I have a friend who got his first computer recently and - besides maybe a few very brief sessions of screwing around at friends’ houses over the years - was, for all intents and purposes, an internet virgin until about 6 months ago. This is weird to me because I was online years before the internet became the cultural juggernaut that it is today*. In a way, I kind of feel like the internet and I grew up together. What were your impressions of the internet before you got online, and what are they now?
*And I’m quite sure, from other threads, that most people here were too. I’m looking for the opposite, though, and I don’t want this to become a thread full of people trying to one-up each other on how early they were online. Also, for the purposes of this thread, just let internet/online/www be interchangable. No need to nitpick.