For the web it was in early 1994 with Netscape 0.8 beta. I had an internship in a neuroscience lab in college and a graduate student gave me and another graduate student the early version of Netscape on a floppy. I was entranced although there was probably 0.00001 percent of the content there is today. There was an actual printed directory of sites and it wasn’t that big. I figured out the purpose of the whole thing within 10 minutes and started looking for porn. With no real search engine, that was much harder than it sounds now. I could consistently return one quality (for the day), unique nudie picture about once an hour so gathering 12 of them or so was one hard day. I stuck with it through grad school until the present day and have experienced almost all of the development of the web itself.
I was on the Internet before the Web. I sytarted with BBSs and then moved up to that exciting super BBS, Q-Link for Commodore64 users. What an advance it was, and with my blazing 24K modem (I started with a 3K modem, mind you) I was REALLY going to town. It was 10 cents minute but with great disicipline we (my wife and I, mostly me) were able to keep or monthly bill down to $75 a month or less, though one month we did hit $200. That was a month of fun! Some people regularly paid $600 a month for their Q-link bill. THEY were the addicts! (Sure puts $15 a year in perspective.)
I wore an onion on my belt, as was the fashion at the time.
In about 1975, when I was in grad school at Illinois, we got onto the ARPAnet to log into Stanford to play with their Parry simulation of a paranoid person.
I was using email by 1982 at Bell Labs, if not earlier, long before domain addressing. I had some newsreader tapes, but we didn’t actually get on usenet until 1987 or so. As for home, we played with AOL on our 286 machine, and used Archie and Veronica on our old Packard Bell 486. But before that I got some surplussed UNIX PCs at work, and got them distributed to my group as home machines, so by '91 I was heavily on Usenet at home (dialup, of course.)
My first web browser was Mosaic. We signed up for AT&T Worldnet so early that our login is our fairly common last name, no numbers.
My first computer was a TI-99/4A. All 16kbits of it. I got it in 1982. I still have it in a box in my office closet. I should really pull it down and see if it still works. Maybe dazzle my young ones with some TI-vaders or the adventure game that played off of tape.
Jim
Compuserve, pre-Web, ca. 1988, 300 baud, lightning speed compared to 75 on a teletype. Who-wee, we’re smokin’ now!
By then, I had been building and using microcomputers for over 10 years before a modem was something to consider for home use. IIRC, it cost about $500 for an external (non-acoustic) unit.
I recall being told about the Internet in late 1996 (back then, there was only one 'Net server in the country for Auckland users to connect to, down in Waikato University, and no real ISPs) while at one job. At another job, two years later, being shown Netscape had me popping into the library in the city to spend a few bucks per quarter and half hour searching for stuff and just mucking about. in 1999 I was online at a further job for emails, and in mid 2000 bought my first PC. Been full on with the 'Net ever since.
I’d been on BBS’s and Compuserve since the mid or late 80’s. I remember seeing Yahoo (such as it was) in '94.
94 or 95. Yahoo existed already but AltaVista didn’t (and I was a late switcher to Google since AltaVista was significantly better for almost a year after Google overtook it in popularity.)
You never expect the Thread Police.
Hey, they guy in front of me mentioned Wordstar, which I remember. And, yeah, yer right, it was a word processor in the same way a Stanley Steamer is a Lamborgini. Clunky doesn’t begin to describe it, it took years more research and progress to build a word processing software that sucked. Achieving suckitude was a major advance.
Anyway, I was commenting on something that guy said. “Wordstar”, I think it was. That OK with you?
I first used a BBS in '91 or '92 at a friend’s place, but didn’t really become an Internet user until about '95 or '96.
I’ve posted this before, but it’s worth posting again; anyone interested in recalling the early days of the Internet will enjoy this video: 24: The Unaired 1994 Pilot. (Subtitle: “Jack Bauer saves the world with AOL 3.0.”)
August 1994, when they installed Mozilla on our computers at the place I was working then–a NASA subcontractor; our default “home” was the nasa.gov homepage.
I’d heard some talk about the internet in library school a year or two earlier, but this was the first time I’d actually seen it, and I realized what a really cool thing it was and how it was going to change our lives. It certainly changed mine! I was a librarian then, and I manage a Web site for a small federal agency (not at all connected to NASA) now.
1993 - Mosaic, and I mostly posted to the newsgroups for soaps. In fact, that’s where my tarragon name originated. In 1994, I was introduced to (the not so glorious world of) MUSing–Star Trek games, and being the ST freak I am, immediately became obsessed with it. Got my first PC at home in Dec. 1994, an ISP shell account that fall as well. I eventually got out of the MUS games, upgraded to regular dial-up and now (finally!) have cable modem.
My age? Older than I care to admit! 
Early 80s on Prestel with a 300 baud modem that my dad made out of wood, that we plugged the phone handset into, but I first saw the real internet in 1994 (at London’s first cybercafe. I did a search on Webcrawler for “alien autopsy” and watched a 30-second video that took about 30 minutes to download). Got online at home in Ireland in 1995, using a 14.4 modem that cost £300. Then started working as an editor on “the world’s first online trading hub” in 1996, using Ireland’s first ever T1 line, and have been immersed ever since.
- I was freelancing for a major city newspaper and had to transmit my stories via modem. I was pregnant that year, and I spent a lot of time on the Usenet newgroup about pregnancy (and committed a major faux pas by starting a thread about the ER episode about the pregnant woman with eclampsia without giving a spoiler warning.) I know better now, so if you haven’t seen that episode…
The woman dies.
ETA: I’m 49.
Yes, it was okay. I guess I should have included the 
smilie, as I though my post conveyed confusion and not chastisement. I just didn’t understand why you brought up that nightmare from my past. 
Jim (Sure we don’t need smilies, here’s proof that some of us need them as intent is so often lost in text)
Well, I started using local BBSes around 1991, 1992. In fact, I was a SysOp for a (then dying) BBS in 1993-1994. I first logged on to the Web with CompuServe around 1993 (with Mosaic), and have been surfing actively since then. Got my first high speed connection in late 1996.
I started using the internet in 2001, but it wasn’t with a PC. Sega had just discontinued the Dreamcast, so they were marked down to $99 and I picked one up. They came with a built-in modem and web browser disc, so I hooked it up and got an account through AT&T Worldnet. It was my first exposure to message boards, E-mail, online shopping (it had SSL built in, it worked with Amazon.com, and I even used it to pay my phone bill). It also had IRC.
It wasn’t until the following year I started using a PC online.
- No, really.
I had an email acct since probably 1995-96-97, but would just wander on occasionally to buy some hard to find item, or do some minor research. Email was stupid, phone was much better.
Since then I’ve learned how to cut and paste, send attachments, and have taken 2 full time semesters completely online. Not to mention I have an IT guy for the company.
A friend remarked that a couple of years ago I couldn’t do anything, and now I am traveling with the laptop.
I’m not sure some days if this is bad or good…
Spring of 1995. I met my husband in an AOL chat room.
I poked around on it in '96 or '97, but didn’t really jump into the Intertoobs hard until 1998 when I started doing genealogy research.