(dammit, hit reply too soon, let’s try this again)
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 modem (whoo hoo!). Graphics still took a long time to load, and most web sites in the day were mostly text with small amounts of graphical content splashed around here and there.
My online experience, however, goes back to 1992 when BBSs were in their heyday. Those were the days! We downloaded files by candlelight.
Wow…I’m surprised to find that I can’t actually pin down anything specific. I do know that I took a course on HTML during the summer between my junior and senior years of high school in 1995. Now I’m a web designer…go figure. I suspect I may have used it before then at the public library or in school, but I can’t say for sure.
I had an account on decvax, so it was easy to get email to me. I always have people send me mail, then I’d reply to get theirs. It was much easier that way. BTW, for a long period of time decvax was an 11/750 sitting in the corner of our lab with a bank of modems. Cute little fellow.
I first surfed the WWW in the fall of 1993 on my friend Pat’s PC with Mosaic. There wasn’t anything to see then, though, except that one site that told you whether there was any coke left in the machine on the 2d floor of some school’s physics building. (Six months later, at another friend’s demand, Pat and I hunted down our first web porn.)
Like others in the thread, I’d been using my modem for other stuff before that like MUSHing. I remember when I worked at Egghead in '95; Netscape came out with a new Navigator software package and I figured no one would ever buy it 'cuz you couldn’t telnet.
First Internet use was about '89 with my first home PC and I think a 2400 baud modem. My Compuserve ID was only 3 digits. The interface was ASCII only - then I got seriously into Ozcis as a connection tool. Though it took a little while before Compuserve offered access to the Internet - it was just a way to connect to other Compuserve users at first.
Tried Web browsing as soon as it came my way and liked it enough to pretty much drop everything else online. No doubt this will annoy somebody, but I think the Web is the only really nifty thing to be introduced to computing in the last 20 years.