an AOL floppy disk (yes, floppy disk, version 1.0 for Windows) and got signed up. Connection speed was 2400 and I only got 5 hours of connection time per month before surcharges began to apply. In December of that year I got signed on with a real ISP and upgraded to a 14.4