# Who here is newest to the internet?

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/who-here-is-newest-to-the-internet/482089>\
**Category:** Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share\
**Created:** [January 20, 2009, 3:34am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/who-here-is-newest-to-the-internet/482089 "2009-01-20T03:34:15Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![Cisco](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/ccd318/32.png) [@Cisco](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Cisco)\
**Post date:** [January 20, 2009, 3:34am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/who-here-is-newest-to-the-internet/482089/1 "2009-01-20T03:34:15Z")

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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.